Romanian campaign (1916)
| Romanian campaign (1916) | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Romanian campaign of World War I | |||||||||
Falkenhayn's cavalry entering Bucharest on 6 December 1916 | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
|
Romania Russian Empire |
Germany Austria-Hungary Bulgaria Ottoman Empire | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
|
Ioan Culcer Alexandru Averescu Mihail Aslan Constantin Prezan Grigore Crăiniceanu Andrei Zayonchkovski |
Erich von Falkenhayn August von Mackensen A. A. von Straussenburg Stefan Toshev Mustafa Hilmi Pasha | ||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
|
1916:: p. 254 658,088 50,000 1917: 400,000 1,000,000 |
750,000: p. 254 143,049 (1916): p. 792 20,000 (1916): p. 283 | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
|
535,706+ all casualties Unknown |
47,000+ casualties Unknown Unknown | ||||||||
.svg){kind=link}
After a series of quick tactical victories on the numerically overpowered Austro-Hungarian forces in Transylvania, in the autumn of 1916, the Romanian Army suffered a series of devastating defeats, which forced the Romanian military and administration to withdraw to Western Moldavia, allowing the Central Powers to occupy two thirds of the national territory, including the state capital, Bucharest.
The main causes of the Romanian Army’s defeat by the numerically inferior German and Austro-Hungarian forces in the campaign of 1916 were the major political interferences in the act of military supervision, the incompetence, the imposture and the cowardice of a significant part of the military echelon of conduct, as well as the lack of an adequate training and troops’ equipment for that specific type of war.