2nd Army (Hungary)

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2. magyar hadsereg

active March 1, 1940 - January 22, 1943
August 30 - December 1, 1944
Country Hungary 1940Hungary Hungary
Type army
Insinuation Army Group B
Army Group South Ukraine
Army Group South
Second World War German-Soviet War
Case Blue
Voronezh-Voroshilovgrad operation
Operation Ostrogoshsk-Rossosh
Debrecen operation
Battle for Hungary
commander
Important
commanders

Gusztáv Jány

Hungarian Krupp Kfz. 70 1942
Hungarian unit on the march in 1942
Hungarian 15 cm 31M Howitzer gun 1942
Hungarian 29M Bofors 80mm anti-aircraft gun 1942

The 2nd Army ( Hungarian 2nd magyar hadsereg ) was a major unit of the armed forces of the Kingdom of Hungary during World War II . It was largely destroyed in the course of the Soviet winter offensive 1942/43 in January 1943 and dissolved in April 1943. In August 1944 a second army was set up again. After heavy losses from October 1944, it was dissolved again on December 1st.

history

First lineup

The 2nd Army was formed on March 1, 1940 as one of three Hungarian armies. Its first commander in chief was General Gusztáv Jány . The army was first deployed in the occupation of northern Transylvania after the Second Vienna Arbitration Award in September of the same year.

After the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans expressed the wish that Hungary should take part. Two Soviet air raids on the Hungarian cash register in what is now Slovakia and Munkács in what is now Ukraine on June 26, 1941 , provided a suitable reason for war . On the following day, Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union. The Hungarian participation was initially limited to the Carpathian group of two corps .

After Romania's decision to expand its troop contingent in January 1942, Hungary, who were hostile to Romania, also came under pressure if it did not want to lose its German favor. During a visit by German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to Budapest, the dispatch of further troops was promised. The 2nd Army was selected for this, which consisted of three army corps and a tank division with over 200,000 men and began to be transferred to the front in the Kursk area in April 1942 . The army also had around 35,000 (later up to 50,000) forced laborers , mostly Jews , but also members of other ethnic minorities and “politically unreliable” people in so-called “labor brigades”.

Destroyed equipment of the Red Army on a bridge over the Don in July 1942

Front deployment in 1942 and 1943

From June 1942 the army took part in the German summer offensive under the name Fall Blau . She was subordinate to Army Group B under the command of General Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs . The Hungarian troops first took part in fighting in the Voronezh area. On July 7th they reached the Don south of Voronezh . Your task was then to defend the Danube bank in a 200 km wide section of the front between the German 2nd Army in the north and the Italian 8th Army in the south. When the Hungarians took over the positions on the Don from German troops, Soviet troops still held bridgeheads and the like. a. near Uryv and Shchuchye, between thirty and a hundred square kilometers, on the western bank of the Don. At the end of July and August the Hungarians, with German support, tried to remove these bridgeheads from the Voronezh Front of the Red Army. By September 1942, the 2nd Army had lost 30,000 men. With the use of reserves and with German help, some of the bridgeheads were finally removed.

The army suffered from a lack of heavy weapons and the poor training of its soldiers. In particular, there was a lack of anti-tank guns (Pak). There was also too little ammunition available. Even the food supply was inadequate. A couple of German divisions, which had initially been inserted between the Hungarian divisions as support, have been withdrawn one after the other since the end of November, as they were urgently needed elsewhere after the 6th Army was encircled during the Battle of Stalingrad . In December another German division was withdrawn. Jány now threatened to withdraw his divisions from the front and march off towards home. Now the German side promised to provide weapons aid with the delivery of 250 anti -tank guns and 180 8.8 cm guns , but this never came.

After the two Romanian armies deployed at Stalingrad were almost completely destroyed in operations Uranus and Saturn in November and December 1942, an attack by the Red Army was also expected in the area of ​​the Hungarian 2nd Army. The army was therefore reinforced by German units as a precaution. The only action reserve in the event of a Soviet breakthrough was the so-called Cramer z. b. V. ready. It comprised two German infantry divisions, a tank group and an assault gun division . However, the two German infantry divisions did not have their full personnel strength. The Hungarian 1st Panzer Division, the only reserve of the 2nd Army with outdated tanks, was placed under this unit. The 1st Panzer Division had Hungarian 38M Toldi for reconnaissance, Panzer 38 (t) , ten Panzer IV / F2 and some Panzer III . Jány thought that instead of a division he would now have a whole corps as reserve.

