Bucharest had no real military value, but its capture would have immense political repercussions. After the blows dealt in the spring of 1916 at Verdun and in the summer by the Russian Brusilov offensive, taking the city would show the Entente and the world that the Central Powers were still in the picture. Von Mackensen had moved up his heavy artillery for bombarding the forts around the city, and the various divisions had made plans to storm their sectors. To escape the clutches of the Central Powers, the Romanian army had left the city in full retreat east, where it met Russian reinforcements. Von Mackensen had sent the 9th Army in pursuit while he planned to take care of the enemy’s capital.
The Romanians declared it an open city as their enemies pressed in. The decision to abandon the capital had been made long before the outcome of the battle at its edge. Meeting at Peris on 24 November, the day following von Mackensen’s crossing of the Danube, cabinet ministers approved moving the cabinet agencies to the provincial capital of Moldavia, Iasi, the second city of Romania. The fighting on the Arges River determined the date of departure, and late in the afternoon of 3 December, officials raced about posting placards announcing “that in the interest of defending the country and of organizing resistance forces, the government is forced to leave the capital and to move to Iasi.”1 Most government agencies and officials were already there.
The routing of Romania’s armies and the capture of her capital in such short order could hardly present a clearer juxtaposition of her military ineptitude and colossal misjudgment with the prowess of the Central Powers. It was also a lucky coincidence for the latter that von Mackensen’s Danube Army contained sizable units from each member of the alliance. Few inhabitants of Bucharest harbored any doubts that the Germans and Austrians, angered by what they perceived as Romania’s treachery when she joined the Entente, would exact retribution. The Bulgarians and Turks had even older scores to settle.2
The Central Powers were going to find it hard to take what they wanted most from Romania – namely, her petroleum and grain products. As the gray columns descended from the mountains, tall plumes of smoke told them that the Romanians had fired the wells and fuel storage facilities. The scene was hellish. Low, dark, acrid clouds of burning crude oil laced with tongues of flame smothered the countryside.
When the port of Constanta with its multitude of grain silos and oil tanks had fallen to von Mackensen in October, the Romanians had failed to destroy the facilities, to the chagrin of the Entente. The Central Powers had immediately put the booty to use.3 The blunder led to much finger-pointing, but the lost fuel amounted to the proverbial drop in the bucket compared to what was in storage around the country, to say nothing of what was in the ground awaiting extraction. As the military situation in Romania began to disintegrate in November, Colonel Christopher Thomson (1875–1930), the English military attaché, mentioned to Berthelot the unwelcome necessity of devising a plan to make sure such a calamity did not recur. The subject was batted about, as the Romanians were understandably opposed, and suggestions that the sacrifice was necessary for the good of the alliance fell on deaf ears. Bratianu’s opposition was adamant. He focused on the humanitarian issue, not the oil: the Allies wanted to destroy the grain stocks as well as the fuel in storage and wells, and the prime minister drew the line at that. Destroying the grain would condemn Romanians to starvation, and he threatened to resign over the issue. King Ferdinand tried to compromise by agreeing to the destruction of grain in Walachia but not Moldavia. The prime minister still balked.4 Bowing to Allied pressure, the Romanian government authorized demolition of the wells on 15 November. Left unsaid was what to do about the grain stocks.
The impasse had not deterred the English. In early November the War Office had summoned Major John Norton-Griffiths (1871–1930) from the mud at Ypres, where he had been digging tunnels. An engineer and member of Parliament with a reputation for daring earned in both the Boer and current wars, Norton-Griffiths was told to take down the Romanian oil industry and destroy the supplies on hand. Meeting in London with petroleum experts, he learned enough about the extraction business to know that the wells and pumping machinery were more vulnerable and important than the supplies. He set out for Romania by himself.5
On arrival, he discovered that Thomson and the ambassador, Sir George Barclay, were at loggerheads. Barclay initially did not want the wells wrecked, and he could not get a straight answer from the War Office as to the extent of Norton-Griffiths’s brief.6 The major quickly discovered he was going to need help, and lots of it. While Ambassador Barclay fretted about finding out exactly what his visitor from London was doing, Norton-Griffiths rounded up the English citizens working in the Romanian petroleum industry and informed them it was their duty to king and country to ensure that the enemy would acquire nothing of use if the oil fields were abandoned. As the Germans closed in, he gave military commissions to the civilian oil experts and ordered them to set fire to storage tanks. Destroying the wells proved to be more difficult. Pounding stones and drill bits into the wellheads or dynamiting them turned out to be the best method. Ruining the vast stocks of grain was even easier in many locations. The fuels were often stored in tanks located next to or near granaries, and it was simply a matter of opening the tank valves to flood the grain, spoiling both products.
