Battle of Debrecen

The Battle of Debrecen (in Soviet and Russian historiography the Debrecen operation; in Hungarian debreceni páncéloscsata or alföldi páncéloscsata) was a Red Army offensive in eastern Hungary and northern Transylvania in October 1944. From 6 to 29 October the 2nd Ukrainian Front of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, supported by two Romanian armies, fought on the Great Hungarian Plain against the German-Hungarian Army Group South of General Johannes Frießner. It was one of the largest tank battles of the last year of the war on the Eastern Front, and the largest ever fought on Hungarian soil.

The offensive brought the Red Army large territorial gains. It took Oradea, Debrecen – one of the largest cities of Hungary at the time and the main centre of the east of the country – and Szeged, reached the Tisza and wrested from the Germans and Hungarians almost the entire Tiszántúl, the lands east of that river. It did not, however, achieve its main aim: the encirclement of the German and Hungarian forces withdrawing from Transylvania. At Nyíregyháza German panzer divisions cut off the spearhead of the front, the cavalry-mechanised group of General Issa Pliyev, which broke out of the encirclement only by abandoning most of its tanks and heavy equipment. In the middle of the battle, on 15 October, the regent Miklós Horthy announced that Hungary was seeking an armistice; that same day the Germans seized control of Budapest and handed power to the Arrow Cross of Ferenc Szálasi. Hungary remained in the war on the side of the Third Reich to the end.

Name and dates

Soviet and Russian military historiography calls this fighting the Debrecen offensive operation of the 2nd Ukrainian Front and dates it to 6–29 October 1944; some accounts use the same dates. 6 October was the day of the artillery preparation and the attack by the front’s main forces from the Oradea and Arad areas; on 28 October the Stavka ordered Malinovsky to prepare an offensive against Budapest, which began the following day – which is why 29 October is regarded as the end of the Debrecen operation and the start of the Budapest operation. The Debrecen operation was part of a wider Soviet effort in and in front of the Carpathians: to the north, the 4th Ukrainian Front had been fighting its way through the mountains since September (in the East Carpathian operation), and Malinovsky was to help it by striking into the rear of the German and Hungarian troops defending the passes.

Hungarian and German literature describes the battle differently: as the “tank battle on the Plain” (alföldi páncéloscsata), centred on the struggle within the Oradea – Debrecen – Nyíregyháza triangle. Hungarian authors usually end it on 31 October, when the Germans gave up their last bridgeheads on the east bank of the Tisza at Polgár and Tiszalök. Individual dates differ by a day from source to source: Nyíregyháza passed into Soviet hands on 21 or 22 October (Soviet studies give both dates), and was retaken by the Germans on the night of 26–27 October.

The first Soviet units had crossed Hungary’s border as fixed by the Treaty of Trianon as early as the end of September – on 23 September near Battonya and on 26 September near Makó. Fighting in northern Transylvania, which Hungary had received in 1940 under the Second Vienna Award, had been going on since the beginning of September. The Debrecen operation was, however, the Red Army’s first great battle on Hungary’s core territory.

Background

At the end of August 1944 the southern wing of the German Eastern Front ceased to exist. In the Jassy–Kishinev offensive the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts encircled and destroyed the main forces of the German Sixth Army, and the coup of 23 August in Bucharest, carried out by King Michael I, took Romania out of its alliance with the Third Reich. A few days later the Red Army entered Bucharest, and in September Bulgaria dropped out of the war. Romania declared war on Germany and Hungary, and its armies – above all the First Army of General Vasile Atanasiu and the Fourth Army of General Gheorghe Avramescu – henceforth fought under Soviet command. For the Romanians the aim of the war became the recovery of northern Transylvania, lost to Hungary in 1940.

Hungary was by then Germany’s last European ally still fielding large armies. Since the German occupation of 19 March 1944 the country had been under Berlin’s tight control; in the spring and summer about 437,000 Jews were deported from the provinces to Auschwitz-Birkenau before Horthy halted the deportations at the beginning of July. The regent was looking for a way out of the war: at the end of August he appointed a government under General Géza Lakatos, and in the last days of September he sent a secret delegation across the front line, which arrived in Moscow on 1 October to negotiate an armistice. The Germans, well informed about these efforts, were preparing to seize power in Budapest. At the front, the Hungarians had attempted an offensive in southern Transylvania as late as September, but the attack stalled at Turda, and the Red Army entered Hungarian territory within its 1920 borders.

