How did the Romanians deal with Soviet Armour?

Interesting... us mortals that don't have so higher standards are forced to actually read before stating our opinions on anything else than preconception.
The said book has a pretty good explanation in the begining for the reason "they had to be there", btw

Interesting... us mortals that don't have so higher standards are forced to actually read before stating our opinions on anything else than preconception.
The said book has a pretty good explanation in the begining for the reason "they had to be there", btw

If I've read one book that tried to excuse the presence there, I think I've read them all. But let's leave this for the thread Dragos mentioned. Like I've said, I withdraw the "they ran" statement. I'm out of this thread.

p.s. I'm not a mortal.

cheers

What is the conclusion, from discutions above: romanian soldiers did'nt run. At least they did'nt run in front of the russian tanks. All of them where very brave soldiers, and they fight without fear and without proper help from heavy a.t. guns... Sometimes, they make Camerone-like (forerign legion) fights, etc.

I have doubts. No, i'm sure they run sometimes. Do you, guys, believe in the fact that they where all braves? Some of them had childrens and wifes, and parents at home and they don wanted to die. And enemy tanks are scary "things" like all of the enemy weapons. A russian tank atack, when you have no heavy pak, is a good reason to ask yourself if it worts to die there, or at least if it is not a good solution to run, to survive for the momment, and to fight again in a much better oporunity.

I meet some veterans in my life and some of them told me about fear. Most of the simple soldiers speak about that. Of course, i have heard the stories of the officers who told me: "and the tank hunters attacked the russian tanks with grenades, incendiary devices, at mines". But i did not meet, to the present day, a single officer who make a hunt of a russian tank. Maybe they exist, but most of that kind of missions where for the soldiers and inferior ranks who receive orders... and they execute them, with fear, with memories from home in mind.

They were braves. I'm not sure about myself if, in a war, i will succeed to attack one tank with a hand device. Maybe ill be one of the mans who choose to run and hide, and wait for a better momment. Maybe i will be more lucky and i will cover the tank hunters with automatic fire from my weapon, thanking God i was not selected to kill tanks when some of my comrades will die from MGs of the tanks or under theyr rolling....

The end: some will run, in any war.

Iama

I see the discussion deviated from the initial line drawn up by saudadesdefrancesinhas.

Iamandi, nobody is saying that Romanians were all Rambos, but describing a very complex situation with just a couple of words is IMO incorrect and, why not, childish. You can't put everyone in the same pot, because people are different in terms of character and mental strength. Some ran, some didn't. Like I already said, for the infantry in the first line, which had a prepared defensive position, even as badly fortified as it was, running away through the fields covered in snow, under heavy artillery fire and pursued by tanks wasn't such a great idea and many didn't do it. For the men in the rear echelon, who were not under a direct threat, it was easier to run away only at the news of Soviet armor advancing on the village and many did so indeed. A clear indication of this fact is that among the survivors of each infantry division that escaped the hell of the Soviet winter offensive, the number of combat troops was lower than that of the administrative staff.

Getting back to the original topic, indeed, most of the tank hunters were lower ranks and so were the AT gun commanders. Unfortunately, even though they carried the burden of the war, the officers are those that usually get most of the credit.

As you say... our soldiers were put in a dilema - to stay in theyr fox holes and die, or to run/loose control and die. Some of them used another alternative - to action, to risk theyr lifes who will have no mach value if they stay or run, and theyr attacked enemy tanks with incendiary devices, with pack of grenades (this is the often story i heard), etc. And this were the heroes, in desperate momments, mans who acted against the iminent deadh. Of coures, they were crazy, insane, fools in some eyes, but in this way are made the heroic actions. And fear produce a lot of heroes!

Eight years ago i heard some storyes from an artilery veteran. They were trained to use theyr 100 m.m. howitzers (Skoda, he sayd) to shoot at the T-34 in case of the enemy tanks charge in vecinity of theyr battery. At that time i did not asked the old man what kind of projectiles were used for that. He told me about direct fire against wood tanks and about a demonstrative shoot of one of the officers against one captured russian tank. He show me with the hands how impressive was the explosion of the targeted tank. Also, he reminded about the presence of the Maresal Ion Antonescu at this demonstrative shooting.