The work began on 3 December.7 Assisted by his team of “commissioned officers,” Norton-Griffiths set northern Walachia on fire. He was often only one step ahead of the Germans, leaving on the far side of an oil field as they entered from the near side. The damage to stocks and equipment was immense; Norton-Griffiths told the War Office he estimated that 210 million gallons of fuels had been “destroyed, reservoirs exploding and … utterly ruined.” Cossack cavalry assisted in destroying much of the grain.8
Surrounding Bucharest was a belt of fortresses, designed from plans made by the famous Belgian engineer, General Henri Brialmont. Eighteen large forts had the same number of smaller ones between them, connected by rail and roads. The Romanians had stripped the obsolete forts of their artillery, and no one considered fighting within the city as a desperate, last-ditch effort.9
Von Mackensen was not privy to Romanian plans and instructed his soldiers to prepare for storming the city, while moving his heavy artillery into place. At the same time, he had sent a plenipotentiary into Bucharest to sound out the possibility of negotiating a surrender.10
While von Mackensen waited for a response, preparations continued. He was at von Kneussl’s headquarters the morning of 6 December, listening to a briefing about storming the enemy capital, scheduled for the next day. It was the field marshal’s sixty-seventh birthday. Two years earlier, his forces had captured Lodz in time for his birthday dinner, and he was wondering if the much larger prize of Bucharest would be on his plate for the night’s birthday dinner. Because he had left before his emissary, Captain Lange, had returned empty-handed from talking to the Romanians, von Mackensen did not know that the mayor of Bucharest wanted to surrender. Accompanied by a convoy of automobiles carrying several ministers from the diplomatic corps, the mayor drove to the outskirts of the city to meet Lange, but communications broke down, and von Mackensen’s emissary did not appear.11 Meanwhile, reconnaissance patrols had reported to the LII Corps headquarters that the outer fringes of the city appeared undefended. Kosch seized the opportunity and immediately ordered von Kneussl to send his division into Bucharest.12
Kosch’s orders arrived in the middle of the briefing for von Mackensen. As the Bavarians rushed off, von Mackensen’s chief of staff, General Tappen, suggested to the field marshal that they should go into the city and “take” it. Von Mackensen agreed at once and, accompanied by Tappen and two staff officers, set out for the downtown in a car. He soon passed the marching infantry and then only civilians, Romanian civilians, were in sight. Unaccompanied by any soldiers, he boldly marched into the palace and, to his surprise, found it occupied by Pomeranian grenadiers. He told their adjutant, “Report to OHL. Bucharest taken intact by our Army.”13
In reality, soldiers and cavalrymen from the 9th Army had entered the city first. The grenadiers that von Mackensen found awaiting him in the royal palace came from the 2nd Pomeranian Grenadier Regiment of the 109th Division, part of Kühne’s LIV Corps. On 4 December the OHL had ordered the 9th Army to pass around the north of the city, leaving the Danube Army to take the city. Von Falkenhayn complied.14 As his units passed to the north of the city, patrols discovered that the Romanian army was gone. Infantry from the 115th and 109th Divisions and von Schmettow’s cavalry entered the city. The infantrymen jumped on a tram to ride to the palace, where Field Marshal von Mackensen encountered them.15
As soon as the 11th Bavarian Division arrived in the center of the city, the Pomeranians withdrew. The reception accorded the conquerors was surprisingly cordial. The Germans took over the Ministry of Public Works for their headquarters and established a military administration to govern and exploit the country. Lieutenant General Erich von Tülff (1854–1934) became the military governor.16
While the Danube Army was preparing to assault Bucharest, the 9th Army had circled north of the capital, encountering pockets of stiff resistance. The mission was to get astride the line of retreat to the northeast, trapping both the city’s defenders and the divisions remaining in the mountains. The Romanian forces defending the city had already escaped, but several of the divisions of the 1st and 2nd Armies enjoyed no such luck.
Von Schmettow’s cavalry had circled closest to the city, and Kühne’s LIV Corps passed to their north. Units from both corps had entered the city. Krafft’s group and von Morgen’s I Reserve Corps marched east and southeast along the base of the mountains, while von Staabs’s XXXIX Reserve Corps remained mired in the Predeal Pass.17 On the 6th, von Morgen’s 12th Bavarian and 76th Reserve Divisions overwhelmed the 22nd Romanian Division, which they had been pursing since they broke out of the Campulung Basin, and entered Ploesti.18 The city was Romania’s oil capital and a key railroad node. The same day, the 41st Division smashed the Romanian 10th Division, capturing over 3,500 of the enemy along with the division staff.19 Far to the south, on the Danube, Colonel Szivo’s group forced the Romanian Orsova Group to surrender. From the start of Szivo’s pursuit of the Romanian group on 24 November until its capitulation, the total number of prisoners taken amounted to over 10,000, with forty guns also captured.20
On the 7th, the divisions of Averescu’s 2nd Army facing the XXXIX Corps had bowed to developments in the south and abandoned their positions, retreating southeast. Although von Falkenhayn had given von Staabs an additional division – the Austrian 24th Infantry Troop Division, recently arrived from Russia – the withdrawing Romanians had destroyed the roads, making pursuit from Sinaia impossible.21 Nonetheless, not all of Averescu’s men escaped. Von Morgen’s troops caught the Romanian 4th Division, which had bottled up von Staabs, before it could escape, adding 11,000 prisoners and over twenty guns to their tally.22
Both the Romanian and Austro-German armies were approaching their limits. Many units on both sides had been engaged in combat continuously since Kühne’s LIV Corps had crossed the Szurduk Pass. The forces from the Red Tower and Brasov area passes had been at it even longer. Since crossing the mountains, the 9th Army had advanced over 250 miles, conducted contested crossings of two major rivers (the Olt and the Arges), and fought countless engagements and several major battles. The Romanians had done the same – in reverse.
