Monument at Tapio-Bicske
Pakozd
An easy motorway drive SW of Budapest. Don't go on a weekend as you will be fighting the holiday traffic to Lake Balaton. For some info about the battle, see my post about it from last September here.
Pakozd has an unexpected treasure, a rather good Military Memorial Park, the Katonai Emlekpark Pakozd. This has exhibits covering 1848 to the present day, but of course its main exhibition concerns 1848, and very good it is too. My Flickr album from my visit is here. Highlights include the (presumably replica) 1848 6-pdr rocket launcher and the 6-pdr gun and crew. I knew that many of the Croats fighting against the Hungarians were 4th battalion Grenzers, i.e., the regiments' last militia reserve; but I had not appreciated how poorly equipped many of them were, without uniforms and armed only with spears.
The KEMPP is at the southern end of the battlefield. I didn't walk the whole thing but did go to the northern end as well, so covered both the main axes on which the Croats advanced. The visit made me appreciate just how large an area this small battle (in numbers involved) was spread over: 15,000 or so Hungarians facing twice as many Croats on a front of over 7km. My scenario uses a ground scale of 3500m per 12" grid square, so it necessarily abstracts the terrain somewhat - the hills are a lot more wrinkly and lumpy than the scenario map suggests - but I think I got it right in game terms.
The maps I consulted when creating the scenario showed the hills by Pakozd were neither forested nor totally clear, but more scrubby/patchy. Some of the hillsides today show what they must have looked like then. Sadly the vineyards where some of the Croats got drunk and sat out the battle have mostly been built on now.
As a bonus I learned about Hungary's version of Magna Carta, the "Aranybulla" of 1222. There is a monument to it on the eastern edge of Szekesfehervar.
Kapolna
Our furthest excursion was east to Kapolna, scene of a major Hungarian defeat in the snows of February 1849. Flickr album is here. My post about wargaming it is here.
This had a lot less to see than Pakozd and was harder to get a grasp of. It is twice as large, being fought along 15km of river line. Sprawling villages and lots of trees along the river make it difficult to see a clear picture. In Kapolna itself there is a monument to the battle that depicts the chaplain leading the Zanini battalion's charge to recapture the village from the Austrians; and three trees that represent the famous "three lindens" under which either Kossuth or Dembinski supposedly sat and thought at some point.
To try to get a good view we went up to the Ilka-Top, the hill to which the Hungarians retreated after Schlick's corps came out of the pass and fell on their right flank and kicked them out of Verpelet. This is a very substantial feature, inconveniently convex and nowadays covered in vineyards. My guide obligingly coaxed her car along sandy tracks to try to find decent observation points. The limitations of the viewpoint, of my phone camera, and of the sheer distances we were looking across mean that my photos are not the best, but hopefully they give some idea. Certainly the major ridge with the Debro forest on it dominates. What the photos don't show is, again, how much undulating terrain there actually is, particularly down in the valley around Feldebro and Aldebro. As with Pakozd, the game scale elides these smaller hills away; but the terrain features that are represented in the game (the villages, streams, marshes, pheasantry) provide enough cover and complexity and the game works as a representation of the battle.
As this was our second battlefield of the day and time was running out, I didn't get any closer pics of the southern half of the battlefield: the Kompolt wood, or the high ground west of Kapolna where the battle began, or the church that Kapolna ("chapel") is actually named for ... I guess I'll just have to visit again!
Tapio-Bicske
A small but important division-sized prelude to Isaszeg, in which a Hungarian column surprised Jellacics's encamped Croats, was initially driven back in disorder, but then rallied to drive off the Croats. One particularly glorious episode storming a bridge (which is still there); and a duel between the Hungarian and Austrian cavalry commanders (which the Austrian lost). Flickr album is here. Read about the battle here.
The little village of Tapio-Bicske has grown and sprawled northeast along the road that was the axis of the battle. Much of the area also seems more extensively forested than it was in 1849, and the low ridge in the centre of the battlefield is barely discernible from the road. However, by the famous bridge the land is still as open as it was back in the day, and also on the top of the Repasy-hegy (the hill south of the village). There is an impressive monument next to the bridge.
