All Intensive Purposes

A kind and loving soul who will go unnamed here gave me a gift certificate to one of our local booksellers, which I used to buy Krisztian Ungvary's The Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II, a book I otherwise never would have bought myself. The New York Review of Books recently ran an adapted version of John Lukacs's foreword, which piqued my interest. (The link will work for subscribers only, alas.)

I've never known as much about the Russian offensives at the end of World War II that led to the fall of Berlin. In late 1944, Hitler placed a great emphasis on defending Hungary, in the hopes that slowing the USSR's advance could somehow drive a wedge to separate the Allies. Notwithstanding some local successes, the German and Hungarian forces could not prevent the Soviet forces from encircling Budapest. Defending forces in the capital could have escape to the northwest, and perhaps the capital could have been evacuated, but the German command -- in particular, Hitler -- chose to sacrifice those forces, and the city, in order to slow the Soviet advance towards Vienna. The result was a brutal siege, similar to what happened to Leningrad, Stalingrad and Berlin, except that in the former instances most civilians were evacuated, and in the latter instance the fighting lasted days or weeks, not months. The casualties and damage were truly horrific.

Taking advantage of newly available archives, Ungvary has written a comprehensive and moving account of the siege. Some of it is slow going -- for example, for those of us unfamiliar with Hungarian geography, the movements of military forces can be hard to follow, and the maps do not always help. But do not be deterred; the most compelling parts of the book are those dealing with the privations of those trapped inside Budapest, soldier and civilian, Christian and Jew, and the tale of the battle is only the predicate for their story.

While their own leaders were not without fault, the pity of the Hungarians was to find themselves between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. After finishing The Siege of Budapest, I came across this:

I thought of what Romania's late ambassador in Washington, Corneliu Bogdan, had told his friends--"The West did not lose Eastern Europe at Yalta. It lost it at Munich."--when the West abdicated responsibility for Eastern European security to Hitler and Stalin.

Robert D. Kaplan, Eastward to Tartary 41 (New York 2000). After the siege came the Iron Curtain.