Второе сражение при Тыргу-Фрумос: Испытание советского наступления в Румынии.

The Second Battle of Târgu Frumos was a military engagement primarily between the Wehrmacht and Red Army forces in May 1944, near Iași, Romania. The battle was the main engagement of the Târgu Frumos Operation, and is often referred simply as the Battle of Târgu Frumos. Military historian David Glantz claims the battle was part of the First Jassy Kishinev Offensive, which resulted from a Stavka order to the forces of the 2nd & 3rd Ukrainian Fronts to commence a coordinated invasion of Romania. The offensive was directed towards Iași, with a secondary objective of establishing bridgeheads across the Prut River. The battle of Târgu Frumos 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 & Siret 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 Iași 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. It had been thought that May Day, the traditional workers' day of celebration, would see the opening of a new assault by the Soviet forces. But the offensive re opened on 2 May heralding three shattering and unceasing days and nights of combat. Behind a sixty minute drum fire at dawn, two Soviet armies moved into an attack.

Soviet sources make few references to the battle. Historian David Glantz has found some mention of operations in Romania in April and May 1944 in divisional histories. The main source for him is the Soviet 2d Tank Army's history, where a direct reference to the battle is found. It states that in late March 1944, the tank army was shifted into the sector of 27th Army with the mission of "attacking in the direction of Focuri and Podu Iloaiei. Subsequently, the army was to strike a blow toward the city of Iași and secure it." In the narrative on follow on operations by the Tank Army it is stated that it attacked together with 27th Army’s 35th Rifle Corps. It also claims that the 3rd Tank Corps reached Târgu Frumos, but was repulsed by the German counterattacks. The 16th Tank Corps identified by the German officers appears not to be mentioned in the account. Despite German claims that the Soviet attack was a full fledged offensive, it appears now that the battle of Târgu Frumos was a relatively small scale operation in the context of 1944's fighting on the Eastern Front, even though a Soviet success would have put the Red Army into a much stronger position for its eventual attack into Romania.

At the end of the Battle of Târgu Frumos the frontline stabilised. However, it was from these positions that the Soviets launched the successful Jassy–Kishinev Offensive in late August 1944. On a political level, the battle accelerated the activities of anti German forces in Romania, leading to negotiations between the traditional political parties and the Romanian Communist Party, represented by Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu.