June 25th, 1941: Soviet troops in Romania

 Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.

Text taken from a V Kontakte post by THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR from Sergey Veter

It was the Third day of the war

.......In the south there are Russian wedges on Romanian territory. The Allies are in chaos and confusion." This entry was made in the personal diary of one of the leaders of the Third Reich, Minister of Public Education and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

“This is incredible,” military history buffs will say. “When the Red Army entered Europe, he had dozens of such notes a week!”

But under the above entry is the date “June 28, 1941,” and the bridgehead captured by Soviet sailors, border guards and soldiers of the 51st Perekop Division on the right bank of the Danube was already 75 kilometers along the front and several kilometers deep in Romania!

On June 22, 1941, at 4.15 am, Romanian guns opened fire along the entire Soviet bank of the Danube. Infantry units rushed from cover to the water's edge. And then something unexpected happened for the aggressor: already at 4.18, individual ships and part of the coastal batteries of the Danube military flotilla snapped. At 4.20 all her trunks started talking. By half past five the return fire was so strong and organized that the Romanians had to stop shelling. Their infantry could not even reach the middle of the river.

By the summer of 1941, the Danube military flotilla included 5 river artillery monitors, 22 armored boats, 7 river minesweepers, one minelayer and about two dozen auxiliary vessels. In addition, the flotilla included a separate anti-aircraft artillery division, machine gun and rifle guard companies, six coastal batteries with guns of various calibers and a separate air squadron with fourteen I-153 Chaika fighters.

The flotilla was commanded by Rear Admiral Nikolai Osipovich Abramov.

At the beginning of hostilities, the naval division of the 79th border detachment of the NKVD troops came under his operational control. He had four “sea hunters”, as well as twenty-five small river boats. In addition to this, the 23rd Rifle Regiment of the 51st Perekop Rifle Division, stationed in the area of ​​the city of Kilia, was to act in the interests of the flotilla.

With the outbreak of the war, the position of the flotilla became unenviable. The movement of ships along the Danube and its tributaries was constrained by Romanian artillery fire, and supplies were completely interrupted. The flotilla command faced the question: what to do?

It was possible to follow the path that many commanders of Red Army units chose in the first days of the war - to blow up equipment, burn warehouses and, lightly, with only small arms, catch up with the front rolling back to the east.

But there was another option...

The flotilla did not receive an order to leave. This means we have to fight there, on the Danube. But the enemy dug in at the heights of the right bank, from there he monitored the fairway and constantly fired at the main support bases - Izmail, Renia, Kiliya and Vilkovo. Therefore, in order to facilitate the actions of the ship’s detachments, it is necessary to throw him out of there.

Cape Satul-Nou was chosen as the landing site. NKVD troops came to the aid of the sailors: the commander of the 79th border detachment, Major Savva Grachev, formed a consolidated company from volunteers, entrusting its command to Lieutenant Andrei Bodrunov. Soon the “green caps” were also joined by a platoon of border guard sailors led by Lieutenant Andrei Koshchei.

On June 23, preliminary artillery preparation was carried out.

On June 24 at 2.30, armored boats with border guards left the Kislitskaya channel at low speed and rushed to the opposite bank. Within twenty minutes the first wave of paratroopers rushed towards the Romanian trenches. The appearance of Soviet soldiers came as a complete surprise to the Romanians. And only in a few places did it come to hand-to-hand combat. Basically, the Romanians preferred to surrender or escape. As a result of a short battle, two Romanian companies ceased to exist. The losses of the paratroopers were 10 wounded...

When Abramov was informed about the capture of the cape on the right bank of the Danube, he immediately contacted the commander of the 51st Perekop Division, Major General Pyotr Gavrilovich Tsirulnikov, and asked him for support. The division commander immediately allocated a battalion of the 287th Rifle Regiment of his division, which was immediately loaded onto minesweepers, landed on Romanian territory and began expanding the bridgehead. Soviet infantry, with fire support from armored boats moving in close proximity to the shore, advanced along the Chilia branch down the Danube. And this advance was rapid: in less than a day, the bridgehead expanded by almost 40 kilometers along the front and 2–3 kilometers in depth.

And Soviet officers of not the highest level - the commander of the flotilla, the commander of the border detachment and the commander of the rifle division - were already planning and beginning to prepare the capture of Staraya Kiliya, a city on enemy territory.

It was the third day of the war...

The capture of the Romanian city was not an end in itself. It’s just that the flotilla still could not operate safely in the lower reaches of the Danube and secure access to the Black Sea. In addition, the Romanian garrison in Old Chilia hung over the left flank of the resulting bridgehead. They decided to eliminate this threat on the night of June 26. The main role in this enterprise was assigned to the 23rd Rifle Regiment of the 51st Perekop Rifle Division, which was supposed to land with all three battalions on the right bank of the Danube.

