5

Reality: 1927–1937

FOR JUST OVER A DECADE, HUNGARY’S AERIAL REARMAment proceeded in fits and starts. The environment at the outset of the program in 1927 seemed promising: political and military leaders agreed on the necessity of an air force, the Italian Friendship Treaty offered an instrument for acquiring airplanes, and aviation-minded intellectuals began to provide a theoretical basis for the service’s employment. While these conditions remained relatively constant through the period, until the late 1930s Hungary did not see a substantial improvement in its diplomatic and legal standing, and its economic position deteriorated during the worldwide economic crisis. These problems complicated and slowed the efforts of Hungarian airmen to expand and modernize their service. Western aircraft companies were reluctant to trade with Hungary, and for those so inclined, Budapest’s financial difficulties limited payment options. And because Trianon’s prohibition against military aviation remained in force, such improvements they were able to achieve had to be concealed as commercial or sport aviation. These factors constrained Hungarian airmen as they sought to organize, equip, and train a force capable of fulfilling the nation’s foreign policy. Even so, by the end of 1937 the Hungarian air service had begun to emerge from the shadows, and with the covert assistance of Italy and Germany, to equip itself with a small number of modern aircraft.

The dynamics of this period illustrate the complex relationship between foreign policy and military power. The role of armed force in bolstering diplomacy was demonstrated repeatedly and persuasively even during those heady years immediately following the foundation of the League of Nations. Hungary’s own experience in revolution and intervention, the Italian seizure of Corfu, Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland all served to buttress Defense Minister Károly Csáky’s point to the Crown Council (“In foreign policy it is military strength above all that defines power”).1 An active, and especially a revisionist, foreign policy required a credible armed force. The creation of that force may, as in Hungary’s case, depend upon the ability of diplomats to loosen legal restrictions and to negotiate trade agreements, loans, and cooperative training arrangements.

Though the Italian treaty was a victory for Hungarian diplomacy, a symbol of the end of postwar isolation, its immediate results were disappointing. Contrary to the Foreign Ministry’s expectations, Italian capital did not pour into the country, and Hungarian finance remained dependent on British investment. Nor did weapons flow freely from Rome to Budapest. On January 1, 1928, one of the early attempts at arms smuggling was foiled when five train cars filled with machine guns and spare parts were intercepted by Austrian customs inspectors at the Szentgotthárd border crossing. This was a repatriation of sorts, since these items were among the materiel surrendered by Austro-Hungarian forces at the end of the First World War.² Nevertheless, the Little Entente was irate. The League of Nations investigation that followed concluded that the shipment was indeed a violation of international law, but that it posed little risk to Hungary’s neighbors.³

The Szentgotthárd scandal epitomized the first year of the Italo-Hungarian relationship: it was a provocation to the region that provided very little increase in the strength of either party. The debut of Italian airplanes in Hungary was similarly inauspicious. Delivery of a pair of Ansaldo AC.3 advanced trainers was long delayed, and the aircraft arrived in such poor condition that the accompanying Italian pilots refused to fly them. The type had already suffered twenty-two wing failures, they said, and the undercarriage was defective.4 The grounded AC.3s were eventually exchanged for two airworthy Fiat CR.20s.⁵ The relationship did improve after this rocky start, and Italian factories provided the bulk of the Hungarian air service’s airplanes for the next twelve years. The twin problems of late delivery and uncertain quality never completely disappeared, however, and Magyar aviators sometimes had to choose between an inferior Italian airplane or no airplane at all.

The Ansaldo/Fiat purchase was a result of a secret Bethlen-Mussolini meeting in Milan in April 1928. Their main point of discussion was joint support of the right-wing Heimwehr in Austria, whose ascent to power they believed would shift Vienna away from Paris and toward Rome-Budapest. Prime Minister Bethlen took the opportunity to press the Duce for a 300-million pengő credit and an option to buy 400 Italian aircraft.⁶ Mussolini agreed, pushed perhaps by the possibility of closer Hungarian-German military relations. Italian diplomats were aware that Bethlen had met in Rome with General Hans von Seeckt, the recently retired commander of the Reichswehr and the architect of its resurgence. They also knew that von Seeckt had visited Hungary in October 1927 at Bethlen’s invitation to consider the prospects for Hungarian rearmament. Spurred by competition, Italy’s military attaché in Budapest offered a number of officer exchange programs. After much deliberation and negotiation, it was decided that Hungarian pilots would resign their Honvédség commissions and attend Italian flight schools as civilians. After the Szentgotthárd incident, Mussolini suggested an additional precaution: the Hungarians should renounce their citizenship and become, at least temporarily, Italians. Through these measures it was thought the scheme could avoid breaching the Paris Air Agreement and Trianon’s Article 142.⁷ The British Foreign Office learned of this plan and relayed it to Sir Ronald Graham, London’s minister in Rome. In a cable marked “Very secret,” Whitehall generally agreed with Mussolini’s legal analysis while questioning his judgment:

Our lawyers do not think that Article 142 prevents Hungarians from receiving aeronautical instruction in the air force of a foreign Power, provided they do not ‘enlist (s’enrôler)’ in it, unless indeed it were possible to maintain that the action taken amounted to sending an ‘air or military mission’ to Italy. We do not think that such a contention could succeed, especially as the second paragraph of the article makes it plain that the only obligation on Italy is not to employ Hungarians for the purpose of assisting or instructing in military training…. It is probably the case that the framers of the article in question did not take into account such a contingency as that which has now arisen, as it seems clear that the object of the article was to prevent the spread of Hungarian military ‘kultur’. It was not worded so as to prevent the Hungarians from receiving military training. As to whether Mussolini’s action is inconsistent with the spirit of the article, there is in any case room for a difference of opinion, and Mussolini may be entitled to ‘try it on’ openly as he proposes to do.

As regards the first of his proposals, however, there is no getting away from the fact that they reveal the existence of a most discreditable and dangerous intrigue by Mussolini to violate the Treaty of Trianon by collusion between two of its signatories behind the backs of the other signatories, and it is greatly to be feared that the Hungarians will be far too short sighted to resist his overtures.

… The feeling here is that the best thing that could happen would be that we should learn of the arrangement by some avowable channel of information and thereupon represent to Mussolini and Bethlen the folly of the whole thing. Otherwise we are afraid that if this scheme succeeds both parties will be encouraged to work out others of a similar nature and to grow increasingly rash in the process until the Yugoslavs discover what is going on and produce a most unpleasant crisis by denouncing both Italy and Hungary to the League.

… The whole business shows Mussolini in a bad light and unfortunately is but another sample of his recent policy of giving secret and illegal help to those who in time of trouble would certainly not be friendly to the Serbs. The illicit imports of Italian war material into Hungary and Bulgaria are but other instances of this policy.8

This cable shows how much the Foreign Office knew about Hungarian attempts to skirt the air clauses of Trianon, and also how comparatively little it cared. It also demonstrates how easily international law can be dodged when one party is scrupulous to uphold it and the other motivated to subvert it. It seems that no “avowable channel” presented itself, and rather than risk exposing its intelligence source, Great Britain did not confront Mussolini and Bethlen with the evidence of the illegal pilot training.

The plan to change nationalities proved too complex and was never executed. The LÜH instead sent its initial candidates to Italy as private individuals enrolled in a sport-flying course. The program’s pioneers were Lajos and Pál Batáry, brothers born in Fiume of an Italian mother. Although ostensibly taking civilian lessons, the Batárys in fact received advanced tactical training from RA instructors, an arrangement much like the faux MALERT training operation established at Szombathely five years earlier. Lajos was sent to a fighter unit, while Pál trained on bombers. Care was taken to keep the brothers out of sight of foreign observers: they were not permitted to participate in the autumn maneuvers, and Pál was moved from the 13th Bomb Regiment at Torino to the 7th at Lonate-Pozzolo for fear of discovery. The exact number of Hungarian pilots trained in Italy before 1938 is uncertain, because those Air Ministry records did not survive the war. Attaché reports and Italian documents refer to other trainees, however, so it is clear that the Batárys were not the only beneficiaries of Italian instruction in this period. Lieutenant Colonel Szilárd Schindler, the Hungarian attaché in Rome, learned to fly Caproni bombers, as did Captain Gyula Tost, who flew combat sorties over Abyssinia with the RA. One of the Hungarian service’s chief inspectors, First Lieutenant Elek Ivánkovics, is recorded as attending a four-week course on fighter tactics.9

The pilot training program and secret arms exports strengthened the Italo-Hungarian military ties, but the relationship was far from exclusive. Cooperation with Weimar Germany continued through staff visits and licensed manufacturing. In addition to the Udet 12a adopted in 1926, WM had in 1928 purchased for 40,000 marks the license to produce twenty-five Heinkel HD 22 advanced trainers.10 The HD 22 was used by the MALERT airmail section, which was in reality the air service’s bomber squadron. Even as the Italians kept a close eye on German advances toward their new ally, a French flirtation nearly split the Budapest-Rome pairing. In 1928, the French General Staff announced that the following year two Hungarian officers would be seconded to French forces. When questioned by Italian officials, the Defense Ministry suggested that it had simply responded to a French invitation. Upon further investigation by the Italian attaché in Paris, it was discovered that the request was initiated in Budapest. Quiet Italian intervention resulted in the French politely withdrawing their approval, and the Hungarian officers, one of whom was an airman on the clandestine air staff, never went to France. For the next two years, however, a pair of Honvédség officers did attend the French cavalry school at Saumur. Italy again objected, this time more strenuously. Lieutenant Colonel Schindler was summoned to the Italian War Ministry, where he received a dressing down from a senior officer. The war minister, he was told, thought that further Italo-Hungarian cooperation should be suspended, since Hungary, which could not send its officers on courses in Italy due to financial constraints, managed to send them to France. Through a number of miscommunications the disagreement escalated before finally being resolved weeks later. Though no lasting damage was done to relations with Italy, a possible Hungarian connection to France was severed. Budapest declined the next invitation from Paris. This incident, of minor significance in itself, shows the sensitivity of these countries to perceived shifts in power. Italy, fearing a loss of its own prestige and leverage should Hungary move marginally closer to France, forced Hungary to forgo a relationship that could have ameliorated its isolation. Hungary, the junior partner, had little choice, since the small diplomatic advantage that might be gained through exchanges with French forces was far outweighed by the concrete benefits in weapons and training the alliance with Italy offered.

