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In contrast to the trench-war deadlock on the Western Front, combat in Romania and Transylvania in 1916 foreshadowed the lightning warfare of WWII. When Romania joined the Allies and invaded Transylvania without warning, the Germans responded by unleashing a campaign of bold, rapid infantry movements, with cavalry providing cover or pursuing the crushed foe. Hitting where least expected and advancing before the Romanians could react—even bombing their capital from a Zeppelin soon after war was declared—the Germans and Austrians poured over the formidable Transylvanian Alps onto the plains of Walachia, rolling up the Romanian army from west to east, and driving the shattered remnants into Russia. Prelude to Blitzkrieg tells the story of this largely ignored campaign to determine why it did not devolve into the mud and misery of trench warfare, so ubiquitous elsewhere.
- Sales Rank: #1010684 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-10-23
- Released on: 2013-10-23
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Michael Barrett’s Prelude to Blitzkrieg is an important addition to First World War studies. Well researched and well written, Prelude to Blitzkrieg not only elucidates a thus far obscure First World War campaign, it also indicates the direction of tactics to come in the Second World War. Barrett effectively belies the traditional assumption that the First World War was slow and static and demonstrates that at least in the 1916 Romanian campaign it was a struggle of maneuver and speed. Utilizing sources from both sides of the conflict, Barrett skillfully covers the three main aspects of the Romanian campaign of 1916. These include the Romanian invasion of Transylvania, the Bulgarian-German-Ottoman invasion of Dobrogea, and the Austro-German invasion of Romania." ―Richard C. Hall, author of Balkan Breakthrough: The Battle of Dobro Pole 1918
"This is a well-researched book that very carefully explores the factors shaping command decisions and the consequences of those decisions on the battlefield." ―Austrian History Yearbook
"Barrett's well-written and clearly argued book is traditional military history at its best. Aided by superb maps and consistent geographic terms, a reader will enjoy Barrett's analysis of the campaign and gain a fuller understanding of the swirling events on the Eastern Front." ―Robert A. Doughty, author of Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War
"Historians have given the Romanian front of World War I little attention. Michael Barrett works to correct this gap, comprehensively describing Romania’s 1916 invasion of Hungary and the reaction of the Central Powers." ―German Studies Review
"Michael Barrett’s Prelude to Blitzkrieg presents detailed descriptions of the various battles during the Romanian campaigns in the First World War. It is a well-written, thoroughly researched contribution to WWI historiography. His portrayal of the interactions of all the participants is particularly interesting. A highly recommended read for military historians in general, WWI aficionados and those interested in the Eastern and Balkan fronts." ―Graydon A. Tunstall, author of Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915
"Barnett's book is a valuable addition to the field. He writes well and with authority. He has been able to illuminate a little-known corner of the First World War and provide a state-of-the-art operational history combining detailed narrative with prescient analysis. It should be seen as a model for further research and one can only hope that it encourages other scholars to examine similar campaigns, particularly on the other lesser-known battlefields of the war in Russia, Poland, Turkey, and Armenia." ―American Historical Review
"[Barrett's] treatment of the Central Powers is extensive, and his research in this regard can only be described as exhaustive. This work will stand as the definitive study of the Central Powers part of the campaign for some time to come." ―Journal of Military History
About the Author
Michael B. Barrett was Professor of History at The Citadel for over thirty-five years, and is Brigadier General (ret.), U.S. Army Reserve. He is author of Operation Albion: The German Conquest of the Baltic Islands (IUP, 2008).
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Well, The Title is Great!
By Stanley
With the coming of the one hundred year anniversay of the start of the Great War there are several new books on the market covering both the causes of the war and its battles, especially away from the Western Front. A good example is Edward Paice's World War I: The African Front. Paice goes into detail of the actions of the Germans and their adversaries but the reader still has a grasp of the overall situation and some idea of where everything is. That's not true with Barrett and his Prelude to Blitzkrieg.
Here's an example: "The crisis in the Calimani mountains caused by the Romanian advance to Lunca Bradukiu (Palota) in the Mures Valley saw the unit reembark the following day for Prunda Bargalui, where it came under the temporary control of the 73rd Hunved Brigad, 1st Army Corps, of the adjacent 7th Army." Huh? Now Barrett does explain that over the last hundred years many names have changed as borders are adjusted in favor of victors. But still the eight or nine small maps in the book do little to help the general reader (me) in following the events of the Romanian Front.
