Salonika Camps

[DCliff]

My grandfather was in Salonika from January 1917 to September that year. I have been trying to retrace his journey and would like a photo and location of "Summer Hill" camp and "Four trees camp". Any help would be grateful.

[Rockdoc]

Welcome to the Forum, Dave.

Summerhill was on the Salonika-Seres road, not that far outside Salonika and was an Infantry Base Depot and Artillery Training School. Have a look at this thread and you might get some idea of where it could have been. Adrian (apwright) lives in Salonika and knows the area extremely well.

With Adrian's help, I've identified the position of my Grandfather's unit, 99th Anti Aircraft Section as being at 40°41'27"N, 22°54'8"E. The French airfield and, therefore, the British camp at Summerhill must have been reasonably close because my Grandfather's unit visited them.

I can't help with Four Trees Camp but if you post information about your Grandfather's unit I'm sure we can come up with something useful between us. The position of the troops at any given point is pretty well known, I think.

Keith

[MartinWills]

There was a four trees near macukovo, but I'm not sure it would have been a camp ..... as it was a bit too near the front

[purley]

There was a four trees near macukovo, but I'm not sure it would have been a camp ..... as it was a bit too near the front

Martin

Piton des Quatres Arbres was a hill top which we looked at when we visited Makukovo - no camp there

John

[DCliff]

Many thanks for the information. I have my grandfathers diary and it seems he served with the 5th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, South Yorkshire Regiment and the Leicester Regiment. After Salonika he went on to Egypt and finally France. He was William Ernest Clifford 30346.

[Rockdoc]

Dave, the only regiment of the three you mention to serve in Salonika was the Inniskillings, whose 5th Battalion was part of XVIth Corps (10th (Irish) Division, 31st Brigade) and, therefore, should have been on the eastern part of the British zone, somewhere near the River Struma. That's confusing because Machukovo (spelling is a variable feast in this war theatre!) is in the XIIth Corps area, near the River Vardar and, as John's said, very near the front line. I don't have the expertise to sort this one out, I'm afraid.

It looks like your Grandfather went out to Salonika as a part of a replacement draft because the Battalion was in Salonika from October 1915. That probably explains his references to Summerhill, which was where people were sent while they were being sorted out. The Battalion was transferred to Egypt in September 1917 so he must have still been with them then.

The 5th Battalion's War Diary for the whole of its time in Salonika is at The National Archives, Kew, under WO 95/4838.

Keith

[DCliff]

Thanks for that Keith, that makes a lot of sense and gives me somthing to work with. He did indeed go to Egypt in September that year untill June the following year when he moved to Abancourt in France.

[corisande]

If you have not come across them, this set of contemporary Austro-Hungarian maps is very good on detail

[Rockdoc]

They're a fantastic resource and the best you can get for free but they're inaccurate. Probably not so much as to affect their usefulness to people like us - and I use them a lot - but the French and British did their own mapping later. Under The Devil's Eye has some anecdotes about the preference of the A-H map-makers for alcohol rather than trudging the hills making measurements......

Military maps normally don't show things like camps and dumps in case they fall into enemy hands so it's unlikely that any surviving map will give precise details. I'm having to use odd notes in the War Diaries of the AA Sections to give me any idea of what they were guarding and it was only a few days ago that the significance of the 61.5 kilo point on the Salonika-Seres road came up. I'd seen constant references to it as a site where a gun was always to be found, indicating it had some significance, but nothing more. Then one entry in 74th AA Section's Diary mentioned that it was the XVIth Corps HQ. The Section had had a gun there since October 1916, when it first became active, and this mention was made in July 1917.

Keith