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The Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II. By Krisztián Ungváry. With a Foreword by John Lukacs. Translated from the Hungarian by Ladislaus Löb. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Hardcover. $35.00.
Long after the actual transpiring of events, we still remember what major capital cities of Eastern Europe went through during and toward the end of World War H. Berlin, Vienna, and Warsaw suffered heavy and widespread destruction; Prague, thanks to circumstances and timing, escaped comparatively unscathed. Warsaw was almost one hundred percent destroyed. At Budapest the destruction was heavy, as a "before and after" feature in the Illustrated London News reminded world opinion soon after the end of the war. Now, sixty years after events, in Ungváry's carefully researched and documented study of the siege of the Hungarian capital, we at last have a highly useful and, as it seems, reliable compte rendu of what took place.
Ungváry is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. His book, his doctoral dissertation at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (see his Preface, xxvii), is a brilliant work of military and political history, written in meticulous detail and translated by a Hungarian with a good if not flawless command of English (Löb is an emeritus professor at the University of Sussex). Ungváry's Bibliography (433-455) is most impressive. In addition to the usual list of books and articles the author lists, under "Archival Material," sources at the Archive of Military History, Budapest; at the Federal Archive-Military Archive, Freiburg; at the National Széchényi Library, Budapest; also private collections of writings, including, prominently, diaries of the siege, interviews, and letters. What Ungváry has pieced together, then, and written well, comes to a first book, one showing strong promise, indeed notable accomplishment.
How is it possible to write a careful, day-by-day, account of what transpired, preeminently of military operations, during those horrendous one hundred days? Ungváry adopts a dual, most admirable, method of carefully reconstructing events, of orienting the reader to the known facts and of maintaining, in the telling, political and emotional objectivity. To concentrate on the first-named aspect first: Ungváry's work is divided into six chapters and many sub-headings, treating the curious and brutal history of...