Military operations of the 2nd Mountain Division in the territory between the Prut and Bug (July 3 - August 17, 1941)

In the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, on the front stretched from Finland to the Black Sea, there were involved more than three million German soldiers and about 500,000 Romanian, Slovak, Finnish, Hungarian and Italian soldiers and the French and Spanish “volunteers”. The 3rd Romanian army under the command of General Petre Dumitrescu, which consisted of the Mountain Corps and the Cavalry Corps, covered the border from Bukovina to Cârlibaba. The 2nd Mountain Division led by General Ion Dumitrache was acting on the border with Bucovina, between Rădăuţi and Suceava, and had the main attack vector Novoselytsia ? Hotin. Three weeks after crossing the Prut River, the 2nd Mountain Division crossed the Dniester moving to the east-southeast. On August 17, 1941 the troops which were under General Dumitrache's command reached the right bank of the Bug River. This study is based on the collection of documents of General Ion Dumitrache stored in the archive of the Brasov County Museum of History and formed on the basis of materials donated to the museum by the Dumitrache family from 1984 to 1999.