Constant rain in Walachia had caused rivers to overflow and turned the highways into quagmires or “mud baths,” to use the description of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion. In the higher elevations, snow alternating with periods of thawing had accomplished the same for the thoroughfares there. As one of Krafft’s mountaineers wrote, “the frightful condition of the roads gradually caused our heavy artillery to come to a stop. Only the infantry on foot and the pack animals and mountain guns could move in the rain and mud.”23 Although the poor condition of the roads slowed both armies equally, von Falkenhayn’s supply base was hundreds of miles to his rear, and his units had outrun their supplies. Exhaustion and the difficulties of providing logistical support meant the tempo of the advance had to slow, and von Falkenhayn called for a day of rest on the 8th.24
The Romanians needed rest just as much as their opponents, but fear and desperation kept them moving east while the Germans paused. The loss of their capital, coupled with a steady stream of reversals, had shattered what morale still existed. It was a beaten army that headed east, and the troops were showing signs of panic. An English observer reported that “the Roumanian Army is in full retreat, … their morale is broken and they are utterly useless.”25
King Ferdinand ordered his army to block the advancing Germans east of the capital, on a line running southeast from Ploesti toward Hirsova, on the Danube. The French regarded the effort as futile in light of the exhaustion of the troops. In reality, the pace of the enemy controlled events; Ploesti fell the same day as Bucharest, which dictated moving the defensive line farther east. The Romanian headquarters now wanted to hold along a line running from Rimnicu Sarat, below the apex of the Transylvanian Alps and the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, to Virizu, on the Danube just south of Braila.26
The king and his circle focused their attention on the Russians, whose increasing and essential assistance came with an expensive quid pro quo. The Russians already had four corps (twelve divisions) in Romania, mostly in Moldavia. More units were in transit from Russia. Given the destruction of the Romanian army, it was clear that the Russians would have to assume the bulk of the fighting inside Romania if the country was to survive. They proposed organizing their forces into a front, their term for an army group, that would have control over any Romanian units fit to engage in combat. They wanted a Russian general in command. Angered by what they perceived as Russian indifference to their losses, the Romanians balked at such an arrangement. Berthelot realistically went along, having already acknowledged that his role as counselor for operations had ended,27 and he provided the formula for a command structure that eventually found acceptance. The French general proposed that the Russians should name Ferdinand as the commander of the “Romanian Front,” with a Romanian and a Russian general in charge of the soldiers and units from their respective nations. The general in command of the Russian formations would be second in command of the front. For all intents, however, the Russian general would exercise control. The Russians agreed and nominated Dmitri Grigorevich Shcherbachev (1857–1932), commander of the Russian 7th Army, for the new position. But Berthelot thought that Sakharov was the logical choice and managed to convince both parties to settle for him.28
The Romanians had also moved their general headquarters from Buzau to Barlad, in Moldavia, arriving on the 8th. Barlad was about fifty miles south of the new capital of Iasi. The staff selected the town because of fears that the relocation of the national government had overwhelmed Iasi.
The loss of the national capital and the country’s richest province after barely a hundred days of fighting called for a shake-up of the general headquarters. Iliescu had to go. As chief of staff, he was everyone’s scapegoat. Berthelot’s favorite, Prezan, took his place. Prezan did not want the position; Ferdinand had to order him to take it. Iliescu tried to remain as Prezan’s deputy, but the king did not dare make such an appointment in the furor over the loss of the capital, nor would he even offer Iliescu a division. Getting him out of the country seemed best.29 Iliescu tried to have some of his cronies placed in division commands, but Berthelot blocked the clumsy proposal by insisting that the list go through Prezan. By midmonth, the former chief of staff had left for Paris and a new job as the Romanian liaison officer at the French general headquarters. His departure opened the door for a general housecleaning. Both Berthelot and Beliaev proposed sweeping personnel changes. The Russians even sounded out the possibility of taking control of the country’s telephone and telegraph system and the railroads. Ferdinand finally left such decisions to Prezan, but only after Bratianu had stiffened the monarch’s resolve.30
The German leaders knew that the Romanians were retreating east, where numerous Russian units sufficient to mount a tough defense awaited them near the Sereth River. Von Falkenhayn wanted to upset their plan, and as soon as the rest day ended, the gray columns resumed their advance. To encourage his men, he issued an “Order of the Day,” cataloguing what they had done since Kühne’s corps had turned east at Craiova and started across Walachia. In those seventeen days, he said, the army had captured the enemy’s capital along with 70,000 prisoners, 125 artillery pieces, and 145 machine guns. Added to what the 9th Army had taken earlier in Siebenbürgen, the total now exceeded 115,000 prisoners, 295 guns, and 297 machine guns.31
As the Germans headed east, von Falkenhayn rearranged his northern flank to capitalize on the capabilities of his units. He moved Krafft’s Alpenkorps back into the mountains, to scour them of Romanian units. Von Morgen’s I Reserve Corps marched along the wide plains just below the mountains, and south of von Morgen came the LIV Corps of Kühne. Von Schmettow’s cavalry filled the gap between the 9th and Danube Armies. Von Staabs’s XXXIX Corps joined General von Gerok’s Group to assist in an assault through the Oitoz Pass.32
