All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [375]
Stalin had ordered the capture of Budapest, and at first hoped to achieve this without a battle: even when the Russians had almost completed the capital’s encirclement, they left open a western passage for the garrison’s withdrawal. The German front commander wanted to abandon the city; Hitler, inevitably, insisted that it should be defended to the last. Some 50,000 German and 45,000 Hungarian troops held their positions, knowing from the outset that their predicament was hopeless. One artillery battalion consisted of Ukrainians dressed in Polish uniforms with German insignia. An SS cavalry division was described as ‘totally demoralised’, and three Hungarian SS police regiments were classified as ‘extremely unreliable’. General Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, commanding the German forces, did not leave his bunker for six weeks, and displayed unbridled gloom. One Hungarian general was so disgusted by his men’s incessant desertions that he declared haughtily that he ‘would not ruin his military career’ and relinquished command, reporting sick.
But, as so often, once battle was joined the combatants became locked in a struggle for survival which achieved a momentum of its own. On 30 December, a thousand Russian guns opened a barrage on Budapest that continued for ten hours daily, with air raids in between. Civilians huddled in their cellars, which failed to protect many from incineration or asphyxiation. After three days, Russian tanks and infantry began to push forward, squeezing the shrinking German perimeter on the Pest bank of the Danube, and meanwhile advancing into Buda yard by yard.
A Hungarian gunner officer, Captain Sándor Hanák, awaited attack on 7 January behind the wooden fence of the city racecourse. ‘The Russkis … were coming across the open track, singing and arm in arm … presumably in an alcoholic state. Kicking the fence down, we fired fragmentation grenades and machine-gun bursts into the mass. They ran to the stands, where there was a terrible bloodbath when the assault guns fired at one row of seats after another. The Germans reported about eight hundred of them dead.’ When at last the Pest bridgehead was lost and the Danube bridges blown, in Buda the garrison fought street by street, house by house. In some places the Russians drove prisoners in front of them, who shouted despairingly, ‘We are Hungarians!’ before both sides’ fire tore into them. Bizarrely, a group of seventy Russians defected to the defenders, asserting that they were more afraid of retreating – to face the NKVD’s machine-gunners behind their own front – than of coming forward to surrender. Stalin’s unwilling allies suffered heavily: on 16 January a Romanian corps reported that since October it had lost 23,000 men dead, wounded and missing – more than 60 per cent of its strength.
The Russians conscripted hapless civilians to bring forward ammunition under fire. They advanced steadily through the streets, but suffered checks and slaughter wherever they were forced to cross open spaces swept by German and Hungarian guns. The plight of the defenders was worse, however: Private Dénes Vass climbed over civilian and military wounded laid out along the corridors of his unit’s command post. A hand reached up and tugged his coat. ‘It was a girl of about 18–20 with fair hair and a beautiful face. She begged me in a whisper, “Take your pistol and