August 12th, 1943
HQ of the Romanian Army (Bucharest) - With a hand gesture, the Conducator rejects the proposal of King Michael, who "kindly" offered to make a tour of the front to raise the morale of the troops. Antonescu - who is not fooled by the ulterior motives of this offer, nor of the remarks that the sovereign could hold in front of the soldiers - prefers to send the sovereign in his palace, while perspicturing with the intention of his close relations: "He will be safer there, he who has never seen the front!
In fact, the marshal is more and more openly annoyed by the links that Michel tries to develop with the royal army, in particular through the intermediary of his accomplice Sanatescu - today at the head of the 4th AC, or what remains of it. "Sanatescu, the king of runaways! He has gloriously evacuated Sarata, offering our entire right flank to the Reds!" he says with bitterness.
As soon as Antonescu said these words, he twisted in his armchair, again victim of one of those attacks of gastric pain that assail him more and more often. The Conducator is not in very good health: not only his mental state staggers under the disasters, but he also suffers from multiple food intolerances (perhaps due to a stomach ulcer), and even - according to rumor - from syphilis contracted in his youth. He did try to cure himself by having his meals prepared by an Austrian dietician, Frau Marlene von Exner... but she recently left his service, to join that of Chancellor Hitler! Quite a symbol...
Antonescu will not be able to play a big role in the Romanian political life during the months that will follow. This leaves the field open to whoever dares to take his place.
.........
"Molot was a real... Moloch devouring the troops of General Antonescu. A predictable disaster that only the elements delayed. For, more than the Panzers that List finally sent to the rescue, it was the rain and the waters of the Dniester that prevented the complete destruction of Dumitrescu's 3rd Army, as well as a good part of Reinhardt's 11. Armee.
However, the latter had not slowed down the Soviets alone. Notwithstanding the accounts complacently taken up by the memoirs of the Nazi marshals, the Romanians had fought bravely, just as much as their partners - if not more, given their weak means. For the Soviets, Molot was to be a simple crossing of the Dniester followed by a walk on the plain. The courage of the Romanians meant that the operation finally required a determined, relentless effort, which was to prove fruitful only at great cost.
The German slander went beyond the strict framework of the operations in Romania, and is still used today to justify many errors. Thus, some historians or supposedly maintain with obstinacy that the collapse of the right wing of HG Süd-Ukraine triggered the dispatch to this front of reserves that could have been decisive for Zitadelle - and that the Romanian "rout" alone led to the failure of this operation. This thesis is not new: in his book Panzer!, Guderian himself refers at length to a Romanian incompetence bordering on cowardice, even treason. As is often the case, hiscomments leave the purely military field - and still... - do not stand up to analysis.
The truth is in the facts. And these are stubborn: the Romanian divisions have held on alone for three days south of Tiraspol, and until August 5th in the Chișinău region - that is, eleven days after the start of the Soviet offensive! All this with young, poorly trained, deprived of real air support, which had very few modern anti-tank weapons, even less flak and sometimes even lacked artillery!
The courageous counter-attack of the Guards Division at Hagimus must also be recalled: a local success, very temporary and without any future, but which undoubtedly allowed the defenders of Bender to escape from the encirclement. However, who was to tell, after the war, the gesture of Radu Gherghe's crews? Certainly not the government installed in Bucharest...
More than the alleged "atavistic incompetence" of the Romanians, a typical criticism of the collapse of the right flank of the 3rd Army was probably due to the inability of its infantry divisions to maintain their cohesion under the mechanized blows of the Soviets, once their front was broken through. This was logical: in August 1943, almost the entire Romanian army was still horse-drawn. By ordering the retreat, Sanatescu simply saved his men from certain destruction. This assertion seems to be reinforced by the great cohesion of the few Romanian motorized units - including the Guards armored division - which managed to get out of the worst situations without excessive damage.
The latter were not going to be of much help... The Romanians had since May 17th, 1942 suffered very heavy losses - perhaps even more severe, in proportion, than those of the Wehrmacht. In July 1943, the 3rd Army still had twelve divisions (of which one was the amalgam of the remains of two others), to which should be added four divisions, then in the process of being recompleted and re-equipped in Romania, the fortress units on the Danube, as well as various elements in charge of guarding the coasts against a possible amphibious operation. This total remained impressive for an outside observer.
