Admiral Nicholas Horthy, Regent of Hungary, and his clique of aristocratic Magyar officials had long sought to regain for their country some of its vanished power and glory. From the ceiling-high windows of their brownstone government building in Pest they surveyed Buda spread out in a quiet arc. They looked down the sluggish Danube, past the austere statue of their patron, Saint Stephen, and felt themselves ordained and inevitable monarchs of all they saw and all they could take.
Opportunism had paid dividends in 1940 when, by playing Germany's game, they had taken the long disputed province of Transylvania from...
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