Among the most important benefits of the burgeoning relationship with Italy was access to its aircraft industry. The original LÜH acquisition plan for 1930 included an order for twelve CR.20 fighters in addition to Caproni bombers. Fear that the pace of technological advance would soon make the Fiats obsolete caused LÜH officials to cancel the fighter contract and secure instead the production rights for the Ca.97, a single-engined light transport airplane easily converted to the bombing role.11 The single prototype from WM suffered from problems with steel-tube soldering as well as splits in the linen covering, and the Ca.97 never entered serial production. Giovanni Caproni sent two Ca.101 aircraft as replacements and trekked to Hungary himself to advise WM on production techniques.¹² With the assistance of Caproni and experts from Fiat, WM engineers finally mastered steel-tube construction, and even pioneered a method of varying tube cross-section and wall thickness to maintain structural stability at reduced weights.¹³ In spite of this breakthrough, license production of the Caproni airplanes was not resumed.

The novel technique was put to use in WM’s first independently produced trainer. The WM 10 resembled De Havilland’s Moth, but was lighter than its British cousin due to the new tube construction, and was powered by a Hungarian-designed four-cylinder air-cooled engine. Unfortunately, it was a demanding machine to fly, and after two of the first ten production models were destroyed in crashes, it was withdrawn from the flight schools. The WM 10 was replaced by the Hungaria, a slightly larger and heavier version of the Udet 12a Flamingó produced by the Székesfehérvár-Sóstó workshop. The Hungaria’s extra weight decreased slightly its performance when compared to the Flamingó, but the domestic manufacturing saved 15 per cent of cost without worsening the trade imbalance with Germany.¹⁴

Trade relations with the Dutch Fokker company remained strong. The LFT had flown Fokker fighters in the First World War, and MALERT’s earliest routes had used the five-passenger F.III. WM successfully manufactured fifty Fokker C.V-Ds as well as a small number of fifteen-seat Fokker F.VIII passenger planes for MALERT. In 1930, the company ordered four D.XVI “aerobatic airplanes” with an eye toward eventual licensed production. The D.XVI was actually a modern fighter design, and French press coverage of its delivery (Hungary had ordered it with a Gnome-Rhône engine) delayed the fourth airplane’s arrival by a year and foreclosed the possibility of WM production.¹⁵

Figure 5.1. Fokker/WM C.V-Ds over Budapest. Photo: Fortepan/Tibor Erky-Nagy.

The Hungarian aircraft industry was proving itself a capable producer of foreign designs. But it had not shown the capacity to move a sophisticated domestic machine from the drawing board to the flight line, nor had it developed an engine strong enough to power more than the most basic training airplane. Many First World War Habsburg aircraft had been propelled by fine Austro-Daimler engines, but the imperial dissolution left no major engine works in Hungary. This was a serious shortfall, because “an engine plant is primarily a precision machine tool shop, while an airframe plant is primarily a sheet-metal fabrication and assembly shop.”16 Metal tube problems could be sorted out with a visit from more experienced experts; not so with engine fabrication anomalies. Even Germany, to whom Hungary would eventually turn for engine expertise, was dogged by its own aircraft propulsion deficiencies. Thus the WM-built Gnome-Rhône engines were absolutely critical to Hungary’s aviation production. The French engines were themselves derived from the British Bristol Jupiter, which had its roots in the First World War. The Jupiter had been refined and improved in the decade that followed, and powered dozens of postwar aircraft models. From the Jupiter base, Gnome-Rhône developed a series of radial engines, and sold rights to WM for the manufacture of three versions: the K-7 Titan Major, a seven-cylinder plant capable of 370-horsepower; the nine-cylinder, 600- horsepower K-9 Mistral; and the K-14 Mistral Major, essentially two K-7s mated front to back, producing up to 1,000 horsepower.17 WM engineers introduced a number of small improvements to the design which were adopted by the Bristol and Gnome-Rhône, including a simpler ignition system, castor oil lubrication, and a cast cylinder head with more fins and therefore more efficient cooling. These modifications raised WM’s international profile and earned back a bit of the licensing fee.¹⁸ One of these engines would power almost every aircraft built in Hungary through the end of the Second World War, with the exception of the Bf 109 and Me 210s.

WM was the parent company of UFAG, Hungary’s first aircraft manufacturing plant and its largest producer of airplanes in the First World War. The postwar restrictions and convulsions having made it nearly impossible to sustain a variety of aircraft producers, the Commerce Ministry decided to maintain WM and MÁG as viable aviation firms. Other companies were not prohibited from joining the industry, as when Sóstó moved from repair to production with the Hungaria trainer, but government backing would be focused on WM and MÁG. The two companies reached an agreement with the Commerce Ministry that WM would handle small production runs of fifty or fewer aircraft, while MÁG would produce the larger series.¹⁹ The arrangement was apparently reached amicably, but it proved to be much to WM’s advantage: legal and budgetary restrictions in post-Trianon Hungary all but assured that the overwhelming majority of aircraft orders would be for fewer than fifty machines. MÁG, a primary contractor for Fokker and Berg fighters in 1914–1918, was therefore effectively crowded out of the aircraft market, and in fact the company collapsed during the 1931 economic crisis. Airplanes were only a part of MÁG’s industrial output, but the firm might have been saved from bankruptcy if contracts had been adjusted to spread work more evenly between WM and MÁG. A possible solution would have been for the companies to specialize in airplane size or purpose (WM, for example, could have concentrated on engines and transport aircraft, MÁG on trainers). Efficiency was served by centralization, but one lesson of the disastrous Knoller program in 1915 was that diversification of product and producer was a strategic strength. This suboptimization of limited aircraft manufacturing capacity was not a serious failure on the part of Commerce Ministry or LÜH planners, but it does underline one area in which the staff officers did not adequately address earlier imperial weaknesses.

The LÜH staff, under the leadership of Colonel Károly Vassel since 1923, generally performed well during its long span underground. From the sanctuary of the Commerce Ministry its officers had seen the air service through the Allied inspections, preserving the seven disguised skeleton squadrons (three training schools, two meteorological, and two airmail sections), stimulating domestic production of training aircraft, and arranging imports from Italy, Germany, Holland, and Britain. They had also established a medical institute devoted to aviation-related maladies, a four-year airplane and engine maintenance school, a legitimate aviation weather service (separate from the clandestine fighter squadrons), and a university course for technical officers. The air service strength in October 1928 stood at 164 officers and civil servants and 719 other ranks. As a result of a Honvédség reorganization it grew nearly 20 per cent within months, to a strength of 1,174 personnel in July 1929. In December 1929, Colonel Vassel was promoted to lieutenant general and named chief inspector of the air service.20 His successor at the LÜH was Colonel György Rákosi, whose term included the early phases of cooperation with the RA, the setbacks caused by the worldwide economic crisis, and the intense debates about air power described in the previous chapter.

The effects of the crash of 1929 were just beginning to be felt in Hungary as Vassel and Rákosi took their new posts in December. The next four years would be a “crisis of unparalleled depth” as the economic calamity in the industrialized West led to a precipitous decline in global agricultural prices.²¹ The worldwide wholesale price for wheat, for example, Hungary’s biggest export, dropped 70 per cent from 1929 to 1933.²² The market for other agricultural goods also collapsed, leading to increased consumption of domestic produce and the erection of trade barriers. Germany, which increased its own area under cultivation during the crisis, raised its wheat tariff by 300 per cent after the 1930 harvest. Czechoslovakia, Hungary’s second best customer (after Austria) in spite of the political tensions between the two countries, declined to renew the trade agreement that expired that year. Thus 1931 exports to Prague amounted to only 4.2 per cent of Hungary’s total, compared to 16.8 per cent in 1930.²³ The value of those exports dropped from 45 million in 1931 to 7 million in 1932.²⁴ Imports from Czechoslovakia also fell, but only to just under half of the previous year.²⁵ So it went with other trade partners: total trade contracted (as did all other indicators of economic health), but exports shrank more than imports, exacerbating an already poor balance of payments.

In 1931 the crisis hit the Hungarian financial sector. The failure of the Austrian Credit-Anstalt bank in May sent tremors through Budapest, particularly since the Austrian institution was heavily engaged in Hungarian loans through the Magyar Hitelbank. Prime Minister Bethlen, fearing sagging public approval of the government party, dissolved parliament six months early. He was returned with a large majority and for a few weeks his action seemed to have had the desired calming effect. In mid-July, however, Danatbank failed, initiating a run on German banks.26 “In the wake of one European crash after another, foreign lenders withdrew all credit lines that could be cancelled. Between 1st May and 13th July 1931 the Hungarian National Bank was obliged to pay out gold and foreign currency to a value of some 200 million pengős, which exhausted the country’s reserves.”²⁷ Bethlen instituted foreign exchange controls and secured a new international loan, but could not solve the problem of servicing existing foreign debts in the face of reduced foreign earnings.²⁸ Under pressure from parliament for having failed to anticipate the banking crisis, Bethlen resigned on August 19, 1931, after ten years in office. He was replaced by Count Gyula Károlyi (a cousin of Mihály Károlyi), whom Horthy had suggested to Bethlen as foreign minister in 1930. Károlyi retained nearly all of Bethlen’s ministers, and most of his policies. As a condition of further loans, the Financial Committee of the League of Nations insisted on various austerity measures to reduce government expenditures, including heavy cuts in civil service salaries. Standards of living fell across the country; only the very poorest rural laborers were largely unaffected, since they had effectively “dropped en bloc out of the economic equation, relapsing into a pre-monetary economy based on self-devised and self-sufficient barter.”²⁹

The most direct and immediate result of the economic crisis for the Hungarian armed forces was a reduction in the pace of its secret rearmament. The 1929–1930 airplane order from Italy was cut in half, from 11.6 to 5.6 million pengős, and the entire Italian credit line for armament purchases in the 1930–1931 fiscal year declined to 4.7 million pengős.³⁰ Arms sales around the world took a nosedive during the crisis, dropping over 40 per cent from 1929 to 1933, although that decrease was less than the drop in total exports. The formidable Czechoslovakian arms industry was an exception. It saw a spike in arms exports in 1930, followed by a decline in 1931 to normal levels, a collapse in 1932, a recovery in 1933, and another sharp rise in 1934.31 The healthy output of its adversary’s weapons factories cannot have been comforting to Hungarian military planners.

