From Alan Palmer’s The Gardeners of Salonika, first published in 1965 by Andre Deutsch Limited, London (pp. 119-120):
The [XIIth] Corps Operation Order was a simple one, deceptively so. The 26th Division was to attack over a front a mile and a half wide, westward from the shore of the lake, and the 22nd Division was to support its left flank for another 2,000 yards; the the 60th Division was to relieve pressure on the main attackers by raiding Bulgarian positions in the Machukovo Salient, some two miles east of the Vadar. During the evening of April 24th the Hampshires, Devons and Wiltshires of 79th Brigade (26th Division) assembled in the gullies to the south of the lake. Before them was the hillock known as the Petit Couronné which, with its western offshoots, was the first line of the Bulgarian defences and therefore formed the immediate objective. Half a mile back lay another ridge, no less heavily fortified; and behind and above this second line, some two miles from the British positions, was the greatest obstacle of all – the bare-topped hump which the French, nearly eighteen months before, had named Grand Couronné, after a similar natural fortress in Lorraine. Even this was not the end of the defensive position, for the Grand Couronné was itself overlooked by ‘Pip Ridge’, long and steep and tapering to a razor’s edge crest.
Find out more
- Falls, Captain Cyril (1935, republished 2011), OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR OTHER THEATRES: MILITARY OPERATIONS MACEDONIA VOL II. From the Spring of 1917 to the end of the war; Naval & Military Press
- Palmer, Alan (1965), The Gardeners of Salonika; Andre Deutsch Limited
- Wakefield, Alan and Simon Moody (2010), Under the Devil’s Eye: The British Military Experience in Macedonia 1915-18; Pen & Sword Military
