Armies in the Balkans 1914-18 (Men-at-Arms Series)

Rating:
Summary: Too Much in Too Little Space
Review: As family tradition has it that our name originates in the Balkans, in Bulgaria, I have had a curiousity about the wars and campaigns there, ever since I began studying WW I and perused my sets of Leslie's Weekly, and sets of the New York Times Mid Week Pictorial, a rotogravure mainstay of photohistorians of the Great War. But there have been no known readily available short treatments of those times in the Balkans. So when I saw this listed last month I eagerly sent off for it. As followers of my reviews know, I have a lot of Osprey titles and find them mostly useful.
If this one were a sausage, though, it would burst in the microwave. There is just too much order of battle data and not enough historical interpretation. Another reviewer has caught the author's national slant. (He is a Serb, after all. Try reading some Mexican author on the "Colossus of the North". That era is one of my research specialties.) I think part of the verbal confusion may be due to the translator.
Leaving all that aside, the main fault is just too much available material to cover in the standard volume size of this series. The battle history is too skimpy and should be in a Campaign volume where it could be treated properly. As a cartographer, I am really disappointed at the one inadequate and confusing monocolor map herein. It shows no lines of communications, many place names are missing, and topography is not indicated.
There should be some sense of the life experience of the soldiers both before and during service. Such has been done in the volumes on the British Army for years. We know that all these Balkan proper nations were hard scrabble rural states and most remain so today.
The coverage of the Ottoman Army and the Austro Hungarian forces should be eliminated as the former is covered elsewhere in its own volume and the latter should be. And omit the German forces as well.
This would leave enough room to cover the Serbs, the Romanians, the Greeks, the Bulgarians, etc. in the detail they deserve. This volume should emphasize those national forces not likely to ever have their own volumes, either due to lack of information or lack of importance. Montenegro will never get its own. :-)
The plates are of the usual high quality.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Osprey Title
Review: First of all, to the previous reviewer, the Central Powers were no more the aggressors than Russia, and any attempt to claim otherwise is itself revisionist. Austria-Hungary was simply trying to deal with an affront by a weaker nation, which it had every right to do. That said, this title is one of the best of the Men-at-Arms series. The illustrations are very well done, and it manages to include good basic information about a large number of countries in the small space of the format. The plates all seem to be fairly representative, with the possible exception of Austro-Hungarian forces. The bias of the author toward Serbia is apparent, however it is no more biased than some of the other titles in the Osprey series, such as the Campaign study of Mons. Overall, the plates are what define any Men-at-Arms book, and the plates in Armies in the Balkans are excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Accurate Great War HISTORY, not 1990s REVISIONISM
Review: First, a reminder for the previous reviewers- Central Powers were the AGGRESSORS, the Allies the Defenders.
Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Turks (and in 1915 Bulgaria, seeking to expand its territory) were the bad guys. It was the Turks who perpetrated the ethnic-cleansing and murder of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenians and Assyrians from 1915 to 1918 (and beyond). The Kingdom of Serbia,and later in 1917 the United States, were Allies against those Central Powers expansionists. The Allies won the Great War, which freed the nationalities of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians of Transylvania, and yes also those Serbs who lived in Bosnia. See "Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia" by Richard West for the WW2 events in the Balkans.
"Armies in the Balkans 1914-18" accurately recounts, free of 1990s revisionism, the History of the Great War in the Balkans. To read of the 1990s Balkans, readers should of course look elsewhere. But to those Westerners who couldn't find Foca or Bihac on a map before 1992, this is a fine and comprehensive primer, one of the best of the Osprey Men-At-Arms offerings. It is a bonanza of military and historical information on the Balkan Armies of the Great War, in one concise book. The abbreviated sections on certain Armies are necessary to focus on the indigenous armed forces. The Ottoman Turks are already covered in their own Osprey book.
The 1915 Albanian Retreat was a Serbian "Dunkirk", not a debacle. It saved their armies to victoriously fight their way north out of Greece in 1917-1918, after being re-equipped by the Serbian ally, France. They also fought alongside those Russian Expeditionary Forces that were in that theater before 1917.
By the way, there were morale problems with conscripts of the Imperial Russian Expeditionary units in France. But, nevertheless, a sizeable and combat-proven cadre, the Russian Legion ("La Legion Russe") fought successfully on the Western Front, from December 1917 to 11 November 1918 (read "With Snow On Their Boots").