Anyone knows more about the projectile used form 100 m.m. howitzers against armoured targets?

Iama

Officers often suffer much more casualties than other ranks, because they have to stand up and watch what is happening when everyone else is lying down, go at the front in attacks etc. This was certainly the case with the British Army in the First and Second World Wars, (Officers were twice or three times as likely to die as the men they led) and the Bolivian Army in the Chaco War, I don't have other examples off the top of my head, but I am sure there are more.
Perhaps they feel less fear because they have too much to think about to distract them, because they have got to look after the men in their unit.
It also depends on the quality of the officers, during the World Wars people were often made officers just because of their education or social class, and they would often be less effective than professional soldiers.
I think a lot of Generals would have prefered to be out hunting tanks with grenades, quite a few end up dying doing things like that, or started their career doing that, that is how they got to be Generals. Didn't lots of Romanian Generals die at Stalingrad leading charges against the Russians? I am sure I read that somewhere.

Excellent point. Indeed, percentage-wise, I am almost certain Romanian officers had a higher casualty rate than the lower ranks, for the reasons you described.

Also, officers were specifically targeted by enemy snipers, which greatly contributed to their casualty rate.

I believe your quote applies to most WWII countries, including Germany, USSR, and Romania.

If someone has specific numbers (percentages), I would like to see them.

Getting back to the issue at hand, most armies had to deal to a certain extent with the element of "tank fright", or "panzer panic".

The presence of this panic (and reducing it) had nothing to do with the "courage" of an army's soldiers, but rather with the level of training the troops received. Of course, having adequate anti-tank weapons only helped to further reduce the instinctive fear.

Nonetheless, Romanian Combat troops - I emphasize "combat" because only about half of a division's soldiers were actually involved in combat regularly - had a reasonable amount of anti-tank training which helped them deal with some enemy tanks even with primitive means.

On the other hand, well-equipped Romanian tank hunters were just as efficient as any other foreign troops. One example is given by Allerberger, the second-highest ranked German sniper, who tells of his unit being confronted by Soviet tanks, upon which a Romanian detachment of Pak's was dispatched to help them.
Upon arrival, this detachment, in coordination with some Romanian ground attack planes, quickly disposed of 27 T-34's, impressing even an experienced combat veteran like Allerberger with their efficiency.

This post has been edited by mabadesc on May 18, 2006 02:58 pm

Hi Guys,

The Red Army employed its armour in two main ways - infantry support and exploitation.

It is clear from Soviet reports of the beginning of their attacks on 3rd Army on 19 November that these were less successful than hoped. As a result the main exploitation force of tanks had to be launched into the attack before a breakthrough by the infantry and their support tanks had been achieved.

From this it seems likely that Romanian infantry could, at least for a while, deal with Soviet tanks in the infantry support role. The problems really arose once masses of Soviet tanks had achieved a breakthrough.

That said, for a number of reasons, the Romanian infantry was not good at handling armoured attacks at any stage of the war, be they improvised NI tanks at Odessa in 1941 or JSIIs at Iasi-Chisinau in 1944.

The most obvious success seems to have been that of the Paulis Detachment against the Hungarians in 1944, but Hungarian tanks were not particularly numerous or powerful. (A knocked-out, obsolescent Toldi light tank is usually shown in Romanian photos of the action. Are there other photos of the Paulis action?).

Cheers,

Sid.