Two other events occurred as a result of the crisis that would profoundly affect Hungary and the Honvédség. The first was the accession of Gyula Gömbös to the premiership; the second laid the foundation of eventual German economic dominance. Gömbös, who as a captain in 1921 led the anti-Habsburg forces at Budaőrs, had in 1928 been appointed secretary of state for defense, charged by Bethlen to cooperate with the retired Lieutenant General Károly Soós in drafting the plan for the expansion of the army. In 1929 he became defense minister following Csáky’s sudden resignation. When Gyula Károlyi proved unable to garner significant popular support, the regent in October 1932 asked Lieutenant General Gömbös (the rank had come with his elevation to defense minister) to form a government. In fact, Horthy, with Bethlen’s help, formed most of the government, filling the posts with sound and cautious men expected to moderate Gömbös’s right radicalism. Horthy’s shackling of Gömbös was successful in at least one important area. The secret societies with which Gömbös had been aligned his entire political life, the Hungarian Association of National Defense (Magyar Országos Véderő Egyesülete) and the Etelköz Association (Etelközi Szövetség), as well as his late political party, the Hungarian National Independence (Racial Defense) Party (Magyar Nemzeti Függetlenségi (Fajvédő) Párt) were deeply antisemitic. Gömbös had in the early 1920s written “pamphlets on international Jewry, freemasonry and kindred subjects, which hardly differed in style or content from Hitler’s own effusions.”³² Nonetheless, once in power he passed no antisemitic legislation, instead reaching a secret agreement with the leaders of the Jewish Neolog Community, one of Hungary’s two Jewish bodies, that would secure their endorsement of his government. In his inaugural address, Gömbös appeared to reject his earlier antisemitism:

To the Jews I declare openly and frankly that I have changed my views. That part of Jewry that acknowledges that it shares a common fate with our People I wish to regard as brethren, just as I do my Magyar brethren…. I saw Jewish heroes during the war … and I know that they fought courageously. I know prominent Jews who pray for the Magyar fate, and I know that they will be the first to condemn that part of Jewry which could not or would not assimilate with the national community.33

Gömbös most certainly had not revised his views on the importance of Italy and Germany to effecting Hungary’s revisionist claims, however. Just three days after becoming prime minister, he wrote to Mussolini affirming his admiration for the Fascist system and expressing his desire to continue the foreign policy of Bethlen; that is, one of cooperation with Italy in destabilizing the Little Entente and diminishing French influence in the region. He also requested continued Italian assistance in the matter of importing arms and exporting wheat. A month later, he went to Rome to invigorate the relationship. There was renewed interest in the Italo-Austro-Hungarian customs union, and small arms deliveries intensified. This last development caused all three countries significant embarrassment after a shipment of rifles and machine guns from Italy bound for Hungary was discovered in an Austrian weapons factory awaiting refurbishment. The Hirtenberg incident, so named for the plant in which the arms were found, raised objections from Britain and France, and caused the Little Entente to strengthen their alliance. The weapons eventually were sent back to Italy.³⁴

Italo-German relations were at this time quite strained, Mussolini being very concerned to protect Austrian sovereignty lest he share a border with an enlarged German Reich. Austrian officials did not assuage this concern. Vienna’s military attaché in Rome warned Mussolini, “If one time the Germans are able to breakfast in Innsbruck, that same day they’ll want to lunch in Milan.”³⁵ Gömbös, the originator of the phrase “Rome-Berlin Axis,” felt it his mission to bring his patrons together. A letter to Mussolini (whose chest, Gömbös liked to tell confidantes, was the same size as his own) included his belief that “if Rome and Berlin, Budapest and Vienna would form a stronger alliance, they could play an important role in European politics.”36 Gömbös did not live to see the Axis realized (he succumbed to cancer in 1936), but he did more than perhaps any other Hungarian leader to push his country into alliance with Germany.

This push met with little resistance in its early years. The British minister in Budapest reported in 1930 that many Hungarian leaders favored closer economic ties to Germany. “The existing relationship is perfectly harmonious,” wrote Viscount Chilton, except for the lack of a commercial treaty, the conclusion of which “is indeed of the highest importance to Hungary.”³⁷ Two years later that desire for a treaty had become desperation for a market. Germany had in 1931 relented temporarily from its refusal to import the Hungarian wheat crop, taking nearly half of its annual surplus, but had not repeated the arrangement in the following two years. In February 1934, the two countries signed a trade agreement that offered near-term relief at the expense of Hungary’s long-term economic freedom, although this was not obvious at the time. Through this arrangement, instead of paying their German creditors directly, Hungarian debtors were to purchase Hungarian agricultural products with pengős they owed to German firms. Those goods were then exported to Germany, where the proceeds of their sale could be used to import certain manufactured items back into Hungary. This mechanism substantially increased Hungary’s export trade with Germany, which in 1933 totaled 43.7 million pengős and rose the next year to 88.9 million. Imports increased as well, although less dramatically, thereby giving Hungary what appeared to be a small balance of trade advantage (these were official figures that did not include the prohibited trade in arms; the favorable trade balance would disappear if armaments were considered).

It was not only quantitatively that Germany thus came to occupy a dominant position in Hungary’s economy. She succeeded in interlocking Hungary’s economy with her own in such a fashion than many Hungarian factories would simply have been unable to carry on production without the regular supply from Germany of raw materials, or in other cases, of certain machines, machine tools or spare parts. In other cases the Hungarian factories were only adapted to carry through parts of certain processes which had to be either begun or finished in Germany. This applied particularly to the armaments industry (the development of which in both countries was one of the objects of the agreements).38

Just months before signing this agreement that benefited their arms industries, both Hungary and Germany had been engaged in the League of Nations disarmament conference in Geneva. The defeated countries were already disarmed, and they accordingly introduced or supported efforts to implement the broad disarmament called for in the imposed peace settlements. Their demobilization had been justified in explicitly universalist terms: “In order to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations.”³⁹ The German foreign minister brought this to the attention of the League in a September 1931 address, reminding the delegates, “The counterpart of the obligations assumed by Germany in 1919 is a formal undertaking on the part of the other states that disarmament by Germany should be simply a prelude to general disarmament by the other powers.”⁴⁰ In Budapest in July 1931, the Conference of the International Federation of the League of Nations Societies affirmed the “principle of equality of disarmament between ‘vanquished’ and ‘victorious’ Powers.”⁴¹ Of course “equality of disarmament” was nothing more than a club to be used by Berlin and Budapest to bludgeon the West for its hypocrisy. German and Hungarian diplomats wanted to claim the moral high ground while working for their genuine goal, the recognition of their equal rights to rearmament. The victorious powers and successor states, however, rejected the accusations of hypocrisy, and insisted that they must maintain their defensive arms until all revisionist claims had been categorically renounced.

Unable to find an agreeable level of armament, the conference moved from the “quantitative” question to the “qualitative,” the prohibition of particular types of weapons, including tanks, submarines, and aircraft. The most extreme example of qualitative disarmament was the proposal put forward in early February 1932 by French war minister André Tardieu, who became the premier later that month. Tardieu’s plan called for placing heavy bombers under the control of an international air force, with national governments retaining control only of small defensive aircraft. The revisionist powers objected loudly, claiming that France aimed to perpetuate its military superiority under the authority of the League, and Britain and the United States were cool to the idea of a supranational armed force.42 American president Herbert Hoover offered his own plan that entailed deeper cuts in arms, but without the ties of collective security arrangements. The plan suited neither of its wartime allies: France insisted on security guarantees, and Hoover’s proposed reductions in ships and airplanes were more than Britain’s imperial staff could stomach. In the meantime, internal politics caused Germany’s position on equality of arms to harden, with the result that Germany threatened not to return to the conference after a scheduled adjournment if its right to rearmament were not recognized. Berlin did not carry the motion, and the conference adjourned after only reaching agreements that banned the use of chemical and incendiary weapons and the bombardment of civilian populations.⁴³

Ferenc Szentnémedy, Hungary’s most fervent promoter of the unrestricted aerial offensive, framed the debate as one between France and the Little Entente, who tied together disarmament and security for negotiations but truly opposed national equality of arms; and those countries, like Germany, Italy, and Russia, who believed in practical disarmament and demanded real cuts in offensive forces. Arms inequality, Szentnémedy contended, invited trouble because unarmed countries put themselves at the mercy of their neighbors. The problem posed by aerial disarmament was especially acute, because air forces promised to be uniquely destructive. After six months of negotiations in 1932, the details of which he accurately recounted for MKSz readers, Szentnémedy observed that the Geneva conference had not produced any substantial positive outcomes. “For this very reason,” he concluded, “it is legitimate to claim that the ‘devaluation’ of the conquered must cease. The disarmed surely must be given the possibility for self-defense, at the same time, however, those who aggressively and falsely are arming, must themselves disarm.”44 Szentnémedy’s last sentence perfectly captured Hungary’s public position on the question of aerial arms. In MKSz and other publications he expounded on Hungary’s defenselessness from aerial attack, and the growing strength of the Little Entente’s air arms. A chart in his 1933 book Aviation, derived from League of Nations numbers and German estimates, showed the combined frontline combat strength of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania at over 900 airplanes. Hungary, “due to the peace treaty, has nothing” (A békeszerződés folytán semmi).⁴⁵

This claim was disingenuous. Not only were the Little Entente’s numbers purposely inflated by the reporting countries in order to minimize the effect of any League reductions after Geneva, Hungary had by 1932 managed to acquire a handful of capable combat machines, including the multipurpose two-seat Heinkel HD 22s and Fokker C.V-Ds, Fokker D.XVI and Fiat CR.20 fighters, and Caproni transport bombers. In October 1931, the strength of its secret air force stood at six squadrons: three short-range and one long-range reconnaissance squadrons, and two training squadrons.⁴⁶ And further expansion was planned. Even as the distinguished Count Apponyi listened to Tardieu’s proposal in Geneva, in Budapest the Supreme Defense Council (Legfelső Honvédelmi Tanács, LHT) issued its blueprint for long-term development of the Honvédség. The LHT planned a 21-division motorized army and a 48-squadron air force. Of the 48 squadrons, 21 were planned as bomber units, 15 as reconnaissance, and 12 as fighter squadrons. Although it is not possible to trace exactly the intellectual origins of the 1932 plan, it likely was influenced by Szentnémedy’s 1931 injection of Douhet into the doctrinal debate. With nearly half of the squadrons dedicated to bombing, it was a decidedly offensive arm, and stood apart from its potential adversaries in the region, in whose forces fighters outnumbered bombers by as much as four to one. Among the first concrete steps to expansion was the 1933 increase of 40 per cent in air service enlisted personnel, from 900 to 1,300 airmen, and a more modest increase in officers and civil servants to 191.47

