The Battle of Debrecen begins

At dawn on 6 October 1944, at 4.30 a.m., the troops of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front began their offensive into eastern Hungary. After a short, powerful artillery preparation and air strikes, General Issa Pliyev’s cavalry-mechanised group and the 53rd Army broke through the defences of the Hungarian Third Army south of Oradea and drove north, deep into the Great Hungarian Plain. Their objective was Debrecen, one of Hungary’s largest cities, and beyond it Nyíregyháza and the crossings over the Tisza. So began the operation, lasting until 29 October, that Soviet studies call the Debrecen operation and Hungarian ones the tank battle of the Hortobágy – counted among the largest armoured clashes on the Eastern Front in the autumn of 1944.

Some chronologies state under 5 October that “the Red Army enters Hungary”, and under 6 October that German and Soviet forces advanced against each other in eastern Hungary and the Battle of Debrecen began. The second entry is accurate. The first needs correcting: the Red Army had entered Hungarian territory several weeks earlier. As early as 26 August its units crossed the then Hungarian border at the Oituz Pass in the Eastern Carpathians, in northern Transylvania, which Hungary had received in 1940. It crossed the border laid down by the Treaty of Trianon – that is, into present-day Hungary – on 23 September near Battonya, and on 26 September drove Hungarian units out of Makó. By the beginning of October, therefore, fighting had already been going on for several days in Hungary proper, and what began on 6 October was not an invasion but a great, planned offensive.

The road through Romania

The road to Hungary was opened by the coup in Bucharest. When the fronts of Malinovsky and Tolbukhin struck at Jassy and Kishinev on 20 August 1944, the German Sixth Army was surrounded and destroyed within a few days (the Jassy–Kishinev offensive). On 23 August King Michael I had Marshal Antonescu arrested, Romania stopped fighting the Allies, and two days later declared war on Germany. The German front in Romania ceased to exist. The Red Army passed through Bucharest and the passes of the Southern Carpathians into Transylvania, and the Romanian armies, which until recently had fought on the Axis side, took their place alongside it.

For Hungary this was both a blow and a temptation. The government in Budapest, operating under German occupation since March 1944, sent the Second Army on an offensive in southern Transylvania at the beginning of September, hoping to seize the Carpathian passes before the Red Army reached them. The attack came to a halt after a few days; from 5 September to 8 October heavy fighting went on around Turda, south of Cluj. The newly formed Third Army fought in the second half of September around Arad and Oradea. At the same time the Regent, Miklós Horthy, was seeking a way out of the war: on 1 October a Hungarian delegation arrived secretly in Moscow to discuss an armistice.

The opposing forces

At the end of September Malinovsky’s front was some 800 kilometres long, curving from the Eastern Carpathians through Transylvania to the Banat and the Yugoslav border. It comprised the 7th Guards, 27th, 40th, 46th and 53rd Armies, the 6th Guards Tank Army of General Andrei Kravchenko, the 5th Air Army and two cavalry-mechanised groups. Pliyev’s group, made up of the 4th and 6th Guards Cavalry Corps and the 7th Mechanised Corps, had according to various studies some 390 tanks and self-propelled guns; the smaller group of General Sergei Gorshkov (the 5th Guards Cavalry Corps and 23rd Tank Corps) about 150–175. The Romanian First and Fourth Armies also fought under the front’s command, and a Romanian air corps was operationally subordinate to the 5th Air Army. According to Soviet figures, their superiority over the enemy in men and tanks was roughly three to one.

Facing them stood Army Group South of General Johannes Frießner – the name given from 24 September to the former Army Group South Ukraine, re-formed after the disaster in Romania. In the north, in Transylvania, the German Eighth Army was holding out together with the Hungarian Second Army. In the south, between Oradea and the Tisza, stood the army group of General Maximilian Fretter-Pico: the German Sixth Army, rebuilt for the second time, and the Hungarian Third Army of General József Heszlényi. The strongest German formation in the area was the III Panzer Corps (PL) of General Hermann Breith, with the 1st and 23rd Panzer Divisions. The Hungarian divisions were for the most part poorly equipped and had little modern anti-tank weaponry.

Both sides were planning to attack. Hitler rejected Frießner’s request to pull back the exposed front in Transylvania and ordered him to strike from the Oradea area, destroy the Soviet 27th Army and 6th Guards Tank Army and recover the passes of the Southern Carpathians. The Stavka, for its part, gave Malinovsky the task of destroying the enemy around Cluj, Oradea and Debrecen and then advancing on Nyíregyháza and Chop, into the rear of the German and Hungarian forces defending the Eastern Carpathians. This was meant to help the troops that had been struggling to fight their way through the Carpathians from the north since September: the 4th Ukrainian Front and the 1st Ukrainian Front’s 38th Army, alongside which the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps was fighting. On the same day, 6 October, Soviet and Czechoslovak units seized the Dukla Pass. The main blow was to come from the area south of Oradea and north-west of Arad: the 53rd Army, Pliyev’s group, the 6th Guards Tank Army and the Romanian First Army. On the right wing the 27th Army, with the Romanian Fourth Army and Gorshkov’s group, was to take Cluj and advance on Satu Mare and Carei, and on the left the 46th Army was to clear the enemy from the Banat and seize bridgeheads on the Tisza near Szeged.

