Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  The biathlon became an Olympic sport in 1960. A Finn grabbed the silver medal, just beating out an opponent from — guess where — the Soviet Union. And he didn’t even have to shoot him.

  WHAT HAPPENED AFTER

  The spectacle of the little Finns bravely fighting the Russian bear fascinated the world. World leaders delivered outraged tongue-lashings at the evildoing Russians with the level of indignity rising in direct relation to their distance from the action.

  In a bizarre twist, Stalin’s paranoid delusion about Finnish aggression turned true as the Finns joined hands with the Nazis in 1941 and invaded the Soviet Union, with Mannerheim once again leading the army. Mannerheim refused to advance beyond the 1939 border, and the fighting quickly stalled. Teaming with the Nazis destroyed the good will that Finland built with the West — and it was from then on treated like a friend of Hitler’s. By 1944 Stalin’s troops were once again pushing back the Finns, and Mannerheim became president of Finland. He negotiated a peace with the Rus­sians and fought to rid the country of Germans. He resigned in ill health in 1946 and retired to write his memoirs in Swit­zerland. For decades thereafter Finland lived under the heavy hand of the Soviets, who kept a keen eye on their neighbor.

  While the massive casualties suffered in the war did im­press upon Stalin the need to reform his army, the biggest impact was to let Hitler know that the once-feared Red Army was beatable. Hitler mocked Stalin by privately offering to subdue the Finns. Hitler no longer feared the Russians.

  Stalin led the Soviets through the war that killed some 20 million Russians and, to everyone’s relief, died in 1953.

  TEN.

  ROMANIA FIGHTS BOTH SIDES IN WORLD WAR II: 1941

  Choosing the wrong friends can lead to unpaid loans, un­pleasant dinner parties, and possible jail time. In a war, choosing the wrong friends can be much, much worse.

  On the eve of World War II Romania faced a decision of who to befriend. In a spasm of nationalist doltishness, Ro­mania joined hands with the Nazis in the hope that Hitler would hand them the gift of Transylvania, their ancestral homeland.

  To achieve this goal and make Adolf happy, Romania’s Hitler-wannabe dictator Ion Antonescu decided to attack Russia, the largest and only undefeated country on earth. As Ion would painfully learn, any war plan based on the idea of making Hitler full of smiles and puppy love needs a thorough reevaluation.

  But taking a moment to reflect on this decision apparently never occurred to the Romanian strongman. His decision led little Romania to eventually duke it out with the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Germany, all in the same war. Romania fought so hard and inflicted so much damage to its allies and/or enemies that when the war ended, no one knew how to treat it. The West abandoned Romania and left it to rot under Soviet control for decades.

  Romania’s role in the war was so fickle and so bizarre that during World War II it had the dubious distinction of being the third most powerful Axis country and the fourth most powerful Allied army. Romania allied itself with everybody at the party but still went home with no friends.

  THE PLAYERS

  Ion Antonescu — this brutal dictator of Romania, known as the “Conducător,” led Romania into the attack on the Soviet Union to regain Transylvania, stolen the year before by the wily Hungarians.

  Skinny — Personal slogan was “Death before Dishonor.” He man­aged to obtain both.

  Props — Hitler loved him. He got the big picture about who really should be controlling the world, the Germans and the Romanians.

  Pros — Had blue eyes so Hitler assumed he came from good Aryan stock.

  Cons — Eager participant in the Holocaust.

  Lt. General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz — one of the most decorated air commanders in U.S. history, he held the title of Commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe and was the architect of the strategic bombing raids on the Axis countries.

  Skinny — Prepped Europe for its postwar revitalization by bombing its cities flat.

  Props — Was present at the surrender of all three Axis powers.

  Pros — Never promised to bomb an enemy back to the Stone Age despite directing the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan.

  Cons — Became a writer after the war.

  King Mihai of Romania — He became the Romanian king at age nineteen in 1940 when Ion booted his anti-German father King Carol from the country.

  Skinny — Did nothing as king for four years as his country fought a devastating war.

  Props — Last surviving head of state from World War II. Great-great-great grandson of Queen Victoria of England.

  Pros — Before his country got crushed by the Russians he surren­dered to them.

  Cons — He assumed the Soviets would forgive Romania for invad­ing, looting, pillaging, and killing. Wrong! Also assumed the Ameri­cans and British would give him credit for taking on the Germans at the end of the war. Wrong Wrong!!

  THE GENERAL SITUATION

  It was not easy being Romania in 1939. On one side the German menace, aggressively looking to stomp on anything that moved. On the other side the growling bear of the Soviet Union. In this tough neighborhood it was important to make the right friends.

  Romania, in its first attempt at making friends and influ­encing people, had shrewdly waited until World War I was three years old before joining the Allies, hoping to cherry-pick from the victors’ spoils. The vastly more powerful Ger­mans and Austrians smashed the Romanians. But like the little engine that could, Romania did not give up. Instead, the tiny country manned it out and lost more territory to the Germans before finally calling it quits in early 1918. When Germany collapsed later that year, Romania regained its fighting mojo and again joined the fray, hoping it would be easier to defeat an already conquered enemy. This short second fling so impressed the hard-pressed Allies that Roma­nia won itself a seat at the peace talks in Paris where the spoils were carved up, and it walked away with an outsized share of the local swag. In this case, the minuscule country got enough territory, including Transylvania, to create Great Romania. All was well. Romania had chosen right.

