1941

During the civil war in Russia, Romania, taking advantage of the weakness of the young Soviet country, the civil war and the military intervention of 14 states, occupied a territory that never belonged to Romania and was part of the Russian empire under an agreement between Turkey and Russia even at a time when Romania was not even drawn on the map of the world.     During the entire existence of this territory as part of Romania, the Soviet side never recognized these territories as part of Romania and constantly demanded that stolen land be returned to the Soviet state. Anti-Romanian uprisings and riots such as the Tatarbunar uprising (rum., Mold. Răscoala de la Tatarbunar, Ukr. Tatarbunarske rebel) in 1924, when the fire of the anti-Romanian uprising swept across the whole south of Bessarabia, constantly flared up on this territory.   And only when the beginning "smelled of fried ass" Romanians without military action returned these lands to the USSR.  Some fa...

by Luka Bilić Soviet air raids on Romanian oil industry One of Germany's maim weaknesses was its precarious oil supply situation. National consumption was squeezed to bare minimum (military and civilian) with adverse consequences on economy and military mobility. Bottlenecks such as ersatz rubber(also made out of oil) were implacable and precluded sustainable large mobile operations, also operationally from very start German and Italian surface fleets were virtually immobilized for the lack of fuel and from 1942 even Luftwaffe had to make operational sacrifices due to oil shortage. Romania in 1941 subserviently provided around 60 000 barrels per day to Germany(84% of own production!), or some 35% of total German military and civilian needs. During Summer of 1941 while Wehrmacht reigned supreme on the eastern front (because of surprise and concentration of forces, better army, vicinity of supply basses and so on) fight was pretty much one sided and except for exceptional Re...

  From the very first hours of World War II, the difference in the combat effectiveness of the Germans and their Romanian allies became apparent to Soviet soldiers. In the terrible first days of the war, when dozens of divisions of the Red Army were killed in German  "cauldrons" on the Soviet-German front, border guards, sailors of the Danube flotilla and army units not only kept the state border on the Soviet-Romanian front, but also landed troops on enemy territory. Vissarion Grigoriev, in the summer of 1941, the chief of staff of the Danube Flotilla, recalled:"The results of the first day of hostilities were summed up. The combined efforts of the army units and flotilla reflected six enemy attempts to cross the Danube in the Kartal, Razdelny area, three at Kiliya Novaya, two at Vilkov, four attempts to ford the Prut crossing near Reni. separate groups of Romanian soldiers were caught in the floodplains. Aggressor suffered considerable losses on the Danube, in ...