These were the circumstances in which Romania intervened:
Russian troops were pinned to the Kowel and Galician offensives; half of them
were placed north of the Pripyat with almost nothing to do. Alexeyev himself
had been told again and again that Romanian intervention would be decisive.
Joffre had said that ‘no price is too high to pay for it’; Russian diplomats
had been induced to promise Romania the areas of Austria-Hungary she coveted,
and later on the Entente connived at Romania’s acquisition of Russian
territory, Bessarabia. Alexeyev himself generally felt that Romanian intervention
was not worth this much—on the contrary, it would be a liability. At the turn
of 1915–16, he had opposed schemes for bringing her in—the front would be
lengthened; southern Russia would thus be exposed to a German attack through
Romania; the Russian army was not large enough to cover all of the area; the
Romanian army was useless. In June, his attitude had changed to some extent,
but he was never willing to make sacrifices for Romania, and now preferred to
concentrate his troops on Kowel and Lwów. In any case, the railway-links
between Russian and Romania were too weak to allow any rapid diversion of
Russian troops. There were only two single-track lines connecting the two
countries, even then with the usual problem of differing gauges. Late in November,
Joffre managed to extract from Alexeyev a promise that Russian troops would
assist in the defence of Bucharest; but since the Romanians could not offer
even the sixteen trains per day needed for these troops, the proposal fell
through. Alexeyev would give Romania only a small force—50,000 men (two
infantry divisions and a single cavalry division) under Zayonchkovski.
Otherwise, the Romanians must help themselves. The nearest Russian force was
Lechitski’s IX Army, but it had only eleven divisions, was already engaged on
the Dniester front, and in any case could not receive troops with any speed
since communications were very poor and winter-conditions had already set in.
Grudgingly, Stavka sent an extra corps to Lechitski, and concentrated its main efforts
as before against Kowel.
Romania was virtually indefensible. The richest part of the
country, Wallachia, jutted out in a long tongue between Hungary and Bulgaria:
neither the Carpathians—traversed by many passes—nor the Danube offered real
obstacles to an invasion, yet the Romanians could not simply abandon Wallachia,
since this would mean loss of their capital. Their army could be easily split
up between different functions, each of them difficult to discharge, and the
Romanian high command complicated this problem still more by failing to give
constant priorities to the various strategic tasks. Half of the army was
switched, bewilderingly, between one front and the other. Romania’s
intervention could only matter if the initial offensive against Hungary won an
immediate success.
This did not turn out to be the case. To start with, nearly
400,000 Romanians crossed the Hungarian borders, and met opposition in the
shape of the Austro-Hungarian I Army: 34,000 man, with a corps of miners
volunteering to defend their pits to the west. Frontier villages were occupied,
and the old Saxon town of Kronstadt, which lay in the south-eastern tip of
Transylvania. But supply-problems turned out to be crippling. There was not
much railway-communication between Hungary and Romania, and that little was
badly-managed. The paths through the mountains could often accommodate only
troops moving in single file, not carts or guns. Commanders behaved ineptly,
and seemed to think that the prospect of meeting German troops dispensed them
from further activity. Some of them even thought that, once they reached
Central Transylvania, they would be so far from their supply-routes that
catastrophe would intervene. In consequence, the Romanians did not even choose
to occupy Hermannstadt, defended only by gendarmerie. They occupied the
south-eastern tip of Transylvania, and waited to see what would happen.
The Central Powers’ plan was obvious enough. There would be
an attack on the Romanians in Transylvania, combined with an attack along the
Black Sea coast, into the Dobrogea—fertile lands, inhabited mainly by
Bulgarians and stolen from Bulgaria in 1913, which the Bulgarians were keen to
recover. The Romanians did not expect this attack. First, they thought that
western Powers’ forces in Salonica would pin most of the Bulgarian army. This
was not the case. The western Powers had enough on their hands to contain
mosquitoes, let alone Bulgarians; in any case, their Greek allies were of such
doubtful allegiance that an entire Greek army corps refused to fight at all,
surrendered in toto and was interned in Silesia for the rest of the war. The
attack from Salonica was a complete failure, and did not prevent Germans, Turks
and Bulgarians from concentrating a substantial force against southern Romania.