On the German side, Army Group South Ukraine, re-formed after the disaster in Romania, was renamed Army Group South on 24 September. Frießner had two groupings at his disposal. In the north, in Transylvania and in front of the Eastern Carpathians, the Eighth Army of General Otto Wöhler held the line together with the Hungarian Second Army of General Lajos Veress. 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 core of the armoured forces was the III Panzer Corps of General Hermann Breith with the 1st and 23rd Panzer Divisions; in reserve, near Mezőkövesd, the Feldherrnhalle Panzer Division was being brought back up to strength. Many Hungarian divisions were under-equipped and short of modern anti-tank weapons, and after Romania changed sides the Germans doubted their staying power.

The salient in Transylvania threatened to become a trap. Frießner asked for permission to shorten the line, but Adolf Hitler refused. Instead he ordered him to attack from the Oradea area, smash the Soviet 27th Army and 6th Guards Tank Army and regain the passes of the Southern Carpathians, promising reinforcements. The German attack, however, never got going in time.

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; at the same time its left wing was supporting the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front advancing on Belgrade. The Soviet troops were worn out by the marches of August and September, and supply was hampered by, among other things, the different railway gauge in Romania. The front 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 – combinations of cavalry corps with a tank or mechanised corps, designed for deep raids. According to Western studies, Pliyev’s group (the 4th and 6th Guards Cavalry Corps and the 7th Mechanised Corps) had about 390 tanks and self-propelled guns, and the group of General Sergei Gorshkov (the 5th Guards Cavalry Corps and the 23rd Tank Corps) about 150. According to Soviet figures, the front’s superiority over the enemy was roughly three to one in men, tanks and aircraft, and just under two to one in artillery.

The Stavka’s plan called for the main blow to be struck in the centre, from south of Oradea and north-west of Arad, towards Debrecen, by 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 push on to Satu Mare and Carei, while the 40th and 7th Guards Armies were to advance deeper into Transylvania. On the left, the 46th Army was to clear the enemy from the Banat east of the Tisza and seize bridgeheads on the west bank of the river near Szeged. Once Debrecen had fallen, the front was to wheel north towards Nyíregyháza and Chop and cut off the line of retreat of the Eighth Army and the Hungarian Second Army. As early as 2 and 3 October the 6th Guards Tank Army, weakened by earlier fighting, tried to take Oradea off the march, but was beaten back.

The course of the battle: the breakthrough and the fighting for Oradea (6–14 October)

The attack began at dawn on 6 October after a short but powerful artillery preparation and air strikes. Its weight fell on the sector between Nagyszalonta (today Salonta in Romania) and Szeged, held by divisions of the Hungarian Third Army. On the very first day the 53rd Army and Pliyev’s group tore open the defences there on a frontage of about 100 kilometres; according to English-language studies, the head of the advance covered almost 60 kilometres in twenty-four hours. General Heszlényi had to pull his divisions back towards the Tisza, and Hungarian rearguards and German anti-aircraft artillery could do no more than delay the Soviet crossings of the Körös. Within three days Pliyev’s cavalry and tanks had advanced up to 100 kilometres and reached the area of Karcag, and on 8 October their leading elements reached the Tisza.

The fighting in the northern sector went quite differently. The 6th Guards Tank Army, reinforced with rifle corps, attacked Oradea and ran into Breith’s panzer divisions. On the first day it advanced, according to Western studies, only about 10 kilometres, and over the following days the Germans and Hungarians beat off its repeated attempts to outflank the city; according to Hungarian studies, between 9 and 11 October Soviet tanks attacked Komádi, among other places, several times without success. Fretter-Pico reacted quickly: he put the 76th Infantry Division into the line at Oradea to free the 23rd Panzer Division for operations in the south, and sent the Feldherrnhalle division to cover the Tisza crossings.

