The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Freedom Fight was a desperate struggle of ingenuity against brute force. While Soviet T-34 tanks rumbled through Budapest, the young freedom fighters—many barely in their teens or twenties—fought back with little more than light weapons and breathtaking resourcefulness.
History and family stories tell of these improvised tactics: how they poured oil onto the steep, narrow streets leading to Buda Castle, causing the iron monsters to lose traction. They speak of throwing lard-smeared bread or jars of jam at the tanks’ vision blocks, blinding the crews and forcing them to open the hatches. Sometimes, all it took was a cast-iron pancake pan placed in the road, its protruding handle mimicking the sinister shape of an anti-tank mine. On Csepel Island, workers turned fire hoses into weapons, spraying petrol over the advancing armor and igniting the streets into a sea of flame.
These desperate acts of defiance took a real toll. Historians estimate that 200 to 300 Soviet tanks were fully or partially destroyed. The fighters even managed to bring down a helicopter and several low-flying aircraft with their machine guns. But the cost was catastrophic. In just three weeks, approximately 2,700 Hungarian youths perished, with another 20,000 wounded.
A cruel illusion sustained their hope. Radio Free Europe, sponsored by the CIA, broadcast endless encouragement, promising that help was on the way. It never came. Fearing a direct clash with the Soviets, the West stood by. The United States even blocked a plan from Spain, the only nation to offer tangible aid, which had 100,000 volunteers and ammunition ready to deploy. The planes packed with anti-tank weapons never left the tarmac.
Yet, the freedom fighters fought on, round after round, until their last bullets. As the Hungarian writer Pál Zsombor expertly summarizes in his article for Index, their legacy is a stark testament to a nation’s courage and its profound sense of abandonment. Let me share it with you:
Urban warfare during the 1956 Revolution
The events of 23 October 1956 did not start violently. However, after the firing of the volley at the Radio, some of the crowd, recovering from their initial surprise, went for weapons to assert their demands and defend themselves against violence. Weapons were mainly obtained from barracks, police stations, arms and ammunition depots around Budapest, and from the stocks of weapons in major factories.
This also explains why police weapons such as this one were widely used by revolutionaries. It is the Kucher K1 submachine gun, designed specifically for law enforcement forces, began production in 1953 as an improved version of the King submachine gun:
But weapons also came from the military training facilities of the Hungarian Volunteer Defense Association, which managed the military training of young people, and from the factory on Soroksári Road, which operated under the name of the National Lamp Factory, but was in fact also intensively involved in weapons production. It was from these places that, for example, the 1948 M 5.6 mm small rifles, which were not very dangerous, but were used only for training and sporting purposes, were produced. Since the younger rebels did not always have access to a more serious weapon, this model soon became an attribute of the guys from Pest.
The Defense League was important not only for weapons training, but also because it was partly due to the training received here (and from other organizations involved in military training for young people) that the young people of Pest were not completely unfamiliar with warfare and the use of weapons.
“When I was an apprentice in industry, we had regular shooting classes; it was a subject, and the truth is that I was a very good shot.” (The recollection of Kabelács Pál)
In fact, the Soviet army had been preparing since the summer of 1956 to use the troops it had stationed here since the end of the Second World War to maintain order in the event of a riot or uprising. This took place on the night of 23 October. The Soviets’ aim was, based on previous experiences, for example in East Berlin in 1953, to force the ‘rioters’ to retreat quickly by a rapid armed show of force. Something like this (watch the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzLI7WenYho
Believing that a quick and effective intervention would be enough, they arrived with tanks, as shown above, but without infantry support, and also with rubber-tired armored vehicles open from above, and with several transport vehicles loaded with ammunition. The boys from Pest, however, were not intimidated and quickly developed flexible forms of asymmetric urban warfare and managed to inflict considerable damage on Soviet units with many unusual and ingenious solutions.
The use of one of their most famous tools, the Molotov cocktail, has been discussed in detail on this blog before, so I will not go into it in detail now.
In the absence of adequate heavy weapons, hand grenades played an important role alongside Molotov cocktails. The most common model was the Vécsey hand grenade.
The above model is worth observing. The grenades were, of course, also used in themselves:
But their destructive power could even be increased. This was possible because the grenade heads could be unscrewed from the handle and screwed together by means of threads at the top and bottom of the cylindrical charge (as seen in the picture above). This created the so-called stretched charge or hand grenade bundle.
It was still not enough to penetrate the armor of tanks, but it could be used to break the chain track. Hand grenades assembled in this way were usually attempted to be thrown from cellar windows under the tracks or between the tracks and the rollers. Hand grenades were also sometimes combined with Molotov cocktails, as this allowed the explosive and incendiary effects specific to each device to be exploited.
Other ideas were also used to cripple the tanks. The most obvious way to do this was, of course, to build barricades. At Széna Square, one of the most famous resistance hotspots of the revolution, they used the leftover equipment from the metro construction works in the area, trams, and railway trains brought from the Déli Railway Station.
“The wagons were rolled out to the larger barricade from the Déli Railway Station, as the road sloped downhill in that direction, so that’s where these wagons came into motion, then they came and accelerated more and more, so I think the very first wagon ran over Széna Square. […] Then it derailed and stayed there. The others were then braked there, overturned, and thus the square was made impenetrable, and so there were passages where one could move.” (Recollection by Kiss-Dobos László)
Many barricades were also built from the paving slabs that covered the roads everywhere at that time. Some say that these could also be effective in stopping tanks if they got caught between the rollers and the tank tracks and broke the tracks.
