Traian Moșoiu

Traian Moșoiu was a Transylvanian Romanian who began his career as an officer of the Austro-Hungarian army and ended it as a general of the Romanian army that occupied Transylvania. In 1918–1919 he was, as Romanian historians put it, Bucharest’s “spearhead” in the struggle for the region: his division was one of the first to cross the Carpathians in November 1918; in December he took command of all Romanian forces in Transylvania; in April 1919 his Northern Group took Oradea and reached the Tisza; and in July his manoeuvre group broke the Hungarian offensive across that river. In August 1919 Romanian troops marched past him through the streets of Budapest, and he himself became military governor of occupied Hungary. For Romanians he is one of the heroes of unification, and streets in many Transylvanian towns bear his name. For Hungarians he was the commander of the army that occupied their capital and stripped the country bare, and the Hungarian–Romanian War in which he commanded poisoned relations between the two states for twenty years.

A Romanian in the Hungarian army

He was born on 2 July 1868 in the village of Tohanu Nou (Hungarian: Újtohán), today part of the town of Zărnești near Brașov, in south-eastern Transylvania, which then belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary within the Habsburg monarchy. His father, Moise, was a shepherd and later the village headman. Traian attended the Romanian Andrei Șaguna Gymnasium in Brașov, where besides Romanian he mastered German, French and Hungarian. He then studied at military schools in Budapest and at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, from which he graduated on 1 June 1889 as a second lieutenant of the Austro-Hungarian army. He served in the garrison at Sibiu.

The Romanians of Transylvania, although they made up the majority of its inhabitants, were second-class citizens in the Hungarian state at the time, and their national movement demanded equal rights. In 1891 Moșoiu abandoned the Austro-Hungarian army and crossed the Carpathians into the Kingdom of Romania. His biographers describe the circumstances of this decision in different ways. According to some, he came into conflict with fellow officers when he stood up for the rights of Romanians, was arrested, escaped with his father’s help and made his way across the Bucegi Mountains to Sinaia, where he reported to the Romanian authorities and asked to be admitted to the army. Others write simply that, like many young Transylvanians of his generation, he wanted to serve the Romanian cause. His brother Aurelian took the same road and settled in Ploiești as a Latin teacher.

In the Romanian army

In April 1893 Moșoiu became a second lieutenant of the Romanian army in the 9th Infantry Regiment at Râmnicu Vâlcea. He was promoted regularly: to lieutenant in 1894, captain in 1900 and major in 1909. He commanded companies and battalions in various infantry and rifle regiments, and in 1909–1910 he published two works on the training and “offensive spirit” of the infantry. In 1897 he married a French teacher, Maria Furtunescu, with whom he had two children. In 1913 he took part in the expedition into Bulgaria during the Second Balkan War, and on 1 October that year, as a lieutenant colonel, he took command of the regiment at Câmpulung. In April 1916 he became a colonel.

The First World War

When Romania entered the war against Austria-Hungary in August 1916 in order to win Transylvania, Moșoiu commanded the 2nd Infantry Regiment from Vâlcea and a group of troops in the valleys of the Olt and the Lotru. His units advanced into Transylvania towards Sibiu, his home region. The campaign, however, ended in defeat. In September and October, when the German Ninth Army of General Erich von Falkenhayn drove the Romanians out of Transylvania, Moșoiu’s 3rd Infantry Brigade, and then the 23rd Division, which he took over in October, defended the Olt gorge through the Carpathians. He later called that fighting “the Thermopylae of the Romanian nation”. For a counter-attack he led in person and for the defence of the mountains he received the Order of Michael the Brave, 3rd class, Romania’s highest military decoration.

In January 1917 he became a brigadier general and commander of the 12th Infantry Division, with which he fought in Moldavia in the summer of 1917, in the battles in which the Romanian army halted the German offensive. After the October Revolution and the disintegration of the Russian army, Romania was forced to conclude a separate peace with the Central Powers. Moșoiu then took command of the 7th Infantry Division at Roman, in Moldavia.

The march into Transylvania

On 10 November 1918 Romania re-entered the war, and King Ferdinand I ordered the army to cross the Carpathians. The Habsburg monarchy was collapsing, and Hungary, after the Aster Revolution, was disbanding its army. Moșoiu’s 7th Division and the 1st Rifle Division were the first large units to move from Moldavia into Transylvania. Sources differ on exactly when they crossed the old frontier. The Hungarian–Romanian War is usually dated from 13 November 1918, but according to Romanian accounts the main body of Moșoiu’s division crossed the mountains only at the end of November, through the Prisăcani valley, towards Borsec, Toplița and Reghin on the Mureș. Resistance was negligible. On 1 December, at Alba Iulia, an assembly of Transylvanian Romanians proclaimed union with Romania, and in December the Romanian troops reached the Mureș and then, with the consent of the Allied command, pushed further west.