The advancing formations encountered little resistance on their right flank, located on the plain where Walachia and Moldavia joined. The cavalry had reached the Jalomita River on the 8th, only to discover that the Romanians had destroyed the bridges on the river as well as those along its tributary, the Prahova. By the 11th, the rest of the 9th Army had come to a standstill at the Jalomita. Von Falkenhayn ordered his bridging equipment forward, but the poor roads and logistical issues that had just forced him to grant a day of rest, still plagued the 9th Army. The weak link was transportation in the Transylvanian Alps. Despite Herculean efforts by construction and engineer units, the Germans never got the rail lines back in order during the campaign. Supplies of all sorts arriving in Petrosani at the railhead had to go over the mountains on horse-drawn wagons or in trucks. Once the supplies entered Romania, they were transferred back to rail cars, but the entire process was a nightmare of inefficiency and slowed everything. As his infantry approached the Prahova-Jalomita Rivers, the roads were in such poor shape that the divisions could not march separately but had to march in column behind one another along one or two key avenues. The highways were littered with horse cadavers and broken wagons abandoned by the Romanians and Russians who had preceded the Germans on the same roads by a few days. Farther behind lagged the heavy artillery. Teams of oxen were rounded up from peasant villages and pressed into service towing wagons through the mud. The drinking water gave most of the soldiers diarrhea. Poor quality winter clothing offered no protection against the cold rain, from which there was no escape. The cavalry and their horses suffered the most. Discipline eroded. There were too many stragglers, looting had taken place in Ploesti and Buzau, and shooting at pigs, cattle, geese, and poultry had reached the point where it had become dangerous. Von Falkenhayn knew the situation called for relentless pursuit, but he had to acknowledge his army did not have the strength.33
In the foothills, the Romanians mounted a much more effective defense, and Krafft’s and von Morgen’s men had to fight for every foot approaching the city of Buzau. East of the 9th Army, in the open spaces of Walachia, von Mackensen’s formations had pushed the Russians back without much trouble on a wide front extending east to the Danube River. In the extreme northern Dobrogea, between the Danube and the Black Sea, the Bulgarian 3rd Army had started a drive north. The Russians and Romanians began to show signs of preparing to abandon the region.34
On the 15th, von Falkenhayn finally got his forces across the Jalomita and resumed his advance on Rimnicu Sarat, a town a few miles south of the Carpathian Mountains, where a river of the same name emerged and flowed north into the Sereth. Led by Sakharov, the Russians were dug in and waiting. Technically the deputy to the Romanian king, Sakharov had the “rights” of a commander in chief – which, in effect, placed him in charge. He controlled the Russian 4th and 6th (the former Danube Army) Armies and, indirectly, the Romanian army.35
The Russians had set up a defense line running from Rimnicu Sarat to Braila on the Danube.36 On the 15th, the Alpine Corps had taken the high ground several miles northwest of Rimnicu Sarat, making the city and that flank of the defense line untenable in the long run. Sakharov told Ferdinand and Berthelot that he planned to abandon the city and defend the country with his twenty divisions from a position farther north, presumably on the Sereth River. When he brought this decision up at the king’s daily briefing on the 16th, Berthelot goaded him into offering battle at Rimnicu Sarat, although the Russian commander gave his corps commanders permission in advance to retreat to the Sereth River line if “hard pressed.”37
The 9th Army units moving across the Walachia plain slowed their pace as they closed on Rimnicu Sarat. Von Falkenhayn shifted some units around, sending the 10th Austrian Mountain Brigade to Krafft’s Corps. But for the most part, the tired Germans rested and let their supplies catch up with them, preparing for the attack on Rimnicu Sarat.38 Aerial reconnaissance indicated the Russians were pulling out of the Dobrogea and constructing trench lines behind the Sereth River. The same flights revealed uninterrupted traffic on the highway from Rimnicu Sarat heading north to Focsani, convincing von Falkenhayn that the enemy would delay rather than offer a substantial battle when his advance resumed.39
From the German lines south of Rimnicu Sarat, as one looked north to the city, the foothills of the Carpathians dominated the land to the west. East of the city, the Rimnicu Sarat River turned north, meandering toward the city of Focsani. A highway between the two cities ran alongside the river, which had marshy ground on both sides. Von Falkenhayn’s plan of attack called for weighting his left flank in order to drive the Russians out of the mountains and hills and onto the plain, where they would have to retreat north on the highway. The marsh on either side of the highway would restrict their movement, and they would be out in the open, where Kühne’s LIV Corps could finish them off. Von Morgen’s I Corps (now the 216th, 76th Reserve and 12th Bavarian Divisions), attacking on the left flank between the foot of the mountains and Rimnicu Sarat, had the main burden, having to drive the Russians from their prepared positions at the bottom of the hills. Krafft’s divisions, farther west in the mountains, sealed off any escape to the northwest.40
Von Falkenhayn ordered the advance to begin on the 22nd. To his surprise, the Russians did not retreat; they resisted tenaciously, and the attack bogged down. The I Corps made little headway. To the west, the rugged terrain slowed Krafft’s soldiers, who then got lost, opening a gap between them and the I Corps.41 On the right flank of the 9th Army, von Mackensen’s Danube Army remained motionless, allowing Sakharov to remove units from in front of it and hurl them at the 9th Army. Von Falkenhayn urged von Mackensen to get engaged, but the latter refused, arguing that he had to remain in place lest he expose the flank of his army to the enemy.42
