Word: budapests
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Never a strong reed, Hungary wilted quickly in the hot breath of war. For the government of Admiral Nicholas Horthy the Russian Army, Allied air attacks and the perceptible shrinking of German power were too much. This week Horthy, once the willing slave of Adolf Hitler, took to the Budapest radio, asked for an armistice less than a month after Russians crossed the border. A few hours later the Germans reportedly locked him up. Berlin also installed a new quisling, began barricading Budapest. Hungary was apparently to become another Italy...
...fate of Budapest and of Vienna, 135 miles beyond it, depended upon how much the Germans could spare to defend them. With Germany's east and west fronts in peril, how much was left for the south? Would Hungary's 35 divisions follow Horthy's line? Or would they follow the new government of Ferenc Szalasi, leader of the Fascist Arrow Cross...
...Russians were already less than 50 miles from Budapest. A tank battle was already raging on the Hungarian plain. The country was ideal for motorized attack. By this week Marshal Rodion Y. Malinovsky had widened his front to 120 miles, captured Szeged, Hungary's second largest city, the Transylvanian capital of Cluj, and drawn near to Debrecen, where Patriot Louis Kossuth once declared Hungary's independence. But Malinovsky had a long, tenuous supply line, might be delayed until it was strengthened...
Marshal Rodion Y. Malinovsky's Second Ukrainian Army, driving north from Rumania, had already driven out onto the Hungarian plain. Last week, crumpling paper-thin Hungarian opposition, it reached the only water barrier before Budapest and the Danube - the Tisza River. With hardly a pause, the Russians crossed it 50 miles from Budapest, had a clear road ahead to the capital, where Nazis were already beginning to clear...
...Bulgaria to within 200 miles of the Adriatic. If an Allied landing now followed in the Balkans, the Germans left in Greece and the Aegean would be cut off, like the Germans in southwest France. Then Yugoslavia and the Hungarian plains would offer Allied armies an open invitation to Budapest and Vienna...