Michael B. Barrett. Prelude to Blitzkrieg: The 1916 Austro-German Campaign in Romania.

Abstract

The 1916 Romanian campaign is little known and studied even less. Michael B. Barrett has written an important and timely account of one of the most remarkable campaigns of the First World War. After declaring war on the Central Powers of Germany, Bulgaria, and Austro-Hungary in August 1916, Romanian forces mounted Plan Z, a military operation that was supposed to secure their long-held territorial ambitions and liberate their kinsmen in Hungarian-controlled Transylvania. The Romanians had done so on the assumption that their enemies would be gravely weakened by the heavy fighting on the Western Front at Verdun and the Somme, the latter of which was barely a month old. They judged that now was the right moment to strike. Yet the Romanians had committed the cardinal sin of underestimating their opponents. In what was a stunningly successful counterattack, the German High Command on the Eastern Front rallied quickly and managed to bring a force of thirty-five infantry and six cavalry divisions into the field. In early September some three German and Austrian armies marched up to 360 miles into Romania, across heavily forested and mountainous terrain, and managed to push Romania out of the war in just 135 days. Compared with the seemingly endless battles of attrition on the Western Front, the campaign in Romania proved that decisive maneuver was still possible under certain circumstances. Moreover, it showed that General Erich von Falkenhayn, the man who had lost his job as Chief of Staff of the Prussian Army because of Romania's belligerency, was still a capable field commander at the operational level.