Bulgarians and Germans take Constanța

On 22 October 1916, at about noon, columns of German and Bulgarian infantry and Bulgarian cavalry entered Constanța, Romania’s main port on the Black Sea. The city was empty. The Romanian and Russian troops had withdrawn from it the previous night, and smoke hung over the port. Less than eight weeks had passed since Romania entered the war. In Romania, which still used the Julian calendar, it was 9 October.

Mackensen’s second offensive

After the first successes of September, when Turtucaia and Silistra fell, the front in Dobruja came to a halt on a line running from Rasova on the Danube through Cobadin and Topraisar to Lake Tuzla on the coast, some fifteen kilometres south of the railway from Cernavodă to Constanța. This line, which crossed the Danube by the great bridge at Cernavodă, linked Bucharest with the country’s main port, and Russian reinforcements for Dobruja also came in through Constanța. The Russo-Romanian counter-offensive of 1–5 October achieved nothing, and then quiet fell for two weeks. In that time the Romanian high command moved some divisions from Dobruja to the Carpathians, where after the defeats in Transylvania it was defending the passes against Falkenhayn’s army.

Field Marshal August von Mackensen used this pause to prepare a new blow. The Romanian historian Constantin Kirițescu lists among the reinforcements numerous Bulgarian and Turkish units, the new German 217th Infantry Division and, above all, a great deal of heavy artillery. According to him, Mackensen now had 96 battalions and 28 squadrons. He divided them into two groups. The western group, under the Bulgarian general Stefan Toshev, made up of Bulgarians and the Turkish VI Corps, was to pin the enemy down on the Danube. The eastern group, under General Todor Kantardzhiev, with the Germans, the Bode Brigade and most of the heavy guns, was to deliver the main blow in the area of Topraisar (PL). On the other side stood the Dobruja Army of the Russian general Andrei Zayonchkovsky: in the west the Romanian 2nd and 5th Divisions covering the bridgehead at Cernavodă, in the centre Russian divisions and the Serbian Volunteer Division, and in the east, covering Constanța, the Romanian 9th and 19th Divisions.

Three days of fighting

The offensive began at dawn on 19 October on a front some 70 kilometres long. Mackensen and his chief of staff, General Gerhard Tappen, directed it in person from a hillock from which the whole plain could be seen. At Topraisar the Romanian 19th Division of Colonel Constantin Scărișoreanu repulsed the assaults of the German infantry for two and a half days, despite the fire of guns of up to 210 millimetres directed by airmen. A German account quoted by Kirițescu compared this fighting to the bloody assault of the Prussian Guard at Saint-Privat in 1870. The front broke elsewhere, however. On the very first day the Russian 115th Division gave way in the centre, and the Bulgarian 4th Division, according to Kirițescu, took some 2,800 prisoners from the Russian divisions.

On 20 October the Bulgarians broke through the positions of the Romanian 9th Division between Perveli and Tatlageac, nearer the sea. The next day they took the village of Musurat, and the Bulgarian cavalry crossed the spit between Lake Tuzla and the sea and occupied Techirghiol and Agigea (PL), right outside Constanța. The Russian battleship squadron, which could have shelled the attackers from the sea, took practically no part in the fighting. Kirițescu attributes this to the admiral’s fear of German torpedo boats and submarines. On the afternoon of 21 October the defenders of Topraisar, by now under fire from the flank and rear, abandoned the position. The same day the Bulgarians took a hill near Cobadin (PL) in the centre of the front with the bayonet, and the Serbs defending alongside withdrew with losses. The Russian 3rd Siberian Rifle Division, turned back from the Carpathians to help, reached Dobruja too late.

Entry into the city

On the evening of 21 October a thunderstorm with a downpour broke over the battlefield, and black clouds of smoke rose from the direction of Constanța. The oil tanks in the port were burning. On the morning of 22 October the remnants of the Romanian 9th and 19th Divisions and the Serbs were withdrawing north of the railway from Murfatlar to Constanța, while long trains carried officials and inhabitants towards Cernavodă. Refugees’ carts also trailed north along the sodden roads. At noon the victors marched into the deserted city. Kirițescu, writing from the Romanian perspective, describes looting and how Bulgarian soldiers pulled down from its pedestal the statue of Ovid, the Roman poet who died in exile in ancient Tomis, the predecessor of Constanța. According to him, the Germans put the statue back.

Sources differ on the booty. The Austrian official history writes that granaries full of grain and oil tanks fell into the victors’ hands, because the Russian fleet left the port without destroying the stocks. The British yearbook Annual Register for 1916 stated, on the contrary, that the Romanians had destroyed most of the grain and oil stocks before leaving, and that the Germans announced the capture of only 12 guns and about 7,000 prisoners. Kirițescu mentions smoking tanks in the port, which the Germans occupied.

Significance

The loss of Constanța was a heavy blow to Romania. The country was losing its most important seaport. The next day Medgidia, where Zayonchkovsky’s headquarters was located, fell, and within a few days the whole railway to the Danube was in the hands of the Central Powers. The Romanian divisions that had been fighting in Dobruja since September were so bled white that they were soon withdrawn from the front, and the Russians took over the defence of northern Dobruja. Mackensen could now leave only part of his troops here and move the rest, together with the heavy artillery, to the Danube, from where in November he struck at Bucharest.