There's no doubt that the book is well researched, the same holds true for Paice's African Front offering, but for any reader who is not intimately familiar with East European place names the book becomes incomprehensible. Sorry, maybe I'm showing my own ignorance. Still, in my opinion, the book is not for the general audience. A part of the book I did enjoy regarded General Falkenhayn and his demotion to the Romanian Front after he argued that an offensive war on the Western Front was impossible. In Romania he worked diligently to save his reputation, that's a good story in itself.
One final note. The book is expensive with a $45.00 retail price. That being noted, I was surprised at the very inexpensive binding that Indiana University Press used in publishing it. Again just a small, final note.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Book Review Prelude to Blitzkrieg: the 1916 Austro-German Campaign in Romania By Prof. Michael B. Barrett
By Bryan Fugate
This book by Michael Barrett, Professor of History at the Citadel, is a joy to behold from the standpoint of its solid research and scholarship and its meticulous attention to historical accuracy and detail. This observation is especially true when seen from the viewpoint of a military historian. For a casual reader whose interest in military operations does not run to detail and the interest and ability to study and interpret maps this book would be rather daunting. For the serious-minded student of military history, however, this book is a true gem and can be said to be the “definitive history” of the Romanian campaign in 1916.
For most military historians reading histories of World War I have largely been devoted to the colossal and earth-shaking battles of the Western Front: The Marne, Ypres, Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele to single out the most well-researched. But to the Western reader the battles of Tannenberg and Brusilov’s Galician offensive may be known to some but certainly not by most. What happened in the Transylvanian and Carpathian Mountains and on the plains of Hungary and Wallachia in 1916 would fit into this category even more.
But it would be a huge mistake to ignore the conflict on the Eastern Front for events there had a direct bearing on the larger war in the West. What happened there profoundly affected world history in a permanent and profound way. Russia’s war gave way to defeat, revolution and collapse followed by the rise of the Soviet Empire and all that entailed. Lesser known is what happened to bring about the fall and dissolution of the amalgam of people, cultures and land fiefdoms known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The collapse of Austria-Hungary had a rippling affect that is still with us today in places like Serbia, Kosovo, and the patchwork of peoples in Poland, Serbia, Romania, Moldava, and Ukraine. Stalin’s post-World War II attempt to unify some of these lands again as Yugoslavia under Marshal Tito was also doomed to failure.
Although the roots of the political and social calamity that befell Eastern and Southern Europe after World War I are not the subject of the book at hand, they are laid bare by a study of the 1916 campaign which knocked Romania out of the war and hastened the political changes in Russia which led to the fall of the Romanovs and the triumph of the Communists under Lenin.
But what is really laid bare for the first time is how the concept of Blitzkrieg warfare evolved from set-piece, grinding men and material battles on the Western Front into free-flowing battles of flanking maneuvers and pursuit as carried out by the Central Powers in the East. In the West the war was characterized by enormous losses with gains measured in a few kilometers one way or the other. In the East the tableau was far more open, no trenches, no massive hours-long artillery barrages or coils of barbed wire that stretched from the Alps to the North Sea. We are introduced to the architects of this new kind of warfare: Mackensen, Falkenhayn, Hindenburg and Ludendorff. But, above all, it was Falkenhayn’s grasp of the need to win total victory and how to achieve it. Admittedly much of drive came from his desire to salvage his reputation, but regardless of his motivation, his fixation on a rapid campaign paid off. He accomplished his goal by relentless, unstopping pursuit coupled with a calculated willingness to advance with exposed flanks. His reliance on a mobile, combined-arms strategy not only won the day and the prize of the Romanian capital, Bucharest, albeit taken by Mackensen, no stranger to campaigns of movement. The brilliant invasion and quick defeat of Romania laid the predicate for what happened some two-and-a-half decades later in the German burst through the Ardennes which led to the stunning fall of France by Hitler’s panzer divisions, air power and mobile artillery and infantry.
Barrett gives much and deserved credit to Hans von Seeckt who fulfilled the role of Clausewitz and became the keen observer of the Eastern Front and its fluid maneuvers. Seeckt saw the advantages of mobile, combined arms warfare and introduced them into doctrine in the German Reichswehr during the inter-war years. Seeckt’s vision of a mobile and rapidly evolving battlefront spearheaded by armor for the Reichswehr became the perfect platform for Guderian and Rommel to build on later for their adaptations which became known to history as Lightning War - Blitzkrieg.
