The main causes of the Romanian Army’s defeat by the numerically inferior German and Austro-Hungarian forces in the campaign of 1916 were the major political interferences in the act of military supervision, the incompetence, the imposture and the cowardice of a significant part of the military echelon of conduct, as well as the lack of an adequate training and troops’ equipment for that specific type of war.

On the night of 27 August 1916, three Romanian armies started the attack by crossing the Southern Carpathians and entering Transylvania.

When the offensive through the mountains failed, the High Romanian Commandment refused to save the forces on the front in order to allow the creation of a moving supply, with which the later threat of Falkenhayn would rejected.

[6]The first counterattack of the Central Powers was organized by General August von Mackensen, who coordinated a multinational army consisting of mostly Bulgarian with some German and later Turkish troops.

Simultaneously with the assault, the Bulgarian Third Army defeated a Romanian-Russian force including the First Serbian Volunteer Division at the Battle of Bazargic, despite the almost double superiority of the Entente.

[8] On 15 September, the Romanian Council of War decided to suspend the offensive in Transylvania and to concentrate instead on the destruction of the Mackensen groups of armies.

The failed attempt to break the German-Bulgarian front in Dobruja, combined with the violent storm during the night of 1-2 October, which damaged the pontoon bridge over Danube, determined Averescu to cancel the whole operation.

After eight days, two divisions of German mountain infantry almost managed to disperse the Romanian marching columns near Sibiu.

On 10 November, after a few weeks of concentration of their best troops, the elite unit Alpenkorps, Germans attacked in front of the Vulcan Pass, so that they pushed back the Romanian defenders into the mountains.

The German 9th Army advanced in other sectors of the battle front, attacking all of the passes of the Southern Carpathians, Romanians being forced to retreat constantly, whenever their lines of supply became more and more stretched.

The Russian General Andrei Mederdovici Zaioncikovski together with its troops arrived immediately in order to strengthen the allied Romanian-Russian front in an attempt to stop the army of Mackensen before it would conquer the Bucharest–Constanța railway.

Russians were forced to send massive re-enforcements on the Romanian front to avoid a German invasion into the south of Russia.

Among the young officers from the elite troops Alpenkorps who fought on the Romanian front was the future Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.