The Jassy–Kishinev offensive begins

On 20 August 1944, after four months of relative calm on the southern wing of the Eastern Front, the Red Army resumed its offensive towards Romania. Troops of Army General Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front attacked north-west of Iași (Jassy), while those of Army General Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front struck from a bridgehead on the Dniester south of Bender, the former Romanian Tighina. Facing them was Colonel General Johannes Frießner’s German Army Group South Ukraine, made up of two German and two Romanian armies. So began the operation that Soviet historiography named the Jassy–Kishinev offensive and that Russian military literature still calls the “Jassy–Kishinev Cannae”. Within five days the two fronts had trapped the main forces of the German Sixth Army in a pocket between the Dniester and the Prut, and on the fourth day of the offensive, 23 August, the regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu fell in Bucharest.

The front on the Prut and the Dniester

The Red Army had reached the threshold of Romania as early as the spring of 1944. In March, during the offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine, Marshal Ivan Konev’s troops crossed the Dniester and entered Bessarabia, and at the end of the month they crossed the Prut onto the territory of Romania proper. On 10 April the 3rd Ukrainian Front – then still commanded by Malinovsky – took Odessa and won bridgeheads on the western bank of the lower Dniester near Tiraspol. The advance, however, petered out on the approaches to Iași and Kishinev. The 2nd Ukrainian Front’s attacks at Târgu Frumos in April and early May were beaten off by German and Romanian troops; the American historian David Glantz describes this fighting as a failed “first Jassy–Kishinev operation”, passed over in silence by Soviet historiography. At the beginning of May the Stavka went over to the defensive on this sector.

In May the Soviet command reshuffled its front commanders: Konev took over the 1st Ukrainian Front, Malinovsky replaced him at the 2nd Ukrainian Front, and the 3rd Ukrainian Front passed to Tolbukhin, who had taken the Crimea that spring. The front settled on a line running from the Carpathians past Târgu Frumos and the northern approaches to Iași, then along the Dniester to the Black Sea. Behind it lay the whole of Bessarabia with Kishinev, and further south-west Romanian Moldavia; the passage between the Siret and the Danube known, after the town of Focșani, as the Focșani Gap; and finally the Wallachian Plain with Bucharest and the Ploiești oilfields, which American aircraft had been bombing from Italy since April.

In the summer the decisive events were taking place elsewhere. On 22 June the Red Army launched Operation Bagration and within a few weeks destroyed the German Army Group Centre, and on 13 July the 1st Ukrainian Front moved on Lwów. To patch up the disintegrating front, the German Army High Command (OKH) took divisions away from Romania. By mid-July, according to Russian studies, Army Group South Ukraine had given up a dozen or so divisions, including almost all its armoured units – among them XXXX Panzer Corps with the 14th and 23rd Panzer Divisions. On the eve of the Soviet attack the only major mobile formations left were the 13th Panzer Division, the 10th Panzergrenadier Division and the Romanian 1st Armoured Division “Greater Romania”.

Commanders and forces

Frießner had been in command of Army Group South Ukraine since 25 July. Hitler had sent him from Narva, where as commander of Army Group North he had demanded permission to retreat, and in the same exchange had sent the previous commander in Romania, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, north (the circumstances of the switch are bound up with the retreat to the Tannenberg Line). Frießner had two mixed groupings under him. In the east, in Bessarabia and on the lower Dniester, stood Army Group Dumitrescu: the German Sixth Army, rebuilt after Stalingrad and commanded since July by General of Artillery Maximilian Fretter-Pico, and General Petre Dumitrescu’s Romanian Third Army, defending the coast and the Dniester estuary. In the west, from the Carpathians to Iași, stood Army Group Wöhler: the German Eighth Army under General of Infantry Otto Wöhler and the Romanian Fourth Army under General Ioan Mihail Racoviță.

According to Russian tallies the army group numbered 25 German divisions, 22 Romanian, one Slovak and several Romanian brigades; its air support – Luftflotte 4 and the Romanian air corps – had some 810 aircraft. Soviet historiography put the total German and Romanian strength at around 900,000 men, although that figure is hard to verify. The weakness of the defence lay in its make-up: on key sectors German divisions were interleaved with Romanian ones, which were less well equipped with anti-tank weapons and artillery, and most of the infantry on both sides moved on foot and with horse-drawn transport.

On the Soviet side the operations of the two fronts were coordinated by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko as the Stavka’s representative. Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front had in its first echelon, among others, the 27th Army of General Sergei Trofimenko and the 52nd Army of General Konstantin Koroteyev, while General Andrei Kravchenko’s 6th Tank Army and the 18th Tank Corps stood ready to be committed to the breach. On the right wing, towards Târgu Frumos, the 7th Guards Army of General Mikhail Shumilov, a defender of Stalingrad, attacked together with a cavalry-mechanised group. Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front struck from the Dniester bridgehead at the village of Chițcani (Kitskany), south of Bender, with the 37th Army, the 46th Army and General Nikolai Gagen’s 57th Army, with the 7th Mechanised Corps and the 4th Guards Mechanised Corps in reserve, while General Nikolai Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army faced Kishinev. From the sea they were supported by Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky’s Black Sea Fleet and Rear Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s Danube Flotilla, and from the air by the 5th Air Army and the 17th Air Army.