The clash came before the Germans were ready for their own offensive. On 2 and 3 October the 6th Guards Tank Army, which according to Hungarian studies had only about 170 tanks and self-propelled guns at the time, tried to take Oradea off the march but was beaten back with heavy losses.

The breakthrough of 6 October

The offensive opened on a front nearly 800 kilometres long, but its weight fell on the sector between Nagyszalonta (today Salonta in Romania) and Szeged. There, on the very first day, Pliyev’s group and the 53rd Army tore open the Hungarian Third Army’s defences on a front of about 100 kilometres and to a depth of about 40 kilometres. General Heszlényi had to pull his divisions back behind the Tisza. According to English-language studies, the head of the southern grouping advanced nearly 60 kilometres in the first twenty-four hours. Retreating Hungarian units and German anti-aircraft artillery, whose 88 mm guns also proved effective against tanks, delayed the Soviet crossings of the Körös near Gyoma, Endrőd and Körösladány, but could not stop them. By 8 October Pliyev’s cavalry and tanks had covered 90–100 kilometres and reached the area of Karcag and Hajdúszoboszló, a few dozen kilometres from Debrecen.

In the north the fighting took a different course. The 6th Guards Tank Army, reinforced with rifle corps, attacked Oradea and ran into the 1st and 23rd Panzer Divisions of III Panzer Corps. By evening, according to Western studies, it had advanced only about 10 kilometres, and in the following days the Germans and Hungarians beat off further attempts to outflank them. Fretter-Pico reacted quickly: he put the 76th Infantry Division into the line at Oradea to free the 23rd Panzer Division for a counter-attack in the south, and sent the Feldherrnhalle Panzer Division, which was being brought up to strength at Mezőkövesd, to cover the crossings on the Tisza. On the left wing the 46th Army advanced through the Banat towards the Tisza and on 11 October took Szeged; its spearheads, together with the 18th Tank Corps, seized bridgeheads on the west bank of the river and for a short time threatened Kecskemét, less than 100 kilometres from Budapest.

After the first few days, then, the picture of the battle was ambiguous. Pliyev’s deep wedge had cut through the rear of the German–Hungarian forces in Transylvania, but its flanks were hanging in the air, and the 6th Guards Tank Army had failed to take Oradea, which was to have closed the Soviet pincers. This was exactly the kind of opportunity the German panzer divisions, rushed in from other sectors of the front, were waiting for.

What came next

As early as 10 October the German 1st Panzer Division, attacking from the north, linked up with the 13th Panzer Division near Püspökladány, cutting the 6th Guards Cavalry Corps off from its rear. Malinovsky had to bring the 18th Tank Corps back from the Tisza and shift part of Pliyev’s forces towards Oradea, which was taken from the north-west on 12 October. The day before, Soviet and Romanian troops had entered Cluj, and the Germans and Hungarians had begun to withdraw from northern Transylvania. Debrecen fell on 20 October. On 22 October Pliyev’s group, reinforced by Gorshkov’s corps, took Nyíregyháza and reached the Tisza, cutting the line of retreat of the German Eighth Army and the Hungarian First and Second Armies. A counter-attack by German panzer divisions from west and east, however, cut the group off south of the town; after five days of heavy fighting the Soviets abandoned Nyíregyháza on 27 October and broke through to their main forces. It was one of the last occasions on the Eastern Front when German forces won so clear a tactical success over a large Soviet grouping.

The operation ended on 29 October. According to Soviet figures, the Axis forces lost about 100,000 killed and more than 42,000 prisoners between 6 October and 6 November; German reports spoke of hundreds of Soviet tanks destroyed – 164 in the period 6–10 October alone. These figures cannot be verified and do not corroborate one another; what is certain is that the 2nd Ukrainian Front suffered heavy losses in armour and that its rapid thrust towards Budapest was delayed. Even so, the Red Army moved the front 130–275 kilometres to the west, took almost the whole of Hungary east of the Tisza as well as northern Transylvania, and on 29 October set off for Budapest.

Place in the war

The battle was fought in the shadow of the talks on which Hungary’s fate depended. The defeat of the Third Army in the first days of October convinced Horthy’s circle that there was no more time to lose: on 11 October the delegation in Moscow accepted the preliminary armistice terms, and on 15 October the Regent announced on the radio that Hungary was leaving the war. The Germans were ready for this. That same day they kidnapped the Regent’s son, forced Horthy to revoke his proclamation and abdicate, and handed power to the leader of the Arrow Cross, Ferenc Szálasi. Hungarian troops fought on alongside the Wehrmacht, and the German success at Nyíregyháza merely postponed what had been decided on the Hungarian Plain in October.

Debrecen soon became the political centre of the new Hungary: in December 1944 a Provisional National Assembly met there under Soviet supervision, appointed a provisional government and declared war on Germany. Meanwhile, at the end of December, the armies of Malinovsky and Tolbukhin closed the ring around Budapest. The siege of the capital lasted until February 1945, and the last fighting in Hungary ended in April. For Germany, Hungary remained important to the end as its last source of oil and as a shield for Austria; in 1945 Hitler even sent the 6th SS Panzer Army there. The October offensive from Oradea and Arad was the beginning of this six-month war of attrition, which cost the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides and of Hungarian civilians.