Bulgaria declares war on Romania

On 1 September 1916, a Friday, before noon, Bulgaria announced that it was at war with Romania. The Romanian historian Constantin Kirițescu wrote that in the morning an official of the Bulgarian foreign ministry came to the Romanian legation in Sofia, already cut off from the world, and handed the minister a note declaring war. On the same day the manifesto of Tsar Ferdinand I appeared, and the Bulgarian Third Army went over to the attack on the border of the Dobruja. In Bulgaria, which had adopted the Gregorian calendar in the spring of 1916, it was 1 September. In Romania, where time was still reckoned in the old style, the calendars showed 19 August.

Only this declaration was still needed to complete the circle. For five days Romania had been at war with Austria-Hungary, and Germany and Turkey had already declared war on it. Two days earlier the two sides had broken off diplomatic relations. Now all four Central Powers were at war with Romania.

The note and the manifesto

The Bulgarian note had to justify the war in such a way that Bulgaria appeared to be the side attacked. Only then did a clause of the secret agreement that Sofia had concluded with Germany in September 1915 come into play: if Romania moved against Bulgaria or its allies, Bulgaria would recover the lands lost in 1913. According to Kirițescu, the note cited, among other things, the alleged arrest in Bucharest of the Bulgarian minister Simeon Radev, a Romanian torpedo attack on the Austro-Hungarian Danube flotilla at Ruse and an attempt by the Romanians to throw a bridge across the Danube during the night of 30 to 31 August. Kirițescu mocked this last charge and compared it to the German declaration of war on France in 1914, justified by non-existent air raids on Nuremberg.

The tsar’s manifesto spoke the language of revenge. According to a quotation cited by Bulgarian historians, the war was to “crush the treacherous neighbour, secure the unification of the Bulgarian nation achieved at such great sacrifice and free our brothers in the Dobruja from bondage”. Romanian authors remembered from it the sentence that “the hour of revenge has struck”, and from the Bulgarian press of the time the slogan of a national war against the “hereditary enemy”. The Romanian side also claimed that Bulgarian troops had crossed the border during the night, before the note was handed over, and wiped out the border posts. In reality minor clashes and Bulgarian raids on the Dobruja border had been going on since the end of August.

A week of hesitation

Formally the decision was taken quickly, but it was preceded by several days that Berlin and Vienna watched with growing unease. The Austrian official history writes of “days of painful uncertainty” as to whether Bulgaria would honour its alliance obligation against Romania at all. Kirițescu, who described these days from the Romanian perspective, claimed that the German and Austrian press began to accuse the Bulgarians of treachery, and that German officers in Sofia were already packing their bags.

Bucharest and the Entente hoped that Sofia would stay passive. On the eve of Romania’s entry into the war, the ministers of France, Britain and Russia in Bucharest handed Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu a note which Kirițescu quotes in full. In it they reported that Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov had declared “in the most official manner” that Bulgaria would maintain strict neutrality and would not attack Romania if Romania moved against Austria, and that the Entente powers had taken note of this. Radoslavov also assured a Hungarian journalist from Az Est that relations with Romania were “more than correct”. At the same time, however, Sofia had been preparing for war since July, and on 28 July at Pless the commander-in-chief of the Bulgarian army, General Nikola Zhekov, agreed with the Germans and Austrians a plan for a joint attack on Romania.

Not everything was a game. The Austrian official history states that the Romanians, encouraged by Russian diplomacy, promised the Bulgarians the cession of the Dobruja in return for neutrality, and these promises impressed the Bulgarian opposition. According to Kirițescu, the Entente also hinted that concessions were possible over Kavala, while the Central Powers were ready to promise the Bulgarians the whole of the Dobruja. The last word belonged to the tsar. Ferdinand summoned Radoslavov to his summer residence at Sitnyakovo in the Rila mountains and, as Kirițescu writes, kept him away from the world for several days. He did not receive the leader of the Democrats, Aleksandar Malinov, who wanted to ask on behalf of the opposition for a crown council to be convened. The breaking of relations on 30 August and the shooting on the Danube, from which Ruse suffered, settled the matter. The tsar came down in favour of fully meeting the obligations to the allies.

The wound of 1913

For most Bulgarians this war had one meaning: the Dobruja. In 1913, during the Second Balkan War, Romania had marched into Bulgaria while its army was fighting the Serbs and Greeks, and the Treaty of Bucharest gave the Romanians the southern Dobruja, which they called the Cadrilater. It was an area of more than 7,000 square kilometres with Silistra, Tutrakan, Bazargic (today’s Dobrich) and Balchik. According to the Romanian census of 1910 about 282,000 people lived there, almost half of them Bulgarians and more than a third Turks. Romanians made up less than 2.5 per cent. Bucharest justified the annexation on strategic grounds, while the Bulgarians regarded it as robbery and a stab in the back at a moment of defeat.

