The Allies have not taken a single enemy capital over the course of the war.
The Central Powers have taken several: Brussels, Belgrade, Cetinje, Durazzo, and this week
another one falls.
For this week comes the fall of Bucharest.
I’m Indy Neidell: welcome to the Great War.
Last week, three columns of Central Powers forces began to converge on Bucharest, the
Romanian capital, and the Romanians made ready their defense, there was action in the skies
over Britain, and in Greece, Allied troops tried to march to Athens but were forced to
withdraw by Greek Royalist forces.
There was more turmoil in Greece this week too.
On the 6th, there were massacres of Venizelists, supporters of Eleftherios Venizelos’ provisional
government, in Athens.
The Royalists were now in control there, effectively nullifying Venizelos’ recent declaration
of war on the Central Powers.
Also this week the Entente declared a blockade of Greece, effective from the 8th, and to
make sure they remained in control of the Eastern Mediterranean telegraph cables, the
British occupied the isle of Syra and would soon occupy all of the Cyclades.
The Royalist attack in Athens last week caused Allied Commander of the Salonika Front Maurice
Sarrail to concentrate troops in his rear to meet a possible Greek threat to cut communications
with Monastir.
The fighting had been heavy in that region and the French had been unable to push the
Bulgarians out of gun range of the city.
The Germans had sent a division over from the Somme and the Bulgarians troops from Dobrogea,
but they were not strong enough to retake the city and life there had become very uncomfortable.
The shelling that the citizens had been told was not coming, did in fact come, and wreaked
havoc on the city.
There was also a food shortage, but the city couldn’t be evacuated because that would’ve
blocked the single supply road for the allied troops.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, however you see it, the onset of winter would soon put
an end to operations on the Macedonian front for the time being.
The only foreign capital the Allies were active in was neutral Athens, but not the Central
Powers.
Last week, Romanian General Constantin Prezan was put in charge of the defense of Bucharest,
and his plan was to defeat the three advancing enemy columns one by one.
His 1st and 2nd armies in the north and northwest would form a screen against the Germans coming
from the west from the Olt and the south from Brasov.
General August von Mackensen’s, coming from the south, was the smallest enemy column,
and was the closest to Bucharest, but the defenses of the capital were to the west and
northwest of it.
Bucharest’s forts were obsolete and had been stripped of their guns, so the defense
would take place outside of the city and the only real geographic boundary was the Arges
River, just under 20km west of Bucharest, and at the end of last week the Romanians
had hit Mackensen’s left flank there.
French Major General Henri-Mathias Berthelot, the Allied liaison officer, figured he would
get help from the Russian army of the Danube, but transportation was a nightmare.
The railroads were overwhelmed with evacuating Bucharest and Wallachia, and moving Romanian
units, but the Russians said they’d send four army Corps and three cavalry divisions.
If they could only arrive in time.
And they had their hands full elsewhere anyhow, as this week the Bulgarians repulsed Russian
attacks in Dobrogea.
Mackensen’s flank was threatened but relief was coming.
Those troops arrived just after noon on the 3rd, hitting the Romanians from behind and
scattering them in panic.
The next day the Germans, Bulgarians, and Turks mopped up the west back of the Arges.
24,000 Romanian prisoners and 30 guns were reported taken.
Over the next few days a further 51,000 men, 85 artillery pieces, and 115 machine guns
were captured.
In the north, the German 9th army was now cutting off the retreat of the Romanian 1st
army.
German General Erich von Falkenhayn was very satisfied, since all along the Arges River,
from the Danube to the mountains, two German led armies had fought and beaten most of the
Romanian army, and on December 4th, the Kaiser ordered the ringing of church bells throughout
Germany.
Mackensen brought his artillery into place.
Meanwhile the Romanian army had retreated east from the city where it met up with the
Russians.
The decision to abandon the capital had actually been made nearly two weeks ago, though the
government hadn’t moved to Iasi until the 3rd, but the Central Powers would find it
difficult to get what they wanted from Romania - oil and grain.
