The germans viewed the romanian campaign as an extraordinary triumph and vindication of the annihilation strategy espoused by the new occupants in Pless. Armies from the Central Powers had neutralized Romania in just over four months. The Romanian capital had fallen. The entire province of Walachia was occupied, as was the Dobrogea. The Romanian army was shattered. Although the French military mission under Berthelot had started a thorough training and reconstitution program, only the massive presence of the Russians allowed Romania to remain in the war.
The major awards for the victory went to von Hindenburg and von Mackensen, leaving von Falkenhayn slighted and resentful.1 Von Hindenburg received the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross on 3 December for his direction of the campaign, and the same decoration went to von Mackensen for taking Bucharest.2 Von Falkenhayn did not begrudge the hussar field marshal his medal, admitting that the crossing of the Danube was a nice piece of work. However, he was upset that the OHL and von Hindenburg had received credit for directing the campaign. The 9th Army, he believed, had borne the brunt of the fighting for the duration of the campaign. It had cleared Siebenbürgen, crossed a major mountain range and several major rivers, taken the enemy capital, and destroyed three enemy armies. The main role of the OHL, as von Falkenhayn’s biographer Hans von Zwehl pointed out, was to provide the 9th Army with the means to win – which it did. All the critical choices were made by von Falkenhayn and his staff. He normally made his decisions after briefings by his operations officer and chief of staff. In the daily telephone and telegraph traffic between the staff of the 9th Army and the operations and quartermaster sections of the OHL, von Zwehl claimed, the officers in Pless became aware of the intent of the 9th Army and wrote directives that reflected what von Falkenhayn had already decided to do. This led to an oft-expressed frustration among the staff of the 9th Army: “thus arise historical forgeries; the phone conversations are neither recorded nor placed in the files, only the published orders. The latter can give the impression that the OHL made the decisions.”3 Von Falkenhayn thought that his army had accomplished a great deal: “It is really not an exaggeration, if one were to say that this lengthy forced march [across Walachia] is one of the greatest achievements in military history.”4
Von Falkenhayn’s petulance over a medal was unseemly. Considering how close he had come to ignominious retirement, getting an opportunity to salvage his reputation was unheard-of. His predecessor, let go in 1914 for failing to win, received an office without a job in Berlin. Moreover, even the German official history, written by von Falkenhayn’s detractors after the war, acknowledged that leaders and soldiers in the 9th Army had performed at the highest level. The work recognized that von Falkenhayn had faced a particularly challenging and unconventional chain of command, having to deal with three top level headquarters (the AOK, OHL, and Archduke Karl’s Army Front headquarters), each of which felt obliged to provide him with detailed advice. Despite their criticism of his strategic leadership between 1914 and 1916, the praise for his leadership of the 9th Army in the fall of 1916 was unstinting. He had, in their opinion, demonstrated his mastery of the profession of arms.5
Von Mackensen was ecstatic over the outcome of the campaign. The OHL, he thought, had crafted victory from almost certain defeat. What the Entente had planned as a death blow to Germany and her allies instead brought Romania down, gaining for the Central Powers the rich resources of Walachia. He was lavish in his tribute to the 9th Army commander: “I offer my praise and recognition to the strong-willed and far-seeing leadership of von Falkenhayn, charged with the main mission. What he accomplished in the Romanian Campaign sufficed to place him in the top rank of the army leaders of the war.”6
The key officers on the 9th Army staff, Colonel Hesse, the chief, and Major Frantz, the operations officer, likewise touted the army’s accomplishments and the leadership of its commander. Hesse thought von Falkenhayn kept his focus on the important matters, and “in the realm of military operations, the conduct of the campaign speaks for itself.” Frantz was more direct: “Overall, in my opinion, von Falkenhayn was an exemplary army commander.”7 Even the men in the ranks knew who had directed the war. The Württemberg Mountaineer Corporal Schittenhelm acknowledged that von Falkenhayn held a place of honor in the hearts of the 9th Army’s soldiers. They thought that he belonged in the ranks of the great leaders. Schittenhelm describes how proudly the battalion passed in review at a parade for the general when he came to present medals in January.8
