Don vs. Sinai

“The Don tragedy was the greatest defeat of Hungarian military history. Since the Crusades, Hungarian soldiers have never fought so far away from their homeland as then.” (Minister of Defence Csaba Hende, Hungarian News Agency, January 14, 2013 Monday, 13:15)”

The soldiers of the Kassa (Košice) and Budapest k.u.k. mountain howitzer batteries bathing in the Mediterranean Sea at el-Arish on the Sinai Peninsula in the summer of 1916

Far be it from us to distract the due attention from the Don catastrophe and the commemoration about its seventieth anniversary. But once such inaccuracy slipped into the report of the HNA, we cannot leave it without at least a brief correction.

The Minister of Defence should not be so modest. Even if to a negligible magnitude and significance if compared to the Don adventure, but almost purely ethnic Hungarian k.u.k. military units also fought between 1916 and 1918 in Asia – in the Ottoman Empire, in the territory of today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel – and even in what is now considered as Africa according to the political borders, on the Sinai Peninsula and at the Suez Canal. Our one thousand strong artillery batteries of Kassa and Budapest served the Emperor and King in the same Holy Land, where no Hungarians had fought since the crusades mentioned by the HNA – until the summer of 1916.

Hungarian soldiers entering Jerusalem on May 9, 1916