Air Battles over Hungary 1944-45 Volume 2: Capturing the Capital

The fighting around Budapest would ultimately climax in the launch of the last major offensive by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. To reach this conclusion, the city had to endure becoming one of the greatest fortified cities of the war. Encircled by the Red Army but fiercely defended by German and Hungarian forces, the Hungarian capital was the focal point of an immense air campaign in which thousands of sorties were flown in support of desperate relief operations, bitter urban combat and the final struggle for control of Central Europe. This concluding volume follows the air war from the encirclement of Budapest through to the city's eventual capture and that last great German offensive, Operation Spring Awakening.

As Hitler committed every available reserve to saving the Hungarian capital, the Luftwaffe found itself charged with mounting a sustained air bridge to the besieged garrison, while supporting the three Konrad relief offensives launched in an attempt to break the Soviet encirclement. Opposing them were the Soviet 5th and 17th Air Armies, supported by Romanian aviation, whose aircraft fought not only for air superiority but also to isolate the battlefield and destroy the bridges across the Danube, interdict German armour, and support the brutal street fighting that engulfed Budapest district by district. The scale of the fighting was immense, but it was at a scale only one side could sustain.

Drawing upon Russian, German, Hungarian and Romanian archival sources, Dmitriy Khazanov narrates this complex campaign allowing voices from every perspective to be heard. Detailed operational analysis is combined with first-hand combat reports, memoirs and official documents to describe the experiences of fighter pilots, bomber crews, transport airmen, anti-aircraft gunners and commanders as they fought in some of the harshest winter conditions of the war. The volume explores the Luftwaffe's increasingly desperate supply effort, the Soviet air blockade of Budapest, the cooperation—and tensions—between German and Hungarian air forces, and the evolution of Soviet air-ground coordination during urban operations.

The narrative concludes with the destruction of the Budapest garrison and the dramatic opening of Operation Spring Awakening, Hitler's final strategic gamble. Despite the commitment of elite panzer formations and experienced Luftwaffe units, the offensive failed to reverse the strategic situation, leaving the road to Vienna open and signalling the final collapse of German power in south-eastern Europe. This revised and expanded second volume continues to be illustrated throughout with an exceptional collection of rare wartime photographs, provides an exploration of the interallied relationship between German and Hungarian air forces and the evolution of the anti-aircraft defences for the city, and features specially commissioned maps and full-colour aircraft profiles, with expanded captions, depicting aircraft involved in the fighting. Air Battles over Hungary 1944–45 Volume 2 is the definitive English-language account of the final aerial struggle for Budapest and the decisive air campaign that shaped the last months of the war in Central Europe.