Hungarian Second Army
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The Hungarian Second Army was a Hungarian field army which saw action during World War II. The Hungarian Second Army took a peripheral part in the Battle of Stalingrad and at the Battle of Debrecen.
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[edit] Commanders
The Hungarian Second Army had four commanders from 1 March 1940 to 13 November 1944. The army's commanders were as follows:
- Lieutenant General Gusztáv Vitéz Jány - From 1 March 1940 to 5 August 1943 (awarded German Knight's Cross on 31 March 1943)
- Lieutenant General Géza Lakatos - From 5 August 1943 to 1 April 1944 (awarded German Knight's Cross on 24 May 1944)
- Lieutenant General Lajos Veres von Dalnoki - From 1 April 1944 to 16 October 1944
- Lieutenant General Jenő Major - From 16 October 1944 to 13 November 1944
[edit] Occupation Duties
Hungary was an Axis state at the beginning of the European conflict. Hungary's leader was Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy.
The small Hungarian Army had a peacetime strength of only 80,000 men. Organizationally, the nation was divided into seven Corps commands. Each Army Corps consisted of three infantry divisions with three infantry regiments and an artillery regiment in each of these divisions. Each Army Corps also included two cavalry brigades, two motorized infantry brigades, an anti-aircraft battery, a signals company, and a cavalry reconnaissance troop. [1]
On 11 March 1940, the Hungarian Army was expanded to three Field Armies. Each Field Army had three Corps. All three of these Field Armies were to ultimately see action against the Red Army before the end of the war.
Hungary did not immediately participate in the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). Adolf Hitler did not directly ask for, nor necessarily want Hungarian assistance at that time. Most of the Hungarian forces, including the three Field Armies, were initially relegated to duties within the newly enlarged Hungarian state. Hungary regained substantial portions of its former territories that were ceded following the loss of World War I and the Treaty of Trianon.
At the end of June in 1941, Hungary did join Germany in the war against the Soviet Union. This was after the bombing of Košice (Kassa), allegedly by the Romanian Air Force according to Soviet sources.
At first, only Hungary's Karpat Group with its Gyorshadtest (Fast Moving Army Corps) was sent to the Eastern Front.
[edit] Stalingrad
[edit] Voronezh
Prior to the Battle of Stalingrad, the Hungarian Second Army was involved in the Battle of Voronezh as part of Army Group South. This battle was fought in and around the city of Voronezh on the Don River in June and July 1942. The Hungarian troops supported the German 4th Panzer Army as it fought against the forces of the defending Soviet Voronezh Front. While technically an Axis victory, the battle delayed the arrival of the 4th Panzer Army in the Caucasus at a crucial time.
[edit] The Don River, Operation Saturn, and disaster
The Hungarian Second Army is probably the best known of Hungary's World War II-era armies because of the part it played in the Battle of Stalingrad. By the time that the Second Army was sent to Russia, the rank-and-file of the Hungarian Army had undergone only eight weeks of training.[citation needed] The only tactical experience for many of these soldiers were the manoeuvers held just prior to the departure for the front. This had a poor effect on the morale of the troops in the Hungarian Second Army.
In 1942, the Hungarian Second Army was given the task of protecting the 8th Italian Army's's northern flank between the Novaya Pokrovka on the Don river to Rossosh.[2] This allowed the 6th Army to continue to attack Soviet General Vasily Chuikov's 62nd Army defending Stalingrad.
The Hungarian Second Army, along with almost all of the other the armies protecting the 6th Army's flanks, was annihilated when the Soviets launched Operation Uranus, Operation Saturn, and Operation Little Saturn.
On 19 November 1942, the Soviets launched Operation Uranus. As part of this operation, two Soviet pincers drove through the Romanian Third Army to the north of Stalingrad and through the Romanian Fourth Army to the south and cut off the 6th Army.
On 12 December 1942, as a counter move, the Germans launched Operation Winter Storm. The Germans launched Operation Winter Storm to relieve the 6th Army by attacking through the pincers of the Soviet armies participating in Operation Uranus.
On 16 December 1942, the Soviets counter-attacked the Army Group B's Operation Wintergewitter offensive, and launched Operation Little Saturn. The Soviet penetrated between the Italian Eighth Army and the Hungarian Second Army at the junction held by the Italian Alpine Army Corps and threatened the flank of the German forces attempting to relieve the 6th Army by cutting them off at the Donets river.