Personally, I found Barrett’s descriptions of combat in the high mountain passes of the Transylvanian Alps separating Austria-Hungary from Romania to be the most interesting passages of all. Until I read them I was unfamiliar with the difficulties and peculiarities of warfare at altitude under extreme weather conditions of rain, snow and ice. This was a revelation and a delight to read.
All in all this book is a must-read for the dedicated and serious-minded military historian who wants to explore in substantial detail the innovative strategy and tactics followed by the Central Powers on the Eastern Front. I know it was a revelation to me and I know it will be for you too.
Bryan I. Fugate, Ph.D., Austin, Texas, January 2014
Author of:
Operation Barbarossa, 1984
Thunder on the Dnepr, 2001
Major Bob Unvarnished, 2004
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
AMuch-Needed Addirion
By P. G. Wickberg
What Michael Barrett has written, with the centennial of WWI coming up, fills a gap in the historiography of that war - there hasn't been much written on the Central Powers' campaign against Romania in a LONG time, and one of the basic sources, although by no means comprehensive, is still Erwin Rommel's mole's-eye view of his sector in "Infantry Attacks" (yes, THAT Erwin Rommel - the Desert Fox). The standard picture in a few paragraphs in most general histories of WWI goes like this: after two years of studious neutrality, Romania, whose king was closely related to Kaiser Wilhelm, came into the war in 1916 for the same reason Italy did - they saw a chance to grab a much-lusted-after piece of the crumbling Habsburg Empire at low cost. The outraged Germans, with their Austrian, Bulgarian and Turkish allies, promptly turned on the Romanians and creamed them, knocking them out of the war quickly and occupying all but a narrow strip of the country until the Armistice, at little cost to themselves.
But it wasn't like that at all, says Barrett. In fact, the Central Powers' campaign against Romania took over a year, involved some of the most difficult terrain in Europe (the Carpathians), and strained German and Austrian forces to the limit, resources that could have been used either in France or in the campaign against Tsarist Russia. While the Romanians suffered from having a timid and indecisive King (his wife, the famous Queen Marie, had more strength than he did), a government riddled by corruption and labyrinthine politics (I believe it was Bismarck who once said "Romania isn't a country, it's a profession!") and a military hobbled by cronyism (a problem for many countries in the early part of the war, when getting soft commands for old friends meant more than developing the best leaders), the average Romanian soldier fought well and hard, especially on the rare occasions he was competently led. What made their lot even more difficult than corruption and cronyism, Barrett argues, is that Romania, a newcomer to the war, made many of the same mistakes that its enemies had at the beginning of the war, but had now had two years to correct. Even so, supplying the front lines proved a nightmare while the two sides struggled over the Carpathians, and I was impressed as much by the persistence and inventiveness of the German and Austrian supply officers as I was by the valor of their soldiers. While the Central Powers commanders tended to be men who were sent to this remote front because they had goofed up elsewhere, Barrett would argue that German officers like Falkenhayn and Mackensen showed competence on this smaller front that they had not on larger ones, and that the Turks, in particular, fought better than anyone probably expected (the Bulgarians, also competent fighters, just wanted one thing, the Dobruja, which they had lost to Romania in 1912, and eased up once they got it). On the other side, help from Anglo-French forces at Thessalonika that had been promised somehow never showed up, while Russia, although it did send reinforcements (little and late) to Romania, obviously had its own agenda involving Bessarabia and the mouth of the Danube (the more things change, the more they stay the same, witness the Russian troops still occupying the sliver of Moldova that constitutes the illegal "Transnistrian Republic").
The title of the book comes from the fact that once the Central Powers forces, after infinite pain and struggle, made it down out of the mountains onto the Romanian plains, Falkenhayn and Mackensen pushed them relentlessly, giving the battered Romanians no time to rest and reform until Bucharest had fallen and the remaining Romanians and their Russian supporters were forced over the Sereth River in Moldavia. Due to events in other parts of the war, Romania ended up getting more from the spoils than it probably deserved - Transylvania and Bukovina from Austria-Hungary, Bessarabia from the disintegrating Tsarist Empire, although Stalin snatched the last two back in 1940. But many German officers, including Rommel, had learned valuable lessons about mountain fighting, supply lines and the importance of keeping the pressure on a fleeing enemy, and the Allies would feel the consequences two decades later. For historians of WWI, especially the Eastern Front, this is a book you need to have in your collection.
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