Bulgarians take Cernavodă

Before noon on 25 October 1916 Bulgarian troops entered Cernavodă, a town on the Danube where the railway from Bucharest to Constanța crossed the river. The Romanians had evacuated the bridgehead during the night, and the Bulgarians learned of it only in the morning from a German liaison officer. This is how the Romanian historian Constantin Kirițescu describes it; according to him they entered the town at about ten o’clock and still had to fight a bloody action in the streets against Romanian rearguards. The Austrian official history states that the enemy had already given up the bridgehead to General Toshev’s group on 24 October. In Romania, which still used the Julian calendar, it was 12 October.

Defending the bridgehead

Three days earlier the Bulgarians and Germans had taken Constanța, and the Russo-Romanian centre and left wing in the Dobruja were falling back northwards. Only the right wing on the Danube held. It was defended above all by the Romanian 2nd Division, especially Colonel Cratero’s 32nd Brigade, supported by monitors of the Romanian Danube flotilla. The Bulgarian 1st Sofia Infantry Division (PL) took Rasova (PL) with difficulty and was held up before Lake Cochirleanca. The Romanians withdrew north of it, to the line of the ancient Roman ramparts known as Trajan’s Wall. After the fall of Rasova, however, Bulgarian artillery could shell the bridgehead.

On 23 October the Romanian high command still hoped for a counter-attack and ordered the Russian General Andrei Zayonchkovsky, commander of the Dobruja Army, to hold Cernavodă at all costs. That same day, however, the Russians abandoned Medgidia in disorder, and the Romanian 5th Division, attacked in front and in flank near Mircea Vodă, fell back behind the railway. About a thousand men were left in it. On the morning of 24 October Field Marshal August von Mackensen ordered General Stefan Toshev to take Rasova and Cernavodă that same evening. Toshev attacked with the 1st Division from the south and with the Bulgarian 4th Division and the Turkish 25th Division from the east. The bridgehead was almost encircled on three sides. The Romanian General Rașcu, who commanded the remnants of the 2nd and 5th Divisions, still had the artillery of both divisions but very little infantry. At six in the evening, so as not to repeat the disaster of Turtucaia, he ordered a retreat to Hârșova. The Bulgarians postponed the decisive assault until morning.

Kirițescu stresses that the victors took only a few dozen prisoners and three broken light guns at Cernavodă, while the Romanians saved almost all their artillery. About 200 men were left of the 32nd Brigade. According to him, Toshev in his report described the garrison of the “fortress” as a strong division with numerous reserve battalions and 82 guns, whereas in reality it was defended by the bled-white remnants of two brigades.

The fate of the bridge

At Cernavodă began the King Carol I Bridge, the pride of Romanian engineering. Built to a design by the engineer Anghel Saligny and opened in 1895, with its approaches and the viaduct across the Balta Ialomiței floodplain it was about four kilometres long. The span over the main channel, 190 metres long, was at the time the longest in continental Europe. Sources differ about its fate. The Austrian official history writes that the Romanians blew up the great Danube bridge just before giving up the bridgehead. Kirițescu asserts that the main bridge survived all attempts to destroy it with the weak means of the field troops and remained almost intact, and that on 26 October Romanian sailors and sappers used floating mines to destroy the bridge over the Borcea branch near Fetești and part of the viaduct. The American New International Year Book reported that the bridge was destroyed on 26 October. Either way the crossing was cut, and from then on the Danube separated the Dobruja from the rest of the country.

After the fall of Cernavodă

Within a few days the whole railway from Cernavodă to Constanța was in the hands of the Central Powers. On 26 October the Bulgarians took Hârșova, and some of the Romanians crossed there to the left bank of the Danube by a pontoon bridge. The bled-white Romanian divisions were withdrawn from the Dobruja, and command of the combined Russian and Romanian forces on both sides of the river was taken over by the Russian General Vladimir Sakharov. Mackensen did not intend to force the Danube here, where marshes stretched on the far side. He left only part of his forces on a convenient defensive line north of the railway and began moving the rest, together with the heavy artillery, to the Danube in Bulgaria, in order to strike at Bucharest from there.