Serbia...casualties?

[mebu]

Not sure where to post this...

In conversation the other night, someone siad that Serbia had 25% casualty rate. I thought this far too high but could not offer better info....anyone any idea on Serbia military/population casualty rate?

Many Thanks, Peter.

[Kate Wills]

I can't give you any hard and fast figures without looking, but having repelled the Austrians twice, the Serbian Army was reduced by typhus during the third successful onslaught by Austria and Bulgaria. Then came the terrible retreat from October 1915, when the army, and much of the population, evacuated their homeland and trekked through the mountains to the Adriatic coast. The soldiers who hadn't died of disease or starved to death en route were taken off by the Italian Navy to Corfu, to recover and regroup, before rejoining the campaign in Macedonia.

[bob lembke]

I don't have the numbers, but I have seen a comparative study across perhaps 15 different WW I combatants, and Serbija was listed as having the highest level of casualties for the size of their population. But I am sure that their records were problematical, and the Serbs have a finely tuned sense of victimhood. But they surely had a tremendous level of losses, and it is not well appreciated. What would a "25% casualty rate" be? Certainly not military casualties as a % of the population. % of the military? Total military and civilian losses as a % of the population? Great book, Land without Justice, by a Jugoslav leader (name slips my aged brain at the moment), about the general level of civil violence.

Bob Lembke

[mebu]

Kate, Bob, many thanks for your replies and help.

I have been digging and found following casualties for Serbia (from WW1 by Everett/Keegan,presumably from official British sources)

Total mobilised 707,343

Dead 45,000

Wounded 133,148

Missing & POW 152,958

Total dead/wounded/missing pow is 48%, staggering figure, but if most pow and some missing return, figure comes to around 25%. Still high, and possibly doubtful?

Don't know population figure.

Still I cannot believe the 25% of population figure quoted.

Thanks again, Peter

[apwright]

Some figures from Solunski Front - Zejtinlik by Petar Opačić, Belgrade 1979:

1.2 million military and civilian casualties, or about 28% of the population. (So a total pre-war population of 4.3 million?)

Having mobilised over 700,000 men in 1914, only 158,000 escaped the retreat in 1915. Over 7,000 subsequently died at Corfu and Bizerte.

The reconstituted Serbian army numbered 147,000 (of which 124,000 combat troops) in April 1916.

9,903 KiA and DoW/disease on the Salonika Front 1916-18.

The army numbered about 150,000 at the Armistice, of which 20,000 were non-Serb volunteers "from the other Yugoslav lands".

It also states that Montenegro lost 63,000 men, women and children, or 25% of its population, in the course of the war.

Disclaimer: No idea how reliable these figures are! The author doesn't give any sources.

Adrian

[phil andrade]

The range of estimates is astonishing. So much depends on who - and how - you count. Confirmed killed in action only ? Perhaps forty five thousand. Add on to those the missing in action who were actually killed in battle but not acounted for in initial reports ? Perhaps another forty five thousand. Add on deaths from wounds, disease, hardship etc ? Probably another sixty thousand at the very least. And how many Serbian PoWs perished in atrocious captivity ? Balkan conflicts are intrinsically atrocious....we know that only too well from events in recent decades, and the same vicious aspect was surely apparent a hundred years ago, especially with scores to settle between Bulgars and Serbs, let alone the outraged Austrians.

Niall Ferguson tabulates the Serbian casualties - for the military alone - as 278,000 deaths from all causes; 70,423 men held as PoW and 133,148 wounded. Clearly the deaths from disease and harship greatly outnumbered those killed in battle. The total is given as 481,571 casualties, with the dead representing 37.1% of the total mobilised, 22.7% of the total number of males aged 15-49 in 1914, and 5.7% of the total population.

Phil (PJA)

[mebu]

Thanks again all. Looks like fairly high figure, however accurate.

Peter

[beograd]

Hello to all,

here I enclosed three scan of original documents. It is report of general Petar Pesic to French authorities on the beginning of 1919 about serbian military casualties. The document are on "Arhiv Jugoslavije" (Yugoslav Archives) in Belgrade.

the rest in another post.

kind regards

Predrag

second page

kind regards

Predrag

[phil andrade]

Do I understand correctly ?