2nd Lieutenant Ioan Bogdan, battery commander (100-mm howitzers) in 16th Artillery Regiment, on 19 November 1942:

While the T-34 tank was crushing under the tracks the guns of the 2nd Battery, with the infantry disembarked, the other 4 smaller tanks were keeping in the rear, protected by the dead angles of the terrain. I ordered the gunner to aim at the base of the turret, and when the tank moved some 150 meters away from the 2nd Battery, I ordered fire. Looking through glasses at the effect of the fire, I noticed that the shell hit the turret near the cannon embrasure and ricocheted exploding in air (with delay), but I noticed the shake of the tank at the moment of the impact, because of the big weight of the shell (17 kg). The effect of this hit was that the tank crew could no longer use the cannon. As I was not satisfied with the effect, I aimed the howitzer myself at the second shot. The shell hit the turret in the center, right at the base, and it no longer skipped, but crushed on the armor, and the explosive content spread on the surface of the tank, so as when the delay fuse ignited, it caught fire, igniting also the ammunition crates on the tank. All the soldiers nearby started to cry “hurrah”. The tank crew, frightened by the fire, immediately took a left turn, trying to get out of the range of the howitzer. We did not let them to get too far, as the third shell was projected on the cogwheel of the right track, destroying it. The tank made one more turn in place, then it was abandoned by the crew, which, together with the other tanks, fell back towards north using the dead angles of the terrain.

Off Topic: I've read them. Couriously, there seem to be an unusal number of Soviet soldiers speaking Romanian in that story. Maybe Sgt. Zamfir's unit stumbled upon an entire unit of Romanian conscripts from Bessarabia? That would be really sad, Romanians killing Romanians, fighting for foreign interests.

I don't want to be rude but I remember that in Antony Beevors book Stalingrad he says something like "Romanian troops were left alone, no-one had seen their officers nor NCOs in front line; on the contrary, they were safe behind the own lines, enoying theirselves with wine and women..."

I agree that a common romanian soldier was brave, but according to mr. Beevor I think that their officers were mostly bad. Sorry to say.

-the FINN

There is no such passage in Beevor's "Stalingrad". At one point he claims, based on "Russian recon sources" that the Romanian officers kept some of the supplies for themselves.

Most of the officers fought and died with their troops. Many of the junior officers also respected the tradition to lead the attacks in front of their men, which led to high casualties among them.

To be back ontopic, sort of speaking, has anyone seen "Manner Gegen Panzer" ? It is a small movie (propaganda one, of course), where they are showing all the means used by the German Infantryman to destroy a tank single handed. Perhaps this will answer some questions about the Man-againts-Tank issues presented here.

Hi Hauptmann,

I don't know about Stalingrad, but according to the detailed breakdown of Romanian losses at Odessa, prepared by the German military mission the previous year, Romanian officer losses were slightly higher than those of other ranks.

The German criticism at Stalingrad was that the few engineering resources made available to the Romanians were used firstly to build command bunkers, not front line positions. This undoubtedly aided the comfort of senior officers. However, it may just have been mistaken priorities. In any event, there were never enough engineering supplies to fortify more than a very small section of front, so this seems unlikely to have been a decisive factor.

Cheers,

Sid.

In a previous mesage for another topic (I do not have time to search for it) it was mentioned that before the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad, the Romanians had available 1 piece of 75 mm AT at every 3.7 kilometers (1 per 4000 yards) of frontline.
No canon "lower" than a 75 mm could stop a T-34. And sometimes the Russians attacked with 30...50 T-34's per kilometer.

Somebody who was not Romanian mentioned in the same topic that the German generals responsible with furnishing supplies and equipment for both the German and the Romanian armies denied with intention the desperately requested 75 mm AT's for the Romanians. If I remember right, the equipment was available, but it seems those generals had some accounts to close toward Hitler, and they intended a kind of sabotage. (The guy who posted the information called them "traitors".)

Somebody who died many years ago told me how he climbed on a Russian tank, opened the lid from above and dropped a grenade in the turret. Well, this is another way the Romanians dealed with the Russian tanks - but I am sure it occured in very rare situations. Ironically, that guy, after becoming prisoner, ended with signing for "Tudor Vladimirescu". He told me how during the so called "rest time" between 2 slices of Russian style instruction, they had to pick up wild flowers, and then to create with them letters for propagandistic Communist slogans.

This post has been edited by Florin on May 29, 2006 03:06 am