The sole dissonant voice came from von Morgen. In private, he argued that von Falkenhayn could have captured much more of the Romanian army had he chosen the Campulung Basin for the breakthrough instead of the Szurduk Pass region. Such an approach, von Morgen insisted, would have “achieved a real victory, a Cannae, a Tannenberg. Von Falkenhayn could have then rolled up and captured everything in Walachia. The spirit of ‘weigh then venture,’ embodied by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, was not in this leader – he did not have, as Schlieffen put it, the ‘wisdom of Solomon.’”9
Von Falkenhayn wanted another field command after the Romanian campaign, but the von Hindenburg-Ludendorff team did not want him around. They convinced the kaiser to send him to Turkey to command Army Group F in Palestine, a dead-end position in a dead-end theater. Nine months after arriving in Asia Minor, he found himself working again under his former subordinate, General von Seeckt, who had become the chief of staff of the Turkish army. That talented general had gone east as well, another victim of Ludendorff’s paranoia. The assignment proved a blessing in disguise for von Seeckt. He had left Europe with only victories under his belt, and his absence from Germany shielded him from the finger-pointing in the aftermath of the failed 1918 Spring Offensive. His greatest achievement lay ahead, in rebuilding the defeated army after the war.
Von Falkenhayn left Turkey in March 1918 to lead the 10th Army in Russia, relieving Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn. He remained there until the war ended, then retired and settled at his estate at Lindstedt, near Berlin. Already suffering from the kidney disease that claimed his life in 1922, he published his memoirs, starting with a volume about his time as head of the OHL and continuing with two small volumes covering the Romanian Campaign.
Romania had declared war on Austria-Hungary to liberate millions of Vlachs – ethnic Romanians – living in Transylvania, a province of Hungary. Their fate had not been an easy one. With a status somewhere between serf and peasant, they had no way of changing their lot in a state that would not enfranchise them. Growing national consciousness gradually turned Transylvania into Romania irredenta. Bucharest could not ignore their plight and made numerous appeals to Austria-Hungary on their behalf. The Magyar ruling elite, whose political privileges were protected by an agreement with Austria, turned a deaf ear to any and all efforts to alleviate the misery of the Vlachs. Romanian politicians came to realize that their efforts at conciliating, appeasing, and pleading with Vienna would never bear fruit.
The war had the potential to change that. The winners would dictate territorial changes to the losers. Romania chose partners accordingly, repudiating her pledge to the Triple Alliance and siding with the Entente. The latter at first was willing to accept a benevolent neutrality on the part of Romania, but reversals, mounting casualties, and staggering expenses with no end in sight gradually forced the Entente powers to bring Romania into the war. Bratianu’s clever diplomacy kept Romania neutral for two years; eventually the pressure became too great, and Romania went to war on 27 August 1916.
The entry of Romania into the struggle raised hopes for the Entente; the Chicago Tribune quoted a senior American army officer who indicated that Romania’s entry could open the door to Constantinople.10 In the New York Times, the headlines on 29 August were “Allies See Victory Nearer. Entry of Rumania into War is Expected to Shorten Conflict … London, Paris and Petrograd Rejoice Loudly Over Coming of Another Ally.” The paper’s correspondent reported that Romania’s entry doomed the Central Powers. “The Military Expert” of the New York Times had a lengthy piece complete with a map on 3 September, extolling the virtues of Romania’s geographic position and the possibilities suggested by her entrance into the war. These included aiding the Allies in Salonika, bringing Greece into the war on the side of the Entente, and compelling Austria-Hungary to raise an additional 800,000 men to defend her greatly extended front, men which the “expert” was sure she would not be able to find. The back door to Hungary, via Serbia and Belgrade, was now open.11
None of this happened. Within four months, the Central Powers had smashed Romania’s armies. Many factors determined the outcome of the campaign. Chief among them were timing, organization, strategy, geography, location, experience, and leadership.