Rating:
Summary: Helping to fill a gap
Review: For wargamers and military history buffs for whom World War I has a special fascination, the short shrift given the Eastern Front is frustrating, to say the least. This book helps to balance the scales admirably. The illustrations and uniform details are up to Osprey's usual high standards, and the history of the conflict in that part of the world is presented in a useful synopsis. My only complaint with the book is the obvious pro-Serbian bias of the author. Modern scholarship has shown the Serbia of 1914 to be a rogue state whose sponsorship of terrorist acts and political murder, against both foreign nationals and her own citizens, was a direct cause of World War I; however, the author insists on presenting the old nonsense that Serbia was a beleaguered David fighting the German and Austro-Hungarian Goliath. Setting this aside, this book is a valuable and much-appreciated addition to Osprey's series of books covering World War I.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of Info, Lots of Bias
Review: This addition to the Osprey Men-at-Arms series offers considerable hard-to-find information on the oft-neglected Balkan armies of the First World War. Sections cover the forces of Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, Austria-Hungary as well as the German, Turkish, Russian, British, French and Italian units sent to that front. Dusan Babac, a Serbian military history enthusiast, has culled the archives of the Military Museum in Belgrade and provides many photographs previously unseen in the West. The volume also offers much new and hard-to-find information on the armies that fought in the Balkans. However, there is also considerable overt pro-Serb bias throughout the volume.

The author's pro-Serb bias is evident from the first page, where he states that, "Austro-Hungary had provoked Serbia by holding military maneuvers in Bosnia-Herzegovina in summer 1914," which led to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. No mention of state-sponsored terrorism by Serbian military intelligence or Serbian territorial interests in Bosnia. Later, the successful Central Powers' invasion of Serbia in October 1915 is downplayed by the Serbs "legendary tactical retreat" through Kosovo into Albania. The point that without Allied refuge and support Serbia would have been knocked out of the war by late 1915 is minimized here.

The section on the Austro-Hungarian forces used in the Balkans is not very good. The Order of Battle is skimpy compared to those of other countries, with only divisions listed, no artillery or engineer units provided. Also unlike the other sections, there is no discussion of Austro-Hungarian unit organizations or equipments. The three figures depicted for the Austro-Hungarian army in the color plates are rather odd, non-representative choices. One gets the impression that the author would rather have omitted this section (it did include Croats and Bosnians, after all, not favorite people of most Serbs).

The sections on the Serb, Montenegrin, Greek, Bulgarian and Rumanian armies are quite detailed for a volume this size, with succinct discussions of unit organizations and equipment. Most of the order of battles for these armies include infantry units down to regimental level, cavalry, artillery and engineer units. Some of the order of battles are a bit difficult to decipher however, since the author does not seem to have mastered the military use of the slash in unit abbreviations. For example, in the Serbian army OB, a unit listed as "Danube/2" could be read as 2nd Division of the Danubian Corps, but the author may mean 2nd Danubian Division. Typically slashes are only used for "organic" units below division-level, not for divisions themselves, which are rarely "organic" to a corps.

The sections on the various German, Turkish and Allied units that operated in the Balkans are less detailed, usually mentioning only division-level units. However the small section on the Russian contingent includes a clear error when it states that the initial Russian force was "later joined by the 1st and 3rd [brigades] and grouped in July 1917 into an 18,000-strong division." Readers should see Jamie Cockfield's excellent account of the Russian Expeditionary Force, which has considerable detail on the morale collapse in the Russian 1st and 3rd Brigades stationed in France, and their refusal to be transferred to the Balkan front.

Overall, this volume packs considerable amounts of hard-to-find OB data on some of the minor armies of the First World. Other details on uniforms, rank structure and organization are a bonus. However, the pro-Serb bias of the author reduces the comprehensive value of this volume and renders some of its information as suspect.