Romania 1940 - the Possible War: Romanian Army, Romanian Army (land forces) in 1940

I just meant that - chronologically - they already had Turans when we had FT's and Skodas... which were slightly inferior.

I just meant that - chronologically - they already had Turans when we had FT's and Skodas... which were slightly inferior.

To make this clear in case you missed it in the first place. By 1940 the F-17s were used for guard duty. The R-2s and R-35s were the main battled tanks. Furthermore Hungary had less Turan Is than we had R-2s and the Turan I was inferior to the R-2 in terms of firepower. So the Hungarian tanks were outnumbered and outgunned. In terms of tactics and training I would suspect they were at about the same level as the Romanian crews. So where is the superiority in 1940?

OK, then, I give up. I just believed that - based on the fact the Hungarians didn't have any "old" stuff such as FT's - they had modernized their army better/faster than Romanians. I was also tricked by the name "Rapid Corps" given to their expeditionary force in the USSR. But I just found out some facts about it, so I have to slightly change my position.

It is pointless trying to state that 'logic' should be applied to the situation of pre-war Hungary. The atmosphere in the country was febrile. The Germans did not invent the Transylvanian question in just the same way that they did not invent the South Slovak/Ruthenian question that poisoned relations with Czechslovakia and the Slovak successor state or the Voivodina question that bedevilled relations with Yugoslavia, they just exploited it. The spirit in late 1930s was revanchism and a political party - the Arrow Cross - intent on exploiting this atmosphere. Unfortunately, Horthy was too uninformed to see that it was not in Hungary's long-term interest to sell itself to the Nazis. After the spirit of the Treaty of Trianon was rejected the whole Hungarian military machine was developed with the intention of taking back Transylvania (and Southern Slovakia/Ruthenia and Voivodina). The invasion of Southern Slovakia in 1940 was without the knowledge of the Germans. It having happened, the Nazi regime then exploited it to drive Hungary closer to Germany.

The logic that should be applied is that Hungary would have invaded Romania to seize Transylvania and that the Germans intervened to restrict the imposition of all the elements of Hungarian foreign policy because it wanted to keep Romania as a potential ally for its war on the Soviet Union. That is why Romania was able to keep part of Transylvania by the agreement after the Vienna diktat and to prevent a lasting bitterness between the two countries' armies that would have serious repercussions on the operations of the three-way alliance. If Germany had not been so intent on keeping Romania loyal there would have been no diktat, or at least it would not have been applied to Hungarian-Romanian relations. If there had been no other condiserations - the immediate threat of war with Russia, the Nazis desire to crush Poland, the Western allies resistance to German plans in Czechoslovakia (and Slovakia) - it is probable that the Germans could have helped Romania to win the war that started after the Hungarian invasion.

This view is based on the logic that the Germans applied in the case of the civil war that broke in Romania after Marshall Antonescu had been appointed leader. All 'logic' points to the fact that, as in other countries, including Hungary, the Germans would have supported the political party whose views equated most closely to those of the NSDAP and not Antonescu who was not a fascist. In fact, Hitler sided with Antonescu because he needed the Romanian army in his forces. Even if Hitler's view of the general strategic position was more sophisticated that it needed to be, the reason why he intervened in the struggle over Transylvania was because it gave him a lever to use against the Romanian government. The German general staff had identified that Germany needed Romanian oil to keep their war machine running and Hitler preferred to get his oil imports at prices below market level and could force the Romanian government to be more co-operative by appearing to favour the Hungarians. If the Germans had left alone, the Hungarians would have been beaten and Hitler would have lost his bargaining tool. Hungary, of course, lay on the route for oil from Romania and could have caused disruption to deliveries if Hitler had chosen the Romanian side. This was the logic behind Germany's attitude towards Russia's claim to Bessarabia too.

MMM and Dragos are naive if they think that Hungary would have been dissuaded from attacking Romania because it had no allies. It was not deterred from doing so in Southern Slovakia and Ruthenia.

Atravici

I am British and do not wear yellow, blue and red tricoloured-spectacles. Although I do not speak Hungarian, I have read the arguments (in English) of the Hungarian revisionists and they do not stack up. Denes is correct, Hungary was closest to Italy before the Pact of Steel (and Hungary considered the signing of the pact a threat). The Hungarian armed forces were very wary of Germany. The 'alliance' was a marriage of convenience in which the only common thread was resentment at the treaties of Versailles and Trianon. It suited Germany to support Hungarian claims before major war broke out with the Soviet Union. Once the fighting had started, however, Hungarian claims were given short shrift, especially in Yugoslavia. Before you accuse other contributors of lacking knowledge about their countries I suggest you consider whether you know enough about your own!

