Romania breaks off relations with Bulgaria

On the evening of 30 August 1916 the Romanian minister in Sofia, Gheorghe Derussi, asked for his passports and notified the Bulgarian government that diplomatic relations were broken off. According to a communiqué that the Bulgarian legation in Berlin received from Sofia, relations between the two states were broken off by the Romanian side at 6 p.m. In Romania, which still used the Julian calendar, it was 17 August. Bulgaria had already gone over to the Gregorian calendar in the spring of 1916.

War without a declaration

Romania had been at war with Austria-Hungary for three days, and with Germany for two. That same day Turkey declared war on it. With Bulgaria, bound to the Central Powers by the alliance of September 1915, Romania was formally still at peace, although shots were already being fired on the Danube. During the night of 27/28 August the Romanians made a torpedo attack on the Austro-Hungarian Danube Flotilla lying off the Bulgarian town of Ruse, but sank only a barge carrying oil and coal. The flotilla took refuge in the channel at Belene and then shelled the station and port of the Romanian town of Giurgiu and set fire to the refinery there. According to the Bulgarians, Romanian artillery shelled Ruse on 28 August. On the land border in the Dobruja there were exchanges of fire between outposts.

Bucharest did not want a war with Bulgaria. The treaty with the Entente which Prime Minister Ion I.C. Brătianu signed on 17 August obliged Romania to attack Austria-Hungary, and its war plan provided for three armies to march into Transylvania while the fourth, the 3rd Army, would only defend the line of the Danube and the Dobruja. The Romanians counted on their allies to hold back the Bulgarians. Russia promised to send two infantry divisions and a cavalry division to the Dobruja, and the Allied army at Salonika was to go over to the offensive first and pin down the Bulgarians in the south. The first part of the promise was just being fulfilled: General Andrei Zayonchkovsky’s corps was crossing the Danube. The second failed, because on 17 August it was the Bulgarians who forestalled their enemy and attacked first at Florina. The Romanian General Staff believed that the Bulgarians would not dare to attack once the Russians, who in 1878 had liberated their country from Turkish rule, stood in the Dobruja.

The Dobruja and the year 1913

There was, however, little chance of peaceful coexistence. In 1913, during the Second Balkan War, while the Bulgarian army was fighting the Serbs and Greeks, Romanian troops marched into Bulgaria almost unopposed and approached Sofia. The Treaty of Bucharest then gave Romania the southern part of the Dobruja, with Silistra, Tutrakan and Balchik. The Bulgarians regarded this as a stab in the back and never reconciled themselves to the loss. When they concluded their alliance with the Central Powers, they negotiated that if Romania came out against them or their allies, they would recover the lands lost in 1913.

Relations had been deteriorating for months. In the note which Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov handed to Derussi on 1 September, the Bulgarians listed their grievances: the hostility of the Romanian press, the holding up of goods in transit to Bulgaria and of supplies of salt and oil, harassment of Bulgarians in Romania, the closing of the border on 3 July 1916 and increasingly frequent border incidents. They also claimed that the Bulgarian minister in Bucharest, Simeon Radev, had been unable to communicate with his government since 26 August and had later been handed his passports. This was, of course, one side’s version.

Sofia hesitates

The Central Powers had been preparing for war with Romania since July. In northern Bulgaria stood the Bulgarian 3rd Army of General Stefan Toshev, which, together with small German detachments and the Austro-Hungarian flotilla, was placed under Field Marshal August von Mackensen. Even so, Sofia was in no hurry to declare war, and for several days Berlin feared that Bulgaria would not honour its obligations. According to the Austrian official history, the Romanians, encouraged by Russian diplomacy, promised to cede the Dobruja to the Bulgarians if they remained neutral, and this made an impression on the Bulgarian opposition. The prospect of fighting the Russians was also unwelcome. The Bulgarian government even obstructed the passage of the Turkish VI Corps, which was assembling near Adrianople for the Romanian front. Radoslavov later maintained in his memoirs that Sofia had refrained from breaking off contacts with Bucharest at once merely for the sake of appearances, to gain time.

Romania’s breaking off of relations cut this knot. On 31 August Mackensen arrived at his headquarters in Tarnovo. The next day at 10 a.m. Radoslavov handed the Romanian minister a note stating that Bulgaria considered itself at war with Romania from that morning, and a manifesto of Tsar Ferdinand recalling the wrongs of 1913 was posted on the streets of Sofia. On the Dobruja border the Bulgarian 3rd Army went over to the attack. A few days later, on 6 September, the Bulgarians and Germans took the fortress of Tutrakan, inflicting on the Romanians their first heavy defeat of the war.