Malinovsky then shifted the direction of his main effort. Pliyev’s group turned north-east and advanced along the road from Szolnok to Debrecen. At Hajdúszoboszló its leading corps ran into units of the 23rd Panzer Division; with the support of the 5th Air Army the town was taken on 9 October, and the Germans fell back towards Debrecen and dug in on its south-eastern approaches. On 11 October the 4th Guards Cavalry Corps reached the edge of Debrecen, but it was cut off from the rest of the force. Pliyev’s main forces meanwhile struck Oradea from the north-west, in the rear of its defenders. On 12 October the city was taken; the German and Hungarian units withdrew northwards. The American historian Earl F. Ziemke called this fighting “one of the wildest tank battles of the war”. It cost both sides a great deal of equipment: according to Western studies, by 12 October Pliyev’s group alone had lost about 200 tanks and other armoured vehicles.

On the wings the front made faster progress. On 11 October the 46th Army took Szeged, and its spearheads, with the 18th Tank Corps, seized bridgeheads on the west bank of the Tisza and for a short time threatened Kecskemét, less than 100 kilometres from Budapest. Malinovsky, however, had to shift some of these forces to the east bank to support the drive on Debrecen, and the remaining units fell back to the river under pressure from Hungarian cavalry and German anti-aircraft artillery. The Hungarian 1st Armoured Division and 23rd Infantry Division counter-attacked the bridgehead at Mindszent so hard that the Romanian VII Corps was sent to hold it. That same day, 11 October, the 27th Army and the Romanian Fourth Army took Cluj, the capital of northern Transylvania, and Wöhler’s Eighth Army began to withdraw westwards. By 14 October the front at Oradea had been pushed back some ten to twenty kilometres, while to the north, in the Carpathians, the attacks of the 4th Ukrainian Front intensified.

The course of the battle: the coup in Budapest and the capture of Debrecen (15–20 October)

In mid-October the battle became entangled with the political crisis in Budapest. On 11 October the Hungarian envoys in Moscow accepted preliminary armistice terms, and at noon on 15 October Budapest radio broadcast Horthy’s proclamation: the regent announced that Hungary was asking the enemy for an armistice. The orders to the army, however, were unclear and issued too late, and most army commanders knew nothing of the preparations. The Germans acted according to a ready-made plan. In the morning, units directed by Otto Skorzeny abducted the regent’s son, Miklós Horthy Jr; in Operation Panzerfaust they occupied Castle Hill, and the Arrow Cross, with German help, took over the radio and key government offices. On 16 October Horthy, under pressure and fearing for his son’s life, revoked the proclamation, abdicated and appointed Szálasi prime minister; he was then taken to Germany.

At the front the coup had immediate consequences. General Veress, commander of the Second Army, whom Horthy had authorised to act in his name, was arrested; the commander of the Hungarian First Army in the Carpathians, General Béla Miklós, went over to the Soviets on 16 October, but his appeal to the soldiers went largely unheeded. The Hungarian units fought on under German command. For the Germans, securing Budapest also had a military dimension: according to Hungarian studies, only once it had succeeded could they send to the front the forces held around the capital in case of a coup – the 24th Panzer Division and the 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion with its Tiger II tanks, joined by the 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division.

Around Debrecen the fighting continued without a pause. On 13 and 14 October heavy engagements were fought between the Berettyó and the Sebes-Körös rivers, and the Soviet advance on the city made slow progress. The 6th Guards Cavalry Corps, cut off for several days and supplied only by air, regained contact with the main forces only on 16 October. Near Derecske the 23rd Panzer Division clashed with Pliyev’s group. On 18 October Malinovsky, seeing how dispersed his forces had become, ordered Pliyev’s group, the arriving 6th Guards Tank Army and Gorshkov’s group to concentrate on taking Debrecen as quickly as possible.