Very cool to stand on the actual bridge. It's the one depicted in this painting.
Isaszeg
The Hungarians rebounded from their defeat at Kapolna to achieve a brilliant victory at Isaszeg a couple of months later. My Isaszeg Flickr album is here. Blog post is here.
Isaszeg is east of Budapest, and we did this on the same day as Kapolna. The battle mostly took place along the river Rakos between Isaszeg and Godollo. Sadly, much of this is now covered by urban sprawl, so I couldn't really see the central part where Austrians concealed in vineyards opened up on the Hungarians' flank as they advanced, nor where the cavalry battle happened. My photos are all from the hills just SE of Isaszeg, which are nicely bestowed with monuments, and from where you can get a sense of the shape of the terrain: the King's Wood on the hills to the east, through which the Hungarians advanced; the heights behind Isaszeg to the west, where the Croats held out for a while; and the rugged high wooded hills NE of Godollo in the distance.
Before the visit we only knew about the main monument on Szobor-hegy. While looking for this we were lucky enough to take a wrong turning up a rocky trail into the woods. This turned out to lead us to a whole set of other monuments and graves from the battle.
Komarom
This was a really good full day - and we didn't even cross the Danube. Komarom is about 90 minutes NW of Budapest. The town proper is over the river in Slovakia, where it is Komarno. So is the battlefield of Nagy-Sallo, and that of Pered, and the area was also the scene of a really interesting action in January 1945 involving Hungarian paratroopers and armour (as well as Germans) trying to hold up a Soviet assault. So another Slovakian excursion is on the agenda for another time.
But back to Komarom. After Napoleon overran Austria, the Austrian emperor decided to strengthen Komarom by building some fortifications around it so that an army of 200,000 men could hold out there. The main three are all still there. They were just timber-reinforced earthworks in 1848 but were built to modern standards circa 1870: the Star Fort (Csillag Erod), Fort Igmand, and the Monostor. The Star Fort is undergoing major renovation so we couldn't go in there. Fort Igmand has some Austrian monuments from the battle of Komarom but not much else. But the Monostor is a seriously major fortification that was a working military installation up to and including Soviet times, and is full of exhibits. We spent a good couple of hours just touring round that.
As for the battlefield itself: again it is the sheer scale of the battlefield that is impressive, spanning about 15km. And most of it is flat and open: very flat, and very, very open. Having said that, there are more patches of woods than I expected, and I may have to look again at the old map to see if I was misreading it and seeing cabbage patches where I should have seen forests. But even if I do need to add some woods, there are still plenty of places where it is a good 2 or 3km of open ground.
At the eastern end of the battlefield, Szony has sprawled a bit, but there is still plenty of open ground south of it. I think we found the line of the vineyards that Liebler's grenadiers fell back to before charging back in against Dipold's Hungarians.
Getting to the much-contested ground between Herkalypuszta and Csempuszta - the main Austrian line in the first battle (and I think in the others too, but I haven't researched them properly yet) - was a challenge. Although our road atlas showed a road, it turned out to be a deeply rutted narrow track barely fit for a horse. If you do visit, be prepared to do some very careful driving.
Flickr album from Komarom is here. Account of the First Battle of Komarom here; the Second, here; the Third, here. Planning to wargame the first battle later this month.
Future Plans
As well as these five battles, I've already done scenarios for Schwechat (now a suburb of Vienna) and Nagy-Sallo (in Slovakia). The immediate future plan is to research and create scenarios for the remaining battles: Komarom II and III, Pered, and a few others scattered around Slovakia, Transylvania, maybe Serbia. As I finish each scenario, I will add it to the collection posted publicly in the BBB Yahoo group as usual. Further down the road, eventually the whole set may get published as a book, complete with suitable additional material describing the course of the war and giving more contextfor the scenarios.
Until then - enjoy the photos, help yourselves to the free scenarios for these very different and characterful battles, and have fun learning about and gaming this fascinating forgotten war!
