Happy to be able to start working out the kinks of their postwar plans, after weeks of confused fighting the Soviets occupied Romania, retook the disputed territories, and placed their Communist thugs into the government. In September 1944 Mihai’s delegation traveled to Moscow to naïvely negotiate terms of a peace treaty. Negotiations quickly turned Soviet-style as Foreign Minister Molotov handed the Romanians his terms: namely, take it or leave it. When they protested, he responded by sarcastically asking what the Romanians had been looking for in Stalingrad. Ouch! The pain was just starting. To wrap things up the Russians grabbed all the gold the Romanians had earned selling their oil to the Nazis.
Ploesti met its doom primarily from the bomb bay of the B-24 bomber, the Liberator, the most produced of any bomber in the war. The U.S. Army in 1939, realizing that long-range bombing would play a key role in any future war, looked to upgrade from its B-17 bomber force. The Liberator was a flawed machine — difficult to fly with fuel and hydraulic systems that often malfunctioned. It smelled of jet fuel, was bitterly cold at even medium altitude, unpressurized, possessed not a shred of comfort, and required its crew to pee down a tube. But it carried lots of bombs, flew long distances, and destroyed pretty much all of Europe. In warfare, this qualifies as a raging success.
The war was still not over for the Romanians, however. The Soviets forced their new “friend” to reform its punch-drunk army and form up alongside their new allies to fight the Germans in Hungary. In all, about 210,000 Romanian soldiers fought in Hungary, suffering 47,000 casualties. The high casualty rate stemmed from the Russian tactic of “allowing” their new “friends” the “honor” of leading risky attacks.
After dispatching Hungary, the fun continued in Czechoslovakia when, in early 1945, the Russians prodded the Romanians into invading their third country of the war. They fought hard and suffered harder, again taking more than their share of casualties from the retreating but still formidable German ex-friends.
Romania’s sorry postwar fate was sealed at the Yalta Conference on February 4, 1945. Roosevelt and Churchill traded away nothing in exchange for allowing Russia to control the country after the war. They didn’t even ask for a province to be named later. It’s safe to say that this was the last time the Western leaders thought about Romania for more than forty years.
In the years 1943 and 1944 Romania ranked second to Germany as an Axis power. In 1944 and 1945 Romania suffered the third highest Allied casualty rate. In less than a year, the Romanians contributed 540,000 troops to the Allied cause, behind only that of the United States, the USSR, and Britain. They suffered 167,000 casualties, more than the British in Northern Europe in that same period. For this effort, the Soviets bestowed a medal on King Mihai, and Romania got blackholed by the West.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
As might be expected of anyone who leads an army into Russia, the Soviet-backed Romanian government took Ion out behind a prison and shot him on June 1, 1946. It didn’t go smoothly. The first volley merely wounded the Marshal, who was smartly dressed in a double-breasted suit and his hat raised high in his right hand, just before being pumped with bullets. Still believing he was in charge he ordered one more death; his own. The soldiers quickly finished their work. An officer then shot him in the head a few more times because he could. The Conducător’s Aryan blue eyes would lovingly gaze into Adolf’s no more.
As for the young king Mihai, surrounded by Soviet-directed Romanian puppet troops, he abdicated in 1947 and fled the country. Mihai spent the next forty years or so in Switzerland, working in the airline industry. He finally was able to return to Romania in the mid-1990s. He is the last World War II head of state still alive.
General Spaatz went from triumph to triumph; after having helped turn Europe into rubble, he went on to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. He retired in 1948 with a chest full of ribbons. Upon his death in 1974 he was buried on the grounds of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
The Romanians, after feeding oil to Hitler’s war machine, eagerly participating in the Holocaust, fighting the Soviets for three years, absorbing the pounding of the vast American air force, seeing their only national asset of any great value destroyed, getting robbed and overrun by the Reds, taking on the Germans, invading Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and getting treated like a crazy uncle by everyone involved, were completely ignored by the entire world for two generations. All with a little help from their friends.
It turns out Antonescu did find a way to get Transylvania back. It simply required fighting every major combatant in World War II on both sides of the war and enduring a Soviet occupation.
His beloved Transylvania has been a happy part of Romania since 1947.
ELEVEN.
THE GENERALS’ COUP AGAINST HITLER: 1944
Apparently, Adolf Hitler made many enemies.
It might strike some as hard to believe that the madman who killed millions and started the most devastating war in history did not make friends as easily as Jimmy Stewart or Elmo. But people seemed genuinely angry at the Der Führer.
This select group was not limited to Russians, French, Czechs, Jews, Poles… you know the list. Most Germans who dared publicly express their dislike for Hitler — and even some who expressed these feelings only in private — were locked away and executed. But a few with actual power and the ability to strike back at Hitler did exist. Surprisingly, many were leaders of the German army. These officers were the descendants of the master warfare technicians of the vaunted Prussian General Staff, which had reordered Europe for nearly two hundred years. These plotters gathered, talked, and planned ways to kill Hitler, the despised former lance corporal and HQ messenger.
After numerous close calls that required evading Hitler’s body armor of SS and Gestapo, the plotting climaxed in one last great thrust at Adolf. On July 20, 1944, as the German military desperately fought off the growing weight of Allied forces, this small group took their boldest step. They planted a bomb practically under Hitler’s feet at his headquarters in the East Prussian forest. With Adolf blown up, the plotters planned to seize control of Germany in a swift coup d’état. The generals would then immediately appeal to the Allies for peace terms and bring the horrible war to a close.
But this effort, like their numerous prior attempts, failed. The plotters’ abject failures over many years stemmed from fighting a twentieth-century dictator with a nineteenth-century mind-set. The dwindling number of plotters, steeped in the ways of the Prussian military tradition of noble combat, clung to their outmoded beliefs in the sanctity of honor and following orders, despite Hitler’s use of their revolutionary blitzkrieg tactics, which he used to brutally carve up Europe. Hitler and his gang were radicals who believed in total war and killing anyone who got in the way. This clash of principles, in many ways a clash of centuries, doomed the plotters to failure.
THE PLAYERS
General Ludwig Beck — The old wise man of the German army, Beck held the post of chief of the German General Staff, the top staff officer in the entire army, and achieved renown in Germany for deftly handling the humiliating retreat of ninety divisions from the western front at the end of World War I.