Although every war has its iconic imagery, none matches the grim horror of the Western Front during World War I. Materialschlacht was the German term for the carnage, a word as brutal sounding as its portrayal of industrial-scale slaughter. Trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, artillery barrages, and machine guns mowing down mud-soaked millions formed the landscape of the Western Front. Capping the picture are aristocratic officers living in luxury far from danger, indifferently sending soldiers to their deaths just to capture a few feet of ground.
This familiar picture of stalemated armies, however, depicts the war in the west, where by late 1914 trenches ran in solid lines from the Swiss-German-French border junction to the English Channel in Belgium. In the east, the picture was quite different. There were trenches, to be sure, but the vast area meant that these took the form of local fortifications. Maneuvering, from the first clash in 1914 to the last blows in 1917, was a normal feature of battle. Fighting often took the form that prewar theorists had envisioned: bold, rapid movements of infantry turning enemy flanks, with cavalry conducting reconnaissance or providing a screen of cover for advancing infantry. Infantry remained the queen of the battle by virtue of its mobility, which translated into speed – a speed that allowed a determined attacker to outflank or penetrate enemy positions before reserves could be brought to bear. Infantry that outran its artillery support quickly perished, a development that required the gunners to match the pace of the infantry. Even cavalry remained useful in the east, where the open spaces allowed the exploitation of a breakthrough and the rapid pursuit of a retreating foe. Speed was the elixir of success.
In Transylvania and Romania in 1916, the nature of combat bore a greater resemblance to the opening moves of World War II – a decisive period of rapid movement and battles, called the blitzkrieg by the Allies – than it does to the stereotype of World War I, with trenches and deadlock. Hitting where least expected and advancing without the fixation on protecting exposed flanks so endemic in the west, the German 9th Army defeated two Romanian armies inside Transylvania, poured over the formidable Carpathian Mountains onto the plains of Walachia, rolled up the entire Romanian army from west to east, and drove the shattered remnants against Russia within four months. The rate of advance of the 9th Army in Transylvania in September or across Walachia in November-December 1916 compares favorably with the heady days (for the Germans) of the blitzkrieg in 1939–1940. Of course, blitzkrieg is not a term associated with World War I.
Ironically, the 9th Army was led by General Erich von Falkenhayn, sacked as chief of staff of the Prussian army on the eve of the campaign in August 1916 owing to the perception that his strategy of attrition in the west and failure to pursue a decisive victory in the east had created a debacle. Given the opportunity in Romania to salvage his reputation, von Falkenhayn grasped the imperative for speed. Winter came early in the Carpathian Mountains, and unless he drove the Romanians back and secured the passes through the mountains before weather shut down operations, the Romanians would remain on Austro-Hungarian territory until well into 1917. Von Falkenhayn had few troops at his disposal and, at least initially, his forces would be outnumbered. Getting reinforcements from the other theaters of the war would take weeks. In addition, the projected theater of operations in Romania sat at the edge of the least developed and most remote region of Austria-Hungary, Transylvania, compounding the logistical problems of mounting a campaign. Against all odds, von Falkenhayn succeeded brilliantly, proving himself to be a master of operational warfare as his soldiers smashed through the Carpathian Mountains and raced across Walachia.
The chimera of open warfare that so tantalized the leaders on the Western Front was the norm in the east, raising the question, which front was the true face of war: the stalemate in the west or the vast battles of open warfare characteristic of the Eastern Front? For the man who had the task of rebuilding the shattered German army after the war, General Hans von Seeckt, operations in the eastern theater provided the answer and illustrated the nature of future combat.
Following his participation in the Marne Campaign of 1914, von Seeckt served exclusively for the rest of the war in the east. In May 1915, as chief of staff in August von Mackensen’s 11th Army, he directed the impressive breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow. For the next six weeks the 11th Army rolled across the foothills of the Beskiden and Northern Carpathian Mountains, forcing the Russians to evacuate Galicia and eventually Poland. Over a quarter-million Russians were captured. In the fall of that year, again as von Mackensen’s chief of staff, but this time at the level of army group, von Seeckt directed three armies into Serbia and chased the Serb forces into Albania and Greece within three months. In 1916 he became chief of staff of Army Group Archduke Karl, the senior Austrian headquarters in the southeast Balkan region. That group directed much of the campaign in Romania in 1916.