Regimental commander Peter Sirota managed to find a place in one of the river branches with a similar coastline outline, bottom characteristics and coastal depths. In addition, before dark, the captain conducted training on boarding armored boats, placing them on them and unloading them ashore... This is probably why there were no losses in his regiment the next night.

And artillery and aviation solved their problems. The flotilla squadron bombed several times in the area of ​​​​Old Kiliya. By evening, the howitzer regiment of the 51st Rifle Division arrived at the firing positions, and ammunition was replenished on the coastal batteries and in the gun turrets of the river monitors. And with the onset of darkness, a barrage of fire fell on the Romanian coast.

And 14 armored boats under the command of Captain-Lieutenant Ivan Kubyshkin with troops on board left the channel somewhat higher than the city. They moved with the engines turned off - the paratroopers and sailors pushed off from the bottom with poles. Then, using only their rudders and trying to stick to the shadows, the boats moved down the Danube. And only when the explosions dancing on the city outskirts became visible, the mechanics received the command: “Full speed!”

The Romanians noticed the landing only when the boats were two to three dozen meters from the shore. Soviet artillery transferred fire deep into Romanian territory, and turret guns and machine guns of armored boats began to fire at the surviving firing points. The battalion, led by the regimental commander Captain Sirota himself, landed without losses. And river minesweepers and border boats with two other battalions of the regiment were already leaving the left bank.

Two hours later, Old Kiliya was captured. The Romanians lost about 300 people killed, more than 700 surrendered. As trophies, the paratroopers received eight 75-mm guns and about 3,000 shells for them, 30 heavy and light machine guns, just under 1,000 rifles, almost 100,000 rounds of ammunition, 416 anti-personnel and anti-tank mines, and 340 grenades.

The regiment's losses amounted to five dead Red Army soldiers and seen wounded. Of the sailors of the Danube military flotilla, not a single one died that night, only three armored boats were damaged.

With dawn, Soviet units moved towards each other and by the end of June 26, the flanks of the landing forces landed on June 24 and 26 closed, forming a single bridgehead with a length of 75 kilometers along the front and wedged into the depths of Romanian territory from four to nine kilometers.

It was the fifth day of the war...

When Marshal Antonescu was informed that his troops could not land on Soviet territory, he was “upset.” But when reports arrived on June 24 and 26 that the Bolsheviks themselves had entered the territory of Romagna Mare, the marshal became furious. And he ordered to immediately put an end to the insolent people. The Romanians made their first attempt on June 27: an entire regiment rushed to positions at Satul Nou, which were held by 30 border guards armed with Mosin rifles, two light and two heavy machine guns. When the first attack failed, the second, third and fourth followed, which were already preceded by artillery attacks. But the Romanian batteries were immediately covered by naval and coastal artillery of the Danube military flotilla, and the border guards were not lacking in accuracy... As a result, the Romanian regiment, which by the evening had lost a fifth of its soldiers, was forced to abandon further attempts to throw a handful of soldiers in green caps into the Danube.

And Marshal Antonescu’s rage gave way to panic: on June 28, he reported to Berlin that thousands of NKVD commissars in green caps had invaded Romania, and asked an ally for help.

That’s when Goebbels made that very entry in his diary...

The battles for the Danube bridgehead were just approaching their climax.

On June 28, the 2nd and 3rd battalions of the 23rd Rifle Regiment were recalled to the left bank. On the narrow strip of the right bank there remained no more than two infantry battalions, two platoons of sailors and a combined company of volunteer border guards.

On June 30, the Romanians again attempted to liquidate the bridgehead. A fierce battle broke out again at Cape Sutul-Nou, where the battalion of Captain Nikolai Turgan was now holding out.

When the situation became critical, its chief of staff, Captain 2nd Rank Grigoriev, arrived at the bridgehead to coordinate the actions of the flotilla’s infantry, ships and aviation. Having assessed the situation, he, at extreme risk, at his own peril and risk, ordered a detachment of armored boats to come out of cover, approach the Romanian coast and support the infantry with fire from turret guns at visible targets. At the same time, at the request of his chief of staff, Admiral Abramov took into the air an air squadron of the Danube military flotilla.

Its fighters successfully stormed the advancing Romanian lines. And then it was the turn of the armored boats, which had to operate under fire from heavy enemy batteries. An unusual tactic came to the rescue: the boats took cover from the shells under a high bank, then in pairs they jumped out at full speed into the middle of the river, fired three or four shells at the Romanian infantry, and rushed as hard as they could back into the dead zone. Then, when Soviet fighters appeared in the air, the boats took a breath for a while in cover. This continued until Grigoriev reported to Abramov that the situation on the bridgehead had been restored... After the failure on June 30, the Romanians made three more attempts - on July 3, 4 and 6 - to put an end to the Soviet bridgehead on the right bank of the Danube, for these days in total rushing into attacks eighteen times. All in vain...

