The following is a letter published in the Op/Ed page of The New York Times on September 20, 1993. The writer is a military historian in Canada:

"To the Editor:

"Reburial is Both a Ceremony and a Test for Today's Hungary" (Sept. 5) incorrectly states that Adm. Miklós Horthy became an admiral in a country without a navy."

Capt. Miklós Horthy of Nagybanya was promoted rear admiral and fleet commander on March 1, 1918, near the close of World War I in an empire that was about to disappear. But the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy was, in that age of the dreadnought battleship, the fifth largest in Europe after the British, French, Imperial German and Imperial Russian fleets.

During the years he was regent of Hungary, from 1920 to 1944, Horthy maintained his admiral's rank, even though in 1919, postwar Hungary lost both its seacoast and naval bases. The bases were lost when the pre-1914 Hungarian Adriatic province of Croatia became part of the new post-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

In our era, when South Slavs are again locked in savage racial conflict, and despite Admiral Horthy's pro-Magyar and, some say, anti-Semitic policies as the long-term Regent of Hungary, the fleet in which he served was the only truly multi-ethnic European navy of the 1914 era.

In 1917, as wartime commander of the Austro-Hungarian light cruiser squadron, his three ship captains were a Croat, Romanian and Hungarian Magyar, respectively.

Since most officers of the navy of the Habsburg monarchy were Austrian, Czech, or Hungarian, and most of the crews were Croats, its officers usually had to know three languages: German, the navy's official language, in addition to their own, if not German, and a working knowledge of Serbo-Croatian. The Austro-Hungarian navy was not defeated by racial conflict, but surrendered as a part of the complete military collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in early November 1918.

The most famous Austro-Hungarian naval officer was Lieut. Georg Ritter von Trapp, not because he was that navy's top U-boat ace, but as the founder of the Trapp family Singers, whose songs still make sense in any language.

John D. Harbron
Senior Research Fellow
Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies
Toronto, Sept. 11, 1993

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