On 19 October the German IV Panzer Corps, with the 24th Panzer Division and units brought up from around Budapest, attacked eastwards from the Szolnok area towards the III Panzer Corps fighting at Debrecen. The attack shattered the Romanian units holding the bridgeheads – the Romanian 4th Infantry Division, cut off from the Tisza, had been destroyed by 20 October – and reached Mezőtúr, Túrkeve and Kisújszállás. By then, however, it was too late to save Debrecen. On the morning of 20 October a concentrated Soviet assault took the city; the defenders withdrew to its northern approaches and used counter-attacks to delay any further advance. Romanian units also took part in the fighting for Debrecen, among them the volunteer Tudor Vladimirescu Division, formed in the USSR from Romanian prisoners of war; according to Romanian studies, it was among the first to enter the city, and at the request of Joseph Stalin it was later given the honorific “Debrecen”. By order of the Supreme Commander, the title “Debrecen” was also conferred on 24 Soviet units and formations.

The course of the battle: Nyíregyháza and the encirclement of Pliyev’s group (20–29 October)

After the capture of Debrecen, Pliyev’s group, to which Gorshkov’s corps had also been subordinated, set off northwards on 20 October. That day it advanced only 20–22 kilometres, but on 21–22 October it broke into Nyíregyháza, and its leading units reached the Tisza near Tokaj. For the Germans this was the most dangerous moment of the whole battle: the Soviet wedge had cut the lines of retreat of Wöhler’s Eighth Army and the Hungarian Second Army, which on Frießner’s orders were just then withdrawing from Transylvania and the Carpathian foreland towards the Tisza crossings.

The German command responded by striking both flanks of the Soviet wedge. From the south-west, from the Újfehértó area, the 23rd and 1st Panzer Divisions attacked, led by the Tigers of the 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion; from the east came the formations falling back from Transylvania – General Paul Klatt’s 3rd Mountain Division, the 15th Infantry Division and the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer. According to Soviet sources, the forces of three army corps and one panzer corps took part in the counter-blow. Around 23–24 October the German pincers closed at Nagykálló, where the 23rd Panzer Division linked up with units of the 3rd Mountain Division. Pliyev’s corps in and north of Nyíregyháza were cut off from their rear.

Attempts to break through to them from the south foundered on the defence of the 1st Panzer Division. Malinovsky then ordered Pliyev to leave weak covering forces in the town and break out of the encirclement with his main forces towards Nagykálló. After five days of heavy fighting the Soviet units forced their way south and rejoined the main forces of the front; on the night of 26–27 October the Germans retook Nyíregyháza, and on 27 October the last Soviet units left its surroundings. According to Western studies, Pliyev’s group came out of the pocket having destroyed or abandoned most of its tanks, guns and vehicles. The cavalry corps nevertheless remained fit for combat and, after being brought back up to strength, were fighting again on the Budapest axis by early November. Through the road left open via Nyíregyháza, Wöhler’s Eighth Army withdrew behind the Tisza; by 28 October it had escaped encirclement and taken up new positions beyond the river.

The brief Soviet occupation of Nyíregyháza, lasting only a few days, was remembered by its inhabitants above all for the violence against the civilian population, especially the mass rapes of women described by Hungarian historians and witnesses. German and Arrow Cross propaganda exploited these events, as it did events in East Prussia, to stiffen resistance.

At the same time fighting continued on the Tisza below Szolnok, where Romanian divisions had taken over the bridgeheads on the west bank from the Soviet troops. On 25 October three Hungarian divisions (the 1st Cavalry Division and the 1st and 20th Infantry Divisions) attacked the bridgehead of the Romanian 2nd Infantry Division, which withdrew behind the river; a renewed attack on 26–29 October against the bridgehead of the Romanian 19th Infantry Division at Alpár was repulsed. On the right wing of the front, the 40th, 27th and Romanian Fourth Armies spent the whole of October driving the enemy out of northern Transylvania: on 25 October Romanian and Soviet troops took Satu Mare and Carei, which in Romania was regarded as the liberation of the last Romanian lands – hence 25 October is celebrated there as Romanian Army Day. On the left wing, the 46th Army crossed the Yugoslav-Hungarian border, took Baja and Sombor and entered the land between the Tisza and the Danube. On 28 October the Stavka ordered Malinovsky to prepare an offensive against Budapest; on 29 October the 46th Army set off from the Kecskemét area towards the Hungarian capital.

