Road to Berlin:
The Royal Hungarian Army

Unlike some of the other more unusual nationalities we’ve added to the Panzer Grenadier system, there’s not a long history behind the inclusion of Hungarian pieces in Road to Berlin. Eastern Front has the Royal Romanian Army, and it seemed natural to mirror that in Road to Berlin. And the Hungarian forces were very important in the last year of the war.

The Kingdom of Hungary had no king, refusing to allow Otto von Habsburg to reclaim his legacy. Admiral Nicholas Horthy, former commander of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, instead served as regent. Horthy sent Hungarian troops into the Soviet Union in 1941 to support the German invasion, and dispatched the Second Hungarian Army to the front in late 1942. But for the most part, the Hungarian government tried to avoid committing troops to combat and offered the Germans access to Hungarian industry instead.

Disaster struck the Hungarians south of Voronezh during January 1943. Soviet armored forces smashed the Hungarian divisions, which had little anti-tank capability. Of the nearly 200,000 men in the 2nd Army, only 70,000 returned. Of the army’s 200 armored vehicles, six were recovered, and of its 390 artillery pieces only five light howitzers remained. Tens of thousands of rifles and thousands of machine guns also disappeared. Most of Hungary’s modern military equipment had been lost.

With most Hungarian output of weapons and equipment committed to German contracts, the Royal Army, or Honvédség, suffered a continual lack of modern gear. So although Hungarian factories pumped out large numbers of rifles and machine guns, the same workers once conscripted found themselves training with leftover Austro-Hungarian pieces and sometimes sent to the front with no weapons at all.

The Honvédség retained much of its Imperial-Royal character. Despite a serious commitment to modernization, the bulk of the army’s combat power remained its infantry. Most Haiduks carried the old Imperial Army’s standard 8 mm Mannlicher single-pull bolt-action rifle, with some receiving Mausers either from German stocks or the Hungarian plants making them under contract for the Wehrmacht.

In game terms, a rifle platoon has the same capability whether equipped from German or Hungarian stocks. But there is a noticeable difference in machine guns, and so unlike most nationalities in the Panzer Grenadier system, Hungary has two types of machine gun platoons. The HMG units are equipped with modern German-supplied machine guns, MG42 or ZB.37 weapons. The NHP (nehézgéppuska, “heavy machine gun”) unit has the bulkier, slower-firing, water-cooled Schwarzlose M1907 gun and the Soluthurn M35 light machine gun. In scenarios these two types sometimes appear alongside one another.

In June 1944, Germany contracted to supply the Honvédség with machine guns and mortars, among other weapons, but reneged on the deal while German units in the field confiscated many of the shipments that did get shipped.

Hungary’s elite remained her cavalry regiments, and in 1944 the Honvédség formed the 1st Huszár Division. Two cavalry brigades served in the Hungarian Mobile Corps in 1941, but when the Army General Staff tried to dismount them Horthy intervened and insisted that Hungarian tradition demanded that the cavalry remain on horseback. The cavalry division served in Poland in 1944 as part of the German I Cavalry Corps, fighting very well, and in Hungary in 1945.

A Hungarian Toldi II tank with 40 mm gun.

Tank forces figured prominently in the Honvédség’s plans, but obtaining tanks for them remained a problem throughout the war. The Hungarians bought a license from the Swedish firm Landsverk in 1940 for their L60 light tank, and Manfred Weiss built it as the Toldi. But the Honvédség wanted more powerful vehicles, and later that year the Hungarians obtained a license from the Czech firm Skoda to build their T21 tank. This was a much larger and more powerful vehicle, and to make things even better, Hungary obtained the license while Romania failed to do so. Named “Turan” by the Hungarians, the original model had a 40 mm gun and two machine guns.

The Turan might have been a fine tank design in 1940, but once Axis forces ran into the Soviet T-34 it quickly became obsolete. In an effort to keep up, the Hungarian re-armed the Turan with a 75 mm gun, but even this stopgap measure proved far inferior to the Red Army’s machines.

Like the Germans, the Hungarians used the chassis of their obsolete tanks to build assault guns carrying more powerful weapons. The Zrinyi, designed by Manfred Weiss engineers on a widened Turan chassis, carried a 105 mm howitzer. The vehicle prototype appeared in December 1942, and the first production model appeared in August 1943. About 70 were built. Four models with a 75 mm anti-tank gun also appeared.

German vehicles, promised repeatedly, arrived only sporadically despite Hungary having paid for them in advance in hard currency. Second Armored Division actually received a platoon of Tiger tanks in 1944, and both Hungarian armored divisions operated the PzKw IV. The most common German-made vehicle was the Hetzer tank destroyer, and a number of German-made assault guns also saw action. The Czech-made PzKw 38t tanks received in 1942 had all been lost by the time of Road to Berlin’s scenarios.

To combat enemy tanks, the Honvédség still relied on the 40 mm anti-tank gun, a Swedish-designed weapon built under license. By 1944 this weapon was even more useless than it had been in the 1941 campaign. When the MAVAG works in Diosgyör proposed manufacture of 75 mm pieces for the Honvédség, the German firm Rheinmetall saw this as a threat to future business. The Germans exerted pressure and forced the Hungarians to agree not to build their own 75 mm weapons, but to buy them from Rheinmetall. With its production fully taken up by German orders, few weapons actually went to Hungary and the 40 mm gun continued in production until July 1944.

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