Timing is everything, and Romania’s was unfortunate. Prime Minister Bratianu recognized the vulnerability of the Central Powers in the spring of 1916, but his zeal to get the best deal for his nation prolonged the negotiations, generating animosity and causing his country to miss the opportune moment to make her relatively small weight felt. Had the Romanians struck simultaneously with the Russians and the Western Allies in June 1916, the Central Powers could not have responded to all three attacks. The Brusilov offensive was then in full swing; the Somme offensive about to begin. The failed campaign at Verdun had drained Germany. The Central Powers had run out of divisions, and even if they had had sufficient manpower, their organizational arrangements would have allowed national interests to transcend those of the alliance.
Within the kaiser’s entourage as well as the halls of Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, voices rose in protest over the conduct of the war. After two years of enormous and largely defensive battles in the west and sweeping but indecisive victories in the east, the war was at a stalemate. Conrad, who had conducted his own war independent of his Allies, had even less to show. In a war that had become one of attrition, the prospects did not look favorable for the badly outnumbered Central Powers. The criticism grew to a crescendo as the Russian advances and the stupendous assault on the Somme (despite its high cost to the Allies) laid bare the shortcomings of the Central Powers’ war effort. Romania’s entry into the war brought everything into focus and broke the logjam at the top. A new approach was needed, and the military forces of the Central Powers had to be organized into a team directed by a single will. Finally, Romania’s so-called perfidy12 cried out for a response that would discourage other nations sitting on the sidelines from thinking the tide had turned against the Central Powers.
The formation of what is called the Third High Command (OHL), the von Hindenburg-Ludendorff team, brought an end to the indecision at the top and the inability to reign in the feckless Austrians. The strategy of attrition gave way to one of seeking victory through annihilation. A second step consisted of compelling the three other Central Powers to recognize the OHL as the Supreme War Command, or Oberste Kriegsleitung (OKL), vested with the authority to direct the war effort. The dexterity with which the OHL, or OKL, moved units to Romania validated the soundness of the reorganization.
The Third OHL knew its priorities, and it immediately showed what determined and centralized leadership could do. Anxious to restore confidence in the army’s leadership, Ludendorff closed his ears to the howls of protest from army commanders and ordered reinforcements sent to Romania from every front and by every ally. In spite of the irony that von Falkenhayn benefited from the solutions to the weaknesses that had cost him his former position, the results were impressive. Within days the Central Powers marched into Romania from Bulgaria, and within three weeks, the Germans and Austrians started a combined offensive in Transylvania that led to Romania’s neutralization. What made this possible, in addition to the authority of the new OHL, were the much-maligned Hungarian railroads.
Although the Germans complained loudly about them and their hidebound operators, the Magyar trains and officials accomplished the mission. From the onset of the campaign in August until its end in January, the Central Powers sent 2,082 trains into the area of operations – fifteen trains per day, on average. During the crucial build-up period in September, the daily average exceeded twenty-two trains.13 When Romania invaded Transylvania, the Dual Monarchy had an army headquarters and two weak divisions in the province. The Germans had no units in the region. Two and a half months later, when the Central Powers stood poised to cross the Transylvanian Alps and invade Romania, Austria-Hungary had moved two corps headquarters, five divisions, and three mountain brigades to the front, while the Germans had assembled an army headquarters, five corps headquarters, and twelve divisions along with a mix of supporting units.
Of course, the advantage provided the Central Powers by their Hungarian railroads ended at the Romania border, where supplies had to be off-loaded and moved into Romania via horse-drawn wagons or trucks. Within a month of their crossing the Alps, the Germans felt the absence of their railroads, and a combination of miserable lines of communication, poor weather, and distance brought the campaign to a halt in another fortnight.
The Romanians faced the opposite scenario. Although they had the immense advantage of interior lines and working railroads inside Romania, the destruction of the three railroads that traversed the Carpathian passes meant that they had no railroads north of their frontier. Every Romanian soldier in the thirteen divisions that crossed the mountains walked or rode a horse into Transylvania; every ton of supplies destined for the Romanian units in Hungary arrived in a horse-drawn wagon, only after a lengthy journey through tortuous mountain passes.