The major attack by the Red Army (→ Operation Ostrogoschsk-Rossosh ) began on January 12th from the Uryv bridgehead. The attack tore open the front of the Hungarian IV Army Corps in several places. The Hungarian troops were able to hold the front for roughly 24 hours before they retreated. On January 14th, the Soviet troops also attacked the Hungarian VII Army Corps from the Shchuchye bridgehead. Subsequently, the Hungarian III standing on the left wing. Army corps attacked. The Panzer Corps Cramer z. b. V. was refused. Adolf Hitler alone determined the use of this reserve . This task force was the only German reserve on the southern section of the German Eastern Front in January 1943. The later deployment of these German units could no longer prevent the collapse of the Hungarian units.

Major General Gyula Kovács sent the first summary situation report to Budapest. The chief of staff of the Hungarian 2nd Army reported, among other things: "... morale of the army rather bad ... In terms of material we are finished. A total of six guns were saved. Everything else has ... broken down ... Most of the flak, as well as that of the other equipment, are lost. However, numerous wounded were saved ... The entire army is returning. So far 17,000 men have gathered in the Oskol Valley who still have rifles. I cannot speak of battalions because they no longer exist. We can only speak of a large pile of dung! "

Three days after the offensive began, large parts of the Hungarian army were in retreat. Only a few isolated units, which together with German units held a few bases on the front line, remained in their positions on the Don. Because of the Soviet superiority and the lack of anti-tank weapons, the Red Army could not be stopped. Weichs now asked Hitler for permission to take the Hungarians' front back onto the line of the Aidar River. Hitler refused permission to do so. When Soviet tanks with mounted infantry approached Alexejewka, the headquarters of the Hungarian Army High Command, on January 15, the ground personnel in neighboring Ilovskoye tried to hold their positions at an air base of the Hungarian Air Force using infantry weapons alone in order to save a few aircraft. Large parts of the Hungarian and Italian 8th Army , which were stationed south of the Hungarians, threatened to be encircled .

Weichs sent Major General Hermann von Witzleben , German general at the Hungarian Army High Command 2 , to Jány unofficially. Witzleben was supposed to persuade Jány, in the interests of his army, to order the withdrawal at his own risk, without waiting for Hitler's approval, because a withdrawal contradicted Hitler's instructions. Jány demanded clear instructions from the High Command of Army Group B, which Weichs did not want to give him. It was not until January 17th that the High Command of Army Group B gave the Hungarian armies subordinate to it the order to act on the situation . Jány let more precious hours pass before he gave the order to withdraw. An orderly withdrawal of his troops was now ruled out.

Hungarian soldiers with sleighs in the winter of 1942/43
Column of prisoners with soldiers of the Axis powers (early 1943)
Drawing of a Hungarian Toldi tank
Memorial to the fallen of the 2nd Army in Hungary

On January 22nd, the army was effectively disbanded, the remaining troops were subordinated to the German General Command, e.g. Cramer . Only the Hungarian III. Army corps under the command of Field Marshal Lieutenant (Altábornagy) Marcel Stomm held his positions on the Don until January 26th and secured the southern flank of the German Siebert Corps Group under the command of Lieutenant General Friedrich Siebert . This made a planned withdrawal from Voronezh possible for the Wehrmacht. Commander Stomm then tried to break through to the west. On February 1, Stomm disbanded his army corps and gave soldiers and officers the freedom to act “according to the situation”. Stomm and his close staff were taken prisoner by the Soviets. Only a few of the soldiers of III. Army corps succeeded in breaking through the Soviet pocket and reaching the German reception lines. After incomplete information, the III. Army Corps lost over seventy percent of its original troops and equipment.

Of the initial 200,000 Hungarian soldiers and 50,000 forced laborers in the “labor brigades”, around 100,000 fell in the fighting in January 1943, another 35,000 were wounded and 60,000 were taken prisoner. Only 40,000 soldiers later returned to Hungary from captivity. These losses were the highest losses a Hungarian army has ever suffered in a single battle. The last soldiers of the 2nd Army did not return to their homeland until 1955 from Soviet captivity.