Losses

Data on losses are incomplete and come mainly from Soviet sources. According to the study by Grigori Krivosheev’s team, based on documents in the Russian military archives, the 2nd Ukrainian Front lost 19,713 soldiers killed, died of wounds and missing and 64,297 wounded and sick in the Debrecen operation – about 84,000 men in all. The losses of the Romanian First and Fourth Armies are not included in these figures; in the bridgehead fighting on the Tisza alone the Romanians lost at least one infantry division. Western historians stress the particularly heavy losses of the Soviet mobile formations: Pliyev’s group lost most of its tanks in October, and the 6th Guards Tank Army suffered heavy losses in the fighting around Oradea.

According to Soviet figures, between 6 October and 6 November the enemy lost about 100,000 killed, while 42,160 German and Hungarian soldiers were taken prisoner; 1,038 tanks and self-propelled guns and 802 aircraft were destroyed or captured. These figures also cover the fighting of the first days of November and – like much Soviet data on enemy losses – are regarded by historians as inflated. No complete German or Hungarian loss returns exist for this battle; it is known that several Hungarian divisions, especially of the Third Army, were shattered in the first days of the offensive, and that the German panzer divisions, though they won the fight at Nyíregyháza, emerged from it badly weakened.

The civilian population of the Tiszántúl suffered severely. Towns and villages in the path of the fighting, above all Debrecen, Nyíregyháza and their surroundings, were devastated by the artillery and aircraft of both sides, and behind the Soviet front there was looting and violence against the inhabitants. In the autumn and winter of 1944 thousands of civilians, including ethnic Germans, began to be deported from the areas of Hungary occupied by the Red Army to labour camps in the USSR.

Significance

The Debrecen operation moved the front 130–275 kilometres to the west and north-west. The Red Army and the Romanian forces occupied almost all of Hungary east of the Tisza – according to Soviet calculations, about 29 per cent of the country’s territory with a quarter of its population – and the whole of northern Transylvania. The Germans lost any hope of holding the line of the Carpathians and the Transylvanian Alps through the winter, and their troops in the Eastern Carpathians had to withdraw, which opened the way into Carpathian Ruthenia for the 4th Ukrainian Front. The 2nd Ukrainian Front now stood on the middle Tisza and between the Tisza and the Danube, about 100 kilometres from Budapest.

The battle did not, however, deliver what the Soviet command had counted on: the Eighth Army and the Hungarian Second Army were not encircled and destroyed, and the Soviet mobile formations suffered heavy losses. Some Western historians regard the counter-offensive at Nyíregyháza as one of the last occasions on which the Wehrmacht defeated a full-strength Soviet operational grouping in the field. It was, however, a tactical victory that merely averted disaster and allowed the front to be rebuilt on the Tisza. Hungarian authors point out that the Red Army attempted here a rapid, “lightning” raid deep into the enemy’s dispositions, for which its cavalry and tank formations, overstretched and poorly supplied, were not yet fully prepared.

The battle was also of enormous political significance. The collapse of the front in eastern Hungary hastened Horthy’s decision to seek an armistice, and the bungled way in which he went about it gave the Germans a pretext for the coup that delivered the country into the hands of the Arrow Cross. Szálasi’s rule meant further war at the side of the Third Reich for Hungary and, for the Jews of Budapest, terror and, from November 1944, death marches towards the Austrian border.

The road to Budapest

On 29 October, the day after the Stavka’s order, the 46th Army set off from Kecskemét towards Budapest. The swift capture of the capital that Stalin demanded proved impossible: at the beginning of November Soviet troops reached the suburbs but were halted there. Only after further operations by the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts was the city encircled, on 26 December 1944; the siege of Budapest lasted until 13 February 1945 and was one of the bloodiest battles for a great city of the whole war.

Debrecen, taken on 20 October, meanwhile became the centre of a new Hungarian authority. On 21 December 1944 the Provisional National Assembly met there, and the following day the Provisional National Government of General Béla Miklós was formed; on 28 December it declared war on Germany, and on 20 January 1945 it signed an armistice in Moscow. In March 1945 the last great German offensive of the war, at Lake Balaton, collapsed, and in April the whole of Hungary came under Soviet control. The Battle of Debrecen thus opened the final chapter of the war in Hungary – a chapter that ended with the country’s devastation and its absorption into the Soviet sphere of influence.