Romanian Frontier Guards
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2006

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 brought with it the final end of its centuries-old institution of the Military Border, officially dismantled in the 1880s. In these districts, special border troops guarded the frontiers in peacetime and fought the emperor’s battles during wartime. While social conditions had changed, some of the missions carried out by these troops remained for the successor states, particularly that of enforcing customs laws along long, open borders.

Romania established a large force of militarized frontier guards after the First World War. Especially during the Great Depression, such a force appealed to the Romanian royal government (as was the case in Hungary, Yugoslavia and other Eastern European nations) as it augmented their armed strength but could be charged to the treasury’s budget and not the Army’s. By the outbreak of war in 1941, the Frontier Guards (Graniceri) numbered eight regiments organized into four brigades, plus a small establishment of coast guards with seven patrol boats.

The Frontier Guards are among the best troops the Axis player fields in our Red Steel game. They have some special abilities and higher morale than most Romanian infantry. They’ll likely appear in some of our other games at a future date.

Troops of 2nd Frontier Guard Regiment on the march to Odessa, 18 August 1941.

Unlike the conscript Army, Frontier Guards were all volunteers and received a higher rate of pay than the regulars. They served a much longer term, and as long-service professionals therefore had a much higher state of training and readiness than the regular Army. A Frontier Guard regiment had two battalions deployed along the border on patrol and customs duties, running down smugglers in platoon-sized groups and manning frontier posts. Each regiment also had a third, training battalion that was mobilized for front-line service during wartime.

A Frontier Guard battalion was smaller than its Army equivalent, with two rifle companies and a heavy weapons company in the Frontier unit, against three rifle companies and a weapons company in the Army unit. The two-platoon weapons company was also much less capable: where the Army unit had a platoon with six French-made 60mm mortars (the same weapon carried by many other armies of the Second World War), the Frontier Guards still had 37mm infantry guns of Great War vintage, of either French or Austrian origin. The machine gun platoon had 8mm Schwarzlose pieces from early in the century, modified to fire 7.92mm cartridges, where most Romanian infantry units had the very modern and effective Czech-made ZB37 machine gun. A handful of Frontier battalions had 37mm or 47mm anti-tank guns, but this appears to have been very rare. The Frontier Guardsman carried an 8mm model 1895 Mannlicher rifle, left over from Great War stockpiles and modified to fire the same 7.92mm cartridge as the Czech-made ZB24 rifle of the Army’s front-line units.

Frontier Guards typically wore the older French-designed Adrian helmet rather than the distinctive Dutch model worn by Romanian regulars, and wore lighter-colored uniforms. They did not conform to the spit-and-polish of the regular regiments, and look almost slovenly in period photos. But they knew how to fight.

The Frontier Guard formed an artillery regiment in 1941, but the Army would only release French-made 75mm model 1897 field guns. It had two battalions. Just before war broke out three of the Frontier Guard regiments (1st, 2nd and 5th) were formed into the Frontier Guard Division along with the artillery regiment, which was expanded to form a second artillery regiment, though also having only two battalions of 75mm guns. Some sources credit the division with two battalions of the modern Skoda 100mm howitzers issued to the Army’s front-line divisions, but while authorized on paper these do not seem to have actually reached the division.

The Frontier Guard Division began the war assigned to V Corps; this corps had the Army’s best infantry divisions, the Royal Guard and 21st, and adding the Frontier Guards gave the Romanian 4th Army a crack strike force slated to cross the Prut at Falciu. But on 10 July the Romanian high command transferred the division to III Corps to reinforce the faltering advance on Chisinau (Kishinev). A renewed attack on the 13th by the Frontier Guards and 11th Infantry Division started a Soviet retreat, and Romanian troops entered the city on the 16th. Throughout the rest of July, the Frontier Guard Division fought to clear southern Bessarabia of remaining pockets of Soviet resistance.

Odessa’s citizens rally to fortify their city, July, 1941.

On 13 August the Frontier Guard Division entered the bloodiest battle in Romanian military history, the struggle for the city of Odessa. The three divisions of the former V Corps, now styled I Corps, spearheaded the major attack launched that day and on the 17th captured Odess’a water reservoir after very severe fighting. On the 18th, the Frontier Guards advanced 7 kilometers and captured the key Kagarlik Mansion.

In the next Romanian offensive, launched on 28 August, the Frontier Guards formed the corps reserve while 21st Infantry Division took the lead. After the 21st Infantry suffered severe losses, the Frontier Guards filtered through their lines and renewed the attack on 1 September, advancing about a kilometer in the face of heavy resistance. Shifted to another part of the front on the 6th, the border guards again advanced where the regulars had failed. For the next week and Frontier Guard and Royal Guard divisions carried the brunt of the offensive, slowly grinding forward at the cost of fearful casualties.

The losses took their toll, and when the Soviets counter-attacked on the 28th the border guards yielded about three kilometers of hard-won ground. Noting this success, on 2 October three Soviet divisions backed by what armor the city’s garrison commanded attacked the Frontier Guard Division. Two attached machine-gun battalions fled, and soon for the first time in the campaign a frontier guard battalion broke as well. Only intervention by the 6th Infantry Division’s reserve restored the situation.

By the 14th, the Soviet evacuation of Odessa was underway, and soon afterwards the Frontier Guard Division was posted back to Romania. The elite formation had been wrecked by the intense assault combat for which its men were not trained and its organization was not suited. It remained in its garrisons until June, 1943, when it was dissolved and its personnel transferred to the regular army’s 4th and 18th Infantry Divisions to replace heavy losses suffered in the Stalingrad campaign.

In Red Steel we overrated the Frontier Guard’s combat ability. The first step should be removed from each light infantry battalion of the Graniceri Division and from the independent 6th Frontier Guard Regiment, and all Frontier Guard battalions should start at their 4-5-7 strength. All “third battalions” (those numbered 3 on the left side of the “unit box”) should have a morale of 4 rather than 5, and a movement allowance of 6 rather than 7, as these are the training battalions of each regiment. Note that the unit’s morale actually improves when it reaches the last step (its training cadre). Balancing that slightly, the Frontier Guard battalions should receive a +2 rather than +1 modifier when attempting Infiltration Movement (19.0).

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