Germans and Bulgarians take Silistra

The British chronology of the war states that on 10 September 1916 German and Bulgarian troops occupied Silistra, the second Romanian fortress on the Danube in southern Dobruja after Turtucaia. It was not, however, a capture in the strict sense. The Romanians left the town without a fight, and the victors entered an empty fortress. Sources differ on the day. According to the Austrian official history and the memoirs of Erich Ludendorff, it happened on 9 September. The Romanian historian Constantin Kirițescu writes that the Bulgarians and Germans entered Silistra two days after its evacuation, that is on 10 September. This date was also given in communiqués and the press of those days, and some American yearbooks even give 11 September. In Romania, which still used the Julian calendar, it was the end of August.

A fortress no one defended

Silistra, the Roman Durostorum, had guarded a crossing of the lower Danube for centuries. The Russians besieged it, among other occasions, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829 and the Crimean War. After 1878 the town belonged to Bulgaria. In the spring of 1913 a conference of ambassadors in St Petersburg awarded it to Romania together with a strip of land around it, and the Treaty of Bucharest gave Romania the whole of southern Dobruja. The Romanians developed Silistra into a bridgehead, as they had Turtucaia, but here, unlike there, they built a pontoon bridge to the other bank, to Călărași. The fortress was defended by the 9th Infantry Division of General Basarabescu, according to Kirițescu 16 battalions and 13 batteries.

The fate of Silistra was decided at Turtucaia. When the Bulgarians stormed that fortress, the 9th Division was ordered to go to its relief. General Basarabescu, however, sent only part of his forces, which the Bulgarians routed on the way on 6 September, and his soldiers returned to the town in disorder. On the same day Turtucaia capitulated, and several thousand stragglers reached Silistra. The victorious Bulgarian units could now move east. The Romanian command, shocked by the loss of two divisions, feared that the isolated 9th Division would share the fate of the 17th Division. During the night of 7/8 September it ordered the evacuation of the fortress. According to Kirițescu, a council of war in Silistra decided the same night that defence had become useless and dangerous and that resistance had to be organised further north.

Evacuation and entry

On 8 September the Romanian authorities and the Romanian population left the town. The pontoon bridge was dismantled, and in the afternoon the 9th Division withdrew north towards Lake Oltina. The retreat was covered by monitors of the Romanian Danube flotilla. Then, as the Austrian official history writes, German uhlans rode into the abandoned fortress, having outpaced the 1st Sofia Infantry Division (PL), which was marching there. They were the Thuringian 6th Uhlan Regiment, the same one that had fought in the German-Bulgarian detachment at Tutrakan. For the local Bulgarians this was liberation and the return of land lost in 1913.

The fall of Silistra completed the defeat of the first days of the Dobruja campaign. The Bulgarian Third Army of General Stefan Toshev had already taken Dobrich without a fight, and the Russian corps of General Andrei Zayonchkovski had failed to retake it. On 9 September the Russian-Romanian forces stood on a line from Lake Oltina on the Danube to Mangalia on the Black Sea. The Austrian official history calculates that after nine days of the campaign they had been pushed back 50–90 kilometres from the border. On the same day the Romanian command formed them into a separate Army of Dobruja under Zayonchkovski and began to reinforce it with divisions taken from other fronts. Field Marshal August von Mackensen pressed on north, towards the Cernavodă–Constanța railway, Romania’s only land link with the Black Sea.