Russia at war 1941-1945

Chapter X RUMANIA, FINLAND AND BULGARIA PACK UP

Apart from Poland, the Red Army had a lot of other fish to fry. In that summer and

autumn of 1944 Hitler's satellites were collapsing one after the other, and it was

important to speed up the process. Below the surface, there was rivalry between the

Soviet Union and the British and Americans in the Balkans, and Moscow thought it

essential to occupy Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary as quickly as possible.

[ Some (perhaps over-suspicious) Russians attributed Churchill's wish to get the Red Army to capture Warsaw at any price to a desire to slow down its progress in south-east Europe.]

Events in Rumania followed upon one another with fantastic speed during that month of August 1944. Since the late spring the Russians had held a line running (west to east) from the Carpathian foothills across Moldavia and Bessarabia just north of Jassy and Kishenev, and then along the Dniester to the Black Sea some thirty miles south of

Odessa. The Moldavian sector was held by the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under Malinovsky, the Bessarabian sector by those of the 3rd Ukrainian Front under Tolbukhin, which also held an important bridgehead on the right bank of the Dniester just south of Tiraspol. Facing them, east to west, were the Rumanian 4th Army, the German 8th Army, the German 6th Army and the Rumanian 3rd Army, the whole, under the command of

General Friessner, forming Army Group Süd-Ukraine consisting of some fifty divisions, half of them Rumanian.

On August 20 both the Ukrainian fronts struck out with forces estimated by the Germans at "ninety infantry divisions and forty-one tank and three cavalry formations".

[ Philippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 259.]

As the same writers say:

The avalanche had now been set in motion and nothing could stop it on its way to

the Rumanian interior. It was all the easier for the enemy since half the divisions of Army Group Süd-Ukraine were Rumanian, and the Russians deliberately struck their first blows at them. But it was not till August 22 that the full extent of the catastrophe could be measured... With its sixteen divisions the German 6th Army

was trapped in the Kishinev area and the Rumanian 3rd Army along the Black Sea

coast. In the general confusion no one did anything to blow up the bridges across the Pruth and the Danube and, for the Russians the road was now clear to Bucharest

and the Dobrudja.

This roughly corresponds to Russian accounts of the same operation which, within a few days, was to knock Rumania straight out of "Hitler's war". As General Talensky told me in 1945:

"The Germans holding the line north of Jassy were worried, for this was our road to the Rumanian oil and to the Balkans. They concentrated here practically all that was left of the Rumanian Army, which now formed part of the German Army Group Süd-Ukraine.

The Germans had strongly fortified their lines though, in fact, they were pretty sure that the Central Front was engaging all our attention, and that there was little to fear for the present.

[ This is corroborated by German evidence showing that, in July, a number of strong

German formations were moved from Rumania to other parts of the front. See Philippi

and Heim, op. cit., p. 260.]

"So our attack of August 20 came like a bolt from the blue... By August 23 fifteen German divisions were trapped. Unlike the Rumanians, who either offered no resistance or even (in a number of cases) turned against their 'allies', the Germans resisted fiercely at first; some 60,000 were killed, but, in the end, we bagged 106,000 prisoners, among them two corps commanders, twelve divisional commanders and thirteen other generals. Two

corps commanders and five divisional commanders were found dead. We also captured

or destroyed 338 planes, 830 tanks and mobile guns, 5,500 guns and 33,000 trucks... It was a classically-done job."

Nearly the whole of the German 6th Army was destroyed; but most of the German 8th

Army hastily retreated west to the Carpathians.

Jassy had been captured on the 22nd and Kishenev on the 24th; during the following