I do not wish to debate the rights and wrongs of which country should govern Transylvania, I shall only say that the Hungarian minority under Romanian sovereignty has never been subjected to the sort of appalling regime that was applied to those Romanians who were transferred to Hungarian sovereignty, when their region was transferred under the Vienna Agreement.

Denes

I could provide an enormous list of sources in a number of different languages to support my argument but I think my article is long enough.

Let's argue, then!
1.

I had no informations about that, but one should NOT compare a remnant of a state or a puppet-state (i.e. Slovakia) to a whole state (Romania before june 1940). After that, a concerted Soviet-Hungarian attack on Romania would have been feasible only for the misinformed; however, I state that in 2009, with a knowledge of the facts (wider than the most of people back then or now), so it is excusable somehow if the Romanian decisin factors believed it could happen like in 1919, except the part that back then the Soviets only planned to attack, but didn't do it.
2.

Hitler did NOT need us, but we rather offered cooperation, as it would have been a real stoopid (and I guess deadly for any government) gesture to let the Germans reclaim Bessarabia by force, while the Romanian Army just watched... Only later in the war did Adolf require help from Antonescu.
3.

Is that so? The Dictate only managed to disconten the both parties involved, keeping them with a hope of getting the entire Transylvania at a certain point; as for the bitterness in the Army, there wee many quarreling in the Romanian army, including the rejecting of a liaison officer from the Hungarian army OR the fact that Antonescu requested that never in the course of war a Romanian unit should fight alongside a Hungarian one.

4. A long article does NOT improve the valour of truth in its affirmations - and yes, you should quote your sources.
Enough?

This post has been edited by MMM on February 13, 2009 01:30 pm

MMM

Cred ca am inteles punctul primul in raspunsul dvs, dar n-am citit niciodata ca guvernul roman a avut o frica ca Rusia sa invadeze Ungria in anul 1940, situatiele n-a fost acela de 1919.

I quote from the book "Hungary at War: Civilians and Soldiers in World War Two", by Cecil D. Eby:

"After the fall of France, Russia gave the Romanians (a nominal but never useful French ally) four days to surrender Bessarabia, and Molotov, in a friendly note, indicated his acceptance of Hungarian claims to Transylvania. Exulting in this opportunity to even the score with the despised Romanians, Hungarian border guards [that had expanded enormously in anticipation of a Hungarian invasion of Transylvania] fired some random shots across the frontier and girded for war. Hitler, who had his eye on the Romanian old fields and wanted no national quarrels in Eastern Europe, intervened. He warned that the Romanian army was much better armed than the Honvedseg. Through pressure, Germany and Russia persuaded Romania to surrender to Hungary a portion of northern Transylvania containing more than two million people, about half of them Magyars. The negotiations, which returned about 40 percent of pre-Trianon Translyvania, was called the Second Vienna Award. The disgruntled Romanian army backed out without firing a shot. German warnings saw to that....Both countries were embittered by the settlement and vowed to settle the dispute by war at a future time, when the German eagle and Russian bear were not monitoring the situation...More menacing, Hungarian politicians legalised the Volksbund [that advocated union with Germany], which could now openly proclaim its National Socialist ideas".

I have never read either that the Germans had territorial claims on Bessarabia. It is likely that they had no objections to the Romanians governing the territory (and, indeed, they probably preferred Romania to the Soviet Union with which they had been forced to sign a treaty by which 90,000 Volksdeutscher were expelled from Bessarabia) and it provided a useful bribe for them to keep Romania sweet.

I do not deny that there were divisions in Romania in 1940. Indeed, it was the existence of divisions that probably emboldened the Hungarians to act in the first place. I do not deny either that the Romanian government never accepted the Second Vienna Settlement and this anger affected their tripartite relationship. However, in 1940, as the book "Maresalul Ion Antonescu, Erou, martir sau criminal de razboi" published by Editura Tesu in 2007, indicates, it was the German view that the southern flank of their advance into Russia neeeded to be covered.

