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Serbia's Artillery During the First World

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Serbia's Artillery During the First World Serbia’s Artillery during the First World War 221 Chapter 9 Serbia’s Artillery during the First World War James Lyon In 1906, two years before the 1908 annexation crisis over Bosnia and Herze­ govina, the so­called ‘Pig War’ erupted between Serbia and Austria Hungary. It lasted until 1911 and saw the Dual Monarchy shut its borders to Belgrade’s agri­ cultural exports, 75 per cent of Serbia’s export market. The trigger was probably Serbia’s decision to purchase French artillery rather than the competing Austro­Hungarian Škoda guns.1 This customs war fueled growing antagonism between Belgrade and Vienna before the First Balkan War of 1912, while pro­ viding quick­firing French 75mm and 120mm artillery for Serbia’s Army. It also made Serbia dependent on France and its allies for materiel and ammunition. The ‘Pig War’ aside, the story of Serbia’s artillery in the Great War is colorful and diverse: in 1914–15, Serbia used a panoply of front­line cannon manufac­ tured by Schneider, Škoda, de Bange, Krupp, and Broadwell, alongside British, French and Russian naval artillery. Artillery would play an overwhelming role on the Balkan Front during 1914–15, particularly the victories, defeats, and cata­ clysmic disasters such as the Kolubara Battle and the Central Powers invasion and occupation of Serbia in late 1915. From 1916 to 1918, a re­equipped and much smaller Serbian Army in exile on the Thessaloniki Front was armed almost exclusively with French artillery. The war’s first five months gave the sharpest contrast between the theories and realities of the modern battlefield, based on the changes wrought by tech­ nology. Nowhere is this truer than the Balkan Front, where Serbia’s artillery corps had already learned from the Balkan Wars, and where it faced a much larger foe that still adhered to older practices. These first months also offered brutal and incontrovertible proof of a lesson crucial to the modern battlefield: that the side with mishandled (or no) artillery would always lose. Balkan War Experience For Serbia, war began in 1912, and the First and Second Balkan Wars (1912, 1913) provided two years of invaluable experience. Artillery officers were the most 1 See D. Đorđević. Carinski rat Austro‑Ugarske i Srbije, 1906‑1911 (Belgrade, 1962). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004307285_010 222 Lyon intelligent, and “the artillery were considered the elite of the Serbian Army,”2 with many of the most prominent general officers having finished artillery school. During these relatively mobile wars, the Serbian army used its artillery more effectively than the other combatants, or as one Great Power observer condescendingly phrased it, they were “less timid” than the Bulgarians, Turks, and Greeks.3 Contemporary observers portrayed Serbia’s army as aggressive and innovative in handling field pieces, mountain guns, and heavy artillery, ignoring prevalent French doctrines in ways that would soon become accepted practice among all combatants of the First World War. The heavy artillery was thought to have been particularly effective. While the Bulgarians kept their field guns at maximum range, the Serbians usually moved them in close, occasionally to exposed positions on the battle­ field. Commanders were advised to position batteries less than 4,000 meters from the enemy lines: long range firing was considered “heretical” and “was condemned by the rules and the higher commanders.”4 This meant that “when the situation demanded it, they not only took unconcealed positions, but actu­ ally moved to a closer one during the course of the battle” to better support the infantry.5 Serbian field artillery was very mobile, having roughly double the number of horses of its adversaries. The Serbs often improvised. During the Battle of Manastir, the Morava I Division dragged four field guns up to the crest of a mountain, then each night used ropes to haul the guns closer to the Turkish forces, lowering guns down steep slopes by hand: infantry carried fuse setters and 2,500 shells uphill to the battery. 6 Because the crest had room for only four cannon, and because there was a need to fire at several targets simultaneously, each of the four guns in the battery acted independently, firing faster and engaging targets sooner than had they operated as a single battery. 2 A. Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War, 1914–1918 (London, 2007), p. 103. 3 Captain G. Bellenger, French Field Artillery, “Notes on the Employment of Artillery in the Balkan Campaign,” translated from the Revue d’artillerie, Nov. 1913, by Major W.S. McNair, 6th Field Artillery, The Field Artillery Journal (January­March 1914) 84. 4 D.Z. Stojanović, Taktika artilerije, I. Knjiga: opšti deo i poljska vojna (Sarajevo, 1921), p. 16. The rules in question were laid out in the 1912 artillery manual Artileriska egzercirna pravila, II knjiga – Nastava za gađanje iz poljskih I brdskih brzometnih topova. See Vojna Enciklopedija, vol. 1 (Beograd 1958), p. 240. 5 G. Bellenger, p. 84; N.P. Morrow, “The Employment of Artillery in the Balkan and in the Present European War,” The Field Artillery Journal (April­June 1915) 319. 6 G. Bellenger, p. 84..
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