Romania declares war on Austria-Hungary

On Sunday 27 August 1916 (14 August by the Julian calendar, then in force in Romania), a crown council met at the Cotroceni Palace in Bucharest. King Ferdinand I and Prime Minister Ion I.C. Brătianu presented the country’s leading politicians with a decision that had in effect already been taken: Romania was entering the war on the side of the Entente. That same evening, at about 9 p.m., the Romanian minister in Vienna, Edgar Mavrocordat, handed a note at the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry in which Romania declared that from that moment it considered itself at war with Austria-Hungary. The government proclaimed general mobilisation. According to the Austrian official history, at the same hour Romanian advance guards crossed the Carpathian passes and entered Transylvania.

The British chronology of the war records under this day the mobilisation order and the declaration of war on Austria-Hungary. After two years of neutrality and bargaining with both sides, Romania, which as late as 1914 had formally been an ally of the Central Powers, turned against them with an army of more than half a million men.

The crown council

Invitations to the crown council had been sent out on 25 August. The meeting began on Sunday at 10 a.m. Besides the king and the heir to the throne, Prince Carol, it was attended by the ministers, the presidents of both houses of parliament and the leaders of all the parties that mattered, including former prime ministers. The council no longer had anything to decide. The treaty with the Entente, signed ten days earlier, obliged Romania to attack Austria-Hungary by 28 August at the latest, the note to Vienna was already on its way, and the troops stood ready at the border. The Austrian official history writes that the gathering was of purely formal significance and that its purpose was to have the political leaders approve the commitments Brătianu had made with the king’s knowledge.

Even so, the debate was stormy. Most speakers, among them Take Ionescu, who had long called for a war for Transylvania, supported war on the side of the Entente. The Conservative leader Alexandru Marghiloman and the former prime minister Titu Maiorescu argued for keeping neutrality. The only advocate of war alongside Germany was the aged Petre P. Carp, who as early as August 1914, together with King Carol I, had wanted to stay faithful to the alliance with the Central Powers.

Carp’s speech is the best remembered, though participants’ accounts differ in detail. According to them he predicted defeat and reminded the king of his German origins. To the remark that no Hohenzollern had ever yet been defeated, Ferdinand is said to have replied that he had already defeated one, meaning himself. Carp is also said to have declared that he would pray for the defeat of the Romanian army, because its victory would ruin the country. Take Ionescu reportedly commented that Carp was “Shakespearean in his error”. One of Carp’s sons was soon killed in the Transylvanian campaign.

Brătianu closed the debate. According to the notes of the minister Ion G. Duca, the prime minister admitted that he was not sure of victory, but that even if Romania were defeated it must at this moment claim its rights, because inaction would be a moral desertion that would weigh on the nation’s fate for centuries. He recalled Tudor Vladimirescu, leader of the uprising of 1821, and Michael the Brave, who at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries had briefly united the Romanian lands. Both had been defeated and killed, but their deeds had become the foundation of national aspirations.

The note to Vienna

The note declaring war was delivered in Vienna in the evening. The American monthly Current History reported that it was also handed to the Austro-Hungarian minister in Bucharest, Count Ottokar Czernin. The document recalled that the Triple Alliance, which Romania had joined in 1883, had according to the assurances of its members a purely conservative and defensive character. In 1914 Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia without consulting Bucharest, which is why Romania, like Italy, had not joined it. In the spring of 1915 Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary and the Triple Alliance ceased to exist. Vienna’s assurances that it was not waging a war of conquest had proved empty, and the war threatened great changes of frontiers, dangerous for Romania’s future.

The most important issue was that of the Romanians in the monarchy. The note accused Austria-Hungary of having carried out, over thirty years, no reform that would improve their lot, and of treating them as an inferior race, subjected to the oppression of an alien minority. Even after the outbreak of war Vienna had done nothing in this matter, and after two years of fighting had shown itself, as the note put it, as ready to sacrifice its peoples as it was powerless to defend them. Romania, wishing to hasten the end of the war and to protect its national interests, was placing itself alongside those who could secure for it the realisation of national unity. The note ended with the sentence that for these reasons Romania considered itself from that moment at war with Austria-Hungary.

Romania declared war only on the Habsburg monarchy. The treaty with the Entente did not require it to go to war with Germany, Bulgaria or Turkey, and Brătianu refused to the end to attack Bulgaria, although the Russians and the French demanded it. Declarations of war by the other Central Powers were only a matter of days.

Transylvania

The aim of the war was Transylvania and the other Hungarian lands inhabited by Romanians, as well as Bukovina. Some three million Romanians lived in Austria-Hungary, most of them in Transylvania, where they formed the majority of the population alongside the Hungarians, the Székelys and the Transylvanian Saxons. Their fate had for decades stirred more feeling in Romania than any alliance obligations. The Germans, wishing to keep Romania neutral, had repeatedly urged Vienna to make concessions. The Austrian official history admits that giving up even a scrap of Transylvania was out of the question in the face of opposition from the Hungarian prime minister, Count István Tisza. Brătianu was prepared to accept part of Bukovina in return for neutrality, but he considered entering the war on the side of the Central Powers only in the event of Russia’s complete defeat. That did not happen.

