As 1944 started, the war had turned decidedly against Romania. The Allies were preparing for the European invasion; their bombing force had grown considerably and was raining death on the Axis countries, and the Russians were on the march west. But loyal Ion still saw Adolf through rose-colored glasses.
Spaatz, from his headquarters in Great Britain, upped the ante and pushed for the “Big Oil” plan that would unleash the full strength of his bomber force onto Romania. After the Allies landed in Normandy on June 6, Spaatz was freed to pursue his plan. Just two days after the invasion, on June 8, 1944, Spaatz giddily declared that the strategic air forces’ primary mission was destroying Hitler’s oil supply. The largest bomber force ever created was now focused on Romania.
Spaatz led off with a dive-bombing attack featuring his long-range P-38 fighters, equipped with extra fuel tanks. Then he turned to the heavy bombers. For two months his Fifteenth Air Force flew bomber run after bomber run at the facility from its base in Italy. Defenses started to crumble, destruction began to surpass the ability to repair it, and oil production declined. Soon the German and Romanian fighters, now badly outnumbered by the hundreds of Allied bombers and their fighter escorts, hid in the skies far away from their enemy.
Even the British got into the action. They attacked Ploesti four times in 1944, lighting up the dark sky and adding to the slow devastation of the oil fields. Spaatz’s plan was working. Oil production was cut in half from March to April 1944, and halved again by June.
The attacks culminated with the nearly seven-hundred-plane raid on July 15. By this time Ploesti was getting plastered once or twice a week. The German army was frequently abandoning their beloved Panzers and trucks for lack of fuel. Big Oil was having big impact.
Finally, the last bomber dropped its load on August 19 to rattle the dust a little more. Ploesti was dead. When the Russians captured the area on August 30, they told the Americans the place had been totally destroyed. In all, the Allies ran twenty-four missions against Ploesti involving almost 6,000 bombers. While it cost the Americans 230 bombers and their crews, the results were spectacular. The Germans completely ran out of oil in late 1944. The dividend paid off during the Battle of the Bulge that December, when the Germans abandoned their Panzers with empty gas tanks and walked away.
Too slowly it had dawned on Antonescu that he was losing. While spending the majority of his time conducating the retreat on the Russian front and pretending to be an effective general, the Germans were running his country while fighting off the growing storm of bombers over Ploesti. Ion had installed the baby-faced son of King Carol, Mihai, as a symbolic ruler in 1940 when he had thrown King Carol out. From his palace in Bucharest, Mihai knew the end was near and teamed up with officers loyal to him and political leaders who opposed Ion to overthrow the Conducător.
Mihai’s plan was to quit the war and ask the British and Americans to occupy key parts of the country to prevent Russian occupation. Mihai realized that the Russians might be somewhat miffed at Romania’s role in the devastating invasion, but he believed the Allies would want to help keep the Russians at bay. The small problem with the plan was that the Allies had no intention of occupying Romania and had already slotted Hitler’s Stalingrad buddy into the Soviet sphere of control.
Mihai’s plan was further complicated by the fact that the German troops in Bucharest were actually running the country and could easily eliminate the few Romanian soldiers stationed in the capital.
On August 23, Antonescu came to Bucharest and agreed to swing by for a visit to the young Mihai, who was now determined to act. Ion, undoubtedly surprised that the useless young king was suddenly stepping forward to vent his completely irrelevant feelings, walked into the meeting blindly confident and without a weapon or guards. King Mihai demanded he quit. Ion laughed him off. Then King Mihai simply arrested Ion and proceeded to take command of the country, appointing his fellow conspirators to lead the government.
Once word got out, the Germans never flinched but simply added Romania to their growing target list. The ever-practical Germans used the same air bases they shared with the Romanians in attacking the Russians to now attack the Romanians. The Romanians and Germans suddenly found themselves fighting each other from the same air base. It was like a time-share for air forces. The Germans pounded Bucharest without the slightest hint of nostalgia for their former ally. Meanwhile, the Russians watched all of this with glee. In a horrifically clumsy diplomatic sleight of hand, Romania had turned a friend into an enemy but neglected to turn an enemy into a friend. The Germans conducted a fighting retreat to the west while the Russians swept in from the east. Romania had managed to briefly turn World War II into a three-way affair: the Allies and the Axis versus Romania.
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