Sofia’s war aims, however, went further. The manifesto spoke not only of the Dobruja but also of defending “the unification of the nation”, that is, Macedonia, won from Serbia in the autumn of 1915, which the Entente and its army at Salonika wanted to take away from the Bulgarians. Bulgarian politicians and soldiers also had in mind the northern Dobruja, given to Romania by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and the mouth of the Danube. Kirițescu wrote that the Bulgarian commanders preferred from the start a campaign in the Dobruja to a march on Bucharest, because it gave them the lands they were fighting for. This issue was to set Bulgaria at odds with its allies in 1918, when they would not hand over the whole of the northern Dobruja to it.

Against the “liberators”

The hardest thing was something else. On the other side of the border, in the Dobruja, the Russians already stood: General Andrei Zayonchkovsky’s corps, with a Russian infantry division, a cavalry division and a division of Serbian volunteers. Formally Bulgaria and Russia had been at war since October 1915, when Tsar Nicholas II called Bulgaria a traitor to the Slav cause. Until then, however, Bulgarian soldiers had not had to fight the Russians. The memory of the Russo-Turkish War, after which Bulgaria regained its statehood, was alive. The Austrian official history admits that the memory of liberation by the Russians was rooted too deeply in Bulgarian hearts for them to think without misgiving of a clash with them.

The Romanian war plan rested on this. The Romanian general staff believed that the Bulgarians would not dare attack the Dobruja while the Russians stood in it. Zayonchkovsky later wrote that the entire Romanian assumption that Bulgaria would not declare war had been mistaken. It did, however, have some basis. The pro-Russian parties of the Bulgarian opposition, Ivan Geshov’s Nationalists, Malinov’s Democrats and most of the Agrarians, were opposed to war with Russia. The leader of the Agrarians, Aleksandar Stamboliyski, had been in prison since 1915, sentenced to life for opposing entry into the war. The victor over the Turks in 1912, General Radko Dimitriev, had served in the Russian army since the beginning of the war. The American press of the time concluded from this that the Russians would find “half-friends” in Bulgaria.

Kirițescu called Bulgarian Russophilia a parade that “would evaporate on the day war was declared”. He was right. What worked on the Bulgarian soldiers was not sentiment but the Dobruja. A few days later, in the fighting near Dobrich, the Bulgarians fought Russian troops for the first time in their modern history and did not give way.

The army on the border

Bulgaria was prepared for the war. Since the autumn of 1915 the Third Army of General Stefan Toshev had stood in the north-east of the country, between Ruse and Varna, and for almost a year it had been fortifying positions on the border with Romania and on the Black Sea. At the end of August it was placed under Field Marshal August von Mackensen. According to the Austrian official history, the army consisted of the 1st and 4th Infantry Divisions, a brigade of the 6th Division, the 1st Cavalry Division and the garrisons of the fortresses of Ruse and Varna. On the Danube there was also a German detachment under Colonel von Kaufmann, and on the river the Austro-Hungarian flotilla. Kirițescu put the strength of the Third Army at 62 infantry battalions and 55 artillery batteries. The Bulgarians had superiority in artillery and, most importantly, kept their troops concentrated in one place. Two Turkish divisions were on their way from Adrianople.

The Romanians had in the southern Dobruja three divisions of the Third Army of General Mihail Aslan: the 17th at Tutrakan, the 9th at Silistra and the 19th at Bazargic, about 72,000 men in all according to Kirițescu. They were 60–90 kilometres apart, and the Russian corps was only assembling far to the rear, near Medgidia. Meanwhile most of the Romanian army was marching through the passes into Transylvania.

Significance

The Bulgarian declaration put Romania in the situation its leaders had wanted to avoid at all costs: a war on two fronts against four states at once. The plan, which envisaged an offensive in Transylvania and defence in the south, rested on the assumption that Bulgaria would stay passive or that it would be pinned down by the Russians in the Dobruja and by the Allied army at Salonika. The latter could not help, because as early as August the Bulgarians had forestalled its offensive.

The first consequences came quickly. As early as 6 September the Bulgarians and Germans took the fortress of Tutrakan, and the Romanian high command, shaken by the defeat, began to pull troops from Transylvania to the south. In November Radoslavov boasted in the National Assembly, as quoted by Kirițescu, that while he was lulling the Romanian minister with promises he was making all the preparations, and when the time came he “threw himself on the Romanians”. By January 1917 the troops of the Central Powers had occupied the whole of the Dobruja, and the Treaty of Bucharest of 1918 awarded Bulgaria the southern Dobruja. The defeat of the Central Powers, however, gave it back to Romania. The Bulgarians regained it only in 1940.