Not until the 24th did von Morgen’s division break into the first line of Russian trenches on Hill 417, on the far west flank. Twice the Russians counterattacked to regain their positions, although they were driven back each time. Both sides resorted to the use of bayonets. The positions along the heights to the west of the city proved to be the key to the defenses, as the Russians began to withdraw after losing them. The Germans did not know this, however, and after two days of fighting with little to show, von Falkenhayn and his staff felt that they had lost the battle.43
Von Falkenhayn committed his reserve during the night of the 24th, giving the 89th Division to von Morgen and the 41st to Kühne. Von Morgen’s part of the attack for the next day, Christmas, was called off, not from religious scruples, but because his main supply route from Ploesti had disintegrated, and neither trucks nor horse-drawn wagons could use it. The LIV Corps struggled to move, and to the east, the Danube Army finally joined in the effort but made little progress, as inadequate artillery preparation had left the enemy trenches undamaged.44 The 26th proved decisive. Von Morgen’s Corps, led by the 89th Division, stormed the Russian lines at 1 PM and succeeded in entering the second and third rows of enemy trenches, holding on to them despite desperate Russian efforts to retake them. It was their last gasp. On the afternoon of the 27th, the German 76th Reserve Division entered Rimnicu Sarat, and the Russians began to withdraw along the entire front. The six-day battle netted the Germans over 10,000 Russian prisoners, fifty-eight machine guns, and two artillery pieces. By nightfall, von Morgen’s soldiers were on the north bank of the Rimnic Sarat River.45
Despite their success, von Falkenhayn’s corps commanders told him their men were at the end of their tether. He then proposed to the OHL that he bring the campaign to an end at Rimnicu Sarat. The OHL responded that it wanted the 9th Army to take the city of Focsani,46 but it remained noncommittal about ending the campaign. Both the Danube and 9th Armies pressed on toward Focsani and the Sereth River over the next week. “I had to turn a deaf ear to the complaints of my subordinates about the terrible conditions of their units and the impossible tasks they had,” von Falkenhayn wrote. Logistical support was visibly collapsing. He wanted to move his headquarters to Rimnicu Sarat, but he felt the chaos in Buzau dictated that he remain there to help organize things. Buzau was the terminus of the railhead, where supplies were transferred to wagons or trucks, but the weather and roads had combined to slow movement forward from there to a trickle, and mountains of supplies were rapidly accumulating. Typhus and cholera had already made inroads among the prisoners of war in the stockades, worrying the general that such maladies might spread to his hospitals.47
To the east, von Mackensen’s forces had almost reached the Sereth River. The Russians were abandoning the Dobrogea and withdrawing to the north side of the Danube and Sereth,48 pursued by the Bulgarian Third Army. The Bulgarians had reached Tulcea on 2 December, where they threatened Braila, a key inland seaport where the Sereth merged with the Danube. They made no further progress, however, and von Mackensen had to send German units to take Braila. The city fell to the 11th Bavarian and the 217th Divisions on the 4th of January. The two divisions had attacked from the unguarded land side. Von Mackensen had sought assistance from the 9th Army, but von Falkenhayn found excuses not to help.49
North of Rimnicu Sarat, the Russians and Romanians continued to contest the advance of the Central Powers, and hard fighting remained – particularly in clearing the enemy from the mountains west of Focsani and along the Sereth River, along the south bank of which the Russians had constructed some fortifications. Exhaustion led to mistakes; tired officers in one of the 7th Cavalry Division’s squadrons failed to establish adequate security in Bulianca the night of 1–2 January, and the Russians surprised the unit, killing or capturing 9 officers and 425 troopers, as well as taking some artillery.50 Resistance was fierce in the mountains, and the 9th Army commander had nothing but praise for his mountaineers, the men of the Alpine Corps, the Württemberg Mountain Battalion, and the Austrian mountain brigades. No other troops in the world, he thought, could have advanced under such conditions. The Württembergers and Bavarian Guards Regiment had the mission of driving the enemy from the 3,300-foot Magura Odobesti Massif west of Focsani. The massif extended for miles to the Putna River, and its steep slopes, covered with thick forests, brought the German columns to a crawl. Cossack cavalry and Romanian infantry contested the advance. On the 6th, the Rommel Detachment took Height 637, the key to the massif, carrying their heavy machine guns on their backs because the pack animals were unable to climb the steep slopes. In the tiny Romanian villages dotting the massif, the natives greeted the Germans as liberators, having suffered from the depredations of their Cossack “allies,” who had occupied the region for the last month.51
Similar scenes played out to the southeast as the rest of the units of the 9th and Danube Armies pulled up to the Putna and Sereth Rivers.52 Von Falkenhayn had a momentary scare on 3 January when his intelligence section seemed to have lost sight of the enemy. Foul weather had grounded his aerial reconnaissance, and the Russians were avoiding the use of their radios. The intelligence officer, Captain Huth, told him he believed the enemy had thirteen infantry divisions facing them with another in reserve. Signs seemed to indicate that the enemy was massing for an attack against the 9th Army. At that time, von Falkenhayn had only ten divisions, but his fears seemed unjustified when the LIV Corps eliminated a Russian bridgehead at Nanesti on the south bank of the Sereth on the 4th. To Kühne’s left, von Morgen was approaching Focsani, and Krafft’s columns had gone around both sides of the Magura Massif and reached the Putna River, although the Württemberg Mountain Battalion and the Bavarians were still crossing the massif.
