Monday, Oct. 23, 1944

Another Italy?

Never a strong reed, Hungary wilted quickly in the hot breath of war. For the government of Admiral Nicholas Horthy the Russian Army, Allied air attacks and the perceptible shrinking of German power were too much. This week Horthy, once the willing slave of Adolf Hitler, took to the Budapest radio, asked for an armistice less than a month after Russians crossed the border. A few hours later the Germans reportedly locked him up. Berlin also installed a new quisling, began barricading Budapest. Hungary was apparently to become another Italy.

The fate of Budapest and of Vienna, 135 miles beyond it, depended upon how much the Germans could spare to defend them. With Germany's east and west fronts in peril, how much was left for the south? Would Hungary's 35 divisions follow Horthy's line? Or would they follow the new government of Ferenc Szalasi, leader of the Fascist Arrow Cross?

The Russians were already less than 50 miles from Budapest. A tank battle was already raging on the Hungarian plain. The country was ideal for motorized attack. By this week Marshal Rodion Y. Malinovsky had widened his front to 120 miles, captured Szeged, Hungary's second largest city, the Transylvanian capital of Cluj, and drawn near to Debrecen, where Patriot Louis Kossuth once declared Hungary's independence. But Malinovsky had a long, tenuous supply line, might be delayed until it was strengthened.

Mop-Up. Far behind the Hungarian front line, Yugoslavia and Greece were mere mop-up operations. Belgrade, the "white city," wise in the ways of war, was again a battlefield. Russians and Yugoslav Partisans were fighting in its streets, where Germans had erected pillboxes, antitank obstacles and gun emplacements. To the south, the railroad-junction city of Nish was captured by Partisans and Bulgarians.

Greece, free of the Germans, was rapidly occupied by the British. Athens and its port of Piraeus were entered by British troops after the Greek flag was hoisted by patriot fighters. The British aim was to: 1) prevent internecine war between left and right; 2) maintain Britain's influence in a traditionally close Mediterranean country; 3) provide food, clothing, medicine.

In northeast Greece the beaten Bulgarians began to withdraw from Thrace in answer to Allied demands. Off western Greece the British walked onto the island of Corfu, its once-green hills and flowered meadows torn by incessant bombing. Not a shot was fired.

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