Given her geography and unfavorable location, the most sensible strategy for Romania was to defend her northern frontiers, primarily in the passes, while advancing southeast toward Istanbul, being joined from Salonika by the Allied Army of the Orient in a converging attack on the Turkish capital. Capturing Istanbul would have knocked Turkey and Bulgaria out of the war and opened the Straits to the relief of Russia, possibly ending the war.
But Romania had not joined the war to help the Entente. Her objective was Transylvania, and to get it she had to occupy it, which would not materially help the Entente. She had no reason to go to war with Bulgaria; she wanted to go to war only with Austria-Hungary. Consequently, Romania refused even to declare war on Bulgaria, Turkey, or above all Germany, hoping they would return the favor.
Hope is not a viable course of action, however, and the Romanians wisely hedged their bets. Their agreement with the Allies called for General Sarrail to launch an offensive from Salonika, ostensibly to tie up the Bulgarians, and as a form of additional insurance, they arranged for the Russian XLVII Army Corps with the Serbian Division to appear in the Dobrogea at the start of hostilities. They thought that the Russian-Serbian corps would remind the Bulgarians, kindred Slavs, where their interests lay. If that failed, they planned to conduct combined minor offensive operations with the Russians in the western Dobrogea in order to tie up the Bulgarians.
The Romanian advance into Transylvania from the south and east was intended to eliminate that province as a salient before they marched into central Hungary. Unfortunately, it cost them the advantage of interior lines, which they would have enjoyed had they remained on the defensive at the edge of the Carpathians. The ascent over the mountains and march into Transylvania also created immense logistical difficulties as they moved farther from their supply depots. The lines of communication became long and fragile. However, advancing into Transylvania gave them an overwhelming numerical superiority at the onset. The region was almost devoid of Austro-Hungarian forces, and the majority of the area’s residents were ethnic Romanians who greeted the invaders as liberators. In addition, the invasion took the Central Powers by surprise.
At the operational level, the Romanians made two critical mistakes that squandered these advantages. First, they did not assign the highest priority to cutting the key railroads coming from Hungary into Transylvania, especially the one from Arad. Cutting that line, as von Falkenhayn noted, would have meant that the Central Powers would not have been able to recover Transylvania in 1916.14 Second, once over the mountains, the Romanian general headquarters allowed its crossing forces to stop, resting at a considerable distance from one another and thus unable to render mutual assistance and vulnerable to defeat one by one. Moreover, by stopping, they surrendered the initiative to their opponents.
The experience of the Central Powers constituted another important advantage. The Romanians were neophytes at war. Their last combat had been in 1877–78, while in 1916 their enemies all had two years of hard-earned understanding of the new military technology, as well as considerable skill in the handling of large units and major operations that came only from actual participation in war. Romania’s rude awakening to these realities came almost at once in the Dobrogea, when her supposedly impregnable forts fell in days. The panicked Romanians then overreacted, prematurely halting operations in the north and mistakenly shifting the center of gravity of their campaign to the south. Shuttling divisions back and forth from Transylvania and the Dobrogea left units sitting in boxcars instead of foxholes. The wasted movement and countermovements undermined morale and confidence in senior leaders. Armies unaccustomed to large-scale operations and combat made these mistakes. After two years of combat, the Central Powers in 1916 knew how to move soldiers, and the Romanians did not.