According to the data compiled in the Russian statistical study edited by Grigori Krivosheev, the two fronts together with the fleet numbered about 1.3 million men. Soviet sources also give some 16,000 guns and mortars, about 1,900 tanks and self-propelled guns and about 1,800 aircraft in the two air armies – more than 2,600 including naval aviation. The Soviet superiority in armour and aircraft was thus many times over, and on the breakthrough sectors, where the artillery was concentrated, it was overwhelming.

The plan, and warnings that went unheeded

The Stavka’s plan called for two blows on the flanks, far apart and aimed above all at the sectors held by Romanian troops. The 2nd Ukrainian Front was to break through north-west of Iași, commit its armour to the breach, seize the Prut crossings before the retreating divisions of the Sixth Army could reach them, and then send the 6th Tank Army towards the Siret crossings and the Focșani Gap. The 3rd Ukrainian Front was to break out of the Dniester bridgehead, split the junction between the German Sixth Army and the Romanian Third Army and wheel north-west. The two thrusts were to meet in the area of Huși, Vaslui and Fălciu on the Prut, encircling the forces defending Kishinev. At the same time the enemy was to be persuaded that the main blow would fall on the Kishinev axis – hence feint concentrations and strict concealment of the regrouping.

The deception worked. Until the last hours the German command did not know the exact location of the Soviet assault groupings, and partly read the movements behind the front line as a transfer of forces northwards, to the Vistula and the Baltic states. The Romanians judged the situation more soberly. According to accounts cited in the literature, the Romanian command expected a repeat of Stalingrad: blows against the Romanian armies on the flanks and the encirclement of the German Sixth Army in the middle. Marshal Antonescu, who had spoken to Hitler at his headquarters in East Prussia at the beginning of August, proposed withdrawing to the fortified Carpathians–Focșani–Nămoloasa–Brăila line and then along the Danube. Frießner – who had only just lost his command in the north for requesting a retreat – did not take up the proposal, and German staffs considered the Romanian fears exaggerated.

In the background a political game was being played. The Romanian opposition – the leader of the National Peasants’ Party, Iuliu Maniu, and the Liberal Constantin Brătianu – had been sounding out the possibility of a separate peace with the Allies since 1943, while the Deputy Prime Minister, Mihai Antonescu, was conducting his own talks through neutral countries. In the spring of 1944 the Soviet legation in Stockholm had passed armistice terms to the Romanians. Around the young King Michael I a conspiracy was maturing whose members – courtiers, opposition politicians, communists and some generals – intended to overthrow the marshal and take the country out of the war. When the Soviet offensive began on 20 August, the plan for the coup was already in place.

20 August: the breakthrough

The offensive opened on the morning of 20 August with a massive artillery preparation on both sectors. According to Russian studies, at around 7.40 a.m. the infantry and tanks moved off behind a double rolling barrage – from the bridgehead at Chițcani and from the area west of Iași. Artillery fire and attacks by ground-attack aircraft almost entirely destroyed the first defensive position. German participants recalled that when the shelling stopped, Soviet tanks were already deep inside their positions, and a battalion commander of the 306th Infantry Division described how Soviet aircraft broke up his men as they tried to fall back.

On the 3rd Ukrainian Front’s sector the attack of General Mikhail Sharokhin’s 37th Army hit the junction between the German XXX Corps and the Romanian-German XXIX Corps. By evening the Romanian 4th Mountain Division and 21st Infantry Division had been almost completely destroyed, and the German 306th and 15th Infantry Divisions had suffered heavy losses. The 13th Panzer Division, the Sixth Army’s only significant reserve, counter-attacked that same day and the next, but to no effect. Franz Josef Strauss, who served in its panzer regiment and later became one of West Germany’s leading politicians, recalled that by the third day of the offensive the division had ceased to exist as a tactical unit. Meanwhile Gagen’s 57th Army pinned down the Germans at Bender.

In the north the 27th and 52nd Armies of the 2nd Ukrainian Front broke through the first defensive position on 20 August, and by midday the 27th Army had broken through the second as well. Malinovsky committed the 6th Tank Army to the breach on the first day – rather than, as was usual, after the breakthrough was complete. The German command threw three infantry divisions and one panzer division into counter-attacks but could not close the gap. That day the Romanian 1st Armoured Division fought Soviet tanks at Scobâlțeni near Podu Iloaiei; according to one of its officers, both sides lost several dozen vehicles, and in the evening the division withdrew southwards in good order. Russian studies quote Frießner as saying that “unimaginable chaos” then reigned in the ranks of the German and Romanian forces.