To prevent all that oil falling into the hands of the Central Powers, Colonel John Norton-Griffiths,
a British MP and engineer, organized serious sabotage at the Ploesti oil fields, blowing
up or destroying 70 refineries and 800,000 tons of crude oil.
He figured that the wells and machinery were more valuable than the oil itself.
British citizens working in the Romanian oil industry were rounded up and drove stones
or drill bits into the wellheads or dynamited them., and since many oil tanks were located
near granaries, opening the tank valves flooded the grain and ruined both products.
Cossack cavalry also helped destroy grain.
I have to point out that the Romanians were opposed to destroying their grain since they
didn’t want to be condemned to starvation, though they did authorize destruction of the
wells.
In “Prelude to Blitzkrieg”, a book on the Romanian campaign, I read that an estimated
210 million gallons of fuel were destroyed.
On December 6, 1916, Bucharest fell to Mackensen and the Central Powers, as did the oil fields.
It was Mackensen’s 67th birthday.
Lieutenant-General Erich Tülff von Tschepe und Weidenbach was appointed military governor
of Romania.
As the week came to and end, the Romanians retreated eastward as Wallachia was now in
enemy hands.
Bucharest didn’t have any real military value, but it did have political value.
After the French fortitude at the Battle of Verdun and Russia’s Brusilov Offensive,
this would show the world that the Central Powers were still very much alive and kicking.
Nations on both sides had seen shake-ups in their governments over the past few weeks,
and this week was no exception.
On December 4th, Herbert Asquith resigned as Prime Minister, and David Lloyd George
succeeded him the 7th.
Winston Churchill wrote to a friend that he believed George was the only man in the British
government who had any aptitude for, or knowledge of war, but that only disasters lay ahead
in the coming months.
Last week, Admiral David Beatty had succeeded John Jellicoe as Commander of the British
Fleet and this week, when Sir Henry Jackson resigned, Jellicoe was appointed First Sea
Lord.
There was also big political activity in Russia this week.
On the 2nd, new Prime Minister Alexander Trepov announced in the Duma that the Allies had
acknowledged Russia’s right to Constantinople and the Bosporus when the war was won.
However, he was loudly hissed and the deputies chanted, “Down with the ministers!
Down with Protopopov!”
Alexander Protopopov was a protégé of Rasputin.
Now, Protopopov had tried to dissolve the Duma, and though Trepov had gotten the Tsar
to agree to remove Protopopov as Minister of the Interior and move him to the less influential
Commerce, and the cabinet had demanded Protopopov’s resignation, the Tsarina had intervened.
She and Rasputin requested, and the Tsar acceded to that request, that the unpopular Protopopov
remain as Minister of the Interior.
And the week ends, with shelling in Monastir, blood in Athens, political intrigue in Russia,
and Bucharest falling to the Central Powers.
Lloyd George had bluntly stated that the war was not going well for Britain - the enemy
had recovered the initiative, was expanding its territory, and had 4 million men in reserve.
The Battle of the Somme may have relieved Verdun, but it hadn’t broken the German
lines, taken any major objectives, or prevented the Germans from sending men to other fronts.
There was a growing danger to shipping from submarines, the Entente was having solidarity
problems, and the public at home demanded victories, which only the Central Powers seemed
to be getting.
George also said this of the British Army’s Commander in Chief (the Somme), “Haig does
not care how many men he loses.
He just squanders the lives of these boys.
I mean to save some of them in the future...”
This seems to imply that there would not be another Battle of the Somme in 1917, but George
didn’t suggest an alternative, better way of conducting the war.
And think about it, the Italians had big problems, Russia was pretty much spent, Romania was
collapsing, the Balkans didn’t help much this year, Mesopotamia was halfway around
the world, so if not the Western Front, then where else would the British launch an attack?
And there was no question about just playing defense, George insisted that this war was
a fight to the finish, and that would mean fighting on the Western Front, and - it seems
to me - that would entail more offensives on the scale of the Battle of the Somme.
And that battle alone claimed over a million casualties in under five months.
1917 already looks grim.
If you want to learn more about the architect behind the battle of the Somme, Douglas Haig,
you can click right here to check out our special episode.
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