Ferenc Julier

Ferenc Julier was a career general staff officer of the Austro-Hungarian army whom fate placed, for a few weeks, at the head of the Red Army of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. After the resignation of Aurél Stromfeld in July 1919 he became that army’s chief of staff and prepared its last offensive: the thrust across the Tisza against the Romanians on 20 July, which collapsed after a few days and decided the outcome of the Hungarian–Romanian War and the fall of the republic. At the same time he was an opponent of the Communists and kept in touch with the counter-revolutionaries, so that some accused him of treason and others of serving too zealously. After the war he did not return to the army and became one of the finest Hungarian military writers of the interwar years. His life is less well documented than those of other commanders of the period. According to one account his wife burned most of his papers after his death, and there is no personnel file for him in the military archives.

Origins and army career

He was born on 10 October 1878 in Nagyvárad, today Oradea in Romania, the son of the innkeeper Vilmos Julier and Anna Tarsoly. He attended the Catholic gymnasium in his home town and then the Ludovika Academy in Budapest, which trained officers for the Hungarian Home Defence force (the Honvéd). There he formed friendships with officers who would later play an important role in the Hungarian army: Stromfeld, Jenő Tombor and Vilmos Rőder. In 1897 he graduated with distinction as an infantry cadet and began service in the 3rd Honvéd Infantry Regiment in Debrecen, where on 1 November 1898 he was promoted to second lieutenant.

After a course for senior Honvéd officers he was admitted in 1903 to the War College (Kriegsschule) in Vienna, which opened the way to the general staff. From 1905 he served on the staff, and in 1910 he became a captain of the general staff.

The First World War and the revolution

He began the war as a staff officer of the army group of General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin on the Eastern Front. In 1915–1916 he was chief of staff of the 11th Honvéd Cavalry Division. He then worked in the Ministry of Home Defence and, from 1917, in Vienna at the command responsible for replacements for the armed forces, where he worked with Tombor and Captain Gyula Gömbös, later prime minister. The end of the war found him in Budapest with the rank of lieutenant colonel of the general staff. From October 1918 he organised the ministry’s railway transport department, and from 1 January 1919 he headed the operations department of the War Ministry. On 31 December 1918 he married Juliánna Bergmann.

After the Aster Revolution the government of Mihály Károlyi disbanded the army returning from the fronts, and Hungary was left almost without troops in the face of the Romanians, Czechoslovaks and Serbs who were advancing into the country. According to Hungarian biographical sketches, Julier was one of those officers who in March 1919 concluded, for purely military reasons, that a seizure of power by the Communists, who were counting on help from Soviet Russia, offered some chance of defending the borders. A large part of the officer corps, grouped around Gömbös, rejected any co-operation with the Communists.

In the Red Army

After the proclamation of the Soviet Republic on 21 March 1919 Julier stayed in the operations department, now part of the People’s Commissariat for War. On 5 May he became chief of staff of III Corps, which played the main role in the northern offensive against the Czechoslovaks. Launched at the end of May, the offensive drove the Czechoslovak forces back some 150 kilometres and occupied a large part of Slovakia. Under pressure from the Entente, however, the government of Béla Kun agreed to withdraw the troops, and on 3 July the Chief of Staff of the Red Army, Stromfeld, resigned in protest. Julier took over his post.

According to his biographical sketch published by Hungary’s University of Public Service (Ludovika), Julier, like many former officers, hated the Soviet Republic, and the withdrawal from Slovakia undermined what confidence he had in it. He nevertheless considered it his duty to fight the foreign armies occupying the country. He accepted the post for two reasons: he wanted to protect anti-communist officers from the Red Terror, and he hoped that as chief of staff, once the external enemy had been dealt with, he would be able to bring the army over to the side of the counter-revolution. North of Szeged, where a counter-revolutionary government was operating and Miklós Horthy’s National Army was being formed, he deployed units whose officers sympathised with the counter-revolution, and he sent the army’s order of battle to Szeged via Vienna.

The Tisza offensive

In Julier’s judgement an attack on the Romanians was the only possible course in the circumstances. In the north a fresh armistice with Czechoslovakia was in force, while in the south stood French troops, who also shielded the government in Szeged. Julier hoped that the Romanians would fall back, that the offensive would reach Nagyvárad, and that success would prompt the Hungarian population of Transylvania to rise up. The plan was drawn up in a tense atmosphere at the royal palace in Gödöllő. The Revolutionary Governing Council approved it on 10 July. Before the attack began, Gömbös, on behalf of the National Army, called on Julier by letter to lead the army against Szeged rather than the Romanians and go over to the counter-revolution. Julier refused, as the units were already on the move. He did, however, propose that the soldiers go into battle under the national flag rather than the red one, but Kun flatly rejected this.