This coincided with a rise in the published annual government subsidy to MALERT from 200,000 to 300,000 pengős. Since MALERT functioned as a legitimate commercial endeavor in addition to its role as a false front for the Hungarian air service, we cannot with confidence completely disentangle the two organizations’ sources of funding. The 300,000-pengő subvention acknowledged by Budapest was just a fraction of the total government expenditure laundered through the company’s books. MALERT’s growth since its establishment in 1922 followed the same pattern as that of the air service, and was dependent to nearly the same degree on diplomatic successes. The airline could also only acquire airplanes and open new lines when negotiations with foreign countries permitted. In the early 1930s its transport fleet consisted of nine Fokker craft (three F.IIIs, two F.VIIs, two F.VIIIs and two F.XIs), and six Capronis (four Ca.97s and two Ca.101s). MALERT’s routes expanded in 1930–1931 as the company began domestic service, first to Pécs and Kaposvár, then to Nyíregyháza and Miskolc.⁴⁸ The Pécs flight garnered national attention, with photographs in the press of MALERT’s president, Prince Ferenc, and the Pécs county high sheriff, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer (who would soon enter the cabinet as interior minister), emerging from the Fokker.⁴⁹ International destinations doubled, with Venice and Klagenfurt added to the schedule.⁵⁰ This expansion was short lived, and indeed 1932 saw a precipitous decline in MALERT’s operations. In the two preceding years, the numbers of flights, passengers, and miles flown had been nearly constant: more than a 1,000 flights each year, carrying around 3,500 passengers 107,000 nautical miles. In 1932 the numbers dropped by almost 40 per cent before climbing slightly the following year.⁵¹ The domestic flights ceased in 1934, as did the service to Venice and Klagenfurt. It is unclear whether the changes were due to softening demand or increasing costs, but the Fokker aircraft were aging, and by 1936 all but the F.VIIIs had been withdrawn from airline service (the F.VIIs and F.XIs were taken over openly by the air force).⁵² The HD 22s and C.V-Ds, thinly disguised bomber and reconnaissance machines, continued to carry mail between Budapest and Szombathely.

Figure 5.2. One of three fifteen-passenger Fokker F.VIIIs produced by WM for MALERT. Courtesy of the Péter Zámbori Collection.

The failure of MALERT’s domestic scheduled flights was not caused by a general apathy toward flying. Sport aviation had an avid following in Hungary during these years and figured prominently in public life. The prewar Hungarian Aero Club (Magyar Aero Szövetség, MASz) had come back to life immediately after the departure of the Allied Aeronautical Commission in 1922. Air shows at regional airfields organized by private groups had tremendous appeal. In September 1924 the War Widows and Orphans Association hosted an air show at Kecskemét. One of MALERT’s newly acquired Fokker six-seaters opened the day by scattering advertising leaflets over the city, and in the afternoon treated spectators to a parachutists’ display. A similar event in Kecskemét in 1929 “met with huge success.” In 1932 the Central Hungarian Automobile and Motor Club organized a larger event there. Seven sport airplanes participated, along with two MALERT Fokkers, in which 133 visitors were able to take a ride (more than a hundred others were in the queue when flying ended for the day). Distinguished guests included István Horthy, the regent’s son and an experienced pilot himself, and the director of the LÜH, Dr. György Rákosi. Rákosi arrived in a Fiat BR.3 named Justice for Hungary, a gift from Mussolini meant as a replacement for Hungary’s most famous airplane that had been lost in a crash earlier in the year.53

The original Justice for Hungary was flown by György Endresz and Sándor Magyar across the Atlantic in July 1931. The record-setting ocean crossing was the most celebrated feat of Hungarian airmanship in the decades between the wars, and perhaps of all time. The stunt operated as part of Lord Rothermere’s campaign to assist Hungary in its quest for rehabilitation and revision. Measured in terms of sympathetic press coverage, particularly in the United States, the flight was a huge success. Christening the aircraft Justice for Hungary was a stroke of publicity genius, because it all but ensured that every news item about the flight would print those words in a positive light, and public fascination with aerial exploits meant there was an eager audience. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the golden age of aviation—this was only the fifteenth nonstop transatlantic flight—and it is unlikely that a “Justice for Hungary” polar expedition or round-the-world sail would have garnered the same interest. For the aviators themselves, Lord Rothermere’s $10,000 prize offered a tangible monetary benefit in addition to the promise of fame and the admiration of their countrymen.

Magyars living within Hungary contributed very little to the trip ($45, according to one account); it was funded almost entirely by the sizable Hungarian diaspora.54 The idea originated in the offices of the Detroit Magyar Hírlap, and soon gained the support of the American Hungarian Federation. Endresz and Magyar traveled to America to raise funds for their flight. Nearly 8,000 Americans contributed, but the individual gifts were small.⁵⁵ After weeks of work, the two had collected just $5,000, and had spent almost $3,000 in the process. Then they met Emil Szalay, a Detroit meat processor who had “a ten-year ambition to do something that would draw the favorable attention of the world to his native Hungary.”⁵⁶ Szalay’s father had served in the Habsburg army after it had crushed the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. He felt a lasting shame, and told his sons, “You must do something good for the Hungarian people to wipe out my disgrace.” Szalay mortgaged his salami factory and handed Endresz and Magyar $22,000 to buy an airplane.⁵⁷ The aircraft selected by their technical advisor Antal Bánhidi was a Lockheed Sirius 8A, a two-seat, low-wing monoplane powered by a 425-horsepower Pratt and Whitney engine, similar to the K-9 Mistral produced under license at WM. The Sirius was a sleek and modern machine with a smooth plywood skin, designed with input from Charles Lindbergh, who wanted a high-speed, low-drag airplane for his further global adventures.⁵⁸ Justice for Hungary carried its name and registration letters HA-AAF in stark white against the red fuselage as Endresz and Magyar set out from Roosevelt Field, New York, on July 13, 1931, on the way to Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, from where they would launch the transatlantic flight.

György Endresz was an extremely experienced pilot. He had flown reconnaissance missions over the Balkans before transitioning to single-seat fighters later in the First World War. At war’s end, he took command of the Győr squadron of mixed one- and two-seat aircraft and maintained that position through the Károlyi government and the Kun regime.⁵⁹ He then flew as a commercial pilot for Aero Express and Junkers, and served as a flight instructor for the MASz.⁶⁰ Sándor Magyar had been an observer in the war and joined the Szeged Whites before taking up a career as an airline pilot in Canada. Born Sándor Wilczek, his choice of adopted surname indicates he was either very enthusiastic about the program of Magyarization, or else possessed of a very dry wit.⁶¹ Magyar was a skilled radio operator and navigator, and his use of radio stations as an aid to navigation was considered by some experts as “only short of Lindbergh’s famous exploit for precision.”⁶² The pair’s original plan had called for an arrival in Hungary by August 20, 1930 (a national holiday celebrating St. Stephen), but unusually bad weather across the Atlantic, forecast to extend through the winter, forced a delay.⁶³ They did move their staging ground nearer the ocean, departing from Flint, Michigan, Szalay’s home town, on September 30, 1930, for New York.⁶⁴

Figure 5.3. György Endresz (right) with two well-wishers in front of the Lockheed Sirius 8A Justice for Hungary. Courtesy of Dénes Bernád.

During the weather delay, Endresz and Magyar found themselves at odds with Lockheed. The aircraft had been constructed with 650-gallon fuel tanks, but the factory test pilots had not conducted trial flights with full fuel. The Sirius had come off the production line behind schedule, and with Endresz and Magyar waiting to take possession, the full fuel flights were not accomplished. Endresz and Magyar were reluctant to do the test flights themselves, because they knew that two similar airplanes had crashed on takeoff with the same fuel load.65 Lockheed proved unwilling to share the desired performance data, so Endresz drew on the expertise at the Budapest Technical University. With the university’s engineers calculations in hand, he and Magyar were eventually reassured that the airplane could take off safely and, provided fuel consumption were very carefully managed, could make the flight, which Magyar reckoned to take between twenty-six and twenty-eight hours. In the meantime, new radio navigation equipment was installed (paid for at a cost of $4,000 by Lord Rothermere) and stronger landing gear fitted.⁶⁶

With the issues finally resolved and the return of suitable weather, Justice for Hungary left Roosevelt Field for a refueling stop in Newfoundland before the July 15, 1931, launch of the nonstop ocean crossing. Time magazine described the flight for its American readers:

Forecast was poor visibility but favorable winds. Unafraid of blind flying, Endresz and Magyar took off. They scarcely saw the ocean during the 16-hour crossing. It was as predicted, a struggle with fog, rain and low clouds the whole way. But Navigator Magyar caught many radio bearings; the monoplane, another Lockheed, hit the coast of France only a trifle off course. They had estimated 26 hours flight to Budapest with two hours fuel to spare. But headwinds over Europe upset that. Just 25 miles short of the goal, at 12 minutes past the 26th hour, the Wasp motor gasped for gas. Endresz landed the plane in a rough field, damaging the undercarriage and propeller.⁶⁷

Flight, the magazine of Britain’s Royal Aero Club, recounted the fliers’ reception after they arrived in Budapest by way of a twin-engined Fokker sent to their forced landing site near Bicske: “They were accorded a stirring welcome by representatives of the Government and a crowd of about 100,000, and later they were driven through streets of cheering people to the Prime Minister’s palace, where they were officially received by Count Bethlen on behalf of the nation. On July 20, Admiral Horthy, Regent of Hungary, received the airmen and decorated them with the Merit Order of the Third Class, and promoted them both to the rank of captain.”68 Emil Szalay was on hand, as were Endresz’s wife and son, along with Magyar’s mother. Rothermere had wired the $10,000 to Bethlen for presentation to the aviators.⁶⁹ The celebrations lasted for a week, and included an intimate brunch (dinner jacket, please) for 500 at Gundel in the St. Gellért hotel.⁷⁰ Pesti Hírlap published a special nine-page supplement chronicling the flight.⁷¹ The festivities provided a welcome distraction from the worsening economic crisis.

