Roumanian Winter 1939-1940
Part 1 of 3

H. G. Watts

By an unexpected piece of good luck I spent the first winter of Hitler’s war within reach of good skiing. I was on the staff of the Military Attache as a member of a small military mission which would have become active if Roumania had become involved in the war during its early months.

However, at the end of the Polish campaign the Germans found themselves cut off from the Polish -Roumanian frontier by an advancing Russian army, and had to abandon the idea of a direct rnihtaiy occupation of the oil fields round Ploesti in favour of the more subversive but almost equally obvious method of introducing a prodigious fifth column. Young able-bodied Germans began to appear in consulates and in German business houses, and to flood the mountain huts and ski slopes at week¬ends. By March 1940 it was rumoured that there were 30,000 of them in the countiy, and that they had uniforms and weapons hidden ready for mobilisation at a few hours notice.

The Military Attache was at first a little embarrassed to find himself encumbered with several cheerful and somewhat irresponsible officers, whom the War Office showed no inclination to remove once the immediate danger of invasion from Poland subsided. However, he found us plenty of intelligence work to do so we established ourselves in an office adjoining his own in what had once been the Legation stables and proceeded to enjoy life in Bucharest, described by John Gunther[1] as ‘a tinselly sort of little Paris’.

We were rather a bad smell to the real diplomats; they didn’t like our habit of testing out our demolition stores in the Legation yard. One gala night we practised shooting with a .32 automatic at a picture of Hitler-drawn on the door of the Abr Attache’s office. The A. A. didn’t see the funny side of this episode and we had to pay for a new door. But we found a good friend in Captain Despard R.N., the Naval Attache, who used to refer to us as ‘The villagers’ and would often drop in for a yam. The ‘wardroom’ was a converted coachman’s bedroom on the floor above ours, and there was always gin or whisky in his hospitable cupboard. He had been a keen skier in the early 1920’s and had known Arnold Limn, D’Egville and Chris Mackintosh, but a badly shattered leg about ten years before had put an end to active sports for him. He kept a .22 pistol in his desk and used to take pot shots at a picture of a girl pinned to the wall whilst he was talking to visitors.

He was a blood-thirsty old devil and enjoyed giving ‘the villagers’ advice about shooting people: “When in doubt, don’t hesitate – shoot the —, and shoot at the stomach, not the
head, it’s easier to hit and ……    “. Here Captain Despard would go off into a description of what happened when he did.

During the. autumn I spent two week-ends walking in the mountains of the Bucegi, between Sinaia and Brasov, which form the watershed between Old Roumania (The Regat) and her somewhat indigestible province of Transylvania, which she had acquired after the 1914 war under the Treaty of Trianon. The grassy uplands, and the glades leading down between gloriously autumn tinted woods promised good skiing when the snow came.

I found an enthusiastic companion in Major Vivian Davidson-Houston, R.E., the assistant Military Attache. Being a sapper DH’s greatest joy was to motor us into the wilds of the Islomitsa valley and show us how to blow up sample lengths of pipe. He had travelled in many countries and spoke Russian and Chinese but he had never skied before. It only took one day for the sport to get its usual hold over him.

The real winter snow fell a week before Christmas, so with new boots and bono wed ski DH and I set off up the Prakova Valley to Sinaia. Nothing exciting happened to the war that winter, and we skied eveiy week-end until the snow melted in May.

The Caipathians are not high mountains like the Alps, in fact there is nothing higher than 8,300 ft, so they do not offer that protection from wind which adds so much to the charm of Switzerland and Austria. The sides of the valleys are steep and craggy, but on the tops the rounded plateau, with limestone under-lying peat and turf, are like the Pemrines, and have evidently at one time been much eroded by glaciers.

The snow quickly goes sun- and wind-crusted and skiing conditions are usually more difficult than under normal winter conditions in the Alps. However, we soon developed an eye for country and began to pick out the sheltered side of a gully where the surface was still unspoilt. At first our borrowed ski had no steel edges; these
are essential if the discomfort of an uncontrolled, rattling side-slip on wind-crust is to be avoided.

It is advisable always to cany a reliable map and compass because sudden unexpected mists can come up at any season of the year, and it is not always easy to find a way down the sides of the valleys from the high ground. The standard of map-making was low compared with British and Alpine; hachurings were used in many maps instead of contours, so that heights were urirehable,. and paths and tracks marked on the map often did not exist or were not precisely indicated on the ground. The method of markhig both ski and walking routes was the same as the one popularly used in Germany; a cypher shown on the map was reproduced on rocks and trees along the track, only the marks were not always kept fieshly painted.