On 20 July 1919 the Hungarian Red Army crossed the Tisza at Tokaj, Tiszafüred, Szolnok and Csongrád. The Romanians, commanded by General Gheorghe Mărdărescu, knew the Hungarian plan. They let the Hungarians advance deep onto the eastern bank and on 24 July struck the flank of their wedge. By 26 July the offensive had collapsed, and at the end of the month the Romanians themselves crossed the Tisza. How the Hungarian order of battle reached the Romanians remains disputed to this day. According to more recent research, it was passed on from Vienna rather than by Julier himself. Count Pál Teleki, a member of the anti-Bolshevik committee and later prime minister, gave a French liaison officer information on the units deployed opposite Szeged so that the Romanians would not fire on soldiers sympathetic to the counter-revolution. The plan may also have reached the Entente through the British, through a young soldier who was spying for the Allies, and through the Italian lieutenant colonel Guido Romanelli, who wrote in his memoirs that he himself had sent it to Vienna.

When the Romanians crossed the Tisza, Julier considered further fighting pointless and informed Kun of this by telegram. At a staff conference he said that the demoralised army was incapable of resistance. On 31 July the republic’s leaders nevertheless decided to counter-attack, but Julier persuaded the commander of III Corps, which had been assigned the task, not to carry out the order. On 1 August the Soviet government resigned and Kun left for Austria. Julier remained chief of staff until 5 August. In the second half of August he was arrested and held in pre-trial detention.

Accused of treason

The leaders of the Soviet Republic who had fled to the West laid the blame for the defeat on Julier. The first to do so was the former commander-in-chief Vilmos Böhm, who wrote in his memoirs of Julier’s “base treachery”. This version was later repeated by the Communist Jenő Landler, and after them by communist and socialist historiography. Historians’ research has not confirmed that Julier was a traitor. The authors of the Ludovika sketch point out, however, that both victory over the Romanians and defeat were acceptable to him, as either could help bring down the Soviet government. The question of whether he did everything he could to win therefore remains open. They compare his fate with that of Artúr Görgey, the commander in the revolution of 1848–1849, who was likewise called a traitor for decades.

The new regime did not convict Julier. He was acquitted both by a Honvéd court and by a military vetting commission, but Horthy’s army did not want him in its ranks. He was retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel and forbidden to wear uniform. In 1932, at Gömbös’s request, the Regent restored him to active service for a single day, promoted him to colonel and retired him again. Tombor was treated the same way.

Military writer

From the late 1920s Julier devoted himself to military history and the theory of war. In 1927 he serialised his memoirs of 1919 in the daily Magyarság under the telling title “With a Counter-Revolutionary Soul at the Head of the Red Army”. He wrote above all for Magyar Szemle, an influential journal of conservative intellectuals. His books included a work on Hungarian commanders (1930), a biography of Görgey written with the historian Sándor Pethő (1930), an exposition of the theory of war in the spirit of Clausewitz, A hadvezetés művészete (The Art of Command, 1931), and a study of the organisation of general staffs (1932). His best-known book was a history of the First World War as seen through Hungarian eyes, 1914–1918. A világháború magyar szemmel, and his most important historical work was a monograph on the Battle of Limanowa of 1914, published in 1937, for which he toured the battlefield himself. His writings on the theory of war are still part of the reading for the training of Hungarian officers.

According to Hungarian biographical sketches, he was also active in politics. He joined the National Radical Party, founded in 1930 by Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, an opponent of Gömbös’s policies. He also wrote for Előörs, the journal published by Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, who later became one of the leaders of the Hungarian resistance against the Germans.

The Second World War and death

In the second half of the 1930s Julier wrote mainly for the daily press and commented on current military events. In 1939 he analysed the Winter War and the Finns’ way of fighting in several articles. After the outbreak of the Second World War he published quarterly assessments of the war situation in Magyar Szemle and also wrote for daily papers, among them Magyar Nemzet, founded in 1938 by his former co-author Pethő and unfriendly towards Germany. He also wrote a book on the German submarine war against the Atlantic convoys.

He died of lung cancer in Budapest on 25 April 1944, a few weeks after German troops occupied Hungary. He was buried in the cemetery at Rákoskeresztúr. Shortly after his death his wife took her own life.

Significance

Julier exemplifies the dilemma faced in 1919 by officers of the old army: whether to serve the Communists, given that they alone were fighting for the country’s borders. His July offensive was the Soviet Republic’s last attempt to turn the tide of the war. Its failure opened the road to Budapest for the Romanians and the road to power for Horthy. The dispute over whether Julier was a traitor was part of a wider struggle over the memory of 1919: for the émigrés of the left it was convenient to blame an officer, while for Horthy the Communists were to blame. In the interwar years Julier described to Hungarians the war they had lost, and during the Second World War, as Hungary fought alongside Germany, he regularly commented on its course in the press. He did not live to see the end of the Second World War or the siege of Budapest.