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EASTERN FRONT: City In Torment

3 minute read
TIME

All week long a cloud—part frost, part smoke, part dust—hung over the agony of Budapest. From the heights of Buda, Red Army soldiers occasionally saw the spires of a cathedral swim out of the cloud’s dark folds, stand in the clear for a few moments, disappear again. For miles around, the snow was black with soot from the cloud. In the heart of the town a grim struggle raged through the days & nights, block by block, brick by brick. As the battle neared its 15th day, the Russians had won more than 1,900 of the 4,500 blocks of buildings in the city. Landmarks of one of the most beautiful capitals in Europe were crumbling under artillery and mortar fire. Coronation Church and the Royal Palace were partly gone; a wing of the Parliament building lay in rubble.

On Rudolf Quay. Beside the tank barricades and rolls of barbed wire which the Germans threw across the streets, the pavements were littered with piles of broken furniture. Whenever the defenders chose to make a fort out of a house they threw the contents into the street. Rudolf Quay was littered with an untidy heap of crumpled pianos.

The defenders had the advantage of fighting from old houses with thick stone walls. Antitank guns were hidden in gateways and cellar windows. Entrances, street intersections, bridges were all mined. The Russians concentrated on taking corner buildings, setting up. a sweeping fire along the streets and leapfrogging to another corner building.

In cellars not used as forts, Budapest’s civilians huddled, their normal numbers of 1,000,000 swollen to perhaps 2,000,000 by refugees who had fled the war-ravaged countryside expecting to find safety in the city. They were dying by hundreds.

Frosty Shrouds. Heavy hoarfrost formed each night; the dead did not stink. They froze hard as stone and in the morning they were wrapped in eerie shrouds of frost.

In the hills west and northwest of the city the Germans hurled tanks and planes into a drive to reach their trapped garrison. They slashed more than halfway through the 30-mile-wide ring the Russians had thrown around the ancient capital, captured Esztergom, riverside anchor of the Red Army front south of the Danube. They were taking desperate chances, for north of the river the Russians were still rolling westward, an evergrowing menace to the German flank. But German commanders knew that success might dam the Russian tide flowing toward Austria. And Dr. Edmund Veehsenmayer, the Nazi Minister to Hungary, had growled: “We don’t care if ten Budapests are destroyed, provided we can save one Vienna.”

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