Gheorghe Mărdărescu

Gheorghe D. Mărdărescu was a Romanian general who spent most of his career in the shadow of others: in the First World War as chief of staff to General Alexandru Averescu, and in 1918–1919 alongside the Chief of the General Staff, Constantin Prezan, and the popular General Traian Moșoiu. In the spring and summer of 1919, however, it was he who commanded the whole of the Romanian forces on the Hungarian front, in a campaign that shattered the army of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and ended with the occupation of Budapest. Victory in the Hungarian–Romanian War secured Transylvania for Romania – and with it Hungary’s hostility for the whole of the interwar period. Later, as Minister of War in 1922–1926, he was responsible for the army of “Greater Romania”. Sources on his life are scarce and come mainly from Romania, while the most detailed accounts of his role in the occupation of Hungary are the critical reports of Allied officers.

Pre-war career

He was born on 4 August 1866 in Iași, then the capital of Moldavia. It is not known whether this date, given by Romanian sources, is reckoned according to the Julian calendar then in use in Romania or has already been converted to the Gregorian. He graduated from the infantry and cavalry officers’ school in Bucharest (in 1888, according to most sources) with the rank of second lieutenant, and in 1892–1894 he studied at the Higher War School. He also took further training courses in Germany, among other places at Spandau near Berlin.

He was above all a training and staff officer. In 1906, already a major, he became the first commandant of the newly created Infantry Musketry School, and he also taught at officers’ schools. In 1910 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and in 1913 to colonel, becoming chief of staff of I Army Corps; in 1915 he headed the cavalry officers’ school. On 10 May 1916, three months before Romania entered the war, he was made a brigadier general.

The First World War

In August 1916 he took command of the 18th Infantry Brigade, but he soon moved to staff work. He was chief of staff of the 3rd Army and, from September 1916, of the 2nd Army, both commanded by Averescu. He took part in planning operations in the Dobruja and then in the defence of the Predeal Pass in the Carpathians, when German and Austro-Hungarian forces were breaking into Wallachia in the autumn of 1916. In the summer of 1917 the 2nd Army broke through the front at Mărăști, and in August it repulsed a German and Austro-Hungarian offensive at Oituz. These battles, together with Mărășești, rank among the Romanian army’s greatest victories of the war, and Romanian biographers credit Mărdărescu with an important part in them as chief of staff. English-language studies also state that at this time he commanded a group of forces; sources describe the exact sequence of his posts in 1916–1917 in different ways. In February 1918, when Romania was forced to make a separate peace with the Central Powers, he was promoted to major general and became technical inspector of the infantry.

Commander on the Hungarian front (1919)

In the autumn of 1918 the Romanian army occupied Transylvania, and General Moșoiu took command of the troops there, at Sibiu. When on 21 March 1919 Béla Kun’s communists seized power in Budapest and the peace conference proved unable to force Hungary to withdraw behind the new demarcation line, Bucharest decided to settle the matter by force. On 11 or 12 April 1919 (sources give both dates) Mărdărescu was appointed commander of all Romanian forces in Transylvania. He held this post until December 1919.

According to published studies he had at his disposal 64 infantry battalions, 28 cavalry squadrons and 160 guns. He divided them into two groups: Moșoiu’s stronger Northern Group, which was to take Carei and Oradea and cut off the Hungarian Székely Division, and the Southern Group. He set the objective of the offensive not at the line drawn by the Allies but at the Tisza, a river that was easy to defend. On the night of 15–16 April the Hungarians struck first, and on 16 April the Romanian offensive began. In four days the Romanians crossed the Western Romanian Mountains; they took Oradea on 20 April and Debrecen on 23 April, and by 1 May they held the entire eastern bank of the Tisza. The Székely Division laid down its arms. Under Allied pressure Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu promised that the army would not cross the river.

