Fall of Bucharest

At noon on 6 December 1916 the first units of General Erich von Falkenhayn’s German Ninth Army entered Bucharest. The Romanian capital, which before the war had about 345,000 inhabitants, surrendered without a fight. The same day the Germans stormed Ploiești, the centre of the oilfields, and on the Danube the Romanian Cerna Group, cut off from the rest of the army, capitulated. The Austrian official history called 6 December a day of “particular misfortune” for Romania. For the army group commander, Field Marshal August von Mackensen, it was his 67th birthday. In Romania, which reckoned time by the Julian calendar, it was 23 November.

After the defeat on the Argeș

The city’s fate had been decided a few days earlier and some 20–30 kilometres further west. On 1 December General Constantin Prezan attacked Mackensen’s Danube Army, which after crossing the Danube at Zimnicea was advancing on Bucharest from the south. The Romanians took the enemy by surprise and captured many prisoners, but on 3 December the corps of the Ninth Army attacking from the west came down on their rear and flank. The Battle of the Argeș ended in defeat for the Romanians. That evening Prezan ordered the First Army to break contact quickly and on 4 December to take up a defensive position on a new line, and the divisions south of it to occupy positions just in front of the south-eastern sector of the capital’s forts. The government left Bucharest and moved to Iași.

On 5 December the Romanian high command, which had already moved to Buzău, concluded that it could no longer defend Wallachia. According to the Austrian official history, all the troops between the Buzău Mountains and the Danube were to withdraw gradually to the Râmnicu Sărat–Vizirul line, and an intermediate position was to be occupied by the approaching Russians. The bled-white Romanian divisions were to go back to Moldavia (PL) to rest. Prezan assured his commanders that a skilful retreat would delay the pursuit by three weeks.

An open city

Bucharest was formally a fortress. At the end of the 19th century it had been surrounded by a ring of more than a dozen forts built to the design of the Belgian engineer Henri Brialmont, with concrete roofs and armoured turrets for heavy guns. The war in Belgium, however, had shown in 1914 that such forts could not withstand the fire of modern siege artillery. John Buchan observed that manning the fortifications would have required 120,000 men, and shutting them up in a fortress would have meant making a present of them to the enemy. In any case, the guns had been removed from the forts even before the declaration of war to form the heavy artillery of the field army. Defending the capital was therefore out of the question.

The inhabitants lived through the last days in suspense. Constantin Kirițescu describes how on the night of 3–4 December the police woke people up and told them to light their lamps and open their gates, because “the city has surrendered, the Germans are coming in”. It was a false alarm, as the enemy was still more than 30 kilometres from the city. The new prefect of police, the Romanian General Mustață, put up notices ordering, on pain of being shot, the surrender of weapons and obedience to the “imperial troops”. Meanwhile columns of baggage trains and stragglers from the Argeș streamed through the streets to the north-east, and on 5 and 6 December military installations were blown up. On the morning of 6 December the arsenal on the Dealul Spirii hill was in flames.

On the morning of 5 December Mackensen, convinced that the city would not be defended, sent a German staff officer under a flag of truce to the fortress commandant with a demand that it surrender without a fight. The officer was driven to a headquarters far to the east of the city and sent back with the answer that Bucharest was an open city. When he returned to the German lines on the morning of 6 December, German flags were already flying over the north-eastern forts. Units of the German 6th Cavalry Division had occupied the undefended fort at Mogoșoaia (PL) around midnight, and the alerted troops of Kühne’s and Schmettow’s corps occupied the whole north-western sector of the ring. At noon the first units of the Ninth Army entered the city, and two German divisions of the Danube Army, the 11th Bavarian and the 217th, occupied the districts south of the Dâmbovița. The Turks and Bulgarians advanced between the forts and the Danube, and the Russian IV Corps fell back before them behind the river lines. According to Buchan, Mackensen rode into the city that same day, and he moved his headquarters to Bucharest on 11 December.

Bucharest was, as the Austrian official history notes, the fourth enemy capital taken by the Central Powers, after Brussels, Belgrade and Cetinje. In the city and in Ploiești the victors seized large stocks that made it easier for them to continue the campaign.