In the months after the successful crossing, Magyar and his new wife moved back to North America, where they were met at the pier by a mayoral welcoming committee, their arrival in New York on a Cunard liner covered by the New York Times. Word of a row preceded them, but “Captain Magyar denied that he and Endresz had quarreled and were scheduled to settle their differences with rapiers.”⁷² Although it did not lead to a duel, Endresz and Magyar had indeed fallen out, and therefore Captain Gyula Bittay replaced Magyar in the Justice for Hungary (the damage from the forced landing was repaired at WM) for the May 1932 flight to Rome to attend the first Transoceanic Airmen’s Congress.⁷³ On arrival at the Littorio airfield the Lockheed “appeared to have been caught in an air pocket when only 200 or 300 feet up. It side-slipped and crashed, bursting into flames.”⁷⁴ Both Endresz and Bittay were killed, and the Justice for Hungary completely destroyed. The ensuing investigation could not determine the cause of the crash, but from the descriptions it seems the probable cause was an accelerated stall, the result of attempting to turn too tightly with too little airspeed. A decade later the same error would cost the life of István Horthy, the vice regent and, like Endresz, the nation’s most famous airman at the time of his death. A hundred thousand Hungarians viewed the procession from the Southern Railway Station to the funeral at the Millennium Monument, where Admiral Horthy led the official party.75 Rome grieved with Budapest. Tens of thousands of Italians turned out to see the fliers’ flag-draped caskets, and a crowd of similar size gathered at St. Peter’s for prayer. Air Minister Balbo, himself a transoceanic airman, was present at Littorio and personally arranged the transportation of the remains, while Foreign Minister Grandi conveyed his condolences to the Hungarian legation.⁷⁶ Mussolini expressed sympathy on behalf of the entire Congress in his speech, as did Sir Arthur Brown, the senior airman present and part of the first crew to fly the Atlantic.⁷⁷

The intense Italian reaction to the Justice for Hungary is revealing. One Hungarian observer ascribed it to comradely affection. Huszadik Század described the Romans “mourning sincerely and truly from the heart,” and suggested “anyone who doubted that the Italians felt true sympathy to us Hungarians can now be persuaded just how deep is the love in the Italians for the Hungarians.”⁷⁸ Another factor may have been the prominent role of aviation in Fascist Italian culture. “The airplane and flight were among the Fascists’ most potent symbols.”⁷⁹ The contributions of Douhet, Caproni, Balbo, and D’Annunzio have been discussed above. Less well known was Mussolini’s own close connection to aviation. He had learned to fly in 1919, emerging from the aircraft after one flight in “enthusiastic delirium.” His role as “Italy’s exemplary aviator was also widely publicized.”⁸⁰ Like Hitler after him, he traveled widely by airplane while campaigning and ruling, and even had books written about his aerial exploits (e.g., Mussolini aviatore and L’Aviazione negli scritti, nella parola e nell’esempio del Duce). Not long after coming to power, Mussolini addressed the Italian Aero Club: “Not every Italian can or should fly. But all Italians should envy those who do and should follow with profound feelings the development of Italian wings.”⁸¹ And indeed Italian aviation feats were a critical component of Fascist modernism. Italian racers set international speed records in the 1920s and won the Schneider Cup in 1926. Italo Balbo led massive formations on long-range flights intended to build up the regime’s prestige as well as prepare RA crews for strategic bombing attacks. The year before the Endresz-Magyar crossing, Balbo led twelve Savoia-Marchetti S.55 flying boats across the South Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro.82 Italian public life was saturated with the idea of the pilot as an exemplar of Fascism, a noble and pure visionary leading the nation to glory. When viewed in this light, the Justice for Hungary crash was an assault on the notion of progress and technology.

In Hungary, even with Gömbös ascending, Fascist modernism did not gain traction in the cultural sphere. The legacy of agrarian aristocrats remained strong, and reaction against the HSR moderated the influence of the avant-garde. Furthermore, Justice for Hungary was from the beginning an attempt to garner attention and sympathy for what was already a national tragedy. Endresz and Bittay were mourned as national heroes, but their sacrifice just added to the ledger of catastrophe. The crash did give an extra emotional weight to the Italo-Hungarian relationship. In addition, the flight increased confidence in Hungarian airmanship and encouraged general aviation within the country.

Airmanship and revisionism were also bound together in the country’s youth flying organizations. Both the Levente (a post-Trianon institution that offered paramilitary training under the guise of fitness and sport) and the Hungarian Boy Scouts were deeply nationalistic and revisionist, and each had flying wings in their association. Levente’s gliding camps were less prominent, but were secretly and directly subsidized by the government.⁸³ The flying Scout troops had been able to purchase airplanes abroad for training while Hungary was still under Trianon’s import restriction.⁸⁴ Its “flying subcamp” was a prominent component of Hungarian Scouting’s moment in the sun, the 1933 International Jamboree, and its organizational chart used military-type designations and hierarchies, with the regent in overall command.⁸⁵ There were flight demonstrations, static displays of airplanes, and aircraft construction seminars. The Jamboree itself was a massive propaganda exercise in soft revisionism. The Scouts were instructed to present Hungary’s case for the overthrow of Trianon in compelling but nonthreatening ways, and symbols and rituals served to shore up the Hungarian claim to the Danube basin.86 Ties between Scouting and revision were not the result of conspiracy or government control, but were rather the natural expression of an organization that explicitly promotes patriotism in all its national movements. That natural tendency was enhanced by the club’s adult leaders, men of traditional and conservative outlooks, perhaps typified by Hungary’s chief Scout, Count Pál Teleki. Teleki, according to C. A. Macartney, was “at his happiest and best” when surrounded by Scouts, and his role as chief Scout was “the occupation which perhaps lay nearest to his heart of all.”⁸⁷ Among the Scouts’ flying instructors were many LFT veterans, and their “General Staff” included the well-known military and sport fliers vitéz Frigyes Hefty, István Hosszú, and Lajos Rotter.⁸⁸ The Hungarian Scouts began to take an active role in civil defense exercises from 1934 in cooperation with the National Air Defense Command (Országos Légvédelmi Parancsnokság, OLP), providing first aid and operating alarm systems.⁸⁹ Their flight activity was generally confined to constructing and operating gliders, a sport somewhat ignored in the West, but developed to an extremely high level of sophistication in the defeated countries, particularly in Germany.

The exploits of German gliding pilots were already known to István Petróczy in 1921, and he had planned to fly in the Wasserkuppe rally during his study tour. In 1920 a sleek glider designed in part by the self-exiled Hungarian genius Theodor van Kármán flew for more than two minutes—an unofficial world record. If Petróczy had been present in 1921, he would have seen a glider fly for twenty-one minutes, another record. The next year the record was three hours. Wasserkuppe’s gliders became a symbol of resistance to the Little Entente, and gliding “a national duty,” according to a liberal German newspaper. In 1926 the lift properties of thermal updrafts were discovered (by accident; a pilot caught in a thunderstorm climbed to nearly 6,000 feet and glided over 30 nautical miles) and modern soaring was founded.⁹⁰ Western experts grasped the significance of the sport, as shown by one report from the Royal Air Force Quarterly: “Once again Germany has demonstrated the value of her intense cultivation of motorless flying, her answer to the limitations of the Versailles Treaty … The traditions of Richthofen, Boelke, Immelmann, and the rest were handed to the soaring pilots at the Wasserkuppe…. Germany is building up a nation of airmen at very low cost—airmen whose knowledge of the air is of a far more intimate nature than anything perhaps dreamed of in aviation history.”⁹¹ Hungarian gliding did not develop into a world-leading activity, nor did it attain the status of a center of resistance as in Germany, but it did serve to introduce many young people (mostly, but not entirely, men: István Horthy’s wife Ilona, among other women, earned her gliding certificate) to the principles of flight. The clubs were a good vehicle for nurturing air-mindedness, or in Petróczy’s words, “the awakening of the interest in aviation in every beautiful and impressionable spirit.”⁹²

Figure 5.4. A Műegyetem Sport Flying Club glider ready for launch in the hills north of Budapest. Photo: Fortepan/Pál Vojnich.

One unheralded member of the Justice for Hungary team was also deeply involved in the youth flying movements. Antal Bánhidi was an advisor to flying Scout troops as well as an instructor and aircraft designer at the Budapest Technical University Sport Flying Club. Before joining Endresz and Magyar as technical advisor, Bánhidi was already an accomplished aviator. In 1929 he made a 2,700-nautical-mile journey to Sweden in a light aircraft, and in 1930 he first flew the Gerle, a two-seat biplane trainer of his own design underwritten by a 20,000-pengő grant from the MASz. The Gerle was a capable trainer and tourer, and sixteen were built in the next decade at the Technical University club. In 1933 Bánhidi and Tibor Bisits (the head of the 1933 Jamboree flying camp) were the first aviators to circumnavigate the Mediterranean, completing the 6,000-nautical-mile flight in Gerle No. 13.93 Later that year, Bánhidi took Gerle 13 from Hungary to Scandinavia and thence to London, where he delivered a medal to Lord Rothermere in appreciation of his support of Justice for Hungary. Bánhidi’s return to Debrecen in a single 900-nautical-mile, 11-hour hop impressed Flight as “a very excellent non-stop flight, not an official record, of course, but certainly something which no one else has done.”⁹⁴ Gerle 13 was powered by a 100-horsepower Armstrong Siddeley engine, and the Coventry company took out an advertisement in Flight that featured Bánhidi’s European trip.⁹⁵ In 1937 Bánhidi flew with the Archduke Albrecht around South America in Gerles Nos. 15 and 16. Bánhidi also appeared on the margin of Hungary’s biggest aeronautical mystery: on June 26, 1941, he tried to intercept the unidentified aircraft that had just bombed Kassa. His CR.42 could not catch the attackers, and he was not able to determine their type or origin.⁹⁶

One year after Bánhidi’s visit to the United Kingdom, a group of British pilots made their way to Hungary. Arriving on September 15, 1934, in fourteen privately owned airplanes, the crews spent a week on the “Magyar Pilota Pic Nic” organized by the Magyar Touring Club. The event attracted the attention of the highest levels of the Hungarian aviation establishment, with the Archduke Albrecht and LÜH director Dr. Rákosi greeting the arrivals at Mátyásföld. The program was innocuous and included stops at Hungary’s best-known tourist locations (baths and czardas at almost every stop), but the group was well-escorted at all times, an indication of the importance accorded the development of aerotourism and Anglo-Hungarian relations. Although traveling as a private citizen, among the British aviators was a senior RAF officer, Group Captain R. Leckie, who presumably took a special professional interest in the current state of Hungarian aviation.⁹⁷ The journey was repeated in the next two years in a similar way, with the party landing on the plain at Hortobágy, and at Debrecen, Szeged, and Siófok airfields. Royal participation was provided in 1935 by Duke Francis Hohenlohe and in 1936 again by Albrecht, now flying his own airplane. István Horthy also assumed a large role in the visits, leading the earliest-arriving Britons to landing at Mátyásföld in a WM trainer. The British contingents each year included RAF officers.⁹⁸

Figure 5.5. Antal Bánhidi at Malmo. He flew Gerle 13 from Hungary to Scandinavia and then to Britain. Photo: Fortepan/Tibor Erky-Nagy.

