Issue: Sepcial Edition: World War I-100 years after

Short History of the 16th Infantry Regiment of "Emperor Nikolas II" In the WWI (1914-1918)

Authors:
Aleksandar Dinčić, M.A.

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The 16th infantry regiment "Emperor Nicholas II" was founded in year 1906, as a regiment of the First Morava Division, while it got its official name five years later, in the honor of the greatest Russian emperor and Serbian defender. He was also known as "Nishki", because the highest percentage of warriors was made by the people from city of Nish and Nish county, while the Headquarters Staff were also located in the center of the Morava Division Region. Since it was the fourth regiment division of the Serbian army, and because of the full filled, the population was also mobilized of the citizens from the sout‐ heast and some part of the central Serbia. The first military engagement of the regiment in the 20th century was its participation in the Balkan Wars, from which he went out victoriously, like the other units of the Serbian Army. Soldiers and theirs commandants bravely fought for Kumanovo, Bitola, Uskub, on the Bregalnica river, and then repressed the Arnauts revolt in western Macedonia. During the Austro‐Hungarian Serbian Campaign, it curiosly fights in all main battles by the end of the 1914, losing almost 100% of the personnel since the beginning of the Great War. An epidemic of typhoid typhus (1914/15) takes even more soldiers lives, while uninfected take part in the attack on Arnauts in Albania, and then in the suppression of the unite aggression by the Central Powers. Retreating under constant battles across Kosovo and Albania, soldiers arrive to the island of Corfu, recover and participate in exhausted battles at the Salonika (Macedo‐ nian) Front. Because of the excessive and irrecoverable casualties, the regiment was finally dissmised by the end of the december of 1916, while the rest of the soldiers approached some other serbian units. An incomplete number of dead, wounded and missing persons is more than 4500 mans.