The pocket on the Prut

On 21 August the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front overcame the third defensive position on the Mare ridge and took Iași and Târgu Frumos; the breach was now about 65 kilometres wide and 40 deep. In the south the 3rd Ukrainian Front cut off the German Sixth Army from the Romanian Third Army. That day the Stavka ordered both fronts to close the ring in the Huși area as quickly as possible and to destroy or capture the “Kishinev grouping”. Frießner, convinced after the first day that the battle was lost, ordered a retreat behind the Prut on 21 August without waiting for Hitler’s consent; the high command approved the withdrawal only the following day. By then it was too late – Soviet armoured columns were cutting the main lines of retreat. During the night of 21–22 August units of the 46th Army, supported by the Danube Flotilla, crossed the Dniester estuary and took Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, the former Akkerman.

On 23 August the 18th Tank Corps reached Huși, the 7th Mechanised Corps the Prut crossings at Leușeni, and the 4th Guards Mechanised Corps Leova. On 24 August Berzarin’s 5th Shock Army took Kishinev, which the Germans had abandoned, and the spearheads of the two fronts linked up on the Prut. According to Russian studies, 18 divisions were caught in the ring – four corps of the German Sixth Army (VII, XXX, XXXXIV and LII) and part of the Eighth Army. The Sixth Army headquarters with Fretter-Pico was outside the pocket. The encircled divisions, without supplies or communications, tried to fight their way west across the Prut, where Soviet troops had already seized the crossings or destroyed the bridges. Bombed and strafed from the air, the columns disintegrated; the commanders of several divisions and the commander of XXX Corps, General Georg-Wilhelm Postel, were killed or captured. By 27 August the group encircled east of the Prut had ceased to exist, and by 29 August troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front had wiped out the units that had got across to the western bank. According to German estimates only remnants – some 10,000 men – broke through westwards towards the Carpathians.

For the Germans it was a defeat comparable to Stalingrad. The same Sixth Army that had been destroyed on the Volga in February 1943 and rebuilt that spring had been annihilated in an encirclement for the second time; German literature and veterans’ memoirs speak of a “second Stalingrad”, and many German writers regard the scale of the disaster as comparable to that earlier defeat. After the war German generals – Heinz Guderian among them, in his memoirs – blamed the speed of the collapse on Romanian “treachery”. More recent research, including the work of the British historian Mark Axworthy, shows, however, that until 23 August Romanian troops put up resistance in many places and that their defeat stemmed from a lack of anti-tank weapons, artillery and transport rather than from collusion with the enemy; Soviet reports make no mention of Romanian cooperation before 24 August.

The coup in Bucharest, and the balance sheet

The defeat at the front hastened events in the capital. On 23 August, the fourth day of the offensive, King Michael I summoned Marshal Antonescu to the palace and had him arrested. The new government of General Constantin Sănătescu announced the end of the war with the Allies and the acceptance of their armistice terms, and when the Germans tried to seize Bucharest by force and bombed the city on 24 August, Romania declared war on the Reich on 25 August. Romanian troops behind the front stopped fighting the Red Army and began disarming German garrisons in the interior. The collapse of the German front in Bessarabia and the coup in Bucharest reinforced each other; Soviet historiography presented the coup as a consequence of the offensive, while Romanian historiography stresses that the conspiracy had been prepared in advance and that the offensive merely decided its timing.

Russian studies state that 18 divisions were destroyed in the operation and that 208,600 German and Romanian soldiers were taken prisoner – a figure that also includes Romanians taken after the coup. German estimates speak of around 115,000 German prisoners, many of whom died before they could even be transported into the interior of the USSR. According to Krivosheev’s figures the Red Army lost 13,197 killed and missing and 53,933 wounded and sick – exceptionally light losses for an operation of this scale, although some researchers consider the official Soviet figures to be understated.

Significance in the history of the war

The Jassy–Kishinev offensive, which ended on 29 August, opened the way to the Balkans and the Danube for the Red Army. On 27 August the 6th Tank Army took Focșani, on 28 August Tolbukhin’s troops took Brăila, and on 29 August Constanța was seized from the sea and from the land. On 30 August Soviet units entered Ploiești, which the Romanians had already largely cleared of Germans, and on 31 August Bucharest. On 12 September an armistice was signed in Moscow with Romania, which for the rest of the war fought on the Allied side – in Transylvania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. At the beginning of September the Red Army entered Bulgaria, and in the autumn the German Army Group E had to evacuate Greece in haste. The Reich lost Romanian oil, the Wehrmacht’s most important source of fuel apart from its own synthetic fuel plants, and the entire southern wing of the Eastern Front from the Carpathians to the Black Sea.

For Stalin it was one of the most successful operations of the war – Soviet propaganda counted it among the “ten Stalinist blows” of 1944, and in September Malinovsky and Tolbukhin received their marshal’s batons. Bessarabia and northern Bukovina returned to Soviet rule and remained within the USSR’s borders as the Moldavian SSR and part of the Ukrainian SSR, while Romania, occupied by the Red Army, came under communist rule within a few years. Antonescu, handed over to the Soviets and taken to Moscow, was sentenced on his return by the People’s Tribunal in Bucharest and executed in June 1946.