The LÜH recognized the economic, technological, and publicity value of foreign aviators flying private airplanes across Hungary, and it established a special office to encourage aviation tourism. The director of the Foreign Tourism Office was Count Nándor Zichy, a former military pilot and avid sport flier, who worked closely with Dr. Ákos Szentkirályi, a retired colonel of cavalry and lawyer who led the propaganda office of the MASz. Together they sponsored a series of international fly-ins, capitalizing on the natural beauty of Lake Balaton to attract pilots. In 1936, the second annual Balaton Star Tour (so named because of the pattern formed by the sequential out-and-back flights around the country) drew sixty-four airplanes with crews from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany (the best represented), Great Britain, Italy, Poland, and Switzerland. Szentkirályi was indefatigable in his efforts to promote general aviation in Hungary. He had a robust propaganda plan for each year, gave numerous interviews, and spoke at MASz and other club meetings around the country. Outreach to other Hungarian associations was noteworthy: the Magyar Athletikai Club founded a flight section and joined the MASz and LÜH in hosting the Balaton Star Tours, and in 1931 MASz and the Reviziós Liga (Revisionist League) issued joint press releases congratulating the crew of Justice for Hungary. Although it was not an overtly revisionist organization, MASz’s official letterhead carried the revisionist creed:

Hiszek egy Istenben,	I believe in one God,
Hiszek egy hazában!	I believe in one country!
Hiszek egy isteni örök igazságban,	I believe in God’s eternal justice,
Hiszek Magyarország feltámadásában!	I believe in Hungary’s resurrection!99

As the 1930s wore on, the veil surrounding secret Hungarian aerial rearmament began to slip. In the early part of the decade, the indiscretions were small. LÜH officers began to wear uniforms and decorations in 1930.100 Dr. Rákosi wore this uniform and was identified as a general in the photographs that accompanied the “Pic Nic” article in Flight magazine. If the incongruity of a uniformed general directing the “Aviation Bureau” of a country denied an air force caused British readers any consternation, it went unrecorded. Likewise, the major English-language papers that covered the Justice for Hungary flight referred repeatedly and blithely to the military ranks of Endresz and Magyar. In these minor matters, as in all things related to illegal rearmament, Hungary tended to follow a step or two behind Germany, so that Budapest’s transgressions seemed familiar and therefore inconsequential when laid against Berlin’s. German attempts to circumvent the proscription of its air force were not accepted, but they were expected, as evidenced by the British air attaché’s report that began, “Naturally however the virile, martial-minded, German people have not yielded willingly to such a drastic reduction in their scale of armaments.”¹⁰¹ The British Foreign Office was aware of the secret Luftwaffe base at Lipetsk in the Soviet Union.¹⁰² A memorandum prepared for British negotiators at Geneva concluded, “Although Germany is forbidden to possess any military or naval air forces, there is abundant evidence to show that in fact she possesses at least the nucleus of an efficient military air force camouflaged within the organization of her powerful civil aviation.”¹⁰³

That, of course, was precisely the Hungarian aspiration. The difficulty lay in the adjectives. Hungary’s camouflaged military air force was not particularly efficient, nor could her civil aviation be described as powerful. Hungary did have a core of notable aviators, its public remained enthusiastic about and engaged in aviation, and its government was able to harness this air-mindedness to further its nationalist and revisionist aims. However, the Hungarian aviation industry could not build itself into a regional air power, and its ability to acquire an air force abroad was restricted by international treaties, by its own financial limitations, and by the scarcity of suitable suppliers.

Certain changes in the European political landscape did seem to favor Hungarian rearmament. The rise of Hitler to the German chancellorship broadened an avenue of support, and Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and its subsequent declaration of equality of armaments served to weaken the case for the continued disarmament of the other former Central Powers. Gömbös, the originator of the idea of the Rome-Berlin Axis, was determined to capitalize on these changes. In Gömbös’s mind the axis should run through Hungary, whose position in the Danube basin would provide a buffer between the two great powers’ spheres of influence.104 As soon as he was able, Gömbös went to Berlin to pitch his idea to the Führer. His visit in June 1933 was preceded by Count Bethlen’s trip in March. Bethlen traveled as a private citizen (as did Gömbös in June), but his task was to prepare the ground for the sitting prime minister. The Hitler-Gömbös meeting was short and informal. Gömbös made a good impression in spite of his impolitic defense of an independent Austria and Hitler’s anti-Hungarian prejudice. Hitler promised to buy more Hungarian agricultural products and sell the country more military hardware, and suggested that Hungary could have what it wanted from Czechoslovakia, but he warned Gömbös to leave Romania and Yugoslavia alone. The Führer did not embrace the Axis, and he gave only a limited endorsement of Hungarian revisionism. The encounter did yield important economic agreements and opened the door for more German weapons, the first of which were light howitzers and sport airplanes.¹⁰⁵ Gömbös did not abandon his quest for German-Italian rapprochement, because he saw it as absolutely essential to Hungary’s future. If Hungary were successful in playing matchmaker between the two, it would buttress both countries’ aid for its territorial claims. If, on the other hand, Berlin and Rome became antagonists, one of them would invariably look for the backing of the Little Entente, which would be fatal to Budapest’s ambitions. At the same time, Hungary feared German dominance and was dedicated to keeping Italy and Austria as counterweights.

A slew of diplomatic crises and continuing budgetary shortfalls in 1934 frustrated the hopes of Gömbös and the Defense Ministry regarding increasing the pace of rearmament. Germany felt aggrieved by the Rome Protocol signed in March enhancing political and economic cooperation among Italy, Hungary, and Austria, and neither Gömbös nor Horthy could convince Hitler that the agreement was not directed against the Nazi state. The summer brought an attempted Nazi putsch in Austria, which resulted in the death of the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and raised fears in Budapest (unfounded, as it turned out) of an Italo-German conflict. The French-Little Entente stance was strengthened by the emergence of the Soviet Union from diplomatic isolation and its admission to the League of Nations. The prospects of a Franco-Soviet alliance as well as the attempted coup in Austria caused Rome to cast its eyes toward Paris, a development naturally resented in Budapest.

The year’s second notable political assassination further undermined Hungary’s position. King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French foreign minister Louis Barthou were killed by a Macedonian terrorist in Marseilles in October. The assassin had been trained by Croatian Ustaša separatists, who had themselves trained on an estate in southwestern Hungary with the government’s knowledge.106 The Ustaši had been expelled before the Marseilles attack, and there was no evidence that the Hungarian government was involved in the deaths of Alexander and Barthou, but it nonetheless earned Hungary opprobrium in the West and “left her in the position of general scapegoat for sins the worst of which were Mussolini’s.”¹⁰⁷ Although the League ultimately rejected Yugoslavia’s demand for international sanctions against Hungary, the furor had increased international scrutiny and eroded foreign support, both of which made arms purchases from abroad nearly impossible. The feeling of being again alone in the world solidified Gömbös’s domestic standing.

The LÜH discarded as unachievable its 1932 plan for forty-eight flying squadrons. According to a 1934 staff study, the maintenance of a force of just eighteen squadrons would cost 16 million pengős, which was more than the budget could bear. Spending constraints, combined with the sour turn in Hungary’s diplomatic fortunes and the realization that the CR.20s purchased just three years ago were already outdated, dictated a pause in aircraft acquisition. The Defense Ministry chose to spend its Italian arms credits instead on light tanks from Ansaldo.108 Perhaps partially in response to this decision, the LÜH submitted a memo in March 1935 to the chief of staff arguing for a larger allocation of the Honvédség budget, noting that it received only 6.5 per cent of defense spending, while the Czechoslovak air service got 10 per cent and the Romanian an astounding 31 per cent. This document also included an assessment of the aerial arm’s mission. “The air force command,” it read, “directs itself to this ultimate goal: to be able to act as a serious opponent against at least one of the Little Entente states surrounding us” (minket környező kisentente-államoknak legalább egyikével szemben komoly ellenségként léphessünk fel).¹⁰⁹ The declaration cast the air force as a distinctly offensive weapon and also defined the range and scope of the expected adversary (one or possibly two Little Entente members, but not all of them at once). The memo urged continued modernization and expansion of the bomber fleet (which at the time consisted of two-seat biplanes and the handful of Capronis), which would function “independently before the initiation of general military operations, then in strict cooperation with the ground forces to contribute to a decisive engagement.”¹¹⁰ This signaled a qualified acceptance of Szentnémedy’s Douhetism. The LÜH agreed that bombers should predominate and that they should be used autonomously at the beginning of the war, but it did not suggest that the bomber offensive alone would bring about a decision.

Out of this message came a new plan for the existing six squadrons to grow to fifteen. The three sport clubs would provide the cadres for four night-bombing squadrons, while three light bomber squadrons would be formed from the flight schools and the Sóstó research unit. Kaposvár’s existing short-range reconnaissance unit would make two additional light bomber squadrons, with its mission being taken up by new observation squadrons based at Pécs and Miskolc. Pilots from the current fighter squadron (“Meteorological Section”) would split into three units. This concept was approved by the Defense Ministry and became part of its “Arpad” rearmament scheme.