RE: cantemir

Wow! When would that happen? I think it's a ludicrous speculation...
It was a misunderstanding (from your side) about the concerted USSR-Hungary attack. I never said there were plans of such thing, only that Romanians feared the hypothesis. Plus, I never said the USSR would invade Hungary in 1940. It did it in 1944
I'll check out this Eby dude on the Net. However, he seems biased.

I am glad that fellow forumist Cantemir is british, so his point of view is neutral from both red-yellow-blue and red-white-green colours. I found his words to be pertinent.

About Slovakia, what I found on wikipedia:

So, were they ALLOWED to occupy the territory? Look at a map of Slovakia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Czechoslovakia_1939.SVG

Is it a correct map?
21 inf, the foreign nationality of Mr. Cantemir is in a certain measure a proof of objectivity, but as you already know, it is hard for almost everyone to accept oppinions which contradict their own. Some of us included...
Also, cantemir, how could the germans have had any

when
1. They had no possibility to reach it
2. They already expressed their lack of political interest in the treaty of 23.08.39?

This post has been edited by MMM on February 13, 2009 06:18 pm

If I'm right, by 1940 the "Honvedseg" (Hugarian Army) had olny about 80 Toldis (light - and lightly armoured - licence build Swedish tank, armed with 20 mm cannon, apparently a good design but prone to mechanical faliure); no Turans were available until late 1941. So, by 1940 I guess even the FT-17 could had, up to a point, paired the Hungarian tanks. But, as everyone pointed out, it was not the case, since the FT were only used for internal, behind the front (security, anti-paras) duties. Considering their hypotetical clash with the R 35s, in that case the advantage for the Romanian tankers would had been even more clear, in my oppinion. For more on that matter, take a look here:
http://www.worldwar2.ro/forum/index.php?sh...ic=2036&hl=r+40

The advantage for the Hungarians was having an important number of AFVs suitable for recon and scouting. There were not only the Toldis in this role, but also (and mostly) the "Csaba"s - armoured cars with a very modern design.

This post has been edited by Agarici on February 21, 2009 11:51 pm

Assuming it was me the one you were referring to (by the way, the nick is "AGARICI"), and that you were sober while writing this post, a couple things:

- I was not accusing Denes of not knowing the history of his country; by the way, and four your knowledge, this would be Romania or Canada, and in no case Hungary, from the classical citizenship point of view. I know, the Central-Eastern European realities (and history) are damn' intricate, so perhaps you shouldn't be so eager in teaching lessons about them. What I said was that Denes, whom I saw posting here for quite a few years now, uses his technical knowledge as a hobby aviation historian as an “intellectual prestige”-type argument (“argumentum ad verecundiam”, in Latin - a standard logical error), in combination with the fact that a certain minority (of which member he is) and its rights was/could have been involved in the bellow-mentioned episodes (another typical “argumentum ad misericordiam”) as a starting point to manipulate some general-historical (and highly sensitive) episodes, which could (and should) not be reduced to the sum of raw data about how many planes, and of which type, each side had. I also say that he was/is doing the same thing - weather deliberately or by reflex - in some of his publications (with which I am, more or less, familiar) - and I'm going to illustrate that with examples (and quotations) from his articles, as soon as my time will allow me to. And if the disguised invectives and the typical, textbook reflex of "minority nevrotic self-victimization" are the only answer he could give, that really is his problem.

- Before indirectly asserting that I am an ignorant in history, I advise you to browse this forum a little more. I cam assure you that you could make your point even without randomly accusing other people.

This post has been edited by Agarici on February 21, 2009 11:53 pm

What civil war?

I guess it's the Iron Guard rebellion.

I suppose the three-days-rebellion (jan. '41) is the civil war... Or perhaps the whole ensemble of the Legionaire government could have been seen as a series of clashes and slaughters and assassinations could be mischievously seen as civil war (rather than civil unresting - and not even that was the case). Or, the third choice, he was not

as so gracefully Mr. Agarici had put it.
D'ya really care?

RE: FT-17's last stand
I guess, according to the pictures I've seen this week at the National Military Museum, that the last time an FT-17 has seen action was in the days after 23.08.1944, in Bucharest! I cannot remember for sure, but according to Ion S. Dumitru's book, there weren't any FT's sent in March 1945 to fight along Red Army, right? He had this theory according to which the Groza Gov't was imposed only after the last Romanian tank troops were deployed from Bucharest (as if the almighty Soviets would have feared a couple of old tanks ).
Is that so?