In the winter battle of January 1943, the Hungarian 2nd Army lost all 113 tanks, 460 anti-tank guns and 110,000 rifles as well as personnel losses. Almost 70 out of 90 aircraft belonging to the assigned Hungarian Air Brigade were lost. Since the 2nd Army could not be used as a task force, it was disbanded in April 1943 and the remaining soldiers were brought home or only used as occupation troops in the hinterland.

Hitler is said to have commented disparagingly on the Hungarian losses. This military debacle on the Don is also known as the "Hungarian Stalingrad " or the "blackest day in the history of the Hungarian army ". The annihilation of the Hungarian 2nd Army on the Don in January 1943 is rated in Hungary today as the greatest military defeat by Hungarian troops since the Turkish wars.

In Hungary the downfall of the 2nd Army was hushed up. Hardly anything was reported in Hungary about the fate of the 2nd Army in Russia. After 1945, the fall of the 2nd Army was still hushed up because it had fought against the Red Army. The commander Jány was executed in 1947. After the end of the communist government in Hungary, a memory of the 2nd Army began.

Second lineup

In August 1944, a second army under Lieutenant General Veress was again set up to defend Hungary . The 2nd Army marched on September 5 between Cluj-Napoca and Târgu Mureș to protect Transylvania . From September 13th, after reaching the northern bank of the Maros River, it began counter-attacks against the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front . German counter-attacks had already started on September 12, especially at Temešvár . From September 15, Hungarian and German units also tried to stop the Soviet 6th Guards Panzer Army, which had broken through near Torda (Thorenburg) . The Soviet troops broke through on several sectors of the front from September 26th, so that Transylvania had to be given up largely without a fight.

During the Debrecen operation from 6 to 27/28 October attempted Marshal Malinowski to tear open the front of the army group Fretter-Pico (Hungarian 2nd and German 6th Army ). The mechanized cavalry groups Pliyev and Gorshkov tried in vain to break through Debrecen north to the Tisza . The Hungarian 2nd Army suffered such heavy losses that it had to be relocated to Transdanubia . Due to the losses suffered in the Apatin-Kaposvarer operation , the 2nd Army was finally disbanded on December 1, 1944 and the units under it were transferred to the Hungarian 3rd Army.

Commander in chief

structure

Summer 1942
  • 2nd Army
    • III. corps
      • 6th division
      • 7th division
      • 9th division
    • IV Corps
      • 10th division
      • 12th division
      • 13th division
    • VII Corps
      • 19th division
      • 20th division
      • 23rd division
    • 1st Armored Division

literature

  • Leo WG Niehorster : The Royal Hungarian Army, 1920–1945 , Axis Europa Books, Bayside, NY, 1998.
  • Lajos Vollner: Voronezh: The fate of Hungarian soldiers on the Don / Russia between 1942/43. Bauer-Verlag, Thalhofen 2011. ISBN 978-3941013-73-5 .

Web links

Commons : 2nd Army (Hungary)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Labor Service on degob.org , accessed on 29 November of 2010.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Peter Gosztony. The Stalingrad of Hungarians In: The Time. Vol. 48, No. 2, 1993, ISSN  0044-2070 , p. 62.
  3. ^ Gabor Aron Study Group. Hungary in the Mirror of the Western World 1938-1958 ( Memento of November 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) . Corvinus Electronic Library, Budapest 1998. Retrieved June 14, 2009.
  4. ↑ Anthony Tihamer Komjáthy: A Thousand Years of the Hungarian Art of War. ( Memento of February 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Rakoczi Foundation, Toronto 1982, ISBN 0-8191-6524-7 , pp. 144-45.
  5. ^ Esther Vécsey: Somewhere in Russia Budapest Sun, February 20, 2003. Retrieved June 14, 2009.
  6. ↑ http://www.budapestsun.com/news/56159
  7. ^ Jason Long: The Hungarian 2nd Army in Russia. Structure and Equipment, Summer 1942 ( Memento March 18, 2011 on the Internet Archive ) on orbat.com , accessed November 29, 2010.