Second Battle of Târgu Frumos

Battle of Târgu Frumos (1st Iasi-Kishinev Offensive)
Part of Soviet-German War, World War II
Advance of the Red Army 1943 - 1944
Date 2–8 May 1944 Location Eastern Romania Result German-Romanian victory
Belligerents
Germany, Romania	Soviet Union
Commanders and leaders
Ferdinand Schoerner Mihai Racoviță	Ivan Konev
Strength
Unknown	Unknown
Casualties and losses
Unknown	Unknown

The Second Battle of Târgu Frumos, part of the First Jassy-Kishinev Offensive, was a military engagement primarily between the Wehrmacht and Red Army forces in May 1944, near Iași, Romania.

The battle resulted from a Stavka order to the forces of the 2nd & 3rd Ukrainian Fronts to commence a coordinated invasion of Romania. It was directed towards Iași with a secondary objective of establishing bridgeheads across the Prut river.

The battle 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 & Seret 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.

During April 1944 a series of offensives by the Red Army, including in the Iaşi 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.

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