This was the longest and most brutal war of the Second World War, Hitler ordered it to die, Stalin poured a lot of military supplies again, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in this war, what made this war so hard? How did the Soviets wrestle with the Germans?
The Battle of Budapest
This issue will take you to explore the beginning and end of the Budapest War, and the new audience friends remember to like and support it
With the victory of the defense of Stalingrad, the situation in the Soviet-German battlefield also changed, and the initiative gradually shifted to the hands of the Soviet army. And with the liberation of soviet territory, the front gradually began to shrink towards Germany and its co-states.
In 1944, the Soviet army, which had performed exceptionally well in the Sarabian War, completely shocked the Romanian leadership. In order to show sincerity, the terrified King of Romania would be strong with an iron fist in Romania
Marshal Antonescu
Arrest and surrender to the Soviets.
After the surrender of the Soviet army, the Romanian army, which joined the anti-fascist camp, was integrated into various parts of the Soviet army to assist the Soviet army in combat. Most of the Romanian officers and men who fell at the beginning of the war were like defeated roosters, hanging their heads, but when they knew that this time they were going to attack Hungary, everyone swept away the previous decadence and became extremely fanatical, especially those who had been persecuted by the Romanian fascists and released into the army by the Soviet army, and the fanaticism and courage they showed in the attack on the Hungarian capital shocked the Soviet and German troops who were the main combat troops.
In order to better illustrate the Battle of Budapest, let's first understand the wartime pattern at that time.
Across the danube, Budapest is the capital of Hungary, and Budapest, which sits on excellent terrain, is the gateway between Austria and Germany, and it is also an important position to be taken when raising troops to attack Germany. As a place of contention, Budapest has experienced fifteen siege wars of all sizes over the past nineteen hundred years, but none of them have almost razed Budapest to the ground like this battle.
In this war, the main troops involved in the offensive were the Ukrainian Second Front, the Ukrainian Third Front, and the newly reorganized Romanian and Bulgarian armies, in which the Soviet side had 110,000 troops, and tens of thousands of artillery pieces, as well as thousands of tanks and aircraft, coordinated the attack.
Marshal Malinovsky
Because of the significance of this war, in order to increase the probability of victory in this war, Stalin made the Soviet Union the most legendary
Appointed as lead manager.
In September 1944, seeing the overwhelming Soviet army and the Romanian army, which was already an old enemy, the Hungarian admiral Horthy was deeply unhappy, and at the end of September, he tried to find out Stalin's views on the surrender of Budapest, and in early October, he sent a delegation to the Soviet Union to sign an armistice.
However, Horthy's attempt to defect to the Soviet Union was soon informed by the Hungarian traitors of the German side, and Hitler, angry to learn that Horthy was about to defect, quickly ordered the German troops stationed in Hungary to "take over" the Horthy government's control of Budapest's main transportation hubs, and arrested Horti's only son and his right-hand man, General Logtsz Gorze, to blackmail him into stepping down and allowing Hitler's designated party to come to power. But even if Horti refuses to give in, it will not change the course of this brutal and bloody war.
In mid-October, Hungary was broken by the Ukrainian army and entered Hungary in one fell swoop, and on the 26th, the Soviet army under the hungarian capital Budapest began the longest battle of World War II with the German army. Looking at the duration of the various battles of World War II, no battle was as long and tragic as Budapest, and even the attack on Berlin, an important fascist base, took only 14 days, while Breslau, which lasted 82 days, and Königsberg, which took 77 days to take, their engagement scale was far less than the Budapest Campaign.
On October 29, 1944, the Soviet offensive went exceptionally smoothly, and in just 5 days, the Distance between the Soviets and Da Budapest was only 15 kilometers. However, the Germans, perceiving the dynamics of the Soviets, quickly mobilized a large number of troops to the Budapest area, and the hindered Soviets began a protracted war with the Germans.
However, because the terrain of Budapest was easy to defend and difficult to attack, the Soviet army still failed to achieve the purpose of dividing and crushing the German budapest jiyuan east of the city after more than ten days of fighting.
At the same time, when the University of Technology was carried out in Budapest, it was in the autumn, the material transportation that had been affected by the long lines of communication, under the continuous rainwater, the roads were even more muddy and difficult to walk, which also led to the difficulty of the logistics transport troops to deliver the tight ammunition materials to the front line in time, plus the troops had fought for more than three months before this, and the overall morale was relatively low, so after obtaining the consent of the large troops, the front army temporarily stopped the attack. After that, there were several successive attempts to wage war against the Germans from all sides, but the Soviet offensives were ineffective. Fortunately, the 2nd Ukrainian Front, seizing the opportunity in successive attacks, occupied the area between the Tisza and Danube rivers, and this operation completely cut off the German army trapped in Budapest and wanted to retreat northward.
On 20 November, with the help of the Romanian cavalry of the integrated unit, the Soviet First Guards Tank Division launched its first attack, which pried open a breakthrough in the German defense line against Hungary. The Romanian cavalry, whose hatred was full, frantically harvested their lives with their weapons while driving away 8,000 fleeing Hungarian soldiers.
At a time when the Soviets were about to attack the outskirts of Budapest, the Romanian infantry, in coordination with the follow-up sweeping work, cleared the Hungarian defenders on the outskirts, and these Hungarian temporary mobilization soldiers, who could be killed by the Soviet army in one impact, fought with the Romanians on the positions, as if they were in a brutal battle.
At the end of December, the fortress built by the German army on the outskirts of the city was crushed by the Soviet army with superior troops, and the German army with heavy casualties was far behind the Soviet army in both materials and numbers, relying on the advantage of firepower.