  During the 1930s, as German power grew and sovereign neighbors disappeared with little resistance, Romania’s leader, King Carol II, a former playboy, became increasingly nervous. When World War II broke out in Poland in 1939, Romanians feared their little corner of Europe would be the next entrée for Hitler. Romania’s only safeguard was to ally with the British and the always-eager-to-make-agreements-it-can-never-honor French. But in 1940 when Germany de­feated France and threw Britain off the continent, Romania was on its own.

  Romania faced its own volatile political mixture. King Carol had ruled since 1930 with a strong hand. But the driv­ing force in the country’s politics was the Iron Guard: reli­gious fanatics, right-wing nuts, and violent anti-Semites. Unsurprisingly, they were much loved by the always-on-the-lookout-for-thugs-who-like-to-kill-the-helpless, Heinrich Himmler of the German SS. The Iron Guard was like a posse of Bible-toting SS thugs. They were not happy with Carol and probably wouldn’t have been happy with Hitler, either.

  Fearing an Iron Guard takeover and unhindered by such notions as fair play, King Carol suddenly showed some im­pressive fascistic chops by orchestrating the assassination of the Iron Guard leader Cornelius Codreanu in 1938 and out­lawing the group. Carol also excluded General Ion Antonescu, the head of the army and former defense minister, from his government. In May 1940, with Poland already conquered by Hitler and the collapse of the west imminent, King Carol wrapped up a treaty with Germany giving the Nazi war machine access to Romania’s plentiful oil. The king, believing his hard work was done, was now able to relax and get back to his real interests, living the high life amid the gathering storms of total war.

  Teaming up with the Nazis somehow angered the Soviets, so in June of 1940 the Reds grabbed two northern Romanian provinces, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, primarily be­cause the Russians didn’t already control
them. Hungary, with Hitler’s approval, then jumped into the land grab and took most of Transylvania in August. And in September, Bul­garia took a cheap shot at its northern neighbor and re­claimed the area of Dobrogea. In all, Romania lost about one-third of its territory and population. The country had now become Less Romania.

  Ion denounced the king over the humiliating loss of terri­tory and prestige, so Carol dismissed him from the army and tossed him into prison. But this could not prevent the popu­lation from realizing their country was shrinking and party boy King Carol started to catch the blame. Demonstrating that even louche kings read polls, he desperately sprung Antonescu from prison directly into the prime ministership in September 1940. As a show of gratitude, Antonescu squeezed Carol to abdicate and flee the country. Carol reputedly loaded up a train with royal swag and decamped to Portugal. With the backing of the army, Ion grabbed dictatorial powers and appointed as his deputy the head of the Iron Guard. Touché! The circle of lunacy was complete again, for the moment.

  With the instincts of a true dictator, Ion burned to see the day when he could extend his irrational rule over the ancient homeland of Romanians, Transylvania, as well as the other stolen territories. The problem, however, was that the lost lands were held by two opposite sides of the war. But Ion, starting to warm up to his job as dictator, began to limber up with some Houdini-like reversals and escapes of his own. He soon came up with a plan to fix Romania’s territorial prob­lems by throwing his lot in with Hitler.

  In November 1940, Ion met with Adolf in Germany. In dictator-to-dictator talks, Antonescu ranted about the Jews, Slavs, and Hungarians. The two got along great. Hitler found the Conducător to be an eager ally. He bonded with the German generals. They in turn had little difficulty recognizing the rampant greed of a true sucker. Ion gleefully ac­cepted an invitation to join the Axis.

  In January 1941, Horia Sima, the head of the Iron Guard, was unable to repress his deep-rooted, coup-making urges and tried to overthrow Antonescu. Hitler preferred the order of Antonescu to the anarchy of the Iron Guard and supported Antonescu in crushing the coup. Sima and the other Iron Guard leaders were whisked away by Himmler and stashed in Germany in preparation to take over Romania if Antonescu turned woolly-headed on them. Ion now ruled alone.

  Adding to the volatile mix of greed and hate swirling around Romania was the country’s huge oil reserve. Roma­nia was the largest European oil producer, the West Texas of the Balkans. At the start of the war, the British and French tried to buy as much of the oil as possible and even tried to sabotage the oil transport system, just to keep it away from the tank-happy Germans. Their plots failed, and in August 1940 Germany and Romania cut a deal whereby Germany got virtually all the oil it wanted. Romania got to charge Germany whatever it wanted. You could call it the Hermann Goering Plan.

  The only cloud marring the clear blue sky of the perfect Romanian future, Transylvania included, was an invasion rendezvous with the German army in Red Square.

  WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “TRANSYLVANIA DREAMIN’”

  Throughout 1940 and 1941, the Germans primped the Ro­manian army for the coming dustup with the Soviets. They were the first foreign power informed by the Germans of the invasion date of June 22, 1941.

  Initially the plans for Romanian forces, called Army Group Antonescu, were to simply block the Soviets from taking over the oil fields and then later join in any needed of­fensive operations. All told, Romania’s order of battle num­bered about 325,000 troops.

  With the Soviets reeling in the face of the German blitz­krieg, Romania easily recaptured the two provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina lying between Romania and Russia. The army then halted while Antonescu pondered whether to invade the Soviet Union. Or not. For most people this is a simple decision — NO. But Antonescu was one of the few people on earth who awoke one day and said, “Yes, I think invading Russia will be a good thing.” (For anyone unfamiliar with basic geography, Russia is just about the largest land mass on the face of the earth, and its citizens live in such desperation that the state of total war is often indis­tinguishable from normal daily life.)

  As a reward to the country for his work so far, Ion pro­moted himself to Marshal. With Russia seemingly on the ropes, Antonescu pushed all his chips into the middle of the table: invasion of Russia, full partnership with Adolf. It would all be worth it once Count Dracula’s homeland, Tran­sylvania, was returned to Romanian hands.

  With the decision made, on August 3 the Romanians in­vaded Russia with the goal of capturing the city of Odessa. They eventually succeeded, with the Soviets withdrawing on October 16, but only after Romania suffered heavy casual­ties. Getting beat up by the retreating Russians should have been a big hint to Ion that his army wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. Despite high-quality German arms and a dose of Prussian training to stiffen them, it was clear that the Romanians were ill equipped and ill prepared for a major war with their more powerful and, most important, more numerous enemy. The brutality of the fighting guaranteed that the Soviets would never forget that Romania had en­tered the long hall of sworn Russian enemies to be humiliated eternally after the inevitable defeat. In fact, the Romanians fought with such gusto against the Russians that they suffered a higher proportion of casualties than did the German forces in the east.

  Not satisfied with going toe-to-toe with the behemoth Russia, the cocky Romanians joined Japan, Italy, and Ger­many in declaring war on the United States, the richest coun­try on earth, in the days following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Romania was now taking on half of the developed world to acquire a few provinces smaller than Pennsylvania.

  Despite its small size and distance from Britain, the Allies had Romania squarely in their sights. The only patch of Ro­manian soil of strategic importance was the relatively puny few square miles of the Ploesti oil fields and refineries. From the very beginning of the war, it was well known that Germa­ny’s war machine ran on Romania’s oil. The Allies were now cranking out thousands of long-range bombers like so many murderous Fords and Chevys. Carl Spaatz, the head of the U.S. air forces in Europe, had a particular jones for the Ploesti fields and couldn’t wait to unleash his air armada on them.

  After the Allies secured their position in North Africa in 1942, they prepared to hit the Romanians. The first attack was a slight affair, a jab and a slap but with symbolic impor­tance. In all, twelve B-24 bombers made the run from Egypt to the oil fields, the first strategic bombing attack by the United States in Europe. They caused minimal damage and no planes were lost. It simply proved that the bombers could reach their target. Unfortunately, for future bomber crews, it also alerted the Germans that the Allies were eyeing Ploesti. They instantly beefed up their antiaircraft strength and de­ployed fighters to the area.

  It took over a year before Spaatz could orchestrate another raid. This was one for the ages, perhaps the most spectacular bombing attack of the entire war. On August 1, 1943, from a base in Benghazi, Libya, 177 planes, mostly B-24s, flew at rooftop level for a point-blank attack on Hitler’s oil. The mis­sion was the largest U.S. air attack of the war, to date. So important was the destruction of the fields that the Allies green-lighted the mission even though some of the planners expected half the planes never to return. The planes faced German and Romanian fighters, mechanical troubles, getting lost, intense flak, and at such low altitude, even rifle fire. Handling the massive bombers like fighters, the planes braved the strong defenses to strafe the oil fields with tons of bombs. Fires raged as gas tanks exploded, bombers weaved through plumes of oily smoke, and stricken planes plunged to the ground. Despite the spectacular pyrotechnics, the raid caused only temporary damage to the huge oil complex, which soon began producing more oil than ever. The raid cost the Ameri­cans heavily as fifty-four bombers were shot down, a 30 per­cent kill rate. Spaatz knew more attacks would have to be mounted, but never again from such a low altitude.

  On the ground things were faring even better for Romania. During
the spring and summer of 1942 they blitzed along, riding the coattails of the Germans to the gates of the city of Stalingrad. While the Germans penetrated the city, the under-equipped and under-supplied Romanians guarded the flanks. With the Germans poised for victory the Russians counterat­tacked in November 1942, slicing through the crumbling Ro­manians whose collapse allowed the German Sixth Army to become surrounded. After two more months of brutal fight­ing, the Germans and Romanians surrendered. It was perhaps the bloodiest battle in history and marked a major turning point in the war. From that point on, the Germans and the Romanians fought on the defensive.

  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.