The Russians did attack on the 6th, taking Kühne by surprise and opening a gap at Gologanu, east of Focsani, between the 144th Austrian Brigade and the 216th Division. The Germans lost some artillery pieces, and von Falkenhayn ordered von Morgen to plug the hole.53 He was helped by the cavalry, which had already been told to stand down and was in the midst of reshoeing their horses. Von Schmettow managed to get his riders mounted and rushed into the opening. Meanwhile, Kühne had restored order in his ranks and launched a counterattack. The next day von Morgen’s 12th Bavarian and the 89th Divisions sealed the rupture, driving the Russians back across the Sereth.54
The Sereth River line had become von Falkenhayn’s objective. After pushing the Russians from Rimnicu Sarat, he had met with his corps commanders and the word was the same from each: the soldiers were completely exhausted. Von Falkenhayn asked the OHL to terminate the campaign, but von Hindenburg had said to move on. On New Year’s Eve, Ludendorff had sent the 9th Army instructions to prepare defenses along the Sereth.55 The Russians left Focsani on the 8th and crossed the Sereth on the 9th, with the Germans just behind them. On 10 January, with all of the 9th Army on the south side of the Putna-Sereth River line, von Falkenhayn issued orders to halt and adopt a static defense.56 The campaign had ended.
By early 1917 three Russian armies, comprised of fifteen corps and forty divisions, were in Romania.57 The Russians took over most of the front lines, and their presence, along with the adoption of a static defense on the Sereth and Putna Rivers, permitted the Romanians, assisted by the French military mission, to reequip and retrain their army in the spring of 1917. The staff of the French mission had determined that the largest force Romania could reequip was fifteen divisions. Of course, not all could be reconstituted at once, and some divisions had to remain on line to maintain Romania’s status as a belligerent. Six divisions, forming Averescu’s 2nd Army, remained at the apex of the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, carrying out minor operations. The other divisions, some nine in all, engaged in training under French tutelage in Moldavia. A rotation scheme provided relief for the original divisions of the 2nd Army. This arrangement benefited the Romanian army immensely,58 but it left the Russians bearing the brunt of the operations against the Central Powers in Romania. Alekseyev’s fears that Romania would become a liability had materialized.
Initially, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917 did not lead to many changes for the Russian units in Romania. However, as the contest between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet began to play out, the Russian army slowly disintegrated. Occasional truces and fraternization punctuated infrequent military inactivity on the largely forgotten Romanian Front. During the Orthodox Easter celebration, von Morgen noted that the Russians ceased fighting. The only shooting came from Romanian batteries. A regular postal service between the Central Powers and the Entente sprang up, with mailboxes located between the lines, filled at night and emptied by dawn. After the Easter period, the Russians adopted a more serious attitude, returning to harassment and interdiction fire. Russian planes attacked Focsani regularly. Von Morgen believed that the change in attitude was the result of work by Allied officers in the Russian units, who had fired up the soldiers. Such efforts did not last long, however, and the Germans, who were hoping for the collapse of Russia, issued orders to their troops not to undertake any offensive actions. Military activity largely ceased, and most of the Russian forces in Romania disintegrated into mobs, lulling the Central Powers into a false sense of complacency.59
Prodded by the Allies, the Provisional Government nonetheless launched a summer offensive, called the Kerensky offensive after the government’s war minister, centered on the Bucovina, north of Romania. To prevent the Central Powers from sending reinforcements from Romania, Stavka ordered a feint toward Bucharest from the city of Marasti, on the Putna River. The reconstituted 2nd Romanian Army played a major role. The attack in July came as a complete surprise and made impressive gains.60 Von Morgen admitted that the Romanians showed considerable improvement. They fought better, and they were better led, especially when it came to coordinating their infantry and artillery. In defensive operations, they showed great skill and were tenacious. Their morale was high, and they often tried to use the bayonet.61 At the level of the individual combatant, Corporal Helmut Schittenhelm of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion, echoed the words of the generals. The mountaineers, he noted, faced a different opponent this time, an excellent one who was well equipped and led by French officers.62 The crisis along the Putna River in July and August was such that the OHL had to bring the Württemberg Mountain Battalion and the Alpine Corps Division back from France to restore the front lines. The OHL directed a counteroffensive. The advance began at the end of the first week in August; when after much hard fighting, the Germans had barely gotten through the town of Marasesti to the Sereth River, the OHL called everything off on the 19th. The Romanians had battled the Germans to a standstill,63 but the Russians had completely collapsed in the Bucovina.
The Romanians could not last without the Russians, and the abrupt disintegration of the Russian army after the abortive Kerensky offensive left Romania without help. The battle of Marasesti in August marked the end of major combat operations for Romania. The Russian soldiers started leaving for home, plundering as they headed northeast. The Bolshevik takeover in Russia in early November led to an immediate armistice with the Central Powers. For Romania, the war was over. Only Queen Marie spoke of carrying on; the king, the cabinet, the generals, the political leaders – all recognized the inevitable. Hostilities formally ceased on 6 December 1917, and an armistice was signed three days later with the Central Powers. Negotiations to bring a formal end to the fighting dragged on, overshadowed by the far more important talks at Brest-Litovsk between Russia and the Central Powers. At the end of January 1918, Lenin’s government declared war on Romania for assisting Bessarabian separatists, and the Germans heightened the pressure on the Romanians to conclude a peace treaty, which was done on 8 March 1918. The harsh terms toppled Bratianu. None of the country’s politicians had the political strength or will to form a government after reading the German demands. The impasse forced the king to appoint Averescu as prime minister, probably because he had known von Mackensen before the war while serving in Berlin and had clandestinely favored coming to terms with the Central Powers.64 Averescu formed a cabinet of experts. The hope that the general’s former friendship with the German field marshal might benefit Romania proved illusory. The terms of the treaty were draconian. The Bulgarians took the Dobrogea, the Hungarians the passes in the mountains, and the Germans the oil and grain. The French military mission had to leave, and the king and queen tearfully saw Berthelot and his staff off on 9 March.65 Romania had laid down her arms.66
In the long run, however, the major impact of the Romanian Campaign on the war was economic rather than military. Romania’s materiel losses were steep: most of her oil wells and refineries were wrecked, over 200 million gallons of petroleum products were destroyed, and the Central Powers seized a year’s worth of agricultural produce. The Germans restored the wells and refineries to production, but it took most of 1917 for them to do so. The victory enabled the Central Powers to help themselves to the agricultural richness of Walachia in 1917 as well, probably prolonging the conflict by a year.
