Central Powers enter Dobruja

On 2 September 1916, the day after Bulgaria declared war on Romania, the troops of the Central Powers crossed the whole length of the border into southern Dobruja, the region the Bulgarians had lost to Romania in 1913. The Austrian official history states that the Bulgarians crossed the border on 1 September. The Romanian historian Constantin Kirițescu, who described this fighting in detail, writes that the Bulgarian offensive began all along the line on the night of 1–2 September. Skirmishes had in any case been taking place on both sides of the border for several days.

Mackensen’s plan

The troops on this front were commanded by Field Marshal August von Mackensen, the conqueror of Serbia in 1915. The new German high command forbade him for the time being to cross the Danube towards Bucharest. He was to invade Dobruja, draw as many enemy forces upon himself as possible and defeat them, giving time for German and Austro-Hungarian divisions to assemble in Transylvania. At the request of the commander of the Bulgarian 3rd Army, General Stefan Toshev, the first objective became the fortress of Tutrakan (Turtucaia) on the Danube. It was to be attacked by the 4th Infantry Division, a brigade of the 1st Division and a weak German detachment. The two remaining brigades of the 1st Division advanced towards Silistra to prevent relief from coming from there, while further east, in the centre of the front, General Ivan Kolev’s 1st Cavalry Division attacked. The right wing, the mobile reserve of the fortress of Varna under General Todor Kantardzhiev and a brigade of the 6th Division, was to take Bazargic, today’s Dobrich.

Everything depended on speed. Mackensen wanted to defeat the Romanian garrisons one by one before General Andrei Zayonchkovsky’s Russian corps, which was still assembling around Medgidia, arrived from the north.

Three towns cut off

General Mihail Aslan’s Romanian 3rd Army held three divisions in southern Dobruja: the 17th at Tutrakan, the 9th at Silistra and the 19th at Bazargic. They were 60–90 kilometres apart. The division at Bazargic had been placed under the Russian general, and the other two under army headquarters in Bucharest, so no one directed the whole. Kirițescu judged that on the day war was declared the Bulgarians had all their forces in hand, while the Romanians and Russians were scattered in three groups and small detachments along the border.

The first blows shattered this weak screen. A Bulgarian brigade of the 1st Division attacked Akadınlar, and on 2 September Kolev’s cavalry took Kurtbunar (today Tervel), each held by a single battalion of the Romanian 9th Division. Both withdrew to Silistra. The divisional commander, General Basarabescu, also drew into the fortress the detachments from neighbouring villages and shut himself up there, without trying to establish contact with either Tutrakan or Bazargic. The shortest road between Silistra and Bazargic ran through Kurtbunar. The Bulgarian cavalry drove a wedge between the two Romanian groups.

Fighting on the Varna road

In the east the war had begun earlier. According to Kirițescu, Kantardzhiev’s troops attacked Romanian posts on the road from Varna to Balchik as early as 29 August, before the declaration of war, and in the following days took the railway bridge on the border on the Varna–Bazargic line. Romanian officials abandoned Bazargic in panic. In the town, where most of the inhabitants were Bulgarians and Turks, the station and barracks were looted, and the Romanian army shot those caught on the spot. The Bulgarians presented this as a crime against the civilian population.

On 2 September the troops from Varna advanced further and took the village of Balagea on the road to Bazargic. This was meant above all to draw the Romanians away from Kurtbunar. General Arghirescu’s Romanian 19th Division counter-attacked and pushed the Bulgarians back, and Kantardzhiev had to stop the fleeing men in person. According to Kirițescu, Bulgarian villagers fired on Romanian soldiers and attacked them with axes and pitchforks, which provoked harsh reprisals. On both sides of the border the cruelty of a war in which neighbours fought one another was growing. According to Bulgarian sources, the Romanian authorities had already begun in August to intern in the interior of the country Bulgarians and Turks from Dobruja who were deemed disloyal.

The first days

The advance made rapid progress. Kirițescu wrote that on 3 September Arghirescu, although his troops were winning local successes at Bazargic, took fright at the prospect of encirclement and ordered a retreat. The next day the Bulgarians entered the abandoned town without a fight, and small detachments occupied Balchik and Kavarna on the coast. The very next day the Russians and Romanians moved on the town and on 5–7 September fought heavy battles with the Bulgarians there. In the west the Bulgarian divisions had surrounded Tutrakan in a semicircle by 4 September.

The Romanian war plan assumed that southern Dobruja would be merely a quiet screen for the arrival of the Russians, and that after a few days the allies would themselves move against Bulgaria. After two days of war everything had turned in Mackensen’s favour: the Romanian garrisons were cut off from one another, and the Russians were still far away.