page_title: Royal Hungarian Army
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Royal Hungarian Army / History / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Former Admiral Miklós Horthy, after leading the Hungarian National Army into the Hungarian capital, is received by Budapest city officials in front of the Hotel Gellert on November 16, 1919.
context_page_description: The Royal Hungarian Army was the name given to the land forces of the Kingdom of Hungary in the period from 1922 to 1945. Its name was inherited from the Royal Hungarian Honvéd which went under the same Hungarian title of Magyar Királyi Honvédség from 1867 to 1918. Initially restricted by the Treaty of Trianon to 35,000 men, the army was steadily upgraded during the 1930s and fought on the side of the Axis powers in the Second World War.
context_section_description: As a vanquished power in the First World War, Hungary had hardly grown at all in the immediate post-war years thanks to the territorial demands of its old and new neighbouring states, the Kingdom of Rumania, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Hungarian Red Army that was formed during the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in which many world war veterans enlisted, was defeated by the allied armies in the Hungarian–Romanian war of 1919. The consequence was that large areas of Hungary were occupied and many regions that Hungary had claimed were finally lost.
  In July 1919 the former Commander-in-Chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, Admiral Miklós Horthy, had begun to set up the "National Army" (Hungarian: Nemzeti Hadsereg) as directed by the opposition government. This was supported by former k.u.k. officers like Gyula Gömbös, Döme Sztójay and Anton Lehár. After the withdrawal of Romanian troops in 1919/20 they took over the defence of the country, but remained dependent on the goodwill of the victorious powers that had met at the Paris Peace Conference.
  The Treaty of Trianon that was signed on 4 June 1920 confirmed Hungary's territorial losses and restricted its armed forces to a volunteer organisation of 35,000 men. Heavy weapons such as heavy artillery, tanks, aircraft and anti-aircraft guns were forbidden as was the creation of a general staff. Compliance with these restrictions was supervised by an allied control commission.
caption: Admiral Horthy during the entry of the National Army in Budapest, November 1919
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