Second Balkan War
Bulgaria attacked its own allies in June 1913 and lost everything it had won six months earlier. The First Balkan War had removed the Ottoman Empire from Europe and produced a settlement in London that nobody was satisfied with. The problem was Macedonia. The pre-war treaty between Bulgaria and Serbia had divided it with a disputed zone to be arbitrated by the Russian tsar, and the arrangement had assumed that Serbia would take an outlet to the Adriatic in Albania. Austria-Hungary insisted on an independent Albania instead, which left Serbia with nothing on the coast and a demand for compensation in Macedonia, where Greek and Serbian troops were already in occupation. Bulgaria had done most of the fighting against the main Ottoman armies in Thrace and regarded the claim as theft. Its general staff attacked the Serbian and Greek positions on the night of 29 June without a declaration and possibly without the government's authority. Everything then went wrong at once. The Serbs and Greeks held, Romania declared war and marched on Sofia unopposed, and the Ottomans came back across the Enez line and retook Adrianople. The war lasted a month. Bulgaria kept a strip of Thrace and lost the Macedonian territory, the Dobruja to Romania and Adrianople to the Ottomans. It joined the Central Powers in 1915 to reverse it, and joined the Axis in 1941 for the same reason, and lost both times. The Carnegie commission that investigated both wars in 1913 concluded that the atrocities had been committed by every army involved and that the settlement guaranteed another war. It was reprinted in 1993 with an introduction pointing out that the same villages were burning again.
- Year: 1913 CE
- Category: Military