Among the casualties, figuratively, were the top military leaders of not just Romania but also Germany, Austria-Hungary, and France. The Germans reacted first, using Romania’s entry as the excuse for sacking their chief of staff, von Falkenhayn. His two years at the helm since 1914 had worsened Germany’s strategic position, and his attempts to crack Allied solidarity had failed, leaving Germany committed to a strategy of attrition in which her enemies had all the numbers in their favor. The “Eastern clique” centered on the von Hindenburg-Ludendorff team had long sought his ouster, and Romania’s declaration of war provided the catalyst. But after he was sacked as chief of staff, happenstance ironically allowed him the opportunity to act as nemesis against the Romanians whose entry into the war sealed his downfall.
The Romanian Campaign likewise exposed the precariousness of Austria’s situation and contributed immensely to Conrad’s demise. Fresh from his command in Transylvania, the new Emperor Karl recognized that his country was at the end of its resources and that its army was coming apart. Serving directly under the AOK and OHL during the Romanian Campaign had been an eye-opener for the young general. Austria’s position as the junior partner in the alliance was galling enough; the constant need to stiffen Austrian formations by giving them German units or staff officers or by placing them under German headquarters was humbling, and a swelling crescendo of tactless German remarks fueled the humiliation. Most of the drastic German steps were justified, but Karl thought he knew the main source of the Dual Monarchy’s troubles: Conrad. The chief of staff’s ambitions and plans were out of touch with reality, exceeding the capabilities of his armies. His self-isolation in his own headquarters meant that he had no idea of the capabilities of his armies. Not once did he visit the Romanian Front, leading to a complete loss of contact with his soldiers and the conditions under which they suffered.
The young emperor was determined to assert his authority and lead his subjects to a peaceful resolution of the war – without Germany if necessary. On 2 December, once celebrated universally throughout the Dual Monarchy as the day of the late Emperor Franz Joseph’s ascension to the throne, Karl assumed command of the empire’s armed forces, relegating Archduke Friedrich to the newly created post of deputy commander in chief.67 The fact that the new emperor took charge personally was not surprising; it was a traditional role, and only Franz Joseph’s advanced age had prevented him from assuming it in 1914. But when Karl actually began to exercise command in all its details, the message to Conrad was clear.68 Karl’s first step came in January 1917 when he moved the AOK from Teschen to Baden, about twenty miles south of the capital, forbidding officers’ wives to stay for extended periods. Conrad vainly fought the transfer, unmollified by his consolation prize, promotion to field marshal. The real issue between the two men had passed beyond the conduct of the war, although that certainly formed a major portion of the problem. Karl had become convinced that his faltering empire needed peace at almost any price, and he knew the chief of staff held the opposite view.
Conrad was pushed from office at the end of February 1917, reluctantly accepting command of the Trentino Front. As Conrad’s successor Karl selected Arz, in part because of the harmonious relationship the two had developed during the Romanian Campaign, and in part because the affable Austrian got along reasonably well with the Germans. Many Austro-Hungarian generals were senior in grade to Arz, and his selection raised a few eyebrows, but Karl did not want lengthy second-guessing of his decisions, nor did he care to feel patronized. He wanted a “yes man,” and, according to Gunther Rothenberg, Arz was little more than a traveling companion.69
Karl thought that with Conrad out of the way, he could bring an end to the war in a manner that would allow him to save his empire and dynasty. He sought to rework the formula that gave Germany command of the Central Powers’ war effort, but the Germans ignored him, and Karl began to realize what Conrad had known since the summer of 1916: Austria-Hungary’s past, present, and future sacrifices would have little or no bearing on the outcome of the war or the prospects of the Habsburg dynasty. The Dual Monarchy’s future lay entirely in Berlin, and the war party firmly held the reins. Karl’s conviction that he could end the war without German approval was a delusion.
The shake-up spread to the Entente powers as well. Joffre and French Prime Minister Aristide Briand were caught in the fallout from Romania’s defeat. The generalissimo had many sins to account for, Verdun being the greatest – against which the collapse of Romania was clearly venial. Joffre faced a legion of enemies who sought to use any chinks in his armor to get rid of him, and Romania provided an opening. Viewed as an “Easterner,” Briand had encouraged the Romanians to enter the war, and Joffre was seen as the nominal commander of the region, since he had control over Sarrail and his Army of the Orient and had dispatched the military mission to Romania under Berthelot.
