Hungary 1919: Horthy fails

[Doug M.]

While noodling around online, I ran across this fascinating bit of obscure Hungarian history. From Admiral Horthy's memoirs, Chapter 9, dealing with the counterrevolution against Bela Kun:

"When diplomacy is deficient and power lacking, stratagem must be resorted to... Couriers from Vienna had brought us money, appropriated from the Communist Hungarian Legation in a bold coup de main by a group of Hungarian officers under the blind eye of the friendly Viennese Chief of Police Schober, and with the aid of the Vienna correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, Ashmead Bartlett. Several millions had been deposited there for propaganda purposes."

It's just a throwaway line, but it's suggestive. The seizure of the Communist money came at a critical time; the Kun regime was collapsing, while Horthy was struggling to assemble a plausible alternative force in Szeged. The money allowed him to pay his soldiers, which was beyond the capabilities of any of his rivals.

(That Ashmead Bartlett fellow is interesting too. He was the British journalist who had ripped the lid off Gallipoli a few years earlier. The son of a prominent Tory politician, he was more or less Winston Churchill if Churchill had stuck with journalism.)

Anyway: say for arguments' sake that the seizure of the money fails. (Maybe the POD is Ashmead-Bartlett going down on _Majestic_ in the Aegean, which OTL he almost did.) Say further that this has a snowball effect; Horthy can't make payroll, so his force never grows beyond a few malcontents, and he's not able to march later from Lake Balaton to Budapest.

Now what? There's still a power vacuum, and the French won't allow a Habsburg government, so who takes over in Horthy's place?


Doug M.