Fire & Sword:
Hungarian Infantry
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2023

By late 1944, the Axis alliance in Europe was down to two members: Germany and Hungary. Italy, Bulgaria and Romania had switched sides, Finland had signed an armistice, and Slovakia’s armed forces had risen against the Germans. But even as Soviet spearheads, now bolstered by Romanian and Bulgarian divisions, closed on the Hungarian capital of Budapest, the Royal Hungarian Honvéd continued to fight.

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 home. 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 suffered a continual lack of modern gear. Hungarian factories pumped out large numbers of modern rifles and machine guns, but once conscripted, the workers from those plants found themselves training with leftover Austro-Hungarian pieces and sometimes sent to the front with no weapons at all.

The Royal Hungarian Army fights for Budapest, and beyond, in Panzer Grenadier: Fire & Sword. It’s a tactical-level game (units are platoons, for the most part) of the Soviet siege of Budapest and Axis attempts to relieve the surrounded city. The Hungarians see a lot of action. Let’s have a look at some of the Hungarian pieces.

Infantry

Despite a serious commitment to modernization, like most armies of the Second World War, Hungary’s relied on its infantry for most of its combat power. All of its senior leadership had come through the old Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army or the Royal Hungarian Honvédség, the national regular army of the Hungarian half of the old Dual Monarchy. The new Royal Army therefore retained many practices from the old Imperial and Royal Days, from organizational quirks to footwear to the way Haiduks (Hungarian infantrymen) held their rifle strap while marching.

A Hungarian infantry platoon had three squads, each of eleven men including a corporal as squad leader. The squad relied on a Solothurn M31 light machine gun as its base of fire, a weapon designed by Louis Stange for the German firm Rheinmetall’s Swiss subsidiary, Solothurn (machine gun development being forbidden under the terms of the Versailles Treaty). The German Reichswehr rejected the weapon, but the Austrian Bundesheer and Hungarian Honvéd both adopted it as their squad automatic weapon.

The Hungarians bought 3,000 of them from Solothurn, and manufactured at least 9,000 more under license at Budapest’s huge FÉG armaments works. The weapon had the virtues of light weight and a high cyclic rate of fire, but the latter hardly mattered as it was fed by a 30-round magazine that had to be constantly replaced in action.

Most Haiduks carried the old Imperial and Royal Armies’ standard 8 mm Mannlicher single-pull bolt-action rifle, with some receiving Mauser bolt-action rifles either from German stocks or the Hungarian plants making them under contract for the Wehrmacht. In game terms, a Hungarian rifle platoon has the same capability whether equipped from German or Hungarian arsenals.

Four rifle platoons made up a rifle company, a holdover from the old days. While some internet sites claim that the company had three rifle platoons and one machine-gun platoon, that’s the usual German organization during World War Two and wasn’t Hungarian practice. By 1944, a Hungarian infantry battalion had three rifle companies and one heavy weapons company.

The Hungarian royal government fell in October 1944, after negotiating a separate peace with the Soviets. German commandos captured Regent Horthy and placed Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szalasi in charge. Szalasi’s movement followed a quasi-fascist nationalism that called for co-operation with other nationalist movements, though due to the wartime situation Szalasi did not have the opportunity to host fellow fascist-nationalists for conferences. What his government did manage was to call out various militias to defend Budapest from the Soviets.

Not all of these were Arrow Cross men, who (much like Germany’s Armed SS militia) mostly confined themselves to murdering thousands of Jews rather than fighting actual armed opponents. That task fell to the militias formed from city workers, factory employees and other civic organizations. Whether political or civic, the militiamen carried weapons issued by the Royal Army’s arsenals: old Mannlicher rifles and captured weaponry taken from the Red Army in the 1941 campaign or supplied by the Germans. While the Arrow Cross mostly avoided combat, some of the civic militia fought with surprising effectiveness, using their knowledge of the city to thwart the invaders.

Machine Guns

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 (nehéz géppuska, “heavy machine gun”) units has the bulkier, slower-firing, water-cooled Schwarzlose M1907 gun and the Solothurn M31 light machine gun, mounted on a tripod for use as a medium machine gun. In the game these two types sometimes appear alongside one another.

A Hungarian machine-gun platoon had, on paper at least, four heavy machine guns of whatever model. The Hungarians rarely mixed different weapons in the same formation. A heavy weapons company had three machine-gun and two medium mortar platoons. The machine gun platoons could be attached to the rifle companies (this seems to have been the usual deployment) or kept together for concentrated firepower.

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

That the Honvéd’s infantry; next time we’ll look at its heavy weapons.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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