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The Battle
On Stalin�s order, Marshall
Malinovski initiated the attack on
Budapest on October 29, 1944. On November
3, the first Soviet tanks rolled into Vecs�s, Kispest
and reached Ferihegy airport. However, because
of the hastily given order and the incoming German
reinforcements, the Soviets were forced to
retreat and until the end of December, the
�Attila line� in the larger Budapest area constituted the front.
The actual street combat started simultaneously with the complete
surrounding of the city on December 24. Battles fought
for cities and towns usually differ from conventional
warfare. Surrounded by large buildings, orientation becomes difficult,
defense is easier. Central control often ceases and small
cells operate independently. The commanders of units not larger than
50-250 soldiers become responsible for setting
the direction of combat. The significance of heavy artillery
diminishes in favor of hand-to-hand combat. While an open field
battle usually ends with the rapid collapse of the enemy, the
agony of city battles can drag on for weeks and months. Often the
resolve of the defenders takes along time to destroy ďż˝ but this means that
the suffering of the soldiers and the civilians is prolonged: an
example of this is the siege of
Leningrad, where even though hundreds of thousands
had frozen and starved to death, the defenders refused to surrender.
Budapest experienced a continuous and gradual withdrawal of the defending
troops. However, the situation in Buda was quite different: the front
barely moved a few hundred meters at
a time. The defending troops were vulnerable on
V�rosmajor, R�zsadomb and Sas-hegy, yet their stations at the
Farkasr�t cemetery were especially lethal to the attacking Soviet troops.
The SS soldiers took over the crypts, dug up the graves, threw out
the coffins and with things looted from the neighboring houses,
set up their positions. Later, many met their death in this cemetery.
Initially, it was possible to repel the heavy Soviet artillery
because the German troops were well
supplied with a large number of small arms.
Furthermore, the defendersďż˝ small number demanded unorthodox
tactics that took advantage of the terrain. This was
referred to as �chess-board� tactics: the defenders
held their positions at the various villas of the area. The Buda
hills were scarcely populated at that time, houses were 50 or more
meters away from each other. This was to
the advantage of the German troops: while they were forced
to retreat from the attackers, the Soviets were often caught
in the undefended areas in between the houses. They were then
fired at from the villas and sharpshooters prevented reinforcements
from reaching them. Although this amounted almost to blasphemy
for those who held orthodox views on military strategy, this
practice worked well even for poorly trained and poorly armed troops
who could use their creativity and knowledge of terrain to
their advantage. Given the special characteristics of the Buda
hills, even when the Soviets advanced and the front retreated
back to Alkotm�ny street, adventurous Hungarian units carried
out diversionary actions in R�th Gy�rgy
street and V�rosmajor. Again, this was possible
only because the now Soviet positions were concentrated around
various houses and there was no continuous front line. By this
time, both the German-Hungarian and Soviet troops were decimated.
Thus the terrain and the distribution of
buildings gave rise to guerilla-type warfare on both
sides.
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