Von Seeckt became disenchanted during the war with the German fixation on enveloping the enemy, a tactic driven into a generation of staff officers by the late chief of the general staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen (1833–1913). He had seen the stalemate that arose when going around an enemy flank took too long and forfeited surprise or when it could not be done at all. In such cases, “the general cannot simply declare that he is at wit’s end; he will be acting quite in the spirit of Count Schlieffen, if, with a clear objective in view, he launches his masses at the most effective point.”1 A breakthrough would allow the successful attacker the same opportunity as an envelopment to operate in the enemy’s vulnerable rear areas. Present at the most decisive operations of the east, von Seeckt observed firsthand the achievements of fast-moving, combined arms operations that either broke through the enemy’s lines or went around them, but that in all cases came to operate in his rear areas, surprising him and cutting the vital lines of communication to his front-line forces, leaving them paralyzed.
During the Romanian Campaign of 1916, von Seeckt and his Austrian commanders at Army Group Archduke Karl exerted little real authority over the determined and headstrong von Falkenhayn or von Mackensen, operating in Bulgaria. Nonetheless, von Seeckt had a front-row seat on an operation that exemplified many of the hallmarks of the philosophy and tactics he incorporated after the war when in command of the Reichswehr – tactics that, when fully developed in the late 1930s, became known as the blitzkrieg.
This book is not, however, about von Seeckt and the development of blitzkrieg tactics in the postwar German Reichswehr. The historians James Corum and Robert Citino have done groundbreaking work there. Instead, this book focuses on a relatively significant campaign that is little known in the English-speaking world, made more important by the employment of what later formed blitzkrieg tactics. Among these were mobility, speed, combined arms operations, and risking exposed flanks, all in an effort to gain entrance to the enemy’s rear area so as to paralyze him or neutralize his ability to react. In such a fashion, a smaller but better led force could defeat a much larger one.
There has been a renaissance in scholarship on World War I over the last thirty years, but more remains to be learned about the war in the east. Indeed, a definitive account of the Eastern Front does not yet exist.2 There are several reasons for this. Despite the massive scope of the war in that arena, to say nothing of the enormity of the theater, in the long run, the decision came in the west. In addition, revolution, German postwar Freikorps adventures in the Baltic, civil war, and continued fighting kept the area in turmoil longer than in the west, obscuring the picture. The emergence of new states and postwar boundaries, especially after World War II and the ensuing Cold War, often blocked access to sources for decades. Elimination of those borders and twenty years of scholarly interaction have now made possible detailed examinations of the Eastern Front. It is hoped that from studies like this, focused on specific campaigns, a full-bodied picture will begin to emerge.
National, state, and regional boundaries and names of places in southeast Europe have changed many times since 1916, presenting the historian with a bewildering and often confusing set of options from which to choose. Occasionally the warring parties agreed on the same name for a location or place, but usually they did not, each having its own name for the same place or region in its own language that was not simply a transliteration from one alphabet to another. The Germans invariably used the German name and the Austro-Hungarians (whether Austrians or Magyars) the Magyar name; and the Romanians generally employed their name. For example, von Falkenhayn said Hermannstadt, his Austrian counterpart General Arthur Arz von Straussenburg wrote Nagyszeben, and Romanian Chief of Staff General Dumitru Iliescu put down Sibiu. In similar fashion, Kronstadt, Brasso, and Brasov are one and the same in German, Hungarian, and Romanian, respectively. Not only was this practice followed by the participants in their documents and by those who wrote memoirs, but in the postwar period, historians followed the same convention. It is a permissible practice to use place-names as they appeared in documents, but I have elected to use the current Romanian names. First, contemporary atlases of sufficient detail are hard to come by. Second, with the exception of some of the Dobrogea region, all of the places mentioned in this book where the fighting occurred are now in Romania. A reader looking up these locations in a current atlas or on the Internet will find only their Romanian names. Third, switching back and forth from the German, Magyar, and Romanian names as they appear in the original documents and memoirs would cause all but the most dedicated readers to slam the book shut with a resounding thud. Even the name Romania has gone through several orthographic revisions. At the time of the war, Roumania was common. During the interwar period, Rumania became the norm; in recent years, Romania is at the fore. Wallachia is just as often spelled with one l as with two; Moldova can substitute for Moldavia. This book uses Walachia and Moldavia. There is an exception to every rule, and mine to the one about using Romanian place-names is to use Bucharest for the Romanian capital rather than Bucureşti.
Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia all used the Julian calendar during World War I, which was behind the western Gregorian calendar by thirteen days. In Romania the war broke out on 14 August, while in Vienna it was 27 August. In citing documents from Romanian and Russian sources, I have adjusted the dates to correspond to the current Gregorian calendar, which is the common practice.
This project would not have been possible without the translation work of Lieutenant Iulia Bădoi of the Romanian National Police. She was indefatigable not only in translating material, but also in finding some key sources. She made the arrangements to acquire the photographs from the National Library and Romanian National Military Museum, both in Bucharest. Lieutenant Bãdoi and her father, Valentin Bãdoi, escorted my wife and me on a wonderful week-long trip through Transylvania and its battle sites. Their love of their country and its history was obvious. Elizaveta Zheganina went to the Russian army archive in Moscow and did the translations for me of General Andrei Medarovich Zaionchkovsky’s reports. She had helped me with an earlier book, and her attention to detail was as strong as ever.
Military history without decent maps is almost impossible to follow. Larry Hoffman of Paso Robles, California, did the excellent maps for this book, as he had done for a previous work of mine. Sending these maps back and forth across the county for checking and revision is a challenge, even with the Internet, and Larry was always positive and responsive. Dr. Spencer Tucker, the general editor of the series, is a font of encouragement, and Bob Sloan at Indiana University Press and his colleagues did their usual great job for an author. Indiana’s copy editor, Jeanne Ferris, created order in the footnote apparatus and smoothed the rough edges elsewhere.
Works of history rely on voices from the past, most often kept in records stored in archives or the memoirs of participants. The author who tries to put them together relies on many people. The Internet and computers have radically changed access to archives and documents. The archivists and librarians who respond to e-mail inquiries and who staff the desks in the reading rooms are the foot soldiers of historical research.
Researchers can search online from different continents, order documents and books, and find them waiting on arrival in the archive. It is an astonishing phenomenon and a great pleasure to converse on the Internet with archivists, then fly to Europe and have materials sitting on a desk in a reading room, awaiting action once the registration formalities are finished. My sincere thanks to the staffs of the Military and Photographic Archives of the Federal Republic of Germany in Freiburg i.B. and Koblenz, respectively; the Military Branch of the Bavarian State Archive in Munich; the Bavarian State Library in Munich; the State Archive of Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart; the Romanian National Library; the Romanian National Military Museum; the State Archive of the Republic of Austria in Vienna; the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow; and the National Archive of England. The assistance of the librarians and archivists at the U.S. Army Heritage Education Center at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, matched that of their colleagues in Europe.
As a scholar who has the advantage of a college teaching position, my efforts have been facilitated by colleagues who took over my classes when I left for a research trip or to present a paper at a conference, sounding out some theories or narrations that found their way into this book. The Inter-Library Loan desk at The Citadel worked its usual magic and located books and articles that I did not think existed in the United States. Several colleagues checked my work or helped correct some bad writing. Rosemary Michaud, who edited a previous book of mine on the German capture of the Baltic Islands, returned to the front lines and earned an oak leaf cluster to her distinguished editing medal. She knows the mot juste and has an eye for the repeated word, the hackneyed phrase, and even the rhythm of sentences. Time and again, she would command: “That word stopped me cold. Change it!” My Citadel colleague, Professor Kyle Sinisi, helped enormously as well – as he did on an earlier book. They have improved the style of this work. Errors and uninspired prose are mine; the good passages are theirs.
International travel and residence while abroad can amass substantial bills quickly. The Citadel Foundation of The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, graciously underwrote many of the trips and expenses involved in conducting the research for this book. Deans Samuel Hines and W. B. Moore Jr. likewise provided financial assistance.
Finally, there is more than comfort in knowing that at the end of a long, bewildering day, or a tiring and frustrating research trip, there is a sanctuary of quiet and tranquility at home made possible by my wife, Sara. It is to her that this work is dedicated.
Michael B. Barrett