On 13 January 1943, the Red Army launched the Voronezh-Kharkov Strategic Offensive Operation (13 January 1943 - 3 March 1943) by the Bryansk, Voronezh, and Southwestern Fronts which destroyed the Hungarian Second Army near Svoboda on the Don. An attack on the German 2nd Army further north threatened to bring about an encirclement of that Army as well. However the German 2nd Army managed to withdraw, and was forced to retreat. By 5 February 1943, the troops of the Voronezh Front were approaching Kharkov.
With the success of the Voronezh-Kharkov Strategic Offensive Operation, approximately 120,000 Hungarian Army's troops were killed, wounded, or captured. The Hungarian Second Army, like most of the other Axis armies of the Army Group B, ceased to represent a meaningful fighting force. The 6th Army encircled in Stalingrad, had surrendered on 2 February 1943.
The remnants of the Hungarian Second Army returned to Hungary on 24 May 1943.
[edit] Order of Battle 1942
In 1942, Colonel-General Gusztav Jany commanded the Hungarian Second Army during the Stalingrad disaster. The order of battle was:
Second Army
- IIIrd Field Corps
- 6th Light Field Division
- 7th Light Field Division
- 9th Light Field Division
- IVth Field Corps
- 10th Light Field Division
- 12th Light Field Division
- 16th Light Field Division
- VIIth Field Corps
- 19th Light Field Division
- 20th Light Field Division
- 23rd Light Field Division
- 1st Armored Field Division
Most of the field divisions sent to the Eastern Front as part of the Second Army in 1942 were light field divisions. Hungarian field infantry divisions typically had three infantry regiments. By comparison, "light" divisions typically had two regiments.
In addition to the three infantry Corps, the Hungarian Second Army included the 1st Armored Field Division. Most of the armor in this division was included in the 30th Tank Regiment. At the time of the Battle for Stalingrad, the primary battle tank in this unit was the Czechoslovakian Panzer 38(t). These were augmented by Hungarian Toldi tanks for scouting duties, Hungarian Nimrod armoured self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, and Hungarian Csaba armored cars. The tank regiment also had about ten German Panzer IV/F2 tanks and a few German Panzer III tanks in its heavy tank battalion. Unfortunately there were far too few of these better German tanks to make much of a difference.
[edit] Attached to Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico
[edit] Hungary becomes a battlefield
On 19 March 1944, as Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy surrounded himself with anti-fascists and as relations between Hungary and Germany became less and less cordial, and Hitler used German forces to ensure Hungary's continued participation in the war by launching Operation Margarethe. The German dictator arranged to keep Horthy busy by conducting negotiations while Hungary was quietly and efficiently overrun by German ground forces in a quick and bloodless invasion.
Soon all of Hungary was to become a battlefield.
By mid August 1944, German Colonel-General (Generaloberst) Johannes Friessner's Army Group South was on the brink of collapse. To the north, the Soviet Operation Bagration was completing the destruction of Army Group Centre. To the south, Germany's former ally, Romania, declared war on Germany on 25 August 1944 as a result of the Yassi-Kishinev Strategic Offensive Operation (20 August 1944 - 29 August 1944).
Later another of Germany's former allies, Bulgaria, declared war on Germany on 8 September 1944 following the Soviet East Carpathian Strategic Offensive Operation (8 September 1944 - 28 September 1944) as the Soviet forces crossed the Hungarian border. The subsequent Budapest Strategic Offensive Operation (29 October 1944 - 13 February 1945) by the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts far into Hungary destroyed any semblance of an organised German defensive line. By this time, Fyodor Tolbukhin's 3rd Ukrainian Front, aided by the 2nd Ukrainian Front commanded by Marshal Rodion Malinovsky had annihilated 13 Axis divisions, capturing over 100,000 prisoners.
[edit] Wartime Mobilization
On 30 August, Hungary mobilized the Hungarian Second Army (for the second time) and the Hungarian Third Army. Both armies were primarily composed of weak, undermanned, and under equipped reserve divisions.
General of Artillery Maximilian Fretter-Pico's recently re-formed 6th Army represented the nucleus of what remained of Friessner's force. By October 1944, seeing that his Hungarian allies were suffering from low morale, Friessner attached the recently re-formed Hungarian Second Army under the command of Lieutenant-General Lajos Veress von Dalnoki to Fretter-Pico's army. The combination of German and Hungarian armies was designated Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico.