The Soviets quickly crushed the SS panzers, and the 4th SS Panzer Corps was one of the german best fighting units. It included two well-known World War II units, the Skeleton Division and the Viking Division, but within a dozen days of fierce fighting with the Soviets, the SS casualties reached 29,000.
Skeleton Division
Although the Budapest airfield was once controlled by the SS during its confrontation with the Soviets, even the most famous troops were unable to escape under the high-intensity fire of the Soviets, and the last hope of the German breakthrough was snuffed out.
However, Hitler, who was well aware of the importance of Budapest, in order to boost morale, Promised all the commanders of the troops "knighthood" and issued orders to stick to Budapest.
After a month of siege, most of the buildings of the historic old city were destroyed under the baptism of artillery fire, and the Germans were killed and wounded only a few tens of thousands, but in the face of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops, their probability of victory was almost zero.
On the 29th, seeing that the German army was getting weaker, the Soviet army sent a delegation to ask for negotiations with the Nazi stubborn, although the German army and Hungary agreed to this proposal, but just when the Soviet delegation entered the territory of the Nazi diehards, the German army shot them and killed them.
The recalcitrant Germans reduced the SS to pieces, allowing them to hide in the streets at night and use small artillery to carry out flexible attacks on the Soviets, but because the Soviet weapons were too bulky, when the weapons moved to the target position, the Germans had already fled, which gave the Nazi diehards the opportunity to take advantage of the opportunity to gain the upper hand in a short time.
In addition, shameless Hungarian Nazi diehards, in order to limit the Soviet army, used civilians as a shield when attacking the Soviet army at the window of the block, which made the Soviet army helpless.
But the Romanian soldiers did not have such worries, because they did not care at all about the lives of these civilians, and as long as they did not approach themselves, they would shoot immediately. After confirming their safety, they would stop to identify whether the person they had just shot was a civilian or an enemy.
At the same time, the Romanian army and the Hungarian diehards, who carried the bonus of national hatred, fought particularly fiercely in the house-by-house war, and they were originally enemies in every building and every room, and they fought a fierce war in every building and room, and beat Budapest into Stalingrad, which also shocked the Soviet and German troops who were fighting.
On 7 January 1945, although German reinforcements arrived in Budapest to attack the Soviets, the Germans were at the end of their rope, and although they repelled one of Marshal Tolbuschin's forces, it was only in vain. By this time the Hungarians had begun to defect to the Soviets and were engaged in battles against the Germans and Hungarian diehards.
On 17 January, exhausted, the Germans abandoned the struggling Pest district for a strategic shift. Relying on six tons of ammunition from German reinforcements, he carried out defensive operations with the rugged terrain of the Buda district that was easy to defend and difficult to attack. In order to shake off the Soviet pursuit, the Germans blew up 4 bridges on the Danube. Just as the Germans were preparing to destroy the last bridge, the Germans were at odds with Hungary and infighting arose, at which point the Soviets again sent emissaries to negotiate with the Germans, but were still killed by the stubborn resistance of the Germans.
On 30 January, the Germans in Budapest, who recognized their situation, sent a final telegram to Hitler that "all hope has been lost." ”
Five days later, Mount Adler was captured by soviet and Romanian troops and several 88 mm guns were captured. Even as Romania attacked the remaining enemy base areas with these 88 mm guns, it also seriously injured a large number of Hungarian civilians, resulting in the death of 10,000 enemy and innocent people in the attack. After the artillery attack, most of the Hungarian diehards had already chosen to surrender, and just as the Soviets sent emissaries to negotiate for the third time, the stubborn Germans once again killed them.
It was not until February 13, 1945, that the Soviets, who were bombarded by heavy fire, completely took Control of Budapest, and finally fewer than 700 Germans escaped from the encirclement.
Before the war was launched, Budapest was in Stalin's eyes a political spoil that could quickly elevate the position of the Soviet Union, which was doomed to budapest from the beginning. He once hinted to Churchill that the Soviets could still have a Christmas after taking Budapest. And when he negotiated with the United States and the Soviet Union three months later, at the Yalta Conference, his chips would be much bigger than they are now. So in this war, Stalin assigned Malinovsky a large number of troops, 750 tanks or self-propelled guns, 1100 aircraft, and asked him to break through Budapest in the shortest possible time, or even three days.
Yalta Conference
In this war, the Germans lost 115,000 people, while the Soviets lost 197,000 in Budapest, and about 5,000 people were killed in the street battles alone.
And because of the tragic casualties during the siege, but also let the Soviet army hate the citizens of Budapest, so after the Soviet army entered the city of Budapest, it began to rob them, beat, shoot and a series of other angry acts, during the war, 12,000 people died in the bombing, 25,000 people were starved to death, and more than 50,000 Budapest citizens were forced by the Soviet army to change into German uniforms and become "prisoners of war" sent to the Soviet Union to participate in the battle, and most of these citizens who were taken as "prisoners" died in foreign countries.
It has to be mentioned that this cruel and bloody Budapest War was the darkest part of the Second World War. Originally, this war was hoped to avoid the sacrifice of innocent people, but in this war, Stalin did not hesitate to attack early for political interests, which also plunged the war that could have been resolved quickly into a protracted tug-of-war.
From the perspective of the German army, Hitler, who was obsessed with turning the war around, hoped to take the opportunity of Budapest to let the German army reproduce the magic of Stalingrad and let the German army once again stand on the upper hand of World War II, and this way of not folding means is the most taboo in the art of war. His series of frantic orders increased the number of casualties among soldiers and civilians on both sides for no apparent reason.
But it is worth affirming that the victory in the Budapest War, which marked the arrival of the victory in the anti-fascist war, also made the situation clear. After this war, the Soviet army and its leaders were greatly encouraged, and the Soviet Union's voice in the Allied forces was greatly enhanced.