In July 1919 Kun staked everything on an offensive across the Tisza. According to many studies the Romanian command knew its plan, and Mărdărescu prepared a defence in depth: a weak line along the river and strong reserves, including Moșoiu’s manoeuvre group, ready to counter-attack. The Hungarians crossed the river on 20 July and drove several dozen kilometres forward from Szolnok, but on 24 July the Romanians struck their flank and by 26 July had thrown them back across the Tisza. On the night of 29–30 July Mărdărescu’s troops crossed the river themselves, and on 1 August Kun’s government fell.

On the evening of 3 August a cavalry detachment under Gheorghe Rusescu rode into Budapest. According to Romanian authors it did so without orders, and Mărdărescu, displeased that someone had robbed him of the glory of taking the capital, had him disciplined. Romanian tradition adopted 4 August, the date Mărdărescu himself gave, as the date of the capture of Budapest. The next day the main forces arrived. According to Romanian sources Mărdărescu took the parade of the 1st Chasseur Division on Andrássy Avenue; according to Hungarian and most other accounts the troops marched past General Moșoiu, who had been appointed military governor of the city. For this campaign King Ferdinand I awarded Mărdărescu the Order of Michael the Brave (sources differ as to the class).

The occupation and the dispute with the Allied mission

As commander of the occupying forces, Mărdărescu had to deal with the Inter-Allied Military Mission, which the Supreme Council of the peace conference had sent to Budapest to supervise the disarmament of Hungary and the withdrawal of the Romanians. He received its first instructions on 16 August. Cooperation was bad from the outset. The government in Bucharest held that it was entitled to compensation from Hungary for the plunder of the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation of Romania in 1916–1918, and it requisitioned weapons, rolling stock, factory machinery, grain and cattle. The American member of the mission, General Harry Hill Bandholtz, described trainloads of loot being taken away in his diary, and on 5 October he personally sealed the doors of the National Museum to prevent its collections from being removed. The Romanians replied that they were removing state property owed to them as reparations, keeping order and protecting Hungary from a return of communism. The dispute contributed to Romania’s poor reputation in Paris. In November 1919 the Romanian army left Budapest, and in the spring of 1920 it withdrew behind the line that the Treaty of Trianon was to confirm.

In 1921 (or 1922, according to other data) Mărdărescu published a book on the campaign, The Campaign for the Liberation of Transylvania and the Occupation of Budapest (1918–1920), in which he set out the Romanian point of view. It was reissued in Bucharest in 2009.

Minister of War

In the spring of 1922, after Brătianu’s Liberals returned to power, Mărdărescu became Minister of War and held the office until the end of March 1926. Romanian and English sources differ on the date of his appointment (25 March or 20 April 1922). This was the period in which Romania was building its position as a guardian of the post-Versailles order: in alliance with Poland (from 1921), with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the Little Entente, which was directed against Hungarian revisionism, and with the backing of France. The army had to guard long borders with Hungary, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, which did not recognise the incorporation of Bessarabia. During his term of office, in September 1924, the army suppressed the Bolshevik-inspired Tatarbunary uprising in southern Bessarabia. In 1927 he was promoted to corps general (general de corp de armată).

He died on 5 September 1938 at the spa of Bad Nauheim in Germany, a few weeks before the Munich Agreement, which set in motion the collapse of the order his army had stood to defend.

Memory and significance

In Romania Mărdărescu is remembered as the victor of the 1919 campaign and one of the architects of national unification. There are streets named after him in Sibiu and Oradea, and in August 2019, on the centenary of the capture of Budapest, a monument to him was unveiled on the grounds of Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, in the presence of representatives of the government and the university. In Hungary his name is associated with the occupation of the country and with requisitions remembered as plunder.

The campaign he commanded in practice settled the fate of Transylvania, Crișana and the eastern Banat before the Treaty of Trianon confirmed it. At the same time Hungary’s humiliation, the occupation of its capital and the loss of its lands became one of the sources of Hungarian revisionism, which in the 1930s pushed Budapest towards Italy and Germany. In 1940, two years after Mărdărescu’s death, the Second Vienna Award gave Hungary northern Transylvania with Cluj and Oradea, and Romania, under Ion Antonescu – who in 1919 had served on Prezan’s staff – went to war at Adolf Hitler’s side.