http://nhw.livejournal.com/671288.html[return][return]Palmer wrote this in 1965, with access to the memoirs of all the major participants on all sides, as a comprehensive and masterly scholarly account of the Macedonia Campaign. He concentrates especially on the geopolitics, especially the squabbling between the armies' far-off masters in Paris and London debating what it should do (or indeed if it should still be there). The final chapter, where the commanding general manages to persuade/hoodwink the politicians into letting him try a September offensive against the Bulgarians, and they fold within days and partly as a result the whole war finishes a few weeks later, is very exciting and almost moving. There were several incidental details that I found very interesting:[return][return]i) the account of the trial and execution of "Apis" (Dragutin Dimitrijevi), which Rebecca West refers to in murky terms in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but I found entirely comprehensible as presented here - Paai knew that Apis had already been responsible for the murders of King Alexander and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and didn't want any more names added to the list (and Paai was not the last Serbian Prime Minister to worry about rogue elements of military intellgence; unlike poor Zoran Djindji, he was able to get them before they got him); and[return][return]ii) the brief but intriguing and entertaining account of Essad Pasha's attempts to present himself as the legitimate ruler of Albania - obviously, while he was able to bring in extyra forces and territory, it was very welcome, but eventually the Allies decided they weren't all that interested in Albanian territory anyway.[return][return]One really annoying thing - the town of Veles is consistently mis-spelt Velea (except in the maps). And `tip is mis-spelt as Stip. As I keep on saying, if you're going to get the diacritical marks wrong, better not to use them at all.

This is basically a condensed version of the official history written by Cyril Falls, with a heaping dose of Francophobia. If you're willing to commit to reading that instead (two volumes, totaling roughly 660 pages, and was re-printed in the later 90's), you will be much better served by doing so. Palmer's prose is pretty dire here; it comes across as downright archaic at points. That he constantly assumes the absolute worst of General Sarrail, the French commander, grows old very, very quickly.

Another alternative is Wakefield and Moody's Under the Devil's Eye, although they don't dig into the battles of the campaign to the same extent. Richard Hall's Balkan Breakthrough can provide a different angle on the Macedonian Front, as he writes from the angle of the Bulgarian Army. I understand that books in English on this particular sector of the war are fairly uncommon, but there is absolutely no reason to push yourself through this one.

The Gardeners of Salonika: The Macedonian Campaign, 1915-1918 by Alan Palmer was first published in 1965 and I think was the first English publication covering the Allied campaign against the Central Powers in the Balkan region during the Great War.

The Salonika campaign is one of the lesser-known campaigns of the Great War and in this book Alan Palmer tries to correct the many half-truths and myths about the fighting in this region.

Allied armies from Britain, France, Russia, Greece and Serbia fought against troops from Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria in a wilderness of mountains, gullies and hilltops in some of the worst weather and health (malaria) conditions known to the allied forces.

The book is well-written, easy to read and offers some interesting character studies of the commanders involved in this campaign. It is a good general account offering a decent overview of the campaign from its beginnings till the armistice signed in 1918.

The one thing this book lacks is decent maps of the operational area of the armies involved. Towards the end of the book two maps are provided to allow the reader to follow the movements of the armies during the final offensive but they are not detailed enough.

Workmanlike account of the Salonika Campaign, a useless but costly sideshow of the First World War. At the campaign's height, 300,000 Allied troops were tied down in Greece, mostly dying of malaria or feuding with their Greek hosts rather than fighting Bulgarian/Austrian troops. Indeed, the diplomatic finagling proves the story's most interesting angle: the Allies parked this huge army within Greece while that country was still neutral, leading to no end of political turmoil and needless bloodshed. The book itself is no masterpiece, but it's hard to find English-language accounts of this campaign so points for trying.

very interesting history of Salonika