However, it could not erase a reality that was far more sinister: after fourteen months of often very intense operations, during which the Romanians had often had the impression of being considered as cannon fodder by their German allies, ten divisions had disappeared from their initial order of battle, either because they had been annihilated or that they had been so depleted in the course of the fighting that the survivors had to be repatriated.
Their reconstitution was of course envisaged to defend the mother country, with conscripts trained by the survivors or what remained of the men of the reserve and border guard divisions - but the question of their armament also arose. In fact, Romanian industry was showing serious signs of exhaustion, Germany's "generosity" was reaching its limits, while the equipment captured in France or the USSR, or even that taken from the Italians was not inexhaustible! Moreover, from August onwards, the new recruits and the re-enlisted soldiers had to be devoted in priority to the re-completion of the divisions martyred by opposing operation Molot, which condemned any revival of the destroyed Romanian divisions. Fifteen months of uninterrupted fighting had well and truly exhausted the Romanian army.
On the other side of the bench, the spectacular success of Petrov should not make us forget the colossal efforts made by Tolbukhin - which were obviously not in vain, if only by preventing the Heer from moving south to the aid of the Romanians. It is easy to analyze the tactical history of the failures of the July 1943 offensive, and even easier to castrate pawns on a map between Yampil, Camenca, Rîbnița and Dubăsari - at the time, the Soviet general had to juggle with deficient means of crossing, leaders demanding quick results, and stubborn Germans defending their entrenchments with a fierceness worthy of the trenches of the Other War. No more than to the Romanians, we will not throw the stone to the 4th Ukrainian Front... The water of the Dniester unfortunately kept them a taste of ashes for a long time.
Having said this, we still have to assess Molot's achievements. For the USSR, it was 210 000 dead and as many wounded. For Germany, only 39,000 dead and wounded, and only 5,000 prisoners - thanks in particular to the unexpected withdrawal of General von Sponeck. Finally, for the Romanians, the butcher's note reached formidable proportions: 85,000 victims and 25,000 prisoners - with, in addition, the loss of a historically Romanian region that would later be divided between two socialist republics (Moldavian and Ukrainian). A devastated region, emptied of its inhabitants... Obviously, this could have been enough to provoke the fall of Antonescu - thus representing, in a way, a kind of evil for a good. However, the prolonged presence of the "Sommergarten" force on the Romanian border, but also and above all the tragic Bulgarian example of September 1943, forced the forces hostile to the Conducator to a form of prudence which was to last until the winter.
Especially since Romania was not likely to be helped by its neighbors! Bulgaria, reluctant partner of the Reich, was delighted with the Romanian rout and saw in it the justification for its refusal to declare war on the USSR. It is possible that the events of the month of August, even more so than the ascent of General Montgomery through Greece, may have precipitated the decision of the regent Kyril of Preslav and the sad events that followed. As for Hungary, always more ambivalent and prisoner of its contradictions, already saw herself as the only partner who could speak as an equal with the Reich...
Had it not already recovered, under Berlin's arbitration, considerable territories unjustly attributed to Bucharest? In Budapest, some pro-German nerves of the Horthy regime affirmed that the Magyars remained "the only true friends of the Reich," notwithstanding their mixed performance in the field. Finally, as is only fair, the Slovaks did not count for much - their status still seemed to be inferior to that of Romania, hardly that of a client state of the Reich like Croatia or Mussolini's Italian Social Republic...
Thus deeply destabilized, Bucharest held however in vain until the end of the year, its army serving however henceforth only as auxiliary in the Roman mode - that is to say, second rank troops placed in the interlines. A question still remains, however, the only one worth asking: launched a week later and thus benefiting from better weather, would the Soviet Hammer have taken everything away? Impossible to say - but in any case, and independently of the risk of an anticipated intervention of the German reserves, it seems quite certain that fewer frontovikis would have remained at the bottom of the Dniester..." (Dennis Deletan, Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940-1944, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
.........
.........
Somewhere - A voice in the depths of a dark sanctuary, where only a few braziers light up under statues from another age. "Already finished? Yet this Pleistoros had promised me better! Disappointing, like all the Dacians - I would have thought them much more expert in the matter."
A breath of spite crosses the sleeping corridors. A shadow dances on the columns of the temple, watched over by granite crocodiles and obsidian lions, impassive under the centuries. "Very well. I'll have to take care of it myself. There must be something interesting going on further south..."
A roaring laughter bursts out, invades the temple and reverberates through space and time...
