Hungarian Red Army
헝가리 붉은 군대
The army of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the first Hungarian "workers' and peasants'" army, whose formation the Revolutionary Governing Council ordered on 25 March 1919. Raised at first from volunteers recruited through the trade unions, it reached 200,000 men by the end of May and, under commander-in-chief Vilmos Böhm and chief of staff Aurél Stromfeld, drove the Czechoslovak army back in the northern campaign. It disintegrated after the Tisza offensive collapsed in July. It was a separate army from the Soviet Red Army.
In depth
On 21 March the Ministry of Defence became the People's Commissariat of War, with József Pogány as commissar. After disputes over Pogány the Revolutionary Governing Council set up a three-man committee of Béla Kun, Vilmos Böhm and Jakab Weltner on 24 March, which backed Pogány's plan to fill 200,000 vacant places with volunteers recruited through the trade unions. The army was organised into six divisions, the Székely detachment and the Danube guard. Volunteers numbered 20,640 on 1 April and 48,196 on 12 April, and a decree of 23 April made enlistment compulsory. From 4 April a five-member war collegium of Kun, Fiedler, Szántó, Böhm and Haubrich directed defence.
Facing the Romanian offensive that began in mid-April, the army grew from 40,000 to 60,000 men but had lost everything east of the Tisza by 1 May, largely because many officers of the old army had been dismissed and untrained soldiers and workers appointed in their place. The government then appealed for national defence instead of class slogans, and many officers and men of the old royal army returned, to defend the country rather than the Communists. Many foreign volunteers, among them Poles, Russians, Germans and Ukrainians, also joined.
The general counter-offensive of 20 May retook Miskolc, and in the northern campaign that followed the army advanced within three weeks to the Nitra–Zvolen–Košice line and reached the Polish border at Bardejov, where the Slovak Soviet Republic was proclaimed. But when the Clemenceau note of mid-June demanded withdrawal from the reconquered north and the leadership accepted it, Stromfeld resigned on 3 July and many officers followed. Ferenc Julier became the new chief of staff.
The offensive across the Tisza against the Romanians on 20 July made early progress but collapsed within days because of the troops' poor fighting value and because the plan had reached the Romanians. With desertion and the dispersal of the officer corps the army fell apart, and on 1 August the Revolutionary Governing Council resigned.