In March 1935, the LÜH ordered from Italy twenty-six aircraft, including nine three-engined Ca.101/3m transport bombers (powered by WM-produced K-7 engines) and a pair of Caproni fighters for trials. Three more Ca.101/3ms were ordered in exchange for the Italian production rights to the Hungarian Gebauer motor-driven airplane cannon.111 In addition, Captain Mihály Nagy was sent to Italy to visit factories and examine aircraft for possible purchase. After numerous test flights and inspections, Nagy recommended taking the CR.32 fighter under contract, with an additional three types—the A.P.1, Br.64, and Ro.37 day bombers—for further trials.¹¹² The CR.32 order expanded to twenty-six airplanes in 1935 and, with the awarding of a 93-million-lira credit in 1936, grew to fifty-two.¹¹³ Eventually six Hungarian fighter squadrons would be equipped with the CR.32, which served well until the early 1940s, and in which a Hungarian pilot would claim the country’s first aerial victory since 1919. The Ca.101/3m was less successful. It was intended to fill the night bomber combat role, but its performance, even with three engines, was less than impressive, although it did look the part of a civilian airliner in MALERT colors.

Delivery of the Fiat and Caproni airplanes slowed in late 1935 when Italy invaded Abyssinia. The importance of the Italian arms trade to Rome’s diplomatic efforts was secondary to its role as a supplier of aircraft to the RA, and some of the machines promised to Hungary made their way to Eritrea and Somalia instead. Italian forces there mustered 168 aircraft for the October 3, 1935 assault, and there was no Abyssinian air force to combat them. In the course of the war the RA flew 4,500 combat sorties, dropped nearly 4.5 million pounds of bombs (mostly 5-pound antipersonnel types), and delivered 2 million pounds of supplies, losing only 8 aircraft and 48 airmen in the process.114 Given the high accident and casualty rates of peacetime and training flights at the time, the RA’s low loss rate in Abyssinia was remarkable.

The contribution of Italian air operations to eventual victory and the future implications for air warfare were somewhat less clear. Army leaders and some military commentators highlighted the close cooperation between fast-moving land forces and reconnaissance and attack aircraft in overcoming Abyssinian resistance, while RA leaders (Mecozzi was a notable exception) found validation for Douhet’s theories in the RA’s ability to attack when ground offensives stalled.¹¹⁵ Ferenc Szentnémedy agreed with the latter assessment. In his September 1936 analysis of the Abyssinian War, he quoted Douhet’s own one-line summary of his theory: “Defend on the land and sea, attack in the air.” Szentnémedy continued, “Domination in the air is required—everything else is secondary. Is that the whole of it? Roughly, yes.”¹¹⁶ The Abyssinian army was destroyed and its capital occupied in only seven months, thanks in large part, he contended, to the air force. The victory could not, however, be considered a full vindication of the idea of independent air warfare, because Abyssinia lacked the necessary urban population and industrial centers whose destruction would lead to capitulation. It was for that reason that the Italian army had to engage Abyssinian forces. Because of this, the action was worthy of further reflection: “The Italian war offered a wealth of extraordinarily valuable experience in relation to developing aerial leaders. Douhetism depreciated in value not at all in the course of the Abyssinian war, and the experience of the war must be taken into account in European military doctrine.”¹¹⁷ There were also practical lessons to be learned. In an earlier article Szentnémedy had focused on tactical operations, including sketches of various RA airplanes. His mention of the use of the “eminently tested” three-engined Ca.101 in both bombing and reconnaissance missions would have been particularly interesting to readers aware that this airplane was the backbone of the clandestine Hungarian air service’s bomber fleet.118 He later drew attention to the RA’s use of parachute-delivered supplies, detailing the simplicity and reliability of the 5-foot “iron torpedoes” that could deliver up to 450 pounds of goods. According to Szentnémedy, the Italian parachute supply expertise extended to live cows and goats delivered under their own silk canopy. Aerial resupply would make planners revisit the commonly held assumption (affirmed by General Ludendorff) that offensives could advance only 75 miles without a logistical pause.¹¹⁹

The importance of aerial resupply also figured in the first MKSz article about the Spanish Civil War. Elemér Tóth, who had previously written for the journal about transport and parachute operations, noted that airlifted supplies had allowed Nationalist troops to withstand the Siege of the Alcazar. The majority of Tóth’s report, which was based on an account in the French journal Revue de l’Armée de l’Air, was concerned with assessments of fighter and bomber employment. As in Abyssinia, the performance of Italian, and increasingly German, airplanes was closely scrutinized. The Fiat CR.32 was judged to be quite vulnerable due to its water-cooled engine and the placement of the fuel tanks in the fuselage, which increased the chance of fire and thereby decreased the possibility of a successful forced landing or escape by parachute. The Junkers Ju 52, which MALERT would soon add to its fleet, was a purpose-designed passenger airplane converted into a bomber for use by the German Condor Legion. Its airliner origins complicated the efforts to retrofit defensive armament, which left it susceptible to enemy fighters. The bombers therefore were given close fighter escort, on occasion at a nearly 1:1 ratio (e.g., a December 1936 raid on Madrid comprised twenty-five Ju 52s and twenty-three accompanying Heinkel fighters). One French pilot described a particularly effective Nationalist tactic: ten to twenty fighters would attack a certain position with machine guns and small bombs while the Nationalist ground forces prepared to attack. When, after the air strikes, it seemed that the opposing force’s spirit was broken, the infantry attacked, with continuing support from the air.120 This tactic would be used to great effect in Poland, France, and the Soviet Union in the coming years.

A subsequent piece focused on the size of the forces involved, especially the tendency toward large air battles consisting of sixty to eighty airplanes on each side. That meant nearly a third of operational Nationalist aircraft were committed to battle at one time. MKSz estimated Republican (“Red”) air strength by the end of 1937 to be approaching 1,000 aircraft, with the Republican fleet being weighted more heavily toward fighters (approximately a 3:1 fighter-to-bomber ratio) than the Nationalists. Another ratio mentioned was the proportion of Nationalist flying squadrons to infantry divisions, which at roughly 1:1 signaled an insufficient aerial component (the 1932 plan envisioned forty-eight squadrons for the Honvéd’s twenty-one divisions). To counter the Republicans and achieve success in the air, the number of Nationalist squadrons should be tripled to around one hundred, of which almost half should be bomber squadrons, one-third fighter squadrons, and the remainder reconnaissance. Author András Sólyom listed twelve conclusions that could be drawn from the Spanish war experience through the middle of 1937. The first was that although both sides fielded modern machines, much obsolescent equipment was also in use. This was an important insight that corresponded with Hungarian experience in the First World War, where old models continued to fly productively in the East well after the types had been withdrawn from service on the Western Front. He also rightly observed that all modern fighters should have retractable landing gear for greater speeds, that metal skins and air-cooled engines were more rugged than fabric covers and motors requiring radiators. Sólyom’s judgment was shakier on a pair of critical points: the expectation that normal fighter armament would not exceed the 8-millimeter caliber, and that superchargers were of limited utility because fighters would rarely fight above 15,000 feet.121 Both of these conclusions were badly misguided. Because Hungarian aircraft choices were so severely constrained by what its allies made available, however, it cannot be said that the lack of foresight had significant negative effects on acquisition policy. In general, it can be said that Hungarian airmen were well informed regarding contemporary aerial operations, and that they studied the Abyssinian and Spanish wars with a mind toward future air warfare. Journal articles, however faithfully reported and read, were no substitute for actual experience, and the inability to apply practically the lessons derived vicariously was a severe handicap.

Hungarian interest in the German experience in Spain was particularly keen because the door had been opened to increased defense cooperation with Berlin. Prime Minister Gömbös had long wanted to push Italy and Germany to closer relations for Hungary’s benefit; events in 1935–1936 brought his dream to fruition. First Hitler unilaterally rejected the military clauses of Versailles, at one blow unleashing Germany’s considerable armament production and weakening Trianon’s legitimacy. Mussolini then made overtures to Hitler in order to minimize Italian vulnerabilities after the beginning of the Abyssinian campaign. Finally, Italo-German cooperation in Spain clinched the deal. The Rome-Berlin Axis was established in secret protocol of October 25, 1936, pledging the two Fascist countries “to deal with the political and economic problems of the Danubian basin in the spirit of amicable collaboration.”¹²²

Even before the formalization of the Axis, Gömbös’s foreign policy had certainly loosened wallets in Rome and Berlin: the 93-million-lira credit from Italy was followed by a 28-million-mark line from Germany. Using that credit, the LÜH placed an extraordinary order in July 1936 for 190 German aircraft. The order comprised sixty-six Ju 86 bombers and three Ju 52 transports, thirty-six He 46 fighters and eighteen He 70 long-range reconnaissance airplanes, thirty-seven Bücker Bü 131 trainers, eighteen Focke-Wulf FW 56 and six FW 58B advanced trainers, and six Bayerische Flugzeugwerke Bf 108s.123 The Ju 86s, He 46s, and He 70s were to be powered by WM-produced K-14 engines (the Ju 86s were ordered in spite of an earlier VKF report that found them too heavy for light bombers, and too weakly armed).¹²⁴ This order, with the fifty-two CR.32s being delivered from Italy, composed a nearly complete small air force, and would have, if immediately filled, ended the fiction of Hungarian aerial disarmament—the Ju 86 order plainly listed bomb racks and bombsights.¹²⁵ It also was more airplanes than Hungary could handle at that time. A complete accounting in 1935 of all qualified pilots in the LÜH, without regard to recency of experience, listed 223 names, including thirteen officers of the VKF, with an additional thirty-eight in various stages of training.¹²⁶ Delivery of the primary trainers was to begin immediately, with the entire order to be completed by the end of September 1937. In fact, by the end of 1937, although six fighter squadrons had been formed and equipped with CR.32s, no significant numbers of German combat aircraft had arrived.

But they would. The 1936 order marked the Honvéd’s turn to Germany, a move long desired by Gömbös and much of the VKF. German weapons were more sophisticated, and German martial instincts more sure. Hungary would still seek and appreciate Italian military support in a range of areas, but that the resurgent Germany would very soon eclipse Italy as Hungary’s primary patron was clear. This of course was welcomed by the officers and men who coveted the newest German aircraft and tanks, but some Hungarian political leaders, including the regent, were wary of growing German power and sought ways to balance it in order to ensure Hungary’s independence. In the next three years Hungary would continue to exploit German aid for its own rearmament and revisionist plans while trying to subtly undermine German designs for domination of Central and Eastern Europe.

For a decade after the end of the IMCC mandate, the Trianon military clauses remained in effect. Hungarian airmen continued the campaign of deception they had initiated in 1920, using civilian aviation to conceal a growing but still clandestine air force. They were exposed to different theories of air power, and developed their own expansive view, informed by but not conforming to Douhetism. But their efforts to build an air force in accordance with their ideas were continually frustrated by treaty, economic crisis, the limit of domestic industry, and lack of foreign suppliers. By 1936, the economic crisis had eased, a few Hungarian aviation factories had proven their ability to build quality (if unoriginal) products, and shrewd diplomacy had secured Italian and German backing. In 1938 the hated Treaty of Trianon would finally begin to crumble, and Hungarian military airmen would be free to operate openly for the first time since 1920.

