Serbia’s mountain retreat kept an army alive to fight again
World War I’s Balkan Front pitted Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Ottomans against Serbia, Montenegro, and later Western Allies plus Greece. Three Austro-Hungarian invasions failed in 1914; a 1915 combined offensive overran Serbia, yet the army escaped via Albania to Corfu and Salonika.
The Balkan theatre of the First World War set the Central Powers, meaning Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, against an Allied camp of Serbia, Montenegro, France, Britain, Russia, Italy and, eventually, Greece. Its root cause was the feud between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. In 1914 the Habsburg army invaded Serbia three times and failed each time, partly because a Russian advance in the north drew off its strength.
In 1915 Vienna reinforced the southern front and brought Bulgaria in as an ally. Attacked from the north and east at once, Serbia fell in late 1915 after holding out for more than a year, and Montenegro was occupied too. The Serbian army refused to surrender. It trekked over the Albanian mountains, and Italian transport ships in the Adriatic carried the survivors to Corfu and other Greek islands. Within months they had regrouped at Salonika, still a working army with a new base.
The Allies had landed in neutral Greece and opened the Macedonian front, where Serbian troops joined the Franco-British Army of the Orient in a long trench war against Bulgarian and German forces. Their presence split Greek politics in the so-called National Schism over whether to join the Allies; Greece finally did so in 1917. In September 1918 the Vardar Offensive broke the Bulgarian line. Bulgaria sued for peace, Serbia was retaken, and the advance halted only at the Hungarian border in November.
Italy played its own game. It seized the Albanian port of Vlore in December 1914, entered the war under the 1915 Treaty of London in return for a large slice of Dalmatia, spread through southern Albania from autumn 1916 and occupied Northern Epirus that August. At the 1919 peace it received only a small part of Dalmatia. That disappointment, and a hunger to restore national pride, helped Benito Mussolini build support for his movement.
Source: Balkan Front (World War I)