The Romanians had also expected Bulgaria to be deterred by the presence of a
Russian force, Zayonchkovski’s, in the Dobrogea. In theory, the Bulgarians were
Russophil; men even thought they might make peace once Romania entered the war
on Russia’s side. This again was not the case. The Bulgarians hesitated about
intervening; they even protested when German and Austro-Hungarian units
stationed in Bulgaria took action against Romania (bombing Bucharest, for
instance). But they decided in the end to declare war on Romania, a day or so
after their allies. In this way, a joint offensive of all four Central Powers
became possible. Moreover, the railways that fed reserves to Transylvania were
superior to anything on the Romanian side. By the third week of September, the
Central Powers’ forces had been stepped up to 200,000 men, half of them German.
The Kowel offensive did almost nothing to prevent this.
The campaign opened with an unexpectedly successful feint attack by the Bulgarians and their allies in the Dobrogea. Mackensen, who commanded these forces, decided on a diversionary move against the Romanian fortress, Tutracǎia, on the Danube. A besieging force, actually smaller than the garrison, moved up. The fortress’s commander announced to an assemblage of foreign journalists that ‘Turtucaia will be our Verdun’. It fell the next day, eighty per cent of the garrison surrendering, and the rest fleeing, their commander in the lead. By 8th September, Silistria also had fallen, this time without even spoken resistance. The Bulgarians and their allies crossed the border and invaded the Dobrogea. Here they were due to encounter Russian forces. But the collaboration of Russians and Romanians almost constituted an object-lesson in how not to run a multinational force. Zayonchkovski, though doing his best to maintain polite forms, complained again and again to Alexeyev that his task was impossible: to make the Romanian army fight a modern war was asking a donkey to perform a minuet. Ordinary Russian soldiers regarded their allies with the utmost contempt, not least when these allies surrendered to Russian units, mistaking them for Bulgarian ones. Russians sacked the countryside in a dress-rehearsal for the agrarian atrocities of 1917: estates laid to waste, wine-cellars ruthlessly plundered, beasts’ throats cut, drunken soldiery drowned or boiled to death in vats of burning spirit. Russian officers quoted an old tag on Romania—‘des hommes sans honneur, des femmes sans pudeur, des fleurs sans odeur, des titres sans valeur’. The Romanians, at their allies’ mercy, could only exaggerate the Central Powers’ strength in the hope that more Russian troops would somehow be sent to save them. But Alexeyev was adamant: he felt that Wallachia and the Dobrogea should be given up, and the Romanian army withdrawn into the Moldavian mountains until it had absorbed the facts of modern war. A division was sent from Kuropatkin’s front in mid-September, and Lechitski was told to make better progress south of the Dniester. Otherwise, Russian help consisted mainly of renewed, futile attempts against the Kowel marches.Turtucaia. The campaign opened with an unexpectedly successful feint attack by the Bulgarians and their allies in the Dobrogea. Mackensen, who commanded these forces, decided on a diversionary move against the Romanian fortress, Turtucaia, on the Danube. A besieging force, actually smaller than the garrison, moved up. The fortress’s commander announced to an assemblage of foreign journalists that ‘Turtucaia will be our Verdun’. It fell the next day, eighty per cent of the garrison surrendering, and the rest fleeing, their commander in the lead. By 8th September, Silistria also had fallen, this time without even spoken resistance. The Bulgarians and their allies crossed the border and invaded the Dobrogea. Here they were due to encounter Russian forces. But the collaboration of Russians and Romanians almost constituted an object-lesson in how not to run a multinational force. Zayonchkovski, though doing his best to maintain polite forms, complained again and again to Alexeyev that his task was impossible: to make the Romanian army fight a modern war was asking a donkey to perform a minuet. Ordinary Russian soldiers regarded their allies with the utmost contempt, not least when these allies surrendered to Russian units, mistaking them for Bulgarian ones. Russians sacked the countryside in a dress-rehearsal for the agrarian atrocities of 1917: estates laid to waste, wine-cellars ruthlessly plundered, beasts’ throats cut, drunken soldiery drowned or boiled to death in vats of burning spirit. Russian officers quoted an old tag on Romania—‘des hommes sans honneur, des femmes sans pudeur, des fleurs sans odeur, des titres sans valeur’. The Romanians, at their allies’ mercy, could only exaggerate the Central Powers’ strength in the hope that more Russian troops would somehow be sent to save them. But Alexeyev was adamant: he felt that Wallachia and the Dobrogea should be given up, and the Romanian army withdrawn into the Moldavian mountains until it had absorbed the facts of modern war. A division was sent from Kuropatkin’s front in mid-September, and Lechitski was told to make better progress south of the Dniester. Otherwise, Russian help consisted mainly of renewed, futile attempts against the Kowel marches.