One of the witnesses reports:
“We were watching the tanks from behind a big steel plate. The tanks were having difficulty moving, the cube stone on the barricade was underneath them, and they were stalling. They somehow managed to climb over with great difficulty, I don’t know how, but they climbed in such a way that it turned into night.” (The recollection of Meszlényi János)
Others hoped that the tanks would “slide” on the paved street stones, thus limiting their movement (this was called “the Persian carpet”).
But some reports say that barricades made of paving stones were not really much use against tanks. One particular case of tank crippling is pointed out by Pálos István, who says that on one occasion someone managed to cripple a tank on the Múzeum Boulevard by sticking an iron bar, used for tram shifters, into its track.
“It was a very cold night, and the air was damp. At the corner of the Museum Boulevard, the road was full of burnt-out AVH (State Security) trucks and military vehicles. Among them was a crippled tank: an old Russian T-34 from World War II, still in use by the Hungarian People’s Army. Earlier, someone in the crowd had disabled it with just an iron rod. These thumb-thick rods were used by electricians to operate the tracks. They were part of all tram equipment at the time. The freedom fighter pushed it between the tank’s tracks.” (Recollection of Pálos István)
A similar story was reported in rural areas:
‘People put blocks between the tracks and iron bars, which soon stopped the tank. Some people even took off the shovel attached to the side of the tank and used it to beat the sides of the monster. The driver then got out, dropped his pistol, and fled.” (Recollection by Horváth István)
The revolutionaries of Újpest, on the other hand, tried to fight the tanks with material brought from the nearby Glue factory. They hoped that if they could use it to lubricate the roads, they could slow down the advance of the tanks.
According to the recollection of Budaházy László, in Budafok, they tried the opposite and tried to make the roads as slippery as possible.
“We attacked some Russian tanks and tried to blow them up, but we didn’t succeed. As we had smeared the road with grease, when the tanks tried to drive away, they slid off the main road towards the lower roadside and humped down the hillside.” (Recollection of Budaházy László)
In addition to setting up physical obstacles, the revolutionaries also tried to hold back the invading Soviets by all sorts of camouflaged means.
“At the end of Berzenczey Street, there was already a Soviet tank. The lads threw a rope from one side of Berzenczey Street to the other. A sheet imitating a dummy was folded over the rope, and they pulled it back and forth. The Soviets shot, machine-gunned, and cannonaded the dummy with ferocious force, and the guys laughed.
Those were joyful moments…” (Recollection by Csongovai Per Olaf)
The above quote is, of course, more of a humorous scene. But the revolutionaries also used more serious camouflage during the clashes. For example, they also tried to slow down the movement of tanks with disguised but harmless devices that looked like weapons, to make them easier targets for Molotov cocktails or the revolutionaries’ few armor-piercing weapons. One of the most notorious of these solutions was used at the Corvin Passage.
“It was the evening of the twenty-sixth, the lads went to the canteen, took some china soup plates and put them on the pavement. And the Russians didn’t dare to put tanks on these plates! I saw tanks approaching these plates. They stopped and then started to go backward at such speed that they were smoking. Morale in the Soviet army was getting worse and worse.” (Recollection of Pongrátz Ödön)
The effectiveness of this ploy was obviously increased by the fact that, as the quote says, by this time, the Soviet troops were already significantly less inclined to fight and did not want to take unnecessary risks. A similar solution to the one described in the quote was to place upturned pots, china plates, or upturned and broken-handled pancake irons in the middle of the street, string them up, and drag them back and forth along the road in front of the tanks. The driver of the tank, with limited visibility, thought that mines were in the way and slowed down or stopped.
The following picture proves that this was not just fiction:
The solution of using strings was also used for other purposes by the freedom fighters. In the testimony of Angyal István, the leader of one of the most famous revolting groups, it is recorded that the fighters used strings to drag the necessary equipment and food from one corner to the next in the streets that were under fire. However, the revolutionaries did not always have to rely solely on the aforementioned DIY solutions.
They also had some cannons captured from the enemy. One of them was seized when they destroyed a truck carrying an armored cannon on 24 October. According to the recollections of the Corvin Passage commune, these were handled by two revolutionaries (Wooden-leg Jancsi and a freedom fighter nicknamed Beszkártos) with a piece of string from the cinema’s cashier’s box. They mainly aimed at the tank tracks to paralyze them and set them on fire.
“Because I knew that the only vulnerable point of the Russian tanks was the track. If you puncture it with a cannon shell, it can’t go any further, and then it’s the gasoline cylinders. […] When we set up the cannon, I went to the landlord and told him I needed a rope at least twenty meters long. […] Finally, I got a wire rope and we fed it into the cinema box office, tying the other end to the firing device. […] When one of the staff […] saw the tank coming down the boulevard and pulled his hand down, Józsi pulled the trigger mechanism made of broomstick rope that had been attached to the end of the rope in the cashier’s box. […] Seven to ten seconds was the norm, the time needed to reload the cannon.” (Recollection of Pongrátz Ödön)
The revolutionaries also took advantage of the fact that the Soviet columns were deployed along the major arteries of the capital, and the flank roads were not secured, so that the tanks could be more easily disabled by hitting them from the side in the less armored part of the tanks.
Finally, it is important to mention that the revolutionaries also covered many open surfaces – walls or wrecked vehicles – with their inscriptions and humorous slogans to encourage themselves, propagate their demands, and ensure the sympathy of their compatriots. In this way, they were essentially waging psychological warfare.
Source of the article: https://ntf.hu/index.php/2017/07/28/varosi_harcmodor_az_1956_os_forradalom_idejen/
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