The Second Battle of Târgu Frumos was a military engagement primarily between the Wehrmacht and Red Army forces in May 1944, near Iași, Romania. The battle was the main engagement of the Târgu Frumos Operation, and is often referred simply as the Battle of Târgu Frumos.
Military historian David Glantz claims the battle was part of the First Jassy-Kishinev Offensive, which resulted from a Stavka order to the forces of the 2nd & 3rd Ukrainian Fronts to commence a coordinated invasion of Romania. The offensive was directed towards Iași, with a secondary objective of establishing bridgeheads across the Prut River.
The battle of Târgu-Frumos was only briefly described by Soviet historians. Recently, Russian historians have begun describing this as a distinct battle. For example, the four volume Great Patriotic War (1998) prepared for the Russian Federation states: Thus, during the Târgu-Frumos operation, the 2nd Ukrainian Front's forces tried unsuccessfully to complete a deep penetration of the enemy's defense and reach the territory between the Prut & Siret Rivers. By order of the Stavka, they themselves went over to the defensive along existing lines on 6 May.... The several attempts by the 3rd Ukrainian Front's armies to conduct attacks from their Dnestr bridgeheads & seize new bridgeheads also led to nothing.
According to accounts by Hasso von Manteuffel, one of the two German division commanders, and Ferdinand Maria von Senger und Etterlin, the German forces defeated a Soviet offensive by the 2nd Ukrainian Front that was expected to be a precursor of a much larger offensive in Northern Ukraine. The battle of Târgu Frumos has been used as a case study in officer tactical education in the United States Army and other armies, teaching how a mobile defense can defeat an armoured spearhead. There are however questions about the accounts by the two German officers, relating to the failure to include Romanian forces into their account.
Prelude
During April 1944 a series of offensives by the Red Army, including in the Iași sector, was intended to deceive OKH as to the real time and place of the major offensive planned in Belorussia. The German-Romanian forces successfully defended against the local limited objective attacks throughout the month of April. The attack aiming at Târgu Frumos was the initial attempt by the Red Army to achieve its goal of deceiving the OKH, and testing the Axis defenses in Romania while preventing movement of reserves to the Belorussian sector of the Eastern Front.
It had been thought that May Day, the traditional workers' day of celebration, would see the opening of a new assault by the Soviet forces. But the offensive re-opened on 2 May heralding three shattering and unceasing days and nights of combat. Behind a sixty-minute drum fire at dawn, two Soviet armies moved into an attack.
The battle
The battle of Târgu Frumos was a series of engagements and smaller combats over several days during which armoured forces of the Wehrmacht LVII Panzer Corps, in particular of the Grossdeutschland Division and 24th Panzer Division, engaged the Red Army's 16th Tank Corps of the 2nd Tank Army, which was also attacking from the north.
One unit's experience in the opening hours of the battle was described as such: