The Slovak–Hungarian War begins

At dawn on 23 March 1939 Hungarian units, which a few days earlier had occupied Carpathian Ruthenia, crossed the Slovak border from the Uzh river and advanced westwards. There was no declaration of war, nor even a warning. Their orders were to push as far west as possible. The Slovak State had existed for nine days, its army was only just being formed from the remnants of the Czechoslovak forces, and the Germans, who had promised Slovakia protection, were due to sign a treaty guaranteeing its borders in Berlin that very day. So began the Hungarian–Slovak war, known to both Slovaks and Hungarians as the “Little War” (Slovak: Malá vojna; Hungarian: Kis háború). It was the first war fought between two of Hitler’s future allies, and the first test of what German guarantees were worth.

A border nobody had drawn

Hungary had never accepted the loss of the lands awarded to Czechoslovakia by the Treaty of Trianon. After the Munich Agreement it began to recover them. In November 1938 the First Vienna Award gave it a strip of southern Slovakia including Košice, and in March 1939, as Czechoslovakia disintegrated, Hungarian troops occupied Carpatho-Ukraine. On 15 March the government in Budapest was the first to recognise the new Slovak State of the priest Jozef Tiso, which was greeted with relief in Bratislava. The relief did not last long.

Until then the line between Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia had been an internal Czechoslovak administrative boundary, drawn by Prague after 1918. On 17 March the Hungarian Foreign Ministry informed Berlin that since Ruthenia had passed to Hungary the border had to be redrawn, as the old line was not an international frontier. A map was attached to the note: the new border was to run some ten to twenty kilometres west of Uzhhorod, beyond Sobrance, and then due north to the Polish border. Budapest cited the 1910 census, according to which Ruthenians and Hungarians, not Slovaks, predominated in this strip. Military considerations mattered more, however. The old line ran within sight of Uzhhorod and of the railway along the Uzh valley to the Uzhok Pass, which was now Hungary’s most important link with Poland. The Hungarian staff prepared two variants: a “small solution”, the occupation of a strip 10–15 kilometres wide, and a “large” one reaching as far as Poprad, which would have cut off the whole eastern part of Slovakia.

The Germans agreed to a “small correction”. On 18 March the German consul in Bratislava, Ernst von Druffel, informed the Slovak Foreign Ministry that Slovakia should not oppose a change of the border in the Uzh valley. On the same day the Slovak leaders were signing in Vienna the treaty of protection, in which the Reich guaranteed Slovakia’s independence and territorial integrity for 25 years. Bratislava replied that the demand was unacceptable from the military, strategic and ethnic points of view. The Hungarians knew that the guarantee would take effect once the German side had also signed the treaty, and decided to act before that happened.

An army under construction

The timing could not have been worse for Slovakia. The Czechoslovak army was being divided up amid chaos: the Czechs were returning to the Protectorate, while Slovak soldiers from units in Bohemia and Moravia had not yet made it home. The last trainloads of Czech soldiers left Slovakia on 22 March, the day before the attack. Regiments that should have numbered two to three thousand men each now had between seventy and four hundred. Officers were in shortest supply, as Slovaks had made up only about 3–4 per cent of the Czechoslovak army’s officer corps. German troops who had entered western Slovakia were emptying the arms depots there. In the east there was also a shortage of railways: the Vienna Award had given Hungary the only line leading to Michalovce and Humenné, so reinforcements had to travel by a roundabout route.

The new state’s Minister of Defence was Lieutenant Colonel of the General Staff Ferdinand Čatloš. On 15 March he ordered plans to be drawn up for the defence of the borders with Hungary and Poland and the first reserve age groups to be called up, for the time being only in the eastern districts. The defence of eastern Slovakia was entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel Augustín Malár.

23 March

The Hungarians struck in the early hours of the morning in three columns: from Velykyi Bereznyi towards Ulič and Starina; from Malyi Bereznyi through Ubľa towards Stakčín; and, strongest of all, supported by tanks, armoured cars and anti-tank artillery, from Uzhhorod through Tibava towards Sobrance. By 8 a.m. this last column was already outside Sobrance. Many border posts were taken without a fight. In the first minutes the Hungarians surprised an entire infantry company asleep and took it prisoner. Some Hungarian units advanced under white flags, their commanders claiming that they were occupying the new border with the consent of the Slovak government. Disarmed Slovak and Czech soldiers were sent into captivity. In the course of the day the Hungarians penetrated 10–20 kilometres into the country.

