First Serbian Volunteer Division
Serbian Volunteer unit in WWI
The First Serbian Volunteer Division (Serbian: Srpski dobrovoljački korpus) or First Serbian Division, was a military formation of the First World War, created by Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, and organised in the city of Odessa in early 1916. This independent volunteer unit was primarily made up of South Slav Habsburg prisoners of war, detained in Russia, who had requested to fight alongside the Serbian Army. In April 1917 the name of the division was changed to the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes Volunteer Corps.
Composition
At the request of Serbian prisoners of war, out of the ranks of captured Austro-Hungarians soldiers, the Serbian consul in Russia Marko Cemović took advantage of the presence of Tsar Nicholas II in Odessa during a military parade, to personally present to the Emperor the project of a corps of Serbian volunteers. On 7 November 1915, the Tsar agreed to establish volunteer units in Russia. In 1916, a mission of the Serbian army went to Russia and started organising the Serbian prisoners of war captured by the Russians in their early offensives against the Austro-Hungarian army, those early volunteers also included Croats from Dalmatia, Bosnian and Slovenes who chose to join "in the spirit of Yugoslav unity".
Even though the Serbian volunteers greatly outnumbered all the other ethnic group, a large number of the division's officer corps was made of former Habsburg reserve officers of Croat and Slovene descent. In April 1917 the name of the division was changed to the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes Volunteer Corps. The force holds a particularly significant place in World War I history due both to its intermingling of different Slavic ethnic groups as well as its role in the final military operations of the Salonika front.
It also included men from South Slav diaspora communities, especially the United States.
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