Ploiești and the burning wells

At the same time as they entered the capital, Falkenhayn’s troops were gaining successes further north. The Bavarian 12th Infantry Division stormed Ploiești, inflicting heavy losses on the Romanian 22nd Division. The Romanian 4th Division, exhausted by its march through the mountains, found its lines of retreat cut and was surrounded. The Hungarian 51st Honvéd Division had already entered Sinaia, the king’s summer residence, on the evening of 5 December and was ordered to guard the royal castles.

The oilfields, however, did not fall into German hands intact. According to the Austrian official history, as early as 5 December the great derricks in Câmpina had been set on fire with the participation of two senior British officers, and thick black smoke covered the whole area. The destruction was directed by a British member of parliament, Colonel John Norton-Griffiths, who according to Buchan was helped by American engineers employed in the Romanian oilfields. His men plugged the wells with cement, threw nails into the tanks and set fire to the oil stores. Buchan wrote that Falkenhayn advanced on Ploiești like the Israelites through the wilderness, with a pillar of cloud before him by day and a pillar of fire by night. According to the American historian Daniel Yergin, some 70 refineries and 800,000 tonnes of oil were destroyed, and Erich Ludendorff later admitted that Germany’s fuel shortages had to be attributed in part to Norton-Griffiths. Not everyone rated this so highly: the British diplomat Lord Hardinge claimed that after six months the destroyed wells were working again.

The capitulation of the Cerna Group

The same day saw the end of the Romanian detachment that had been holding out on the Cerna near Orșova since November. Left to its own devices after the defeat on the Jiu, it had spent two weeks fighting its way east through Oltenia, pursued by Colonel Szivó’s Austro-Hungarian group. At the beginning of December it reached the lower Olt, but the bridge at Turnu Măgurele had been destroyed, the swollen river could not be forded, and Austro-Hungarian monitors were waiting on the Danube. On 5 December 26 officers and 1,600 men surrendered at Cilieni. On the evening of 6 December, after a whole day of fighting, ten battalions, a squadron and six batteries laid down their arms. According to the Austrian official history, a total of 8,000 men with 26 guns were taken prisoner.

The balance

The Romanian army suffered enormous losses. The Austrian official history states that in the battle for Bucharest Falkenhayn’s army alone took 60,000 prisoners, 85 guns and 115 machine guns, and the Danube Army on 3 and 4 December 5,000 prisoners and 39 guns. The numbers of killed and wounded on both sides are not known. Almost the entire Romanian army took part in the battle. Only a few divisions remained intact.

Sources estimate the losses of the whole 1916 campaign differently. According to the Romanian general and historian Gheorghe Dabija, quoted by the Austrian official history, the Romanians lost about 17,000 killed, 56,000 wounded, 147,000 prisoners and 90,000 missing. Kirițescu, in a work published in Paris in 1934, gave 50,000 killed, 80,000 wounded and 110,000 prisoners. According to the Austrian official history, by the end of the campaign only six and a half of the 23 infantry and 2 cavalry divisions remained at the front, numbering 90,000 men, and 105,000 soldiers had been sent to Moldavia for reorganisation. The Romanians also lost 359 guns and nearly 300,000 rifles. The losses of the Central Powers in the whole campaign were not given.

What came next

The German Supreme Army Command decided to continue the advance as far as the line of the Trotuș and Siret rivers and the mouth of the Danube, the shortest line between the Carpathians and the Black Sea, in order to occupy as much of the land rich in grain and oil as possible. The pursuit began as early as 7 December, and by the middle of the month the Central Powers’ troops had reached Buzău. Ever larger Russian forces moved in to defend Moldavia, and after the fighting at Râmnicu Sărat over Christmas the front settled at the beginning of 1917 on the Siret, between the Eastern Carpathians, Focșani and Galați.

Bucharest remained under occupation until the end of the war, and Mackensen took power in Romania as military governor. A few days after the capture of the city the Central Powers, taking advantage of this victory, announced a peace offer. The Central Powers had not, however, managed to destroy the Romanian army, which, rebuilt in Moldavia with the help of a French military mission, returned to the fight in the summer of 1917.