The 1929 Romanian Navy Procurement Plan

Abstract

After the partial implementation of the procurement program for 1926-1927, the command structures of the Romanian Navy worked diligently to promote some naval procurement projects to meet the defence needs of the maritime coasts, in particular. The next such plan from a chronological point of view was drafted in 1929. It focused, among other things, on building bases to accommodate the forces of the Sea Division, one somewhere around Constanța, and the second one at the mouth of the Danube. Concretely, in 1929, the ship requirement was modified somewhat compared to the one planned in 1924, in the sense that it started from the need to have four destroyers available at any time, in other words, there had to be eight such units in the equipment, as some would inevitably have been under repair and others needed for reconnaissance missions. To support an ultimate collision with larger enemy ships, the Romanian Navy wanted at least one fast cruiser. However, the Romanian Navy did not receive any new ships until close to the outbreak of the Second World War, if we do not take into consideration the submarine “Delfinul”, commissioned in 1926. Nevertheless, we consider that the different points of view of naval specialists, concentrated in the 1929 naval plan, were valuable in terms of the crystallisation of some options of unitary acquisitions in the following decade, when the worsening of the international situation required the revision of Romania’s naval policy