Török Ignác és a honvéd hadmérnökkar szervezése
Ignác Török and the Organization of the Corps of Honvéd Military Engineers

Summary/Abstract: Ignác Török is mostly known as the defender of the castle of Komárom as well as the leader and organizer of the corps of honvéd military engineers, this characterization is only partially true. He was in full charge of leading the corps of military engineers in the last month of the war of independence only, he had much more to do with the organization of the corps. Establishing an organizational unit for Hungarian military engineers started in the spring of 1849 only, when Ignác Török, stationed in the fortress of Komárom, set about the task locally. This was where those organizational principles were developed which provided a model for establishing the general corps of engineers. The paper points out that human resources, which were mostly available for other arms and services, were not sufficient for launching the military engineering service. The military engineer officers of the imperial and royal army, even though there were a surprisingly high number of them, were mostly stationed outside of Hungary, so they could not constitute a base for the military engineering corps. There were only six persons who were in service throughout the Hungarian war of independence, and all of them were compelled every now and then to participate in services other than military engineering. Of the military engineer officers in service in Hungary only three were fighting for the cause of the war of independence, and two of them belonged to the previous group. All this meant that establishing a corps of military engineers was only possible through involving civil engineers. Török's empathic and teacher-like temperament (he had been an instructor at the Noble Guards) made him ideal for the organizational job. However, it proved to be a rather challenging task to accommodate the civilian mentality of discussing politics to disciplined military thinking. Overcoming such problems were mostly successful when leadership roles were given to civilian engineers who had done military service in the imperial and royal army before either as military engineers or in some other services (like János Mihalik, for example). Dictated by necessity, the stopgap to place all military engineer officers with excellent military education in the new general staff was also a huge problem, which, until the spring of 1849, practically prevented the establishment of the Hungarian corps of military engineers (mainly due to the lack of cadres). It was only in May 1849 that a chief was appointed to lead the corps of military engineers, but general Miklós Gyulai Gaál was mostly involved in other areas. Because of this, it was Ignác Török who had to deal with the tough organizing task, which he could only start as an appointed chief in July, when the war of independence was already about to collapse. In spite of this, he attained spectacular results, his organizational principles used in Komárom were applied throughout the army.

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