Torrey Torrey details how, by the end of 1916, the armies of the Central Powers, led by German generals Falkenhayn and Mackensen, had administered a crushing defeat and occupied two-thirds of Romanian territory, but at the cost of diverting substantial military forces they needed on other fronts. In return, it received the Allies' formal sanction for the annexation of the Romanian-inhabited regions of Austria-Hungary. The Romanian Battlefront in World War I, Paperback - Glenn E. Despite a strategically vulnerable position, an ill-prepared army, and questionable promises of military support from the Allied Powers, Romania intervened in World War I in August 1916.