Likewise, by 1916, the rigors of campaigning had pruned the older and unfit generals who had marched to war in 1914, and the inexorable Darwinism of battle had favored the fit and eliminated the weak. In both the Allied and Central Power camps, new men ran the war, while disgraced generals went to Limoges or some similar limbo. In the first five weeks of the war in 1914, French generalissimo Joffre sacked two army and ten corps commanders, as well as half of the division leaders.15 In the same time period, the Germans had let go their chief of staff and one army commander, and Conrad had dismissed two army and at least five corps commanders in the first two months of the war. In 1916 the same ruthless process worked its way through the ranks of the Romanian generals. King Ferdinand relieved two chiefs of staff, five army and as many corps commanders, and a host of leaders at the division and lower levels. By the end of the campaign, Romania had a cadre of competent and experienced leaders whose performance would attain some victories in 1917. As von Morgen noted, the Romanian of 1917 was a far different soldier than the one who took the field in 1916. But 1916 was the year of learning for Romania, and the cost of tuition was high.
The title of this book is Prelude to Blitzkrieg, using a term typically associated with World War II, and primarily with the early campaigns waged by the Germans in Poland, the Low Countries, France, Yugoslavia, and Russia in 1941. The layman takes the German word literally and thinks of speed, conjuring up an image of tank columns accompanied by dive bombers moving rapidly into the enemy’s rear area. The Romanian Campaign saw speedy advances. The Austro-German advance across the length of both Siebenbürgen and Romania lasted just over four months, or 135 days. The 9th Army covered 360 miles, while the 1st Army, with its mission to guard the flank of its sister force, made 80 to 90 miles. By comparison, the Allied offensive along the Somme River in France, conducted almost simultaneously, saw the English and French move their lines forward seven miles over a period of 138 days. A year later, the 3rd Battle of Ypres (also known as Passchendaele) began on 31 July and lasted until 10 November. The distance the British advanced was five miles over a period of 102 days. The Germans in 1916 moved the French five or six miles back toward Verdun, battling from late February until the end of July, a little over five months. The pace in 1918, when movement returned to the Western Front, was not much greater.
If one separates the campaign in Romania into its phases, first clearing Siebenbürgen and then invading Romania, the speed of the Austro-German advances is more striking. After von Falkenhayn started his offensive, the 9th Army pursued the 2nd Romanian Army seventy miles from Sibiu to Brasov, defeated it, and then advanced another twenty miles to the enemy’s border fortifications, all within thirteen days – an average daily progress of seven miles. After the 9th Army crossed the Transylvanian Alps, where both sides had sat locked for a month in a stalemate, von Falkenhayn then marched across Walachia to Bucharest in just three weeks, a distance of some 250 miles, or close to 12 miles per day. That equates favorably with the German drive across Belgium and France to Dunkirk in May and June 1940, which averaged almost ten miles per day, or with the speed of Army Group North from the German border to Leningrad in 1941, a rate of eight miles per day.
But speed was not the sole essence of blitzkrieg. The use of a combined arms team whose focus was to destroy the enemy’s ability to act by employing speed and mobility to penetrate far into his vulnerable rear areas in order to confuse and paralyze headquarters constituted the blitzkrieg. Of necessity, such thrusts involved the risk of exposing one’s own vulnerable flanks to enemy counterthrusts. The speed of one’s advance kept the enemy off balance, thwarting his efforts to create a defensive line, frustrating his attempts to assemble his forces, allowing him no chance to recover, and above all disrupting his plans and operations, leading to paralysis.
On arriving in Transylvania, von Falkenhayn told his staff that speed and relentless attack could offset the superior numbers of the enemy. Rapid, even reckless advances with respect to leaving one’s flanks unguarded in order to hasten the breakthrough would become the norm and overwhelm the Romanians, preventing them from consolidating their gains. Hitting them across their flanks and in their rear areas would throw them off balance, and dogged and unending pressure and pursuit would prevent them from forming any effective response.
