Despite a strategically vulnerable position, an ill-prepared army,
and questionable promises of military support from the Allied
Powers, Romania intervened in World War I in August 1916. In
return, it received the Allies' formal sanction for the annexation
of the Romanian-inhabited regions of Austria-Hungary. As Glenn
Torrey reveals in his pathbreaking study, this soon appeared to
have been an impulsive and risky decision for both parties.
Torrey details how, by the end of 1916, the armies of the
Central Powers, led by German generals Falkenhayn and Mackensen,
had administered a crushing defeat and occupied two-thirds of
Romanian territory, but at the cost of diverting substantial
military forces they needed on other fronts. The Allies, especially
the Russians, were forced to do likewise in order to prevent
Romania from collapsing completely.
Torrey presents the most authoritative account yet of the heavy
fighting during the 1916 campaign and of the renewed attempt by
Austro-German forces, including the elite Alpine Corps, to subdue
the Romanian Army in the summer of 1917. This latter campaign,
highlighted here but ignored in non-Romanian accounts, witnessed
reorganized and rearmed Romanian soldiers, with help from a
disintegrating Russian Army, administer a stunning defeat of their
enemies. However, as Torrey also shows, amidst the chaos of the
Russian Revolution the Central Powers forced Romania to sign a
separate peace early in 1918. Ultimately, this allowed the Romanian
Army to reenter the war and occupy the majority of the territory
promised in 1916.
Torrey's unparalleled familiarity with archival and secondary
sources and his long experience with the subject give authority and
balance to his account of the military, strategic, diplomatic, and
political events on both sides of the battlefront. In addition, his
use of personal memoirs provides vivid insights into the human side
of the war. Major military leaders in the Second World War,
especially Ion Antonescu and Erwin Rommel, made their careers
during the First World War and play a prominent role in his
book.
Torrey's study fosters a genuinely new appreciation and
understanding of a long-neglected aspect of World War I that
influenced not only the war itself but the peace settlement that
followed and, in fact, continues today.
General
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