Romania in the First World War

Romania stayed neutral for the first two years of the war, and on 27 August 1916 it came out on the side of the Entente to win Transylvania and the other lands inhabited by Romanians in Austria-Hungary. The 1916 campaign ended in disaster: the troops of the Central Powers drove the Romanians out of Transylvania and occupied Dobruja, Wallachia and Bucharest, while the king and government took refuge in Moldavia. The rebuilt army defended it in summer 1917, but after the Russian army fell apart Romania had to conclude an armistice, and in May 1918 a peace. It re-entered the war a day before the end, and in 1918 it united with Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania, becoming Greater Romania.

The road to war

In 1883 Romania concluded a secret alliance with Austria-Hungary, which Germany joined at once. Few politicians knew of the alliance, but for King Carol I it was the foundation of foreign policy. In 1913 Romania attacked Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War and by the Peace of Bucharest gained southern Dobruja. The peace was made against Vienna’s wishes, and the conference that settled the new shape of the Balkans met in Bucharest. Public opinion, sympathetic to France, spoke up ever more warmly for the Romanians of Transylvania, oppressed by chauvinist Hungarian policy.

When war broke out, a crown council at Sinaia on 3 August 1914 came out for neutrality against the king’s wishes. Carol I died on 10 October, and the throne passed to his nephew Ferdinand I, who was more sympathetic to the Entente, and his wife, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Marie.

Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu bargained with both sides for two years. As early as autumn 1914 he secured a secret agreement with Russia recognising Romania’s claims to Transylvania, and he borrowed money for weapons in London. He nevertheless refused to help Serbia, because he did not want war without a large Entente army in the Balkans.

Entry into the war

The turning point came with the Brusilov offensive, after which the Russians stood at the Romanian border. On 17 August 1916 Brătianu signed with the Entente a secret treaty and military convention, which promised Romania Transylvania, the Banat and most of Bukovina. On 27 August a crown council approved entry into the war, and in the evening the Romanian minister handed a note in Vienna declaring war on Austria-Hungary.

The answer came quickly. On 28 August Germany declared war on Romania, on 30 August Turkey, and on 1 September Bulgaria, which wanted Dobruja back. The Romanian army numbered 800,000 men, but it lacked machine guns, quick-firing artillery and experienced officers.

The 1916 campaign

On the night of 27–28 August three Romanian armies crossed the Carpathian passes and entered Transylvania. On 29 August they took Brașov, but the offensive soon lost momentum. In the south the Bulgarian Third Army and a German detachment under Field Marshal August von Mackensen struck at Dobruja. On 6 September the fortress of Tutrakan capitulated, and about 28,000 Romanians were taken prisoner. The defeat shook the country, and the offensive in Transylvania was halted. The German Ninth Army of General Erich von Falkenhayn beat the Romanians at Hermannstadt (Sibiu) and at Brașov, and by 14 October it had driven them out of almost all of Transylvania.

The Romanians held the Carpathian passes for a long time, but in mid-November the Germans broke through in the Jiu valley and came out onto the plain of Oltenia. On 23 November Mackensen crossed the Danube at Svishtov and marched on the capital. The counter-offensive of General Constantin Prezan on the Argeș collapsed, and on 6 December the troops of the Central Powers entered Bucharest without a fight.

The court, the government and the Allied legations had already moved to Iași in Moldavia. At the beginning of January 1917 the front settled on the Siret, and Dobruja, apart from the Danube delta, was in enemy hands.

Moldavia, armistice and peace

In the winter of 1916/1917 typhus decimated overcrowded Iași, and food, fuel and medicines were short. Queen Marie worked in the hospitals and became a symbol of resistance for the Romanians. The French military mission of General Henri Berthelot helped to rebuild the army, and in summer 1917 the Second Army of General Alexandru Averescu broke through the German front at Mărăști. In August the German Ninth Army attacked on the Putna, but General Grigorescu’s Romanians stopped it at Mărășești, and Moldavia, the last scrap of Romania, was saved.

The revolution in Russia wiped out these successes. When the Russian army, on which the defence of Moldavia rested, began to fall apart and the Bolsheviks opened talks at Brest, isolated Romania, undefeated in the field, signed the Armistice of Focșani on 9 December 1917. On that day it stopped fighting. Under the pressure of Mackensen’s ultimatum Brătianu’s government resigned, and on 5 March 1918 the government of Averescu accepted a preliminary peace at Buftea.

On 7 May 1918 the government of Alexandru Marghiloman signed the Peace of Bucharest. Romania lost Dobruja and the Carpathian passes, and Germany took its oil. King Ferdinand never ratified it. Even before the peace was signed, on 9 April 1918, the Council of the Country in Chișinău voted for the union of Bessarabia with Romania.

The occupation

The occupied part of the country, about two-thirds of its territory, came under Mackensen’s command in Bucharest. The Germans ran eleven districts and the Austro-Hungarians three, while Bulgaria annexed southern Dobruja. The occupation was purely military and less brutal than in the other occupied countries of the region, but above all the occupiers exploited Romanian oil and grain.

Some Conservative politicians, such as Marghiloman, cooperated with the occupation authorities, while those who refused were interned or deported to camps in Bulgaria. After the peace a German company received the right to Romanian oil for thirty years, and the National Bank came under the control of German commissioners. Food was short, so in May 1918 the government introduced compulsory agricultural labour and the cultivation of all arable land.

The end of the war and the reckoning

After the armistice with Bulgaria the Allied army reached the Danube. At the beginning of November the king dismissed Marghiloman’s government, and on 10 November 1918, as French battalions were crossing the Danube at Ruse, Romania re-entered the war and found itself among the victors. The Germans withdrew from the country, and on 1 December King Ferdinand rode into Bucharest. On the same day the assembly at Alba Iulia proclaimed the union of Transylvania and the Banat with the kingdom, and a few days earlier the General Congress of Bukovina had resolved the same.

The country’s territory grew from 138,000 to 295,049 square kilometres and its population from 7.5 to 15.5 million. The new borders were recognised by the peace treaties: the one with Austria at Saint-Germain on 10 September 1919 gave Romania Bukovina, and the one with Hungary at Trianon on 4 June 1920 gave it Transylvania, Crișana, Maramureș and two-thirds of the Banat.

The country paid a high price for this Greater Romania. It mobilised between 750,000 (US War Department figures) and a million men. The number of soldiers killed or dead ranges from 250,000 according to the Romanian government in 1924 to 336,000 according to the US War Department and the British War Office. Together with civilian victims, Romania lost between 7.7 and 9.1 per cent of its population. National minorities made up about 30 per cent of the new state’s inhabitants, and Soviet Russia never accepted the loss of Bessarabia.