All of these factors appear in both von Mackensen’s drive into the Dobrogea, the expulsion of the Romanians from Transylvania, and von Falkenhayn’s breakthrough into Walachia. The field marshal hurled his two divisions at Turtucaia, relying on the infantry of his allies and his own heavy artillery operating in unison to crush the enemy defenses before the Romanian general headquarters could react and send help. Within four days the Romanian “Verdun” had fallen – before a numerically superior Russian and Romanian corps a mere fifty to seventy-five miles distant could even start moving to assist the beleaguered garrison. The rear and flank of von Mackensen’s army stood completely exposed to the enemy during the siege. And, of course, the loss of the fortress completely disrupted the Romanians’ campaign plan as their general headquarters shifted its focus from Transylvania to the Dobrogea, transferring troops from the former area to the latter. Three weeks later, von Falkenhayn’s unexpected victories at Sibiu and Brasov had expelled the Romanians from Transylvania, and the Central Powers threatened the northern frontier. Unnerved, the Romanians again directed their attention and units back to the north, leaving their armies confused, exhausted, and demoralized.
The mountainous terrain of the Transylvanian Alps prevented von Falkenhayn from turning the Romanian flank in October. He was forced to launch a frontal attack to break through the enemy’s lines. Although his assault was weighted at the westernmost pass, he expected that success would lead to breakthroughs at other crossings along the mountain crest. Initially the German columns would be far apart and incapable of assisting each other, with their flanks exposed. Standard practice called for the Germans to link their advancing columns into a continuous front as soon as possible, but von Falkenhayn understood that such a move would only slow the advance, allowing his enemy the time to form a defense or retreat. Therefore, he took the risk of leaving the flanks of his major units exposed in order to advance as rapidly as possible into the enemy rear. He relied on the mobility and speed of his infantry and cavalry to throw the Romanians off balance. He employed his cavalry to screen the advance and to seize river crossings. Both cavalry and aircraft were used for reconnaissance, with the cavalry being especially useful when weather grounded the planes. Accompanied by mobile artillery, armored cars, and infantry on bicycles, and in constant contact with the 9th Army headquarters via portable radios, the combined arms team proved unstoppable. Von Schmettow’s cavalry used a leapfrog technique to bypass resistance in order to keep moving. The French advisor Berthelot recognized the vulnerability of the exposed German flank as Kühne’s LIV Corps descended from the mountains, but by the time he put together an attack, his efforts had been overtaken by events: the Germans had long passed the line he had proposed to hold. The speed of the German advance rendered Berthelot’s efforts stillborn.
Only as the 9th and Danube Armies closed on Bucharest did their commanders take notice of their exposed flanks. As the front narrowed near the enemy capital, the Romanians assembled their reserves against von Mackensen. When von Falkenhayn fortuitously discovered the Romanian plan, he took advantage of the enemy’s ignorance as to his whereabouts (thanks to von Schmettow’s cavalry) and fell on the massing Romanians, scattering them and threatening their capital. Expecting a last-ditch effort to defend Bucharest, the OHL directed von Falkenhayn to bypass that center of resistance and swing north around the city, in an attempt to cut off the enemy’s retreat from both the mountains and Walachia to Moldova. The move left both the 9th and Danube Armies with exposed flanks, but the OHL gambled successfully that the appearance of the 9th Army in the Romanian rear would lead to a sauve qui peut.
The historians James Corum and Robert Citino have extensively traced the origins of the tactics employed in Poland in 1939 and France in 1940 to the early years of the postwar German army, the Reichswehr. Both credit von Seeckt, the virtual commander of the Reichswehr from 1919 until 1926, with providing the genesis and impetus of the maneuver warfare style (called blitzkrieg by the Allies) that characterized the opening campaigns of World War II, based on his experiences in the east.16 There, maneuver warfare had remained alive. In the west it reappeared to a degree in 1918, with the introduction of storm trooper tactics. In many ways these tactics represented at a micro level what was happening in the east: using combined arms teams, advancing rapidly and relentlessly with exposed flanks, bypassing resistance, and trying to disrupt the enemy’s ability to act by cutting his lines of communication and throwing his command centers off balance. In the west, however, the density of units allowed only squads to maneuver; in the east, there was room for maneuvering by regiments and divisions. The storm trooper tactics were a matter of too little, too late and were coupled to a flawed strategy that did not achieve victory in the west. Nonetheless, they did illustrate what well-trained combined arms teams could accomplish using the micro version of what larger units had employed in the east.
