The nation that initially declared this war was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who declared
war on Serbia.
The rest of the world was soon involved.
Today I’m going to look at the Habsburg Empire but mostly just one part of it.
Today I’m going to talk about Hungary.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the Kingdom of Hungary
and World War One.
Now, in 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise established the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.
This partially re-established the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hungary, and Emperor Franz
Josef was crowned king of Hungary, which he had not been between 1849 and 1867.
Under the compromise, Austria and Hungary had separate parliaments, which met in Vienna
and Budapest, but they did have three common ministries, those of foreign affairs, defense,
and finance.
Franz Josef was the supreme warlord and he also had the right to dissolve the national
assembly, to veto any laws passed by the national assembly, and to appoint or dismiss any members
of the cabinet council.
The nearly 50 years of the compromise before the war were pretty peaceful, and Hungary
underwent considerable economic and social development.
Also, from 1849, when 200,000 Russian troops had helped the Austrians defeat the Hungarians
in the Hungarian revolution and war for independence until December 1914 when the Russians invaded
the Uszok Pass, no foreign army invaded Hungarian territory.
The only real military action was the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, and that resulted
in fewer than 1,000 dead on the Austro-Hungarian side.
Still, in spite of the years of peace there were big problems within the empire.
It was incredibly multi-ethnic, and all of those ethnicities were only held together
by the sovereign and it was in need of real reform.
We’ve mentioned in regular episodes the enormous language difficulties plaguing the
armed forces of the empire, 15 different language versions of the national anthem, independence
movements among pretty much every ethnic group of the empire, also ethnic groups like Italians
or Romanians that wanted to actually belong to another nation.
So in spite of the years of peace, it was a mess internally.
It also had an emperor who, by 1914, was 84 years old and had been on the throne for 66
years, and who was in many ways a relic of a Europe that no longer existed.
Anyhow, back to Hungary, the army, and the outbreak of the war.
The land forces of the empire were in three separate armies; the common army - recruited
from Austrian and Hungarian parts of the empire, the Austrian Landwehr - from the Germanic
provinces, and the Hungarian Honvéd.
According to the 1867 agreement, Hungarians were allowed to raise and maintain their own
armed forces.
In actual practice during the war, all three armies fought side by side, though they had
different nomenclature - Imperial and Royal, Kaiserlich und Königlich, Imperial Royal,
Kaiserlich Königlich, and Magyar Kiralyi, Royal Hungarian.
At mobilization, the Honvéd infantry was made up of 32 regiments, known by their garrison
headquarters names.
For example there was the Miskolci Royal Hungarian 10th infantry regiment.
Croatian troops were part of the Hungarian army, and they served in Croatia, which was
subordinate to Hungary in the Empire.
Those units took on Croatian names.
We’ll talk about them and other troops such as Slovenians, in other special episodes.
After the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and during the July crisis, Austro-Hungarian
army chief of staff Conrad von Hotzendorf did not experience much resistance to his
plans for war with Serbia.
Pretty much the lone voice of opposition was Hungarian Prime Minister Istvan Tisza.
Already on July 1st, just days after the assassination, he wrote a memorandum to Franz Josef stating
that a hasty aggressive move on Serbia would be a fatal error.
As Romania was lost to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, and
as potential ally Bulgaria was weakened by the Second Balkan War, Tisza felt that the
time was totally unfavorable for war.
Once Germany expressed its support for Franz Josef, and once the cabinet passed a resolution
that in the event of a war, Austria-Hungary would not annex Serbian territory, Tisza conceded.
And then the war began and Hungarian soldiers were immediately involved.
Of course, they were involved in the disastrous invasion attempts of Serbia, which led in
just a few months to hundreds of thousands of Austro-Hungarian casualties.
However, there was Austro-Hungarian military participation early on over on the Western
Front.
Yep, 4 Austro-Hungarian heavy artillery batteries were loaned to the Germans for the invasion
of Belgium and helped take Liege, Namur, and Antwerp.
They were even used during the First Battle of Ypres, but were sent to the Eastern Front
to fight Russia in early 1915.
In December 1914 came the Battle of Limanowa, which was one of the greatest military victories
in Hungarian history.
On December 11th, three Hungarian Hussar regiments were given the task of strengthening the Jablonica
Hill defenses and relieving their comrades.
At 5 AM, the 9th Hussars under Colonel Othmar Muhr dismounted and made for the hill, but
it had fallen to the Russians during the night and a vicious melee ensued.
The Hussars were cavalry and their equipment wasn’t really suitable for infantry combat,
but fighting with whatever they could use, including their bare hands, they gained the
upper hand.
Colonel Muhr was mortally wounded, but by six AM the Hussars had control of the hill.
That was not the end of the fighting.
Four Russian regiments tried to re-take the hill a total of 15 times unsuccessfully.
The Russian steamroller had been stopped.
The Hungarians took casualties of around 12,000, the Russians around 30,000.
Hungarian troops were also present at Przemysl fortress during the long months it was under
siege by the Russians.
In fact, the 20th Szegedi Honvéd Division was down to only 2,662 survivors from 8,500
by the time they surrendered to the Russians.
For their service there is a monument at Margit Bridge in Budapest.
The greatest number of Hungarian troops took part on the Italian front, and that’s where
the greatest number fell.
I’ll talk about notable Hungarian service there in regular episodes when we cover major
battles there in future, so I won’t do that here.
I’ll also talk about the notable success of the 39th Honvéd Division, that used newly
developed shock tactics on the Romanian front, but we haven’t gotten to that yet either.
Three Austro-Hungarian Divisions and a Hungarian one were also deployed on the Western Front
in 1918 to beef up the German defenses here.
I’m going to talk briefly about the immediate postwar situation of Hungary.
It’s very complicated.
In mid October 1918, the Hungarian government, with the Emperor’s consent, terminated the
1867 Compromise.
This happened the same day that Tisza was murdered.
Many people felt that he had been responsible for the war, which is kind of ironic since
he had been the voice of opposition back in July 1914.
On October 31st, Count Mihaly Karolyi became the new Hungarian Prime Minister and demanded
the immediate cessation of hostilities.
The Hungarian Democratic Republic was proclaimed November 16th, with Karolyi as president,
universal suffrage, and freedoms of the press and assembly.
Things got messy AFTER that.
There was the Hungarian-Romanian war for starters, which involved Bolsheviks, Hungarians attacking
Czechoslovakia, and Romanian troops marching through Budapest.
We’ll cover that in depth when we get there, it’s not possible to do it here.
The Treaty of Trianon, which came directly afterward, and which is a very divisive issue
even today, was dictated by the Entente in 1920 and Hungary had no choice but to agree.
It regulated the independent Hungary.
It limited the army to 35,000 soldiers including officers, but most importantly, it took away
67% of Hungarian land, 60% of its population, 89% of the forests, 62% of the railways, and
so forth.
British Prime Minister Lloyd George had this to say, “What I have said about the Germans
is equally true about the Hungarians.
There will never be peace in Southeastern Europe if every little state now coming into
being is to have a large Hungarian irredenta within its borders.
I would therefore take as a guiding principle of the peace that as far as humanly possible
the different races should be allocated to their motherlands and that this human criterion
should have precedence over consideration of strategy, economics, or communications
which can usually be adjusted by other means.”
Wise words.
I’m going to leave it there, because anything that came beyond that isn’t really this
channel’s business.
Today was just a brief look at Hungary and Hungarian participation during the war, where
hundreds of thousands of Hungarian young men died in the war that Count Istvan Tisza warned
against.
Thank you Tamás Kloska