The Romanians enter Budapest

On the evening of 3 August 1919, in pouring rain, some four hundred Romanian cavalrymen with two guns and a few machine guns rode into Budapest. They were led by General Gheorghe Rusescu, commander of the 4th Roșiori Brigade – Romanian line cavalry from the garrison of Tecuci. Two days earlier the Hungarian Soviet Republic had fallen, its army had ceased to exist, and the new Social Democratic government no longer had anything with which to defend the capital. The next day the main Romanian forces entered the city and paraded along Andrássy Avenue. So ended the Hungarian–Romanian War, which had begun in the autumn of 1918 with the occupation of Transylvania and in the spring and summer of 1919 had turned into a regular war against Béla Kun’s communist Hungary. The Romanians stayed in the city for more than three months, and the memory of that occupation poisoned relations between the two countries for a long time.

The date

Popular chronologies, and some accounts, take 3 August 1919 as the end of the Hungarian–Romanian War. On the evening of that day Rusescu’s detachment rode into Budapest. Romanian military tradition, however, regards 4 August as the day the capital was taken, when the main forces entered the city and the commander of the Romanian forces on the Hungarian front, General Gheorghe Mărdărescu, reported it to the King. The two days thus make up a single event. It should also be borne in mind that the entry into Budapest did not end the Romanian presence in Hungary. The occupation of the capital lasted until 14 November 1919, and the last units withdrew from the lands east of the Tisza that were assigned to Hungary only in the spring of 1920.

From the Tisza to Budapest

The road to Budapest opened in the last days of July. On 20 July the Hungarian Red Army, effectively commanded by its chief of staff, Ferenc Julier, crossed the Tisza and drove several dozen kilometres into the east bank from around Szolnok. The Romanians had been expecting this blow. Their reserve, General Traian Moșoiu’s group, struck the flank of the Hungarian wedge on 24 July, and by 26 July the whole east bank of the river was back in Romanian hands. On the night of 29–30 July the Romanians themselves crossed the Tisza in the river bend near Fegyvernek, covering the crossing with feint attacks elsewhere on the front. The Hungarian divisions, demoralised by defeat and no longer believing there was any point in fighting for a Communist government, fell back in disorder, and soldiers deserted en masse.

On 1 August the revolutionary government resigned. In his last speech Kun reproached the Hungarian proletariat for not wanting to defend its dictatorship, and that same day he left for Austria with his closest associates. Power passed to the Social Democratic government of the trade unionist Gyula Peidl. It restored the institutions the Communists had abolished, announced the disbanding of the Red Army and asked for an armistice. Peidl hoped that a government the Entente could talk to would persuade the powers to halt the Romanians. The Supreme Council of the Paris Peace Conference did indeed demand that the advance be stopped, but Bucharest had no intention of stopping halfway. For months the Prime Minister, Ion I.C. Brătianu, had been telling the Allies that Romania was a bulwark against Bolshevism and that Hungary had to be disarmed before the Romanian army left the line of the Tisza. Now he could do it himself.

On 2 August the 4th Roșiori Brigade, made up of the 6th and 11th Roșiori Regiments, took Albertirsa and cut the railway from Cegléd to Budapest, along which the remnants of the Hungarian forces were retreating. Its commander, Brigadier General Gheorghe Rusescu, a cavalryman in his early fifties with experience of the war of 1916–1918, was, according to Romanian studies, supposed to cut the Hungarians’ lines of retreat to the south, towards Kecskemét. On the morning of 3 August he learned that the Hungarian Red Army was capitulating and decided to make straight for the capital.

The evening of 3 August

Rusescu detached a fast column from his brigade: three cavalry squadrons, two machine-gun groups from the 6th Roșiori Regiment and a section of horse artillery with two guns, some four hundred men in all. Hungarian studies speak of three squadrons of the 6th Regiment, Romanian ones of squadrons of the 4th Brigade. On the way, according to Romanian accounts, the column was stopped by officers of the Italian military mission, who passed on a request to halt operations. Rusescu ignored it. Hungarian sources describe this differently: members of the mission, who were to convey to the Romanians a ban on entering the capital, were detained by Romanian troops and arrived too late.

In the afternoon the column was caught in a violent storm. By about two o’clock it was a few kilometres from the city centre, near Kispest. According to Rusescu’s memoirs, Hungarian companies with their rifles stacked and an artillery battery were still standing at the eastern approaches to the city. The general ordered them to disperse under threat of force. In the evening, at about six, a delegation of the Hungarian government appeared at the city boundary and asked the Romanians not to enter the city. Rusescu replied that far from withdrawing he would enter Budapest at once; he had his guns brought into firing position and threatened to shell the city if the talks were not concluded before nightfall. Peidl’s government, which had no troops at all, gave way. At around eight in the evening the Romanian cavalry rode into the city. The soldiers occupied the Archduke Joseph Hussar Barracks, renamed the Lenin Barracks by the Communists, and Rusescu set up his quarters in the Dunapalota Hotel, the former Ritz, on the Danube.

For a dozen or so hours a few hundred Romanian cavalrymen with two guns were the victors’ only military force in a city of a million people. On the morning of 4 August Rusescu recorded in his war diary that the population had given the soldiers an ovation, with cheers for Romania. That, at least, was how the Romanian commander saw it. For many inhabitants of Budapest, weary of the communist dictatorship, the arrival of any force capable of keeping order meant relief; for the majority, however, it was a day of humiliation: the Hungarian capital had fallen into the hands of an army that Austro-Hungarian and German troops had driven out of Transylvania and Wallachia as recently as 1916–1917.