The actions of Bulgaria and Romania had opened up a 650 kilometer gap in Friessner's Army Group South. As Friessner desperately struggled to reform a defensive line, news filtered through to Berlin that the Hungarian leader, Admiral Miklós Horthy was preparing to sign a separate peace with the Soviet Union. If this happened, the entire front of Army Group South Ukraine would collapse.
In August, Horthy did replace Prime Minister Döme Sztójay with the anti-Fascist General Géza Lakatos. Under the Lakatos regime, acting Interior Minister Béla Horváth ordered Hungarian gendarmes to protect any Hungarian citizen from being deported.
On 15 October 1944, Horthy announced that Hungary had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union. Most Hungarian army units ignored Horthy's orders. The Germans reacted swiftly with Operation Panzerfaust. Commando leader Otto Skorzeny was sent to Hungary, and in another of his daring "snatch" operations, Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy's son Miklós Jr. The Germans insisted that Horthy abrogate the armistice, depose the Lakatos government, and name the leader of the Arrow Cross Party, Ferenc Szálasi, as Prime Minister. Instead, Horthy agreed to abdicate. Szálasi was able take power in Hungary with Germany's backing.
[edit] Success at the Battle of Debrecen and the end
In late 1944, a re-formed Hungarian Second Army enjoyed a modest level of combat success as an integral part of German General Maximilian Fretter-Pico's Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico.
From 16 September 1944 to 24 October 1944, during the Battle of Debrecen, Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico managed to achieve a major success on a confusingly fluid battlefield. This operation was particularly confusing due to it being an encounter engagement by large forces owing to the Soviet Debrecen Offensive Operation. While avoiding encirclement itself, Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico managed to encircle and destroy three Soviet tank corps of Mobile Group Pliyev (under the command of Issa Pliyev). This defeat of the Soviet mobile group was especially pleasing to Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico's Hungarian contingent. Earlier, in the same battle, Mobile Group Pliyev had easily sliced through the untested Hungarian Third Army. However even this short-lived success on the battlefield ultimately proved too costly to the Hungarians. Unable to replace the lost equipment and personnel in the Battle of Debrecen, the Hungarian Second Army was disbanded on 1 December 1944. The remaining units of the Second Army were transferred to the Third Army.
[edit] Order of Battle - Hungary - 1944
While the Hungarian Second Army was the primary Hungarian unit in Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico, it was not the only Hungarian unit in the Army Group. Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico also included the Hungarian VIIth Field Corps.
Hungarian units in Armeegruppe Fretter-Pico
- VIIth Field Corps (Hungarian)
- 8th Reserve Field Division
- 12th Reserve Field Division
- Hungarian Second Army
- 9th Light Field Division
- IInd Field Corps (Hungarian)
- 25th Light Field Division
- 2nd Armored Field Division
- Group Finita
- 7th Replacement Field Division
- 1st Replacement Mountain Brigade
- 2nd Replacement Mountain Brigade
In 1944, the main battle tank of the 2nd Armored Field Division was the Hungarian Turan medium tank. The Turan tank represented a limited improvement over the Czech Panzer 38(t) and the Hungarian Toldi tanks used by the 1st Armored Field Division in 1942. However, the Turan I tank (with a 40mm gun) and the Turan II tank (with a short 75mm gun) were still no match for a standard Soviet T-34 tank, and, compared to the T-34/76, the Soviets had many much improved T-34/85 tanks by 1944. Unfortunately manufacture of the potentially lethal Turan III tank (with a long 75mm gun) never developed beyond the prototype stage. Doubly unfortunate for the Hungarians, the few better German Panzer IV tanks, Panzer III tanks, and Sturmgeschütz III assault guns were never made available to the them in numbers that would make a difference.
[edit] See also
- Hungary
- History of Hungary
- Hungary during the Second World War
- Military of Hungary - 1940/45
- Battle of Voronezh - 1942
- Battle of Stalingrad - 1942/43
- Battle of Debrecen - 1944
- Eastern Front (World War II)
- Hungarian First Army
- Hungarian Third Army
- Gyorshadtest
- Szent László Infantry Division
[edit] References
- ^ Page 207, The Armed Forces of World War II", Andrew Mollo, ISBN 0-517-54478-4
- ^ p.199, Haupt, Army Group South
[edit] External links
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