326,000 killed, died from wounds, missing or died whilst prisoner ?

Another 82,000 PoWs in enemy hands at war's end ?

200,000 more suffering from wounds or invalidity ?

If so, three quarters of all the serbs who donned uniform were casualties of one sort or another.

I get the impression that a preponderance of these men succumbed to disease and hardship rather than from enemy action on the battlefield.

I wish to investigate further.

Phil (PJA)

[phil andrade]

Look at how relatively low the number of wounded is. In post number 4 mebu cites 133,000.

Beograd superb primal source mentions 200,000 ...but this includes many invalides from sickness as well as from wounds.

The 133,148 in mebu's post looks accurate.

Normally the Great War produced at least two wounded for every one killed or mortally wounded in battle. By that reckoning, the Serbian combat deaths would be in the order of 65,000. Probably the ratio of deaths in battle to wounded was higher on this front : very bitter fighting, less quarter given, dreadful conditions and primitive medical aid etc. Allow for a maximum of 100,000 kiled in action and died from wounds. How do we account for the other 225,000 deaths ?

Maybe many of the missing mentioned in beograd's post were not dead, and not PoWs, but had deserted or been dispersed by the traumatic retreat.

Edit : there is a very similar distorted ratio of deaths to wounded in the official estimate of Romanian casualties 1916-18 : 335,000 deaths and 120,000 wounded. Almost identical to the Serb casualty list provided above What do we have here : vicious Balkan battles worsened by ethnic vengeance ? Huge numbers of deaths from typhus ?

PoWs dying in outrageous numbers ? Or death totals inflated by including missing who were still alive ?

Phil (PJA)

[Terry_Reeves]

With regard to Adrian's post, this is a most interesting piece about the Serbs on Corfu:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/50631402/Serbs-on-Corfu-and-Vido-1916-1918

TR

[phil andrade]

Thank you for that, Terry.

It really brings home to me how little I knew about the extent of Serbian suffering

I've enjoyed a couple of lovely holidays in Corfu, and although I knew that Serbian soldiers and refugees had recuperated in the warm Ionian sun, I had not realised how many thousands had perished in the first dismal days after their arrival. The thought of so many of them being buried at sea in the Blue Graveyard is quite harrowing.

From a nation of fewer than five million people, the death toll is staggering.

The military deaths, in both absolute and proportionate number, exceed those suffered by the Confederate States in the American Civil War, and there were also huge numbers of civilian dead, too. The bloodbath of the Second World War was to follow on so quickly....and we all know about the more recent decades.No wonder the Serbian people feel the way they do.

Edit : more figures to throw into the fray, that serve to indicate the nature of warfare in the Balkans.....Bulgarian military casualties are stated as 101,224 deaths from all causes and 155,026 wounded. The higher proportion of wounded to dead indicates that combat accounted for the preponderant part of the deaths. Austro-Hungarian official figures for the Balkan Front, up until the end of July 1918, confirm 39,557 battle dead and 146,322 wounded; the missing numbered 87,750.

Phil (PJA)

[beograd]

Hello to all,

I didn't wish to advocate to any figure, because I was born after WWII so I personally don't know what happened. That's the reason why I posted original document. The digits in the document are lowest official figure as I know. The counting of victims often use by the local politicians by different motivation. Some of them boosted numbers, others minimalised. If we continue to talks about that it will extending to all casualties.

Here in Great War Forum many peoples discussed about medical care and foreign aid in that sphere in Serbian in WWI. Many of foreign nurses and physician worked in Serbia in WWI and after that. Many of them worked before that in Western front and could compared in Serbia and outside and most of them were frightened what they saw in Serbia, but nontheles they bravely worked and some of them died from illnes, starved or coldness.