The opening came when Joffre sought to sack Sarrail, whose independence troubled him and whose performance in connection with the Romanian campaign frustrated him. The Bulgarians had taken Sarrail by surprise in August 1916 and launched a preemptive offensive against him before Romania even opened hostilities. Sarrail’s sputtering actions against the Bulgarians were not what the Romanians had signed up for, and their calls for his departure were joined by the nations contributing forces to the Army of the Orient. Joffre proposed sending his deputy, General Noël de Castelnau (1851–1944), to Salonika to lay the foundation for Sarrail’s dismissal, but the latter’s friends switched War Minister General Pierre Rocques (1851–1920) for Castelnau. The minister’s subsequent report exonerated the commander of the Army of the Orient and embarrassed both Briand and Joffre, whose hostility toward Sarrail was well known.
Making matters worse for Joffre, on 20 November, Sarrail’s forces took the Bulgarian town of Monastir. Although Monastir was unknown to anyone except its residents, the capture constituted the only Allied success in many months. The minor triumph, coupled with the war minister’s unexpected praise for Sarrail, the disaster at Verdun, the disappointments of the Somme, and Romania’s catastrophic reverse discredited Joffre. Starting on 28 November, a secret session of the Chamber of Deputies took the general and Briand to task. To save himself and to silence the critics, Briand sacrificed Joffre before the year was out by promoting him to marshal and moving him to a nonposition, general in chief and technical advisor to the government.70
The shake-up in the Romanian general headquarters had, as was the case in Germany, begun at the onset of the campaign. Bratianu had planned to oust Chief of Staff Zottu as soon as he could arrange for the arrival of a French military mission, but the Star of Romania corruption revelations forced his hand. Attempting to run the campaign by committee until a French general arrived proved disastrous, and public opinion demanded accountability. Senior Romanian commanders paid the price for failure. The 1st Army had five commanders in fewer months, with only one falling in action. The 2nd and 3rd Armies each had commanders relieved, and corps and division commanders were changed almost weekly. After the fall of Bucharest, the general headquarters could no longer escape blame. There was a whole-scale exodus, led by Chief of Staff General Iliescu and operations chief Colonel Rascanu. Those two left for the Romanian mission in France. General Prezan became the chief of the general staff and brought in his own team. He remained chief of staff until 1920, except for a short break during the armistice period.
As for the soldiers who did the actual fighting, the Germans’ official history stated that they suffered 60,000 battle casualties in the 1916 campaign, with another 66,000 reporting as sick.71 That history does not provide the usual categories of killed, missing, or wounded. Unfortunately, most records of the Prussian Army were destroyed in World War II, but if the casualties of the 11th and 12th Bavarian Divisions and the Württemberg Mountain Battalion, whose records did survive, are typical, 15–20 percent of the German battle casualties (9,000 to 12,000 men) were killed in battle or died of wounds. Of the remainder, 75–80 percent were wounded, with the rest take prisoner or reported missing. Von Kneussl’s 11th Bavarian Division had a higher number (955, or 34 percent) of soldiers listed as missing, but this anomaly stemmed from the failed crossing of the Vulkan Pass in October.72 The Austrians’ official history does not have a tally of the Dual Monarchy’s casualties in the campaign. Instead, it summarizes losses for the entire war. Nonetheless, Austrian combat casualties would have been lower than their German allies because the Dual Monarchy had half the number of forces (eleven divisions compared to twenty-one) in the campaign, and most of the Austrian units did not participate in the fighting in Walachia. The Bulgarians and Turks, committing far fewer men, had far lower casualties. The combined Central Power casualties for the 1916 campaign probably numbered around 100,000 to 105,000. Of that total, approximately 20,000 were killed or died of wounds. Wounded in action (by far the most frequent type of casualty) and missing comprised the remainder. A small number were taken prisoner. The Central Powers had close to 400,000 soldiers in the area, so their casualty rates reached 20 percent.
Romanian casualties were considerably higher.73 Official records acknowledge 250,000 in all, with 50,000 killed, 80,000 wounded, 112,000 captured, and 8,000 listed as missing.74 Romania mobilized 642,000 men for the war; thus her casualty rate was almost 40 percent. She had entered the war with a field army of twenty-three infantry and two cavalry divisions. By the time the Central Powers called off the campaign in mid-January, she could sustain only six infantry divisions. Equipment losses included 359 pieces of artillery, 346 machine guns, 137 locomotives, and 4,000 railroad cars. Romania lost somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of her artillery, machine guns, and small arms.75
Historians, especially in the English-speaking world, have tended to minimize or dismiss the Romanian campaign as an almost farcical interlude in a serious war leading to a lopsided victory.76 That image is incorrect. Although the number of casualties for the Central Powers was not high by World War I standards, the losses challenge opinions that the campaign was a pushover. The number of forces the Central Powers had to commit to crush their opponents also belies the picture of an easy victory. The impression of easily won battles by outnumbered but better-led Central Power armies stems from von Mackensen’s first strike into the Dobrogea and von Falkenhayn’s success in throwing the Romanians from Siebenbürgen within three weeks of commencing operations. In those regions the Romanians initially had the advantage of superior numbers, but the experience of the German and Austrian generals gave them the upper hand. Driving the Romanians from the mountain passes and across Walachia, in contrast, required far more soldiers, and by the time the campaign ended, the Central Powers had committed thirty-five infantry and six cavalry divisions in order to defeat the twenty-three infantry and two cavalry divisions fielded by Romania. The massive Russian intervention after the fall of Bucharest saved Romania, but that should not be allowed to obscure the impressive Austro-German success. Nonetheless, the Central Powers’ victory was neither cheap nor easy.