Mackensen crosses the Danube

On the morning of 23 November 1916 the troops of Field Marshal August von Mackensen’s army group began crossing the Danube from Bulgarian Svishtov to the Romanian bank near Zimnicea. German, Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers landed almost unhindered and by the evening had seized a bridgehead. From the south, alongside the Ninth Army attacking out of the mountains, the second arm of the pincers aimed at Bucharest, about 100 kilometres from the crossing point, set off. In Romania, which kept time by the Julian calendar, it was 10 November.

Preparations

The crossing had long been prepared. The Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, had ordered even before the Romanian declaration of war that crossing and bridging equipment be gathered on the lower Danube and hidden in the Belene channel near Svishtov. After the capture of Constanța and Cernavodă, Mackensen moved the German 217th Infantry Division and the Bulgarian 1st Division from Dobruja to the Danube. Together with General Karl von der Goltz’s improvised division, the Bulgarian 12th Division, the Ottoman 26th Division, German cavalry and Austro-Hungarian sappers, he placed them under General Robert Kosch’s German LII Corps. About 200 guns were set up on the Svishtov bank, and the Austro-Hungarian Danube flotilla was to cover the flanks of the crossing. According to Glenn Torrey, the Bulgarians, interested above all in Dobruja, long resisted sending their troops west, until Mackensen persuaded Tsar Ferdinand I to intervene. The site was well chosen. The river was relatively narrow here, islets made it easier to hide the boats, and in 1877 the Russian army, marching on the Turks, had crossed the Danube at the very same spot.

The Romanian command did not expect a crossing, although according to Torrey there was no lack of warnings. The bank, over a length of about 185 kilometres from the mouth of the Olt eastwards, was guarded only by the Romanian 18th Division, made up mainly of militia formations, with the 2nd Cavalry Division behind it at Alexandria. At Zimnicea there were, as the Germans correctly judged, only two battalions of territorials and a few batteries, according to Torrey poorly trained and armed, most of them without a single machine gun. The day before the crossing the commander of the Danube defence group, General Constantin Christescu, left to take command of the Northern Army. The attention of headquarters was focused on Oltenia, where after the defeat on the Jiu and the loss of Craiova General Constantin Prezan, together with the head of the French military mission, General Henri Berthelot, was preparing a counter-stroke from Pitești against the flank of the forces advancing from the west. The news of the crossing at Zimnicea took him completely by surprise.

The crossing

A thick fog lay over the Danube. General Kosch postponed the start of the crossing, set for 6.30 a.m., by two hours, but the order did not reach the first wave of the 217th Division, which had already pushed off from the bank. At about 8.30 a.m. the crossing got fully under way. Pontoons and ferries towed by motor boats landed one unit after another on the Romanian bank, and the fog limited visibility so much that the artillery hardly fired. The weak resistance at Zimnicea was quickly broken. An Austro-Hungarian monitor tied up at the landing stage in the little town and joined in the fighting. According to Torrey, Zimnicea was taken at about 2.30 p.m., and Mackensen crossed to the other bank soon afterwards and from the Romanian customs house sent Kaiser Wilhelm II a telegram announcing the success of the operation. The only serious obstacle turned out to be Bulgarian soldiers from the mountains, who were afraid of the water and refused to get into the pontoons. They were persuaded to cross on the steam ferries.

On the evening of 23 November about 17 battalions with at least 80 machine guns and three batteries stood on the Romanian bank. The Austrian official history considers that by then the crossing had already succeeded. A feint crossing by a German territorial battalion from Somovit, opposite the mouth of the Olt, also delayed by the fog, ended on 24 November with the capture of the village of Islaz and for a time misled the Romanian command. Also on 23 November the cavalry of General Eberhard von Schmettow, advancing from Craiova, took Caracal and seized a slightly damaged bridge over the Olt at Stoenești. The barrier of the Olt, the last great river before Bucharest, had ceased to exist.

In the following days more units crossed. On 24 November Austro-Hungarian sappers began building a heavy bridge, ready by the morning of 25 November after 23 hours of work. A Romanian counter-attack by two battalions, led on 24 November by the French Colonel Ernest Mercier, broke down, and Mercier himself was seriously wounded. The Romanian cavalry fell back behind the river Vedea. Kosch’s troops, now called the Danube Army, set off north towards Bucharest. The Romanian command long underestimated their strength. Only at the beginning of December was the decisive battle on the Argeș fought, after which the Central Powers occupied the Romanian capital.