And on July 9, the chief of staff of the 14th Rifle Corps, Colonel Rybalchenko, in a telephone conversation, stunned Rear Admiral Abramov, saying that by order of the headquarters of the Southern Front, all army units were being withdrawn from the Danube and all responsibility for the 90-kilometer section of the border was being withdrawn from the town of Reni to the mouth of the river - is now entrusted to the flotilla. “In general, take the defensive, sailors!” — the colonel cheerfully concluded his report. And literally an hour later, intelligence reported to the flotilla commander that in the Tulcha area the enemy was concentrating up to 6 thousand people for a new attack.

The sailors began to prepare to defend the bridgehead and repel with their own forces a possible landing of the Romanians on the Soviet shore. All observation posts on the left bank of the Danube were turned into strongholds within 24 hours, and only half the crews remained on the ships. The Izmail NKVD fighter battalion of about 600 people, mobilized from port workers, was placed at the disposal of the flotilla. Another hundred and fifty fighters were provided by the Izmail police.

Thus, on July 10, its own consolidated infantry regiment was formed under the Danube Military Flotilla. The head of the air defense section, Colonel Matveev, was appointed its commander. Within a day, he managed to coordinate the units and transport most of them to the bridgehead, where they took up defensive positions. Even the training battery available in the coastal defense sector - four old three-inch horse-drawn guns - became a combat unit...

For another week, the sailors, with these tiny forces, held a multi-kilometer bridgehead, and at the same time stopped several attempts by the Romanians to cross the Danube. And they even made a desperate attempt to destroy enemy batteries in the Periprava area. Alas, it ended in failure: a sabotage detachment of 25 Red Navy men, led by the head of the intelligence department of the flotilla headquarters, Senior Lieutenant Zaitsev, died...

Meanwhile, the situation on the Southern Front continued to deteriorate. Soviet troops left Chisinau... And the military council of the Black Sea Fleet gave the order to the ships of the Danube military flotilla to break into the Black Sea and go to Odessa. Preparations for evacuation began. But even in this tense situation, the sailors managed to slap the Romanians in the face. On the night of July 18, monitors “Zheleznyakov”, “Martynov” and “Zhemchuzhin” with a detachment of armored boats approached Vilkov. At dawn, the ships and two coastal batteries opened up a hurricane of fire on the areas where manpower and transport facilities were concentrated. The bombers called from near Odessa and directed by the sailors completed the rout. The blow was so strong that even a few days after the departure of the flotilla, the Romanians did not attempt to land on the already empty Soviet shore...

The evacuation of the Danube bridgehead was carried out no less brilliantly than its capture and retention. The calculation was based on secrecy and surprise. All evening, methodical fire was conducted from the left bank on the Romanian positions as usual, which did not stop even after dark. The armored boats, which took the paratroopers on board gradually and at different points, approached the right bank so that it was similar to the maneuvering of a night ship patrol. And already at 0200 hrs, all rifle units were delivered to the concentration points on the left bank without losses and without stragglers. At dawn they were brought together into a single group and in an organized column they went to Akkerman and Odessa.

As soon as the landing force was removed from the bridgehead, the ships of the flotilla began to break through into the Black Sea. The command and headquarters of the flotilla were on the Udarny monitor. The rest followed him - 101 pennants in total. By the end of the day on July 18, 1941, the Danube military flotilla had so many combat units. They moved in groups, so as not to create a continuous hum of cars, and at large intervals inside each one. On the approach to Periprava, where the Danube fairway narrowed to 300–350 meters, all engines were turned off. And the ships, held by the rudders, were carried forward only by the current...

The Romanians were able to detect only the rearguard of the flotilla and brought down the full power of six coastal batteries on it. In this hell, the armored boats covering the trailing group rushed about, laying a smoke screen and firing as intensely as they could. In this battle, BK-133 and its crew were killed, about a dozen ships were seriously damaged and had crew losses.

But the flotilla still escaped from the Danube. She spent the whole morning in its delta, preparing for the sea crossing. Around noon on July 19, already off the coast of the Black Sea, she was met by the cruiser Comintern and several destroyers. And on July 20, at about 9 am, the ships of the Danube military flotilla - 100 pennants - moored at the walls of the Quarantine Harbor in Odessa.

The first month of the war was ending...

PS Only after 3 long years would the Soviet boats of the Danube flotilla return to the Danube again. But then they will already reach Budapest and Vienna...