I can only to pointed out some digits from Yugoslavian newspapers in 1919 (mostly Croatian) as scketches to paint the picture, but I can't give definitive answer. For example: in one Croatian newspapers in 1919 I read that in Kingdom of Serbs, Croat and Slovenes half milion (500.000) children had only one parent or hadn't anyone. The structure of that digit are: 305.000 Serbia, 165.000 Bosnia and Herzegovina, and rest to Croatia (in today borders) and Slovenia. In 1919, every 5 minute died one child. I also thaught that digits are very high and then, again I read in newspaper that American Red Cross in Serbia prepared 1.700.000 meals per day in 1919. If You shared by 5 meals (breakfast, dinner, supper and two lunch) it is for 340.000 persons!

The situation in serbian archives are not good. Small number of people work there. Many documents not digitalised, many simply not existed. When Serbia occupied many local archives moved to Austria, Bulgaria and Hungary. After WWI some of them went back, some of them didn't. After capitulation of Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Germans moved military and civil archives to Third Reich, mostly to Vienna. Some of them went back after WWII (up to 1981) but many were destroyed in WWII. After WWII, in 1946, the regimental archives of Serbian Army were destroyed to provide the space in the basement of Military Museum (for the military documents of WWII), where then keep old military documents (serbian Military Archives were founded after that). I read in 90's one historical article wrote by serbian academician Vladimir Stojancevic. Stojancevic worked in Austrian archives and in that article he used almost exclusively the data of austro-hungarian origin. It is clearly that the digits of Austrian Red Cross and Military Gouvernmant in Serbia about Serbian POW and civil victims in occupied Serbia differed by 10.000 to 30.000 in various times in 1916 and 1917. Also in one Stojancevic book I read when in 1918 Serbian Red Cross asked to Bulgarian Red Cross about Serbian POW, they got the answer about 14.000 Serbian POW were in Bulgaria. After that 52.000 Serbian POW came back from Bulgaria! The statistics in occupied Serbia were moved with occupators. How many people were born in occupied Serbia? How many people died naturally and how many died from illnes, starvation and coldness? I didn't saw such statistics. The Austro-Hungarian in ocuppied Serbia made the politics of denationalization to destroy Serbs as nation. They don't much care to civilian and their officials from baron von Remen to others stolen in quantity of railway waggons (also read from newspaper). After WWI new kingdom made comission who made reports about human losses. Parts of that archives preserved today, from the reasons I explained previously.

kind regards

Predrag

[vlasidis]

I think that Predrag is closer to the truth than anyone else. You can 't compare the casualties of the French, the British, or the Italians at the Salonika Front with the casualties of the Serbs If anyone have a chance to visit both the Doiran region and Kaymakcalan Mountain or Dobro Polje, or Cerna River, he will agree that the British were in a much more comfortable situation than the Serbs. Fighting on rocky mountains, with terrible weather conditions, with an exhausted army have many more casualties than in other battlefields of Macedonia.

And don 't forget that Old Serbia, Kossovo and Macedonia were occupied not by some western nations but from anothe balkan state that it had a task to evacuate the Serbian population from these regions.

That 's why Serbs had had terrible military and civilian losses.

[beograd]

Hello Vlasidis,

The distortion in ratio of deaths to wounded in compare to Western front isn't be so strange. In my previous reply I mentioned medical care. In the Balkans (Serbia, Romania etc) it was worse than on the Western front, although Allied helped very much. Therefore wounded soldier in the Balkans died much often from their wounds then his contemporaries in the Western front. It is also possible that such soldier, in some cases, counted twice as wounded and died. When Serbian Army retreated from Serbia, king Peter of Serbia freed soldiers from oath. Many of them used that opportunity to came back to Serbia where austrian and bulgarian occupation authorities arrested and sent them to the POW camp when some of them died. As I previously mentioned, the statistics of Austrian Red Cross and Austrian occupation authority about victims in occupied Serbia for the same periods differed significantly. It opened some possibilites to counted twice or more the same peoples. But neverthelles, after WWI the families which didn't lost anyone member in Serbia were rare. The families of my parents are lucky to belonged in that category.

kind regards

Predrag