Germans take Craiova

On 21 November 1916 troops of General Erich von Falkenhayn’s German Ninth Army occupied Craiova, the capital of Oltenia, the western part of Wallachia between the Carpathians, the Danube and the river Olt. According to the Austrian official history, the German 6th Cavalry Division of General Eberhard von Schmettow’s corps rode into the city from the west, and the 41st Infantry Division of General Viktor Kühne’s LIV Corps entered it from the north. The Romanians did not defend the city. In Romania, which reckoned time by the Julian calendar, it was 8 November.

Pursuit through Oltenia

Craiova fell four days after the battle of Târgu Jiu, in which Kühne’s corps had smashed the Romanian 1st and 17th Divisions and emerged from the mountains. From 18 November the Germans followed the remnants of the two divisions down three valleys, those of the Jiu, the Gilort and the Amaradia, in the general direction of Craiova, despite thaw, snowstorms and sodden roads. On 19 November the 41st Division took the important railway junction of Filiași. Schmettow’s cavalry was to overtake the infantry and cut off the Romanians’ retreat, but it was held up by a Romanian detachment which, coming from the Cerna via Baia de Aramă, had got into its rear and attacked its baggage trains. The cavalrymen pursued it westwards for two days and so fell behind the infantry.

On 18 and 19 November the Romanian high command announced that it would fight a battle in Oltenia that was to “destroy the enemy and drive him out of the country”. Until a strike group of several fresh divisions could be assembled near Pitești, the First Army was to delay the German advance. According to the Austrian official history, however, the shattered 1st and 17th Divisions together numbered only about 3,800 men and could not hold up the attackers for the ten days needed for the concentration. General Paraschiv Vasilescu, commander of the First Army, also sent a brigade of the Romanian 1st Cavalry Division with a few armoured cars to Craiova, but he too doubted whether the enemy could be stopped.

A city without a fight

According to the American historian Glenn Torrey, the Romanian command did not want to defend Craiova so as “not to expose it needlessly to bombardment”. One of Romania’s largest cities thus passed into German hands without a fight. The Romanians left large stocks in it, especially of flour, which according to the Austrian official history proved very useful to the pursuing troops, as their supplies could not keep up with the rapid advance. Kühne gave his tired soldiers a day of rest on 22 November. Torrey quotes accounts by German soldiers who toured the city and admired the “palaces of millionaires”, so different from the poverty of the Romanian small towns they had passed through.

The same day the Central Powers were already thinking about the next step. Falkenhayn, who on 18 November had moved his headquarters from Brașov to Sibiu, on receiving the news of the capture of Craiova issued orders for the march to the Olt, the last great natural obstacle before Bucharest. The German Supreme Army Command also demanded the rapid opening of the Danube waterway at Orșova, where on the orders of Romanian headquarters the cut-off Romanian Cerna Group was still holding out. That evening in Vienna Emperor Franz Joseph I died, but, as the Austrian official history notes, this changed nothing for the time being in the ongoing operations in Romania.

The capture of Craiova sealed the loss of Oltenia. The rapid German advance had cut the Romanian First Army in two. The units at Orșova and on the Danube were cut off from the rest of the country, and within the next few days the Germans reached the Olt and crossed it.