Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/September 2018/Op-ed


 * By TomStar81

In September 1918, with the commencement of the Hundred Days Offensive in Europe on the Western Front, the two warring factions' surviving pro-war holdouts began to come to terms with the inevitability of the outcome of the war. With the United States now backing the Allied Powers, the Russian Empire out of the conflict, and an unchecked march by Allied military personnel that was slowly and undeniably forcing the German Empire's battle-weary but still functional military units to withdraw from the territory they had occupied since the outbreak of World War I some four years before, even the hardest ultra-nationalist forces began to realize who would eventually win the war and who was going to lose.

Helping to cement this particular point of view were a pair of military actions fought toward the end of September and into early October. On September 15, a multinational force of the Allied Powers commenced the Vardar Offensive, an operation against Imperial German and Royal Bulgarian forces stationed in what is today the Republic of Macedonia. The operation began with an artillery bombardment that by all accounts damaged the morale of the Royal Bulgarian defenders, and was followed by the Battle of Dobro Pole and the Battle of Megiddo in Palestine. From September 20-29 the Bulgarian Army found itself under attack from French, Italian, British, Serbian, and Greek forces, some of them managing to capture strategically important regions and others of which were stopped or checked by the Royal Bulgarian forces in their withdrawal. Compounding the problems faced by the Bulgarian military were the issues of desertion and mutineers, as many Bulgarians - having heard with Entente forces were breaking through - abandoned their positions and rushed to defend their homelands. Some would eventually be wrapped up in The Radomir Rebellion of 1918, others who had arrived at Kyustendil would cause the Bulgarian High Command to flee the city. By the latter half of September, the Kingdom of Bulgaria had conceded the war and dispatched a delegation that arrived in Thessaloniki to ask for an armistice, which would be granted by French General Louis Franchet d'Espèrey. The Armistice of Salonica, as it came to be called, turned the strategic and operational balance of the war against the Central Powers. The war on the Macedonian Front was brought to an end at noon on 30 September, when the ceasefire came into effect. The treaty included the full capitulation of the 11th German Army, bringing the final tally of German and Bulgarian prisoners to 77,000 and granting the Allies 500 artillery pieces. The Radomir Rebellion was put down, by Bulgarian forces, as of October 2, while Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria abdicated and went into exile the following day.



Meanwhile, on September 18, the Allied Powers in Palestine under the command of General Edmund Allenby would open the Battle of Doiran against forces of the German and Ottoman Empires. The battle, which would last a week, was preceded by much secrecy and once opened encompassed the Battle of Sharon, Battle of Tulkarm, Battle of Tabsor, Battle of Arara, Battle of Nazareth, the Capture of Afulah and Beisan, the Capture of Jenin, Battle of Haifa and the Battle of Nablus, which culminated in the Third Transjordan attack that for all intents and purposes ended military operations in the area. With entire Imperial Ottoman Corps now effectively out of action, the Allied forces made a dramatic push into Ottoman territory, culminating in the capture of Damascus and Aleppo. Combined with the sudden removal of the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire begrudgingly elected to seek an armistices with the Allies, resulting in the Armistice of Mudros in October. Writing on the campaign in 2000, historian Edward Erickson summarized the effect of the Allied Power offensive in the region:

"The Battle of the Nablus Plain ranks with Ludendorff's Black Days of the German Army in the effect that it had on the consciousness of the Turkish General Staff. It was now apparent to all but the most diehard nationalists that the Turks were finished in the war. In spite of the great victories in Armenia and in Azerbaijan, Turkey was now in an indefensible condition, which could not be remedied with the resources on hand. It was also apparent that the disintegration of the Bulgarian Army at Salonika and the dissolution of the Austro–Hungarian Army spelled disaster and defeat for the Central Powers. From now until the Armistice, the focus of the Turkish strategy would be to retain as much Ottoman territory as possible."

With the benefit of hindsight this campaign could also be said to be the last of major operation on the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, which further tightened the noose around the Central Powers necks by removing allies party to the Central Powers and allowing for the redeployment of battle hardened forces from Allied aligned nations to the Western Theatre of World War I.

Compounding the aforementioned problems was a massive uprising of citizens across most of the European continent who were in broad strokes fed up with monarchist and imperial sentiment, and having witnessed the success of the Socialist/Communist uprising in Russia were now protesting en mass in hopes of effecting a similar change for their nation, region, or ethnic group. With the military power of most involved nations largely exhausted by this point in the war, and Allied Power affiliated forces predicted to win in the not too distant future, many of these factions began to stir an already upset and badly proportioned pot at home to demand changes before the governments in their respective area's could regroup and put down the uprisings. With these protesters came new ideas about government, ideas which would take root in multiple nations across Europe in the coming years as politicians and military personnel applied lessons from war years in an attempt to prevent the same mistakes from being made again.