In December 1918 the King entrusted Moșoiu with command of all Romanian forces in Transylvania, with headquarters in Sibiu. Romanian sources state that the command began to operate on 11 December by the Julian calendar, that is, on 24 December, the day the Romanians entered Cluj. Moșoiu worked with the Ruling Council in Sibiu, the government of the Transylvanian Romanians, headed by Iuliu Maniu. By January 1919 the Romanian army controlled most of Transylvania up to the demarcation line in the Apuseni Mountains, beyond which stood the Hungarian Székely Division. In March 1919 Moșoiu was appointed military governor of Transylvania.

The Northern Group: Oradea and the Tisza

On 21 March 1919 Béla Kun’s communists seized power in Budapest. In April General Gheorghe Mărdărescu took overall command of the Romanian forces in Transylvania, and Moșoiu was placed at the head of the stronger of its two groups, the Northern Group. Under the plan it was this group that would decide the outcome: it was to take Carei and Oradea and cut the Székely Division off from the rest of the Hungarian forces. The offensive began on 16 April, after a failed Hungarian night attack. After heavy fighting Moșoiu’s units took the passes of the Apuseni Mountains and occupied Șimleu Silvaniei and Beiuș; on 19 April the general was at Aleșd (Hungarian: Élesd), and on 20 April, together with General Ștefan Holban, he entered Oradea (Hungarian: Nagyvárad) and took over its administration. Oradea, a mostly Hungarian city, passed into Romanian hands, and it still commemorates that day as the beginning of Romanian administration. In 2019, on the centenary of the entry, the city museum opened a permanent exhibition devoted to Moșoiu. His troops then occupied Salonta, Carei and Satu Mare and reached the Tisza, which by 1 May the Romanians held along the whole length of the front.

After this victory Moșoiu became military governor of the area between the old Romanian border and the Tisza, and another general took over the Northern Group. His 7th Division was transferred to northern Moldavia, to the border with Russia, which was in the grip of civil war.

On the Tisza and in Budapest

In July 1919, as the Hungarian Red Army prepared to strike across the Tisza, Moșoiu commanded a manoeuvre group (“General Moșoiu’s manoeuvre group”), a strong Romanian reserve that was to deliver the counter-stroke. On 20 July the Hungarians crossed the river and from Szolnok drove deep into the eastern bank. Moșoiu’s group halted their advance and on 24 July struck the flank of the Hungarian wedge from the Kunhegyes area. By 26 July the Hungarians had been pushed back across the Tisza. On the night of 29/30 July the Romanians themselves crossed the river and set off for Budapest. On 1 August Kun’s government resigned.

On the evening of 3 August several squadrons of Romanian cavalry rode into Budapest, and on 4 August the main body arrived. According to most accounts it marched through the city centre past General Moșoiu, although Romanian accounts also state that the parade on Andrássy Avenue was taken by the overall commander, General Mărdărescu. Moșoiu became commandant of the Romanian garrison in Budapest and military governor of the Hungarian lands west of the Tisza. The occupation, during which the Romanians requisitioned rolling stock, machinery, grain and cattle and hunted down communists, lasted until November. Hungarians remembered it as plunder; Romanians as just compensation for the occupation of their own country in 1916–1918 and as the defence of Europe against Bolshevism.

Politician

In December 1919, at his own request, Moșoiu passed into the reserve with the rank of major general and joined the National Liberal Party of Ion I. C. Brătianu. At the beginning of March 1920 he was for a dozen or so days Minister of War in the government of the Transylvanian politician Alexandru Vaida-Voevod. He entered the Senate. In Brătianu’s government, which held office from 1922 to 1926, he was first Minister of Communications (from January 1922 to October 1923) and then Minister of Industry and Trade (until March 1926; English-language accounts give the Ministry of Public Works for this period). As Minister of Communications he headed the commission that organised the coronation of Ferdinand I and Queen Marie as sovereigns of united Romania in the newly built cathedral at Alba Iulia on 15 October 1922. He supported the autonomy of the Romanian State Railways. His war memoirs were published in Cluj in 1987.

He died in Bucharest on 15 August 1932 and was buried in Bellu Cemetery.

Memory and significance

In Romania Moșoiu belongs to the pantheon of the founders of Greater Romania. There are streets named after him in Oradea, Cluj, Arad, Brașov and Târgu Mureș, among other places; a bust of him has stood in Oradea since 1992, and in 2007, on the 75th anniversary of his death, a monument to him was unveiled in Bran (PL) in the presence of the President of Romania. The railway station at Zărnești bears his name. In Hungary he is remembered above all as the general before whom foreign troops paraded in Budapest in August 1919.

His life shows clearly why the dispute over Transylvania was so bitter. Moșoiu was a son of that land, educated in the schools of the Habsburg monarchy, who out of a sense of national grievance crossed to the other side of the mountains and came back with an army. The border that his soldiers pushed westwards in 1918–1919 was confirmed in 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon. Hungary never accepted it, and its revisionism drove it towards Italy and Germany. In 1940, eight years after Moșoiu’s death, the Second Vienna Award gave northern Transylvania, with Cluj and Oradea, to Hungary, and Romania, seeking to recover it, went to war at Hitler’s side under the leadership of one of the former staff officers of 1919, Ion Antonescu.