Blitzkrieg techniques originating between the wars in Germany started with the traditional German premise that the destruction of the enemy forces was the main objective of any strategy or operation. When possible, the time-tested methods of attacking before the enemy could mass and moving around his flank or in his rear were preferred, but when circumstances dictated – for example, when terrain made an open flank impossible, or the enemy had formed a continuous front, like the Western Front of 1914–1918 or the crest of the Transylvanian Alps – then a penetration leading to a breakthrough would permit the German forces to engage the enemy in his vulnerable rear areas. Here were the headquarters, depots, staging areas, and transport nodes, the destruction of which rendered the enemy’s fighting forces without direction and thus impotent.
Inherent in this technique was the focus on the enemy rear, open to exploitation and destruction by fast-moving, combined arms formations. The unexpected and terrifying appearance of strong columns in an opponent’s supposedly safe rear area threw him off balance. Rapid advance permitted little or no time to react. Paralysis resulted. Technology facilitated this concept in the early 1920s by providing the advancing columns with the necessary mobility, armament, and speed through a skillful combination of motorized infantry and artillery, along with close air support. Such tactics favored a small force. When von Seeckt articulated these concepts in 1921, he planned initially to rely on infantry columns – motorized when possible, but conditioned for long, rapid foot marches as demonstrated by von Falkenhayn’s columns in Walachia – accompanied by mobile artillery and cavalry. The speed of the attack was the key. Equally important, like the storm trooper tactics used to breach the trench lines of the Western Front, the advancing teams were to bypass enemy fortifications, obstacles, and strong resistance. The hallowed concept of a uniformly advancing line of infantry, denying the enemy the opportunity to turn an exposed flank, was abandoned. The deep thrust into the enemy’s rear area exposed the flanks of the attacker to mortal danger, but speed and surprise offset that risk. The shock of the sudden attack, initiated while the enemy was still advancing or before he had massed his forces, led to confusion, paralysis, and defeat.
Of necessity, the new style was more conceptual than real because the Versailles Treaty forbade Germany from having military aircraft and tanks, but the Germans knew of the capabilities of both and incorporated them into their exercises. Both had come into existence in World War I, but the technology of armored vehicles lagged far behind that of aircraft. In von Seeckt’s mind, the slow speed and unreliability of tanks relegated them to the important but auxiliary role of an infantry support weapon during a breakthrough. He was not alone in this view. In the early 1920s, few officers (except for the English General J. F. C. Fuller) envisioned tanks becoming an arm of their own and dominating the battlefields of the next war. Nonetheless, by the late 1920s, aircraft and armored technology had made such strides that von Seeckt’s protégés, Colonels Oswald Lutz and Helmut Wilberg, could easily envision and later organize units including tanks, motorized artillery, and infantry, spearheaded by close air support. The shock effect of a sudden, surprising, and violent combined arms assault on weakly defended or undefended key supply and control points in the enemy’s rear, launched by a rapidly moving armored and air assault that had little or no concern for its own exposed flanks, became the key to the blitzkrieg.
Von Seeckt’s concepts and manuals formed the military doctrine that guided the training of virtually all the senior leaders of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Von Seeckt, of course, served as chief of staff of Army Front Archduke Karl and Josef during the campaign in Romania. He monitored more than directed operations there, but he often visited von Falkenhayn’s headquarters and its subordinate commands in the field. Neither von Falkenhayn nor von Seeckt had much of what today is called charisma, and the recent reversal of their positions in the military hierarchy, as well as the disintegration of what had been a mentor relationship between them just as the campaign began, made their interaction awkward. Von Falkenhayn was a touchy and difficult subordinate, and he did his best to pretend that the Army Front headquarters did not exist. Nonetheless, although the two generals occasionally differed on where this or that should go or take place, they never disagreed on the operational style of the campaign, such as defeating the enemy in detail, leaving exposed the flank of their advancing forces so as not to slow the advance, launching converging attacks, applying continuous pressure, employing combined arms teams, and relying on speed and shock to disrupt and paralyze the enemy. A confused and disoriented foe was as ineffectual as one whose forces were annihilated. It is hard to imagine that von Seeckt also did not find his own experiences with von Mackensen in the Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign replicated, to some degree, in Romania. His close observation from that period and von Falkenhayn’s actions in Transylvania and Walachia reinforced his views that the stalemate in the west was an anomaly, a lesson he would impart to a future generation of German officers.