NOTES

1. See above, ch. 4.

2. Réti, Hungarian-Italian Relations, p. 3.

3. Gy. Juhász, Hungarian Foreign Policy, pp. 86–87.

4. Csima, “Olaszország szerepe a Horthy-hadsereg fegyverkezésében,” p. 294.

5. Sisa, “MKHL olaszországi repülőgép-beszerzései,” p. 1051.

6. The pengő replaced the korona in November 1925, at a rate of one pengő to 12,500 koronas. That made the pengő’s value approximately equal to the prewar korona. Nötel, “International Credit and Finance,” p. 196. The pengő-lira exchange rate in the 1930s was roughly 1:3.2.

7. B. Juhász, “Olasz-Magyar vezénylések,” pp. 140–144.

8. DBFP, Ser. 1a, Vol. 5, No. 32.

9. B. Juhász, “Olasz-Magyar vezénylések,” pp. 146–147, 160–161. Juhász makes extensive use of Italian military and diplomatic archives.

10. Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

11. B. Juhász, “Olasz-Magyar vezénylések,” pp. 153–156.

12. Sisa, “MKHL olaszországi repülőgép-beszerzései,” p. 1051.

13. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 172.

14. Ibid., pp. 170–171.

15. Ibid.

16. Homze, Arming the Luftwaffe, p. 82.

17. Gunston, World Encyclopedia of Aero Engines, p. 71.

18. Winkler, “A Magyar Királyi Honvéd Légierő harci repülőgépeinek fejlődéséről” (HL Tgy 3.643), p. 5.

19. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 166.

20. MKHL, 1938–1945, p. 11.

21. Berend, “Agriculture,” p. 177.

22. Romsics, Hungary in 20th Century, p. 139.

23. Macartney, October Fifteenth, 1:90.

24. Drabek, “Foreign Trade Performance and Policy,” table 7.XI, p. 498.

25. Macartney, October Fifteenth, 1:90.

26. Ibid., p. 92.

27. Romsics, Hungary in 20th Century, p. 139.

28. Radice, “General Characteristics of the Region,” p. 52.

29. Macartney, October Fifteenth, 1:93–98.

30. Csima, “Olaszország szerepe a fegyverkezésében,” pp. 294, 295n.

31. Hauner, “Military Budgets and the Armaments Industry,” pp. 53, 56.

32. Macartney, October Fifteenth, 1:34.

33. Quoted in Sakmyster, “Gyula Gömbös and the Hungarian Jews,” p. 164.

34. Gy. Juhász, Hungarian Foreign Policy, pp. 103–105.

35. Quoted in Fülöp and Sipos, Magyarország külpolitikája a XX. században, p. 172.

36. Quoted in Berend, Decades of Crisis, p. 310.

37. DBFP, Ser. 1a, Vol. 7, No. 225.

38. Macartney, October Fifteenth, 1:141–142.

39. See “Treaty of Trianon, Part V.”

40. Julius Curtius, quoted in Steiner, Lights That Failed, p. 764.

41. Resolution quoted in Wheeler-Bennett, Disarmament Deadlock, p. 8.

42. The Round Table, “Disarmament,” p. 545.

43. Steiner, Lights That Failed, pp. 781–784.

44. Szentnémedy, “A genfi leszerelési tárgyalások légügyi eredményei,” pp. 98, 96.

45. Szentnémedy, A repülés, p. 74.

46. Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

47. M. M. Szabó, A Magyar Királyi Honvéd Légierő a második világháborúban, pp. 18–19.

48. Mulder, “Magyar Aeroforgalmi Részvény Tarsaság.”

49. Képes Pesti Hírlap, Apr. 18, 1930, in Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

50. Mulder, “Magyar Aeroforgalmi Részvény Tarsaság.”

51. MALERT forgalmi eredmények, MMKM 1563.

52. Mulder, “Magyar Aeroforgalmi Részvény Tarsaság.”

53. Kenyeres, Kecskeméti katonai repülés története, pp. 23–24.

54. $45: Zs. Miszlay, “Az első magyar oceanrepülés,”

55. “Aeronautics: For Hungary,” Time, July 27, 1931.

56. “Budapest Flight Plan to Aid Hungary,” New York Times, July 8, 1930, p. 8.

57. “Aeronautics: For Hungary” (July 27, 1931).

58. “Lindbergh Picks a Plane,” Popular Mechanics, Nov. 1930, pp. 803–804.

59. Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, pp. 88, 128.

60. “Endresz György,” in Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon, 1000–1990.

61. Szeged and Wilczek: Vesztényi, “A magyar katonai repülés” (HL Tgy 2.787), p. I/23; Canada: “Hungarians to Fly Here,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 1930, p. 12.

62. “Victory for Radio,” Washington Post, July 17, 1931, p. 3.

63. “Nincs kizárva, hogy tavaszra marad a ‘Justice for Hungary’ amerikai startja,” Uj Nemzedék, Aug. 24, 1930, p. 5.

64. “Hungarians to Fly Here,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 1930, p. 12.

65. “Leszállás nélkül akar Los Angelestől Csikágóig repülni Magyar Sándor és Endresz György,” Uj Nemzedék, Aug. 28, 1930, p. 10., in Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

66. Gibás, “A magyar óceánrepülés,” p. 4.

67. “Aeronautics: For Hungary” (July 27, 1931).

68. “Hungarian Atlantic Flight Succeeds,” Flight, July 24, 1931, p. 730.

69. “Aeronautics: For Hungary” (July 27, 1931).

70. Dr. Szentkirályi Ákos hagyatéka (MMKM 108).

71. Gibás, “A magyar óceánrepülés,” p. 6.

72. “Captain Magyar Lands as an Immigrant,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1931, p. 4.

73. “Aeronautics: For Hungary.” Time, May 30, 1932.

74. “Oceanic Airmen’s Congress: Hungarian Delegates Killed in Crash,” The Times, May 23, 1932, p. 16.

75. Gibás, “A magyar óceánrepülés,” p. 8.

76. “Szerdán délelőtt ¼ 11 órakor érkezik meg Endresz és Bittay koporsója a Délivasuti pályaudvarra,” Huszadik Század, May 1932.

77. “Oceanic Airmen’s Congress.”

78. “Szerdán délelőtt ¼ 11 órakor.”

79. Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War, p. 63.

80. Caprotti, “Technology and Geographical Imaginations,” p. 186.

81. Quoted in ibid., p. 64. Mussolini aviatore by G. Mattioli; L’Aviazione negli scritti, nella parola e nell’esempio (The Air Force in the writings, word and example of the Duce) del Duce edited by Adriano Lualdi; both cited in Caprotti.

82. Ibid., pp. 68–69.

83. Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

84. Weaver, “Revision and Its Modes,” pp. 113, 115.

85. Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

86. Weaver, “Revision and Its Modes,” p. 125.

87. Macartney, October Fifteenth, 1:222.

88. Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

89. Arady, “Magyar cserkészet és légoltalom,” p. 28.

90. Fritzsche, Nation of Fliers, pp. 109–115.

91. Scott-Hall, “Sailplane Capabilities at the Wasserkuppe,” p. 27.

92. See above, ch. 3.

93. “Bánhidi Antal, Szatmárnémeti szülöttje,” Magyar Közlekedési Közművelődésért Alapítvány.

94. “Croydon-Hungary Non-Stop,” Flight, Sept. 21, 1933, p. 951.

95. “Advertisement: 1025 Miles Non-stop,” Flight, Oct. 26, 1933, p. ix.

96. Bánhidi, “Egy volt vadászpilóta visszaemlékezése 1941. június 26-ára” (HL Tgy 2815).

97. “Magyar Pilota Pic Nic,” Flight, Sept. 27, 1934, pp. 1003–1004, 1028.

98. E. Nagy, “Hungarian Holiday,” Flight, Aug. 8, 1935; and “Hungarian Interlude,” Flight, July 2, 1936.

99. Dr. Szentkirályi Ákos hagyatéka (MMKM 108).

100. Kenyeres, Kecskeméti katonai repülés története, p. 23.

101. DBFP, Ser. Ia, Vol. 7, No. 102 enclosure.

102. Ibid., No. 265.

103. DBFP, Ser. 2, Vol. 3, appendix IV.

104. Gy. Juhász, Hungarian Foreign Policy, p. 108.

105. Macartney, October Fifteenth, 1:138–143; Bethlen’s trip: Gy. Juhász, Hungarian Foreign Policy, p. 110.

106. Gy. Juhász, Hungarian Foreign Policy, pp. 115–118.

107. Macartney, October Fifteenth, 1:146.

108. Csima, “Olaszország szerepe a fegyverkezésében,” p. 298.

109. MKHL, 1938–1945, p. 19.

110. Ibid.

111. Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

112. Sisa, “MKHL olaszországi repülőgép-beszerzései,” p. 1053.

113. Csima, “Olaszország szerepe a fegyverkezésében,” pp. 298–300.

114. Gooch, Mussolini and His Generals, pp. 311, 372; sortie count and bomb type: Szentnémedy, “Az olasz repülőerők müködése Abessziniában,” p. 114.

115. Gooch, Mussolini and His Generals, p. 375.

116. Szentnémedy, “Az olasz repülőerők Abessziniában,” p. 102.

117. Ibid., p. 116.

118. Szentnémedy, “A repülők szerepe az olasz-abesszin háborúban,” p. 107.

119. Szentnémedy, “Az olasz repülőerők Abessziniában,” p. 114.

120. Tóth, “Légiháború Spanyolországban,” pp. 97–104.

121. Sólyom, “A Spanyol háboru a légierők szempontjából,” pp. 120–125.

122. Quoted in Gy. Juhász, Hungarian Foreign Policy, p. 124.

123. Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).

124. K-14: Nagyváradi et al., Fejezetek a repülés történetéből, p. 179; Ju 86: Vesztényi, “A magyar katonai repülés” (HL Tgy 2.787), p. IV/107.

125. Bomb racks/sights: Vesztényi, “A magyar katonai repulse” (HL Tgy 2.787), p. IV, 106.

126. Winkler, “A magyar repülés története” (HL Tgy 3.327).