This strategic manoeuvre had been achieved at the cost of
Romanian positions in Transylvania. Here, only ten divisions had been left—less
than the Central Powers, with twelve. Moreover, the Romanians’ advance had been
of the worst possible kind. It had brought them beyond their own lines of
supply, but it had not brought them forward to any point where they could
disrupt the arrival by rail of the Central Powers troops. By mid-September, a
German IX Army had been established (as a grim joke under Falkenhayn’s command)
to co-operate with the Austro-Hungarian I Army. The various Romanian groups
stood in isolated blocks just north of the Carpathians : usually in utter
ignorance as to each other’s whereabouts, and with no possibility of
establishing rapid contact in battle. Falkenhayn drove against one of these
isolated corps, at Hermannstadt, and pushed it back through the Turnu Roşu
pass. The Romanian corps to its right, near Kronstadt, did not learn anything
of this, and was itself driven back with much loss over the mountains. By 6th
October, Transylvania was once more virtually completely in the hands of the
Central Powers. Now Falkenhayn could cross the mountains into Wallachia, and
join up with Mackensen’s forces on the Danube. To avoid this, the Romanians
decided to take back from the Danube the troops they had sent in the second
half of September—such that nearly half of the Romanian army spent the first
six weeks of war travelling between one front and the other. In the short term,
this succeeded. The passes into Wallachia were blocked, and throughout October
Falkenhayn’s groups had a difficult time, pushing through the snow from one
defence-position to another on their way through the mountains. From time to
time, Conrad von Hötzendorf suggested more ambitious plans: a great offensive
towards Bucharest, from the passes just to north-west of it. This plan, though
subsequently praised by Liddell Hart, made too little sense on the ground for
it to be adopted. Throughout October, the Central Powers’ action here was more
important for the troops that it pinned than for the ground it gained.
On the other hand, on the southern front the Central Powers’
offensive achieved considerable results. An offensive into the Dobrogea was
prepared, and launched, mainly with Bulgarian and Arab divisions, on 21st
October. Zayonchkovski’s army had not been strengthened: on the contrary, his
demands for help had met only sarcastic remarks. He complained that his force
was ‘only the bone thrown to the Romanians to get them into this war’; he went
on at length about the ‘repulsive impression as regards military matters’ that
he had gained of his allies, and about their ‘utter misunderstanding of modern
war, their appalling inclination to panic’. But Stavka merely answered that,
since the Romanians were not in any position of numerical inferiority, there should
be no complaints. Defence of the Dobrogea was another piece of burlesque.
Bombardment struck Romanians on the right, who retired without informing
Russians in the centre. The Russian centre fell back in confusion, and the race
to retreat was then won by the Romanian left, which fled back along the Black
Sea coast, pursued by Bulgarian cavalry over the sands. In no time, the
railway-line between Cernavoda and Constanta, the Romanians’ main port, was
broken. Constanta itself was not defended. Russians had ordered it to be
destroyed, but the Romanians regarded it with too great pride to let this
happen, and no doubt felt that their allies would make a thorough job of the
destruction, if allowed to do so. They therefore surrendered the port, intact
and with huge stocks of grain and oil, before the Russians could knock it
about. The Russians naval detachment supposedly guarding it then sailed away,
leaving the Romanian defenders to their fate. By the end of October, the
Central Powers had captured more or less the whole of the Dobrogea, and
threatened to cut off Bucharest from the sea.
Alexeyev now began to recognise that he would have to do
something. The Kowel offensives had failed, and attacks in eastern Galicia were
also dying down in failure; now the Central Powers had almost reached the
Danube delta, and seemed to threaten southern Russia. Stavka first sent VIII
Army to the Dniester, and then agreed to send another army, under Sakharov, to
constitute, ‘Army of the Danube’ with a view to the defence of the delta and
Gǎlǎti. Finally, IV Army was ear-marked for Romania. Throughout November, a
great movement of Russian troops was under way—thirty-six infantry and eleven
cavalry divisions. But the railway-lines, through Reni and Benderi, could take
only 200 waggons a day, at a time when supply alone needed 433. The management
of these lines was such that a French railway-expert suffered a nervous
break-down when he was detailed to sort them out. It was not until mid-December
that the Russian troops had arrived in full strength, and even then they were
badly under-supplied. Early in November, what arrived could suffice only to
prevent further Bulgarian progress along the Black Sea coast.