Operations embodying this style and scale of operational mobility came into play only one more time in the war in Europe, in northeastern Italy in late 1917, at the 12th Battle of the Isonzo, usually called the Battle of Caporetto. German and Austrian armies broke through the mountains and rapidly advanced over seventy miles into Italy in two weeks, five miles per day, capturing 275,000 prisoners. The key players had learned their trade in Romania. Now a part of the newly formed German 14th Army, the Alpine Corps Division and the Württemberg Mountain Battalion led the breakthrough. The architect of the campaign was the 14th Army’s chief of staff, General Krafft. He was closely assisted in the planning by Lieutenant Colonel Georg Wetzell (1869–1947) of the OHL, who had taken Tappen’s place as chief of operations when von Falkenhayn was relieved. Wetzell received the Pour le Mérite medal for his staff work during the Romanian Campaign,17 giving him a level of knowledge about the operational methods employed there that matched that of Krafft. Wetzell was quite close to von Seeckt, having served under him in 1914 in the Marne Campaign, and with von Seeckt’s patronage he rose to become chief of the general staff and a senior commander in the Reichswehr.
Although the Gorlice-Tarnow, Romanian, and Caporetto Campaigns demonstrated the usefulness of the tactics of rapid and incessant attack with a combined arms force, and of bypassing strong points and resistance to enter the vulnerable rear areas of the enemy while leaving one’s own unguarded, in order to disrupt his lines of communication and bring about paralysis, they did not provide a strategy to win the war. Their development came too late and was restricted largely to the Eastern Front.
Had Germany pursued such techniques as early as 1915, the outcome might have been different. After the failure of the Marne Campaign in 1914, von Falkenhayn instead became convinced that neither battles nor campaigns would prove completely decisive. The correlation of forces allied against the Central Powers was too great to achieve military victory. A strategy of exhaustion that might force one of the Entente powers from the war struck von Falkenhayn as the only method that promised success. Such thinking was anathema to the majority of German officers. The chimera of the Vernichtungsschlacht, the battle of annihilation, blinded them to the reality of the war, which had in fact become one of attrition, not decision. Von Falkenhayn’s rivals, von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, forced him out of office by arguing the impossibility of pursuing a strategy of exhaustion from a position of materiel inferiority. The Third OHL then sought an end to the stalemate by returning to the traditional strategy of the decisive battle. Unfortunately for the Central Powers, the density of units in the west and the entry of the United States into the war in 1917 gave the Entente advantages that could not be overcome. The nemesis of the Schlieffen School followed, when the Entente adopted a strategy of exhaustion that left the Central Powers so debilitated that they had to accept dictated terms while still in Allied territory.
It is not without irony that the head of the Second OHL, driven from office because he eschewed his colleagues’ traditional strategy of battlefield decisions, led the most decisive German campaign of the war, one that neutralized the opponent in four months. Dismissed in disgrace, von Falkenhayn had desperately sought to salvage his reputation in Romania by proving that he was a leader, a field commander, a Feldherr. The situation in Romania required intrepid and immediate action; the sluggish Austrian response was going nowhere. Von Falkenhayn planned and executed bold operations, unconsciously using techniques that formed the basis of the style of rapid, mobile operations termed blitzkrieg. As a result, his hastily assembled army ejected a numerically superior invasion force from a province, crossed a high mountain range, shattered three opposing armies, captured the enemy’s capital, and destroyed seventeen of the enemy’s twenty-three infantry divisions – all during the course of a campaign that covered more than 360 miles and took just 135 days. Romania was a prelude to what the world would see in 1939–1941.