Rusescu’s entry remains controversial to this day. According to Romanian authors, the general acted on his own initiative, without orders, and Mărdărescu was furious when he found out. He believed that the brigade’s task was to block the Hungarians’ retreat, not to win glory. Rusescu was disciplined and removed from command of the brigade. Only later did the Chief of the General Staff, General Constantin Christescu, call his raid “a daring act befitting a cavalryman”. Some Hungarian studies, including educational materials of the Hungarian Institute of Military History, present it differently: although Paris had called on the Romanians to halt on 3 August, Mărdărescu is said to have ordered the entry into Budapest that very day. Both versions agree on one thing. Neither the pleas of the Hungarian government nor the note from the powers stopped the entry into the capital.

4 August

On 4 August the main Romanian forces arrived, chiefly the 1st Rifle Division. Representatives of the city authorities and of Peidl’s government – among them, according to Hungarian studies, Ferenc Harrer of the city administration and the War Minister József Haubrich – were still trying to negotiate the terms of entry with Romanian officers, but while these talks were going on the Romanian infantry marched into the city almost simultaneously along three roads, Rákóczi, Baross and Üllői streets. The Romanian artillery fired a few rounds at the suburbs, including Kőbánya, and people were killed in skirmishes with scattered groups of Red Army men and in incidents in the streets. Hungarian tallies speak of a dozen or so deaths in the first days of the occupation.

At six in the afternoon the victors held a parade on Andrássy Avenue. According to Romanian studies, the salute was taken by Mărdărescu, who was celebrating his fifty-third birthday that day, and the units on parade were the 4th Rifle Regiment, a squadron of the 6th Roșiori Regiment and a battery of the 23rd Artillery Regiment. According to Hungarian and most other accounts, the troops marched through the city centre past General Moșoiu. Moșoiu afterwards took command of the occupation forces west of the Tisza, while the commandant of Budapest itself, according to Romanian and Hungarian sources, was General Ștefan Holban. On 5 August the Romanians crossed the Danube bridges into Buda, and Mărdărescu set up his headquarters in the luxurious Gellért Hotel.

By 8 August the Romanian army had taken prisoner more than 1,200 Hungarian officers and, depending on the source, anything from over ten thousand to several tens of thousands of soldiers, as well as several hundred guns, more than 300 machine guns, tens of thousands of rifles and 87 aircraft. The Hungarian Red Army had ceased to exist. Over the following days the Romanians advanced westwards as far as Győr. Only the area around Lake Balaton and the western fringes of the country remained beyond their reach; there stood Admiral Miklós Horthy’s National Army, which was being formed in Szeged.

The occupation

Peidl’s government survived the arrival of the Romanians by only two days. On 6 August a group of counter-revolutionaries led by István Friedrich overthrew it while the Romanian troops looked on passively, and Archduke Joseph August assumed power as provisional head of state. Between 5 and 7 August there were attacks in the city on Jews, whom the counter-revolution identified with the communist regime. It was a foretaste of the White Terror that Horthy’s detachments unleashed in the months that followed.

The powers received the occupation of Budapest with irritation. The Supreme Council sent to Hungary an inter-Allied military mission of four generals – American, British, French and Italian – to supervise the disarmament of Hungary and the withdrawal of the Romanian troops. Romania, however, considered itself entitled to compensation for the plunder Germany and Austria-Hungary had inflicted on it during the occupation of 1916–1918, and began requisitioning on a large scale. Weapons, factory equipment, railway rolling stock, grain, cattle and agricultural machinery were carried off. The figures cited in the literature vary considerably: they speak of 800–1,300 locomotives and anything from over ten thousand to more than thirty thousand wagons. The American member of the mission, General Harry Hill Bandholtz, described the Romanian requisitions in his diary as robbery, and on 5 October he personally sealed the doors of the Hungarian National Museum to prevent its collections from being taken away.

Under Allied pressure the Romanians left Budapest on 14 November 1919, and two days later Horthy rode into the city on a white horse. The last Romanian units withdrew behind the new frontier in March 1920.

Significance

The entry into Budapest decided the fate of the lands over which the war had been fought. When Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon on 4 June 1920, Transylvania, Crișana, Maramureș and the eastern Banat had long been in Romanian hands, and Hungary had no army that could change that. Romania, which as recently as 1918 had lain defeated, became “Greater Romania” and a regional power, an ally of France and, in 1921, a co-founder of the Little Entente, which was directed against Hungarian revisionism.

For Hungarians, August 1919 became one of the most painful memories of the interwar years. To the humiliation of defeat and the loss of two-thirds of the country’s territory was added the memory of foreign soldiers in the streets of the capital and of property carried away. Horthy’s regime, which grew out of the counter-revolution of 1919, made the revision of Trianon the goal of its entire policy and sought support from those who also wanted to overturn the Versailles order: first Italy, then Adolf Hitler’s Germany. It was at their hands that Hungary regained the northern part of Transylvania in the Second Vienna Award of 30 August 1940. Romania under Ion Antonescu, who as a young staff officer had taken part in the 1919 campaign, and Horthy’s Hungary went to war against the USSR alongside Hitler in 1941, competing for his favour and for Transylvania.

History came full circle in 1944. After Romania changed sides to the Allies in August that year, its troops again entered the Great Hungarian Plain, this time alongside the Red Army, and Romanian units fought in the suburbs of Pest during the siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944–1945. The peace treaty of 1947 restored the Trianon frontier. August 1919 also showed how strongly the fear of Bolshevism shaped the politics of Central Europe: both Bucharest and counter-revolutionary Budapest saw communism as a mortal enemy, and the identification of communism with the Jews, which began in the days of the Soviet Republic’s fall, prepared the ground for Hungary’s antisemitism in the 1930s and 1940s.