The country where we did most of our siding lies between the parallel valleys of the Prahova and the Islomitsa rivers. The three most popular resorts within easy reach of Bucharest are Sinaia, in the Prahova valley;, Predeal, at the top of the pass into Transylvania; and Brasov, on the edge of the Transylvanian plain. All three He on the main railway line running north-westwards towards Budapest.

We found plenty of club huts, most of them inhabited all the year round, in these hills, so in even the worst weather we could find shelter, a hot meal and a cup of tea. Roumania, thanks presumably to Slav influence in the past, was, and maybe still is, one of the few European countries where it was possible to get a good cup of tea.

There were three kinds of hut; military outposts in the mountains, where visitors were looked after in a rough and ready army way; those run by the Touring Club Roman, a Bucharest organisation; and huts belonging to the S.K.V. (Siebenburgen Karpathen Verein) a skiing and mountaineering club run by the Saxons from Brasov.

The S.K.V. huts always had that atmosphere of warmth, comfort and welcome that we know so well in Switzerland and Austria, and we found this to be so even when they were full, as they so often were, of Hitler’s infiltrated Reichadeutachers. There was always “Suppe”, scrambled egg or omelette (mit schinken), roast lamb or pork, sausage, apfelstrudel, sheep’s cheese and dark beer, and there was a delicious smell of burning pine wood.

In the T.C.R. huts, staff, language, food and atmosphere were all Roumanian, and somehow we never-succeeded in feeling so much at home in them. The Roumanians have a passion for decorating all then cold food with whorls and rosettes of thick and rather sickly mayonnaise, the choice of dishes never seemed so attractive as in the Teutonic S.K.V. huts, and the cooking was, to our English taste, too greasy and too much permeated with garlic. They have a peculiarly tasteless white curdy cheese – “branza Alba” – with caraway seeds in it. It seemed to take so much longer to get a meal; this we concluded was because the Roumanian idea of a day’s skiing is a slow amble up the hill, a long lunch, chat and drink, and a gentle run down to hot “Tsuica” at the bottom – Tsuica is a spirit distilled from fermented pears or plums; drank hot with nutmeg it can be very stimulating on a cold day. The Saxon, like his Anglo-Saxon cousin, gets to the top, wolfs his meal, runs down, then comes up and does it again.

There is a chaiming legend that these Transylvanian Saxons are descended from the children who were led into the mountains by the Pied Piper of Hamelin; and that he took them by tortuous ways underground till he brought them out into this beautiful country. In point of fact the first German colonies were planted in 1143 by King Geza II of Hungary, who brought them from Westphalia and the Lower Rhine to cultivate and repeople the territory which had been laid waste when conquered by Stephen I early in the 11th century. In the middle of the 18th century there were further migrations of Protestant Austrians from the Salzkammergut. The term “Saxon” is used locally in much the same way as it is still used by the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles, to denote people of Teutonic origin. The Saxon villages still have the solid look so characteristic of central Germany; the stone houses turn blank backs to the street, and face into an inner “hof’, access to which is through great arched doorways. In 1939 there were 250,000 of these Saxons. Their large number, and evident lack of sympathy with government from Bucharest made very real the threat of a “Coup d’Etat” in collaboration with the alleged 30,000 Reichsdeutschers.

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Background notes:

Roumania is about 740 km (about 460 miles) east to west with a varied topography. The hilly Transylvanian Plateau with its wide farmed valleys enjoying warm summers and cold winters, is surrounded by mountains. Here above the timberline, around 1750m (5740 ft), the flora is alpine. The Carpathians enclose it to the north and east, and the Transylvanian Alps to the south. These alps continue south to the Danube gorge as the Banat Mountains. The Bihor Mountains are to the west of the basin. South of the main mountain chain is the Walachian Plain across which the Danube flows.

Although initially neutral in World War II, Roumania aligned with the Axis powers and developed a policy of friendship toward Germany. In June 1940, without opposition from Germany, with which it had signed a nonaggression pact in August 1939, the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia. In August, at the demand of Germany and Italy, Roumania lost most of Transylvania to Hungary, and in September the southern coastal strip was ceded to Bulgaria. The German army occupied Romania under the pretext of protecting the oil fields from British attack and General Antonescu became Roumania’s dictator supported by the Iron Guard. The king abdicated and left. His successor, Michael, was king only in name. Popular riots were met with massacres. Romania later entered World War II in June 1941 by attacking the Soviet Union at the same time as Germany did.

The article was passed first to Cliff Downham, then David Smith before arriving with your Editor for publication. The article has been split into three parts. The first sets the scene and the others cover the southern and northern areas visited on ski.

Tim Watts later coordinated ICI’s work across Europe and was editor of the Journal from 1949 until his death in 1970.

[1] John Gunther, foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News and the NEC, published ‘Inside Europe’ in 1939.