Battle of Zalău

The Battle of Zalău was a military action of the tactical level that opposed on February 23–26, 1919, in the area of the town of Zalău in Szilágy County (now Sălaj County), attacking Hungarian troops from the Székely Division to the Romanian ones from the 13th Infantry Brigade. The course of hostilities was circumscribed Military operations for the defense of the Great Union, the action taking place during the operation of the Romanian Army to occupy the line of demarcation in Transylvania in the Hungarian–Romanian War. The final result was favorable to the Romanian troops, who after having to leave the town, managed to regain it.

Representing a gateway of real strategic importance for both armies, the city of Zalău represented a center with the character of a Hungarian outpost, both of the armed resistance and of a possible offensive that would have aimed to restore the old borders of the Hungary. Its takeover by the Romanian Army was thus preceded by incidents and was associated with a difficult situation of the civilian population, in the existing revolutionary context and the takeover of Transylvania by a new administration.

The establishment of the balance of power along the new military demarcation line – fixed in January 1919 – also associated the conception by each side of the future belligerents of plans to gain additional military advantages over the reality already recorded on the ground, at that time. Thus, the Romanian command tried to impose the appearance of a 10 km (6.2 mi) neutral zone through an additional withdrawal of Hungarian troops, and the Hungarian command made plans to regain the Zalău – Jibou area. There were, however, a series of elements that led to the destabilization of the situation planned by both commands, a central role belonging both to the difficult context in which the Hungarian ethnicity civilian population in the area was found (from among which a significant percentage of the soldiers and officers of the Hungarian military subunits located nearby), as well as the fact that one of the Hungarian battalions located in the vicinity of Zalău was commanded by major Mihály Gyurotsik, whose family was immobilized in the city under the control of the Romanian troops.

Without an order from his superiors in the Székely Division and without taking into account the needs foreseen in advance of the superiority of the effectives, of the appropriate endowment with technical means and of ensuring the supply after the attack with sufficient resources, Gyurotsik thus initiated, on February 23, 1919, an action that would lead to the initial conquest of Zalău by the Hungarian troops and the withdrawal of the Romanian forces in the neighboring areas. However, since, in the context of the technical, organizational and numerical superiority of the Romanian troops, there was no possibility of consolidating the effects of the action of the Hungarian troops on the ground, the city was regained on February 26 by the Romanian troops. An important role was played by the Romanian artillery, which, however, caused significant destruction to the locality, later speculated by the Hungarian propaganda bodies.

From a military point of view, what happened in Zalău caused significant damage to the Romanian troops, both material and image. However, the whole range of problems – generated at the moment or as a later effect, for the rest of the civilian population of Zalău and the city itself – made it so that, in the context of the impossibility of the Hungarian troops maintaining the military result, the balance of the action was a negative one for Hungarian Republican Army.