For entering the war the Entente promised Romania much more: the whole of Transylvania, the Banat, Crișana, Maramureș and the greater part of Bukovina, with the frontier on the Tisza. The issue was at the same time one of domestic politics. Since the start of the war rallies and the pro-Entente press had accused Brătianu of inaction, while the Conservative Nicolae Filipescu and Take Ionescu argued that Romania must fight for the unification of all Romanians.

Why August

Brătianu waited for the moment when entering the war would carry the least possible risk. In 1915, when the Central Powers were winning victories in Galicia and then conquering Serbia, Romania refused to help the Serbs and did not move. In the summer of 1916 everything seemed to argue for war. The Brusilov offensive had been under way since 4 June: the Russians had taken hundreds of thousands of prisoners, occupied Bukovina and reached the Carpathian passes. On 1 July the British and French attacked on the Somme, at Verdun the Germans went over to the defensive, and on 9 August the Italians took Gorizia. Vienna had to shift divisions from front to front, and Transylvania was almost defenceless.

The Allies pressed ever harder. The Russian chief of staff, General Mikhail Alekseyev, who had long preferred Romania neutral rather than as an ally, told Brătianu in July that it was now or never. The British official historian Cyril Falls later judged that Romania had rightly recognised the moment as exceptional, but had waited too long. During the six weeks of bargaining over the treaty the Russian offensive stalled and the Germans managed to plug the most dangerous gaps in the east. Romania entered the war in a much worse position than a month earlier.

The army

The Austrian official history puts Romania’s field army at about 564,000 men, and with rear units at about 623,000. It consisted of 20 infantry divisions, which after a reorganisation in September became 23, two cavalry divisions and several brigades. It had about 1,300 guns, but only about 760 of them modern. Among the older ones were small fortress guns hastily mounted on carriages. There was a shortage of modern heavy artillery, machine guns and ammunition. During two years of neutrality Romania had expanded its army and its own arms production, but deliveries from abroad came with difficulty, and the only route from the West led through Russia. Officers and men had no experience of modern war. The short campaign against Bulgaria in 1913, during the Second Balkan War, had passed practically without fighting.

The war plan, prepared by the staff of General Vasile Zottu, envisaged a concentric attack by three armies on Transylvania: the Northern Army of General Constantin Prezan from the east, the 2nd Army of General Alexandru Averescu towards Brașov, and the 1st Army from the south, through the passes of the Southern Carpathians. The main objective thereafter was Budapest. The fourth, the 3rd Army, was to cover the Danube and Dobruja against the Bulgarians. The Romanians counted on surprise, which is why the declaration of war and the crossing of the border were set for the same hour.

The first night

According to the Austrian official history, the Austro-Hungarian 1st Army, which was only just being formed, had 34,000 rifles and 76 guns in Transylvania. Facing it were 369,000 soldiers of the three Romanian armies. On the evening of 27 August Romanian advance guards moved through more than a dozen Carpathian passes, pushing back the weak posts of the frontier guard and gendarmerie. On the Danube the Romanians that same night made a torpedo attack on the Austro-Hungarian Danube Flotilla, which, suspecting nothing, lay off Bulgarian Ruse. They sank only a barge carrying oil and coal. The flotilla took refuge in the channel at Belene, and the next day shelled the port and railway at Giurgiu. The offensive proper in Transylvania began on the night of 27–28 August.

Reactions

In Bucharest the news of war was received with enthusiasm. As was later recalled, for several days groups of called-up reservists marched through the streets of the towns, with flowers in their hats and musicians at their head. Romanian accounts of the war liked to stress that the soldiers crossed the border on the night before the Orthodox feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, which fell on 15 August by the Julian calendar. On 28 August the king issued a proclamation to the nation. He wrote that the day awaited by generations had come: the day of the union of all Romanians. He called on them to complete the work of Michael the Brave, who had managed only for a moment to create Romanian unity on both sides of the Carpathians, and to give Bukovina, where the hospodar Stephen the Great had rested for centuries, to a great and free Romania.

For Ferdinand the decision was especially hard. He came from the German line of the Hohenzollerns, and Kaiser Wilhelm II was a distant relative. Later the Romanians called him “the Loyal”, because he had put the oath sworn to his new homeland above family ties.

In Vienna and at the Austrian headquarters the news came as no surprise, because the Austrians knew of the Romanian preparations from intercepted radio messages. In Germany it caused a shock. The Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, had not believed the warnings and expected the Romanians to wait until the harvest was in. On the Kaiser the news acted, as the Austrian official history writes, “like a bolt from the blue”. On 28 August Germany declared war on Romania, and on 30 August Turkey did so. Bulgaria, whose troops under the German field marshal August von Mackensen were already assembling on the Danube, joined on 1 September. Romania’s entry into the war soon cost Falkenhayn his post.

The Romanians’ initial successes in Transylvania were short-lived. In the autumn the Central Powers struck from the west and from Dobruja. In December 1916 Bucharest fell, and the government and the king took refuge in Iași. Romania nonetheless survived this defeat, and after the war it annexed Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia.