The First World War Was a Battle of Flesh and Steel

Szöveg: Zoltán Horváth | 2014. május 4. 13:43

“A soldier who falls with arm in hand is a war hero and not a victim”, Col. Dr. László Töll said in Szombathely on Friday, April 25.

The head of the MoD Public Relations and War Memorial Service Department participated in the 15th National Local History Publication Editorial Conference, which was co-organized by the Local History Alliance and the Vas County Local History Association. He was the main patrol of the event, which took place in the Szombathely centre of the Vas County Public Record Office.

László Töll: An estimated 350,000 Hungarian-speaking soldiers were killed in action in the First World War

In his presentation, Col. Dr. László Töll talked about the Great War. He said that there was a work in progress aimed at establishing the exact number of Hungarian soldiers fallen in the First World War, because back in the 1950s, the then Socialist state authorities had completely destroyed the records on personnel losses, so today’s researches have to use cemetery registers to find the relevant data. He added that an estimated 350,000 Hungarian-speaking enlisted men and officers had been killed in action during the First World War.

The head of the department talked about the elite troops involved in the battles, the “storm troopers". He gave a detailed account of the process of selecting and training these storm troopers, whose branch had been constituted by German Captain Wilhelm Martin Rohr, and then he went on talking about their weaponry and tactics.

“The First World War was a battle of flesh and steel, with flesh having been defeated, of course. In essence, that is the reason for the huge number of war heroes", the colonel said.