Before noon Bratislava sent a note of protest to Budapest. At first the Hungarians did not reply, and then they declared that they were conducting no operation in eastern Slovakia. Meanwhile Slovak units, though without a plan and often without commanders, began to gather of their own accord. Near Stakčín Major Matejka assembled an infantry battalion and two artillery batteries. Around Michalovce a reserve officer and secretary of the local People’s Party, Štefan Haššík, gathered some four battalions and several batteries. A third group, under Major Šivica, covered the area of Košice and Prešov, where the Hungarians stood on the border drawn in Vienna. The commander of the Hlinka Guard, Alexander Mach, proclaimed general defensive readiness. Guardsmen volunteered in their thousands, although their involvement, in a country gripped by nationalist fever, was not free of excesses and attacks on Czechs, Jews and former political opponents.

The Slovak air force also joined the fighting. From the airfield at Spišská Nová Ves, the only one in the east of the country, Avia B-534 biplane fighters and Letov Š-328 (PL) reconnaissance aircraft took off, flown by a handful of pilots who had not even had time to fly together. They attacked Hungarian columns near Ulič and Sobrance. On the first day the Slovaks lost two aircraft and two pilots, among them Ján Svetlík, shot down over Ulič, but they slowed the Hungarian advance. They met no Hungarian aircraft that day.

In Berlin, a few hours after the Hungarian attack had begun, Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the treaty of protection for Slovakia. The Reich, however, did nothing to honour it in practice. On the same day Adolf Hitler arrived by warship in Klaipėda, freshly taken from Lithuania, while in the protective zone in western Slovakia German troops stood by and did not even release heavy weapons and anti-tank ammunition from the depots there to the Slovaks.

The following day

On the morning of 24 March the Slovak command ordered a counter-attack to drive the invader back to the old line. Near Michalovce command was taken over by the Czech Major Karol Kubíček, one of the officers who had stayed in the Slovak army in response to Malár’s appeal. Five armoured cars, repaired overnight in Prešov after sabotage by their departing Czech crews, supported an attack that drove the Hungarians out of the village of Závadka. A night attack on the main Hungarian line near Nižná Rybnica, however, collapsed under artillery fire, and the inexperienced infantry fell back in panic all the way to Michalovce. That day the Slovak air force lost many of the aircraft it sent over the front, shot down by Hungarian Fiat CR.32 fighters and ground fire.

On the afternoon of 24 March Hungarian Junkers Ju 86 bombers attacked the airfield at Spišská Nová Ves. Of the thirty-six bombers assigned, only about ten reached the target, owing to confusion and technical faults. The anti-aircraft defences were almost useless, having neither crews nor ammunition. Bombs fell on hangars, barracks, a nearby brickworks and houses. More than a dozen people were killed, among them workers and other civilians, but the airfield remained in operation. It was the first air raid on Slovakia of the years 1939–1945. The funeral of the victims on 27 March turned into a great anti-Hungarian demonstration. In retaliation the Slovaks planned a night raid on Budapest.

It never took place. The Germans, concerned that the “small correction” was turning into a real war, demanded that both sides stop fighting. On the evening of 24 March Čatloš, at the Hungarian side’s request and with the government’s authorisation, issued an order to cease operations but to hold the positions occupied. Clashes continued at the front for several more days, however, and the Slovaks went on bringing reinforcements to the east.

The consequences

The Little War was short, but its consequences reached further. Slovakia learned what German protection was worth: the Reich supported it neither militarily nor in the peace talks, and its sole concern was a swift end to a conflict that interfered with Hitler’s plans. In negotiations in Budapest Slovakia had to cede to Hungary a strip of land around Stakčín and Sobrance. The hostility between the two states, both formally allies of the Reich, lasted throughout the war, and the Slovak air force and army regarded the border with Hungary as the most threatened.

For Poland the Little War was a warning sign, although in Warsaw sympathies lay rather with Hungary, and relations with Bratislava were soured by a dispute over a few border villages in Spiš and Orava that Poland had occupied in the autumn of 1938. Slovakia, humiliated once and dependent on Germany, sought compensation. In September 1939 the Slovak army – with Čatloš commanding the field army “Bernolák” and Malár at the head of one of its divisions – entered Poland together with the Wehrmacht and occupied the disputed areas in Spiš and Orava, including the villages taken by Poland in 1938. Hungary held on to the strip it had seized in March until the end of the war. After 1945 the lands taken from Slovakia returned to Czechoslovakia.