The end of the Slovak–Hungarian War

On 31 March 1939 the last shots of the “Little War” – as Slovaks and Hungarians called the brief conflict that had begun on 23 March – fell silent on the eastern edge of Slovakia. On that day the situation calmed down along the new demarcation line, some ten to twenty kilometres west of the old border with Carpathian Ruthenia, and Berlin gave the Slovaks to understand that they should not expect to recover the strip of land they had lost. The real fighting, however, had lasted only two days. The Slovak command issued its ceasefire order as early as the evening of 24 March, after which an uneasy calm prevailed for a week, broken by exchanges of fire between outposts, the shelling of villages and patrol raids. The date of 31 March, adopted by most studies, therefore marks neither a battle nor the signing of an armistice, but the end of this uncertain period.

Two days of fighting

Hungary attacked at dawn on 23 March, without a declaration of war, from recently occupied Carpatho-Ukraine. It took advantage of a moment when the army of the new Slovak State practically did not exist: Czech soldiers and officers had just left for the Protectorate, and Slovaks serving in Bohemia had not yet returned. By evening Hungarian troops had advanced 10–20 kilometres into the country, taken Sobrance and reached the outskirts of Stakčín. The Slovaks hastily assembled three groups and on 24 March counter-attacked from around Michalovce. They drove the Hungarians out of several villages, but a night attack on a fortified line along the Okna river collapsed under anti-tank artillery fire, and some of the Slovak infantry fled in panic. On the same day Hungarian bombers attacked the airfield at Spišská Nová Ves, the main base of the Slovak air force, killing 12 or 13 people, among them civilians. Flying obsolete Avia B-534 and Letov biplanes, the Slovak pilots lost more than a dozen aircraft in two days.

A ceasefire that did not take hold at once

The outcome of the war was decided by Germany’s attitude. Slovakia had been under the Reich’s formal protection for a few days: on 23 March, a few hours after the Hungarian attack, Joachim von Ribbentrop signed in Berlin the treaty of protection in which Germany guaranteed Slovakia’s independence and territorial integrity. Hitler, however, had no intention of defending Slovak borders against his Hungarian ally. As early as 18 March Berlin had agreed to a Hungarian “correction” of the border in the Uzh valley and told Bratislava not to resist. When it turned out that the Slovaks were defending themselves and the “correction” was turning into a war, the Germans called on both sides to stop fighting. Prime Minister Jozef Tiso asked for German weapons; in reply he was told that the Wehrmacht could itself enter eastern Slovakia, which he refused.

On the evening of 24 March the Minister of Defence, Ferdinand Čatloš, at the Hungarians’ request and with the government’s authorisation, ordered operations to cease and positions to be held. On the morning of 25 March reinforcements, tanks and artillery reached Michalovce, and the Slovak commander in that sector was planning a new attack, but the order ruled it out. On 25 March the government of Pál Teleki declared that it was ready to negotiate; according to Czech studies, the ceasefire took full effect two days after it was announced. Throughout this time Slovakia kept moving more units to the east, and the Hlinka Guard mobilised tens of thousands of men. Some guardsmen slipped out of the army’s control, provoked incidents on the demarcation line and committed excesses against Czechs, Jews and political opponents.

The front line did not change again, but there was still shooting along the border. On 27 March the victims of the air raid were buried in Spišská Nová Ves, and the funeral turned into an anti-Hungarian demonstration. On the same day negotiations began in Budapest. The Hungarian delegation regarded the line it had occupied as the minimum, refused to discuss it and rejected a Slovak proposal for an exchange of territory. The Slovaks appealed to Berlin, invoking the treaty of protection. The reply, which came on 31 March, was unequivocal: Germany advised Bratislava not to insist on the inviolability of the border. At about the same time the last skirmishes died down. The Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute (ÚPN) does record isolated clashes as late as April, but these were border incidents rather than military operations.

The toll

The losses were small compared with what was to come a few months later, but painful for a young state. The Slovaks listed by name 22 soldiers killed; together with civilians, the most frequently cited figures give 58 dead, although some Slovak studies give lower numbers. The Hungarians took 360 Slovak and 311 Czech soldiers prisoner. Hungary first reported 8 killed and 30 wounded, later 23 killed and 55 wounded, though the second figure may have included losses from the occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine. The Hungarian air force lost one fighter, according to some sources shot down by its own artillery.

Both sides claimed victory. The Hungarians had pushed the border away from Uzhhorod and secured the railway running along the Uzh valley towards Poland, and the Regent, Miklós Horthy, could boast of a further step in the revision of Trianon. The Slovaks considered that their resistance had stopped the Hungarians from seizing the whole of eastern Slovakia – what Budapest had spoken of as the “large solution”. The war accelerated the building of the Slovak army and strengthened Slovak national identity, but it also poisoned relations between the two neighbours for years.

A lesson in German protection

On the same day, 31 March, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced in the House of Commons the British guarantee to Poland. The coincidence of dates is accidental but telling. After the seizure of Prague Britain had understood that Hitler did not keep his agreements and had begun to build a front of resistance. At the same time Slovakia learned what the Reich’s protection was worth: the German guarantee had not protected it from Germany’s ally, and Berlin itself had given Hungary its consent to the attack. Tiso’s state remained wholly dependent on Germany, and its western part, from the Little Carpathians to the Javorníky, was occupied by the German protective zone.

What followed

On 4 April 1939 in Budapest Slovakia signed a border agreement in which it accepted the loss of the strip of land around Sobrance and Stakčín, inhabited mainly by Slovaks and Ruthenians. Poland, which had just gained its long-desired border with Hungary, favoured Budapest in this dispute. Slovakia, for its part, became for Germany a forward base for attacking Poland from the south. In September 1939 three Slovak divisions under Čatloš’s command entered Polish Podhale and the Beskids alongside the Wehrmacht, and as a reward Slovakia recovered the scraps of land that had been attached to Poland in 1920, 1924 and 1938. Hungary, by contrast, refused to let German troops pass through its territory, and the common Polish–Hungarian border became an escape route for tens of thousands of Poles. In 1940 both states joined the Tripartite Pact, and in 1941, still hostile to each other, they marched with Germany against the USSR. The lands taken from Slovakia in March 1939 remained Hungarian until the autumn of 1944, when the Red Army occupied them, and after the war they returned to Czechoslovakia.