But this stability could not change things in Wallachia. The
Russian troops could not reach Bucharest in time, nor indeed did Alexeyev
particularly want them to, for he was concerned only to defend Moldavia and the
approaches to southern Russia. A cavalry corps was sent, but it was exhausted
in covering 400 miles, and even re-shoeing of the horses could take up to a
week in Romanian conditions. Early in November, German troops penetrated the
passes into the western part of Wallachia—Oltenia—and by mid-November had
reached the plains. A cavalry corps moved east towards Bucharest, dislodging
the defenders from the southern parts of other passes. On 23rd November the
Germano-Bulgarian force crossed the Danube, and found the task easy enough,
since the Romanians had now diverted most of their forces back to the
Carpathian front: there were only eighteen battalions to forty, and forty-eight
guns to 188 when the Germans crossed at Ruščuk. By 29th November the two armies
of the Central Powers were threatening Bucharest.
There was a final episode of drama. The Romanians had now
been sent a French military mission, under Berthelot, Joffre’s chief of staff
during the battle of the Marne. Berthelot was full of fight; he wished to build
up the Romanian army—so much so that Stavka found his talk dangerous, and
requested his removal. He had visions of a Balkan Marne: a flank-attack on the
Germans as they approached Bucharest, crossing the Arges river. In the first
days of December, Berthelot built up a masse de manoeuvre: divisions scraped
from the Danube and the Carpathians. Amid grandiose announcements of national
heroism, illiterate peasantry were driven forward by stage-heroic staffs into
an affair that only consumed what was left of the reserve-divisions. Apart from
a minor embarrassment, the Germans barely noticed ‘the Romanian Marne’. Socec, who
led one of the Romanian divisions, led his men in flight, was subjected to
preliminary investigation for court-martial, and was then absolved when the
dossier of his case was ‘stolen’ from the war ministry archives. As a
background to all this, British military representatives prudently toured the
oil-areas of Ploiesti, setting light to the wells. In clouds of smoke, the
remnants of the Romanian divisions withdrew to the north, leaving Bucharest to
Mackensen who entered it on 7th December. Of the twenty-three Romanian
divisions, six had ‘disintegrated’, two had been ‘captured’, and the rest
contained, together, 70,000 men. Mackensen plodded after them. But with the
arrival of Russian troops, the Germans’ progress was slow. They were held up at
Urziceni, and then, in a battle over Christmas, at Rîmnicu-Sǎrat. By early
January, they were lodged on the Siret, border of Moldavia, and could not
progress beyond bridgeheads.
Thereafter, the Romanian campaign died down. Both sides suffered from difficulties of supply that prevented them from undertaking further action. On the Central Powers’ side, the cold caused casualties of twenty-five per cent. Mud, lice, appalling roads, lack of railways, hovels made up the picture. The Central Powers also quarrelled bitterly over spoils: Bulgarians and Turks wrangled over the future of the Dobrogea, many Germans and Austro-Hungarians wished to restore Romania as an ally of the Central Powers. At the same time, Mackensen was told to send troops to other fronts. On the Russo-Romanian side, there was also little appetite for action. The Romanian army had been put to flight; it could count on a man-power reserve of less than 250,000 men, most of them quite untrained. The Russians, who now dominated the area completely, had no stomach for further offensive action. Their only action of any scale between early January and the Kerenski offensive of mid-summer was a stroke on the Baltic coast. Early in January they profited from withdrawal of German troops to stage a coup in Courland, against Mitau and Tukkum. They attacked by surprise, in an area of sand-dunes that masked the attackers’ activity; did not bombard in advance; did not attack in ‘waves’. In return for a few thousand casualties, they won a respectable success: thirty-six German guns and 8,000 prisoners. It was a symbol of the patterns prevailing on the eastern front. Minor attacks, launched by surprise, generally achieved far more impressive results than major ones preceded by heavy bombardment. The campaign of 1916 thus ended, fittingly enough, with a demonstration of Brusilov’s correctness.
The Eastern Front 1914-1917
Author: Norman Stone
