The Battle of Mór took place during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 on 30 December 1848 between Austria and Hungarian Revolutionary Army. The Austrians were led by Croatian Ban Lieutenant General Josip Jelačić, while the Hungarians were led by Major General Mór Perczel. The Austrians were victorious and, subsequently, the Hungarian main army led by Artúr Görgei lost the last chance to stop the Austrian armies which were threatening the Hungarian capitals Pest and Buda. As a result of this, the Austrian army led by Field Marshal Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz occupied on 5 January 1849 Pest and Buda.
Background
In the autumn of 1848, the defense of Western Hungary was entrusted to two armies quite far from each other. One of them was the Army of Upper Danube of about 28,000, led by Major General Artúr Görgei, deployed from the Nádas Pass in the Little Carpathians to the southern shore of Lake Fertő. Major General Mór Perczel had about 9-10 000 soldiers stationed along the Mura river, keeping an eye on the enemy who was preparing to invade Hungary from Croatia and Styria.Hermann Róbert: Perczel Mór dunántúli hadjárata és a móri ütközet Aetas 2001 (volume 16, nr. 2), pp. 81
The Hungarian political and military leadership hoped that there would be no enemy attacks in 1848 so that they could use the winter to organize and increase the army. This would have been crucial for the defense of the country, because, for example, nearly a third of Perczel's army was completely unarmed, and more than a third of Görgei's army was made up of fresh recruits who had not yet held a rifle in their hands. The opposing Austrian imperial army was much superior, both in numbers and in training. Görgei faced an army of nearly 55,000 men under the command of Field Marshal Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz. Perczel was threatened by an attack from the south and west, by two army corps, each of about 6,000 men.
The enemy invasion was not long in coming. On 14 December, Lieutenant General Balthasar von Simunich's division launched an attack at the Nádas Pass, the northernmost point of the Hungarian line, and on 16 December the attack of the main imperial forces began on the right bank of the Danube. The much superior enemy broke through at several points the Hungarian brigades deployed in a thin line and advanced unhindered towards the town of Győr. Thanks to the vigilance of individual brigade commanders and the helpfulness of the local Hungarian population, most of the separated troops, with longer or shorter detours, made their way, without being captured or destroyed by the enemy, to the Hungarian camp in the fortified Győr. Görgei's hussars defeated the enemy units advancing with overconfidence in a rearguard action in the Battle of Moson, and therefore Windisch-Grätz decided not to launch a frontal attack against the Hungarian army, but to surround it. But this took time, so between 19 and 26 December Görgei won some time to organize his troops in Győr.
Lajos Kossuth, the Chairman of the National Defence Commission (OHB), the country's true leader, asked Görgei to defend Győr. Kossuth, in successive letters, kept promising reinforcements to Görgei, but they took time to arrive. Most of the reinforcements were to arrive from the Hungarian troops in southern Hungary, which was too far from Győr. However, Kossuth was over-optimistic. Because of the distance, the majority of the troops ordered from Bácska and Bánság could only join Görgei's army, only at the end of December or the beginning of January when he already retreated in Budapest.
Kossuth also intended Perczel's corps as such a reinforcement, on 16 December when the news of Simunich's attack arrived. Both Kossuth and Görgei hoped that the latter's and Perczel's armies, in cooperation with each other, could defend the northern part of Transdanubia from the enemy invasion. The best way to do this seemed to be the plan of Perczel's troops to join Görgei's army in Győr.
However, Perczel did not arrive in Győr. He did not hurry in a straight line to Győr, but when he retreated from Lendva, made a detour to Körmend, and then headed for Devecser instead of Pápa, losing about two days, but even following a straight direction, he would not have reached Győr until the evening of 26 December - provided he had not stumbled upon any of the Imperial columns surrounding the city. The reason for this is explained by the fact that the reports and directions given to him by Kossuth, Görgei, and the Government's Commissar General László Csány, and Perczel's own guide gave him wrong directions,Hermann Róbert: Perczel Mór dunántúli hadjárata és a móri ütközet Aetas 2001 (volume 16, nr. 2), pp. 81-82 but it cannot be ruled out that he deliberately avoided cooperation with Görgei, because it is well known that they had not liked each other since their clash after the great success at Ozora, when Görgei declared Perczel unfit to lead the army, while the latter wanted to shoot the disobedient Görgei in the head.Horváth Gábor: December 30. – A móri ütközet Győri Szalon 2015.12.30 At dawn on 27 December, Görgei evacuated Győr and moved his troops in several columns towards the Vértes Hills. The decision to retreat from the town was taken at the last minute; if Görgei had stayed there for half a day longer, he and his troops would have been caught in a pincer by the Austrians.Hermann Róbert: Perczel Mór dunántúli hadjárata és a móri ütközet Aetas 2001 (volume 16, nr. 2), pp. 82
After the capture of Győr, Field Marshal Windisch-Grätz's main objective was to prevent Görgei's and Perczel's troops from joining. He entrusted this task to the corps of Lieutenant General Josip Jelačić.
Kossuth was seriously worried by the abandoning of Győr. Thus, in increasingly impatient letters, he demanded Görgei to confront the enemy.
Prelude In the meantime, Perczel's army reached Kisbér on 28 December, and on 29 December it retreated through the Strait of Sárkány (Dragon) to Mór. On the night of 29 December, Perczel positioned his army on the heights from Mór, on both sides of the road from Sárkány, and set up his outposts on the mounds east of Sárkány.Friedrich Wilhelm Rüstow: Az 1848-1849-diki magyar hadjárat története vol. I. Pest, Emich Gusztáv, pp. 130 He had about 6,000 soldiers at that time, because the other 4,000 or so, were marching in another direction toward Buda and Pest. According to historian József Bánlaky, Perczel's troops also included a small detachment from Görgei's Army of the Upper Danube. On the 29th, Kossuth ordered Görgei to clash with Windisch-Grätz's main army. He outlined a purely illusory battle plan: he demanded that Görgeit defend a front of some 25-30 kilometers wide so that the troops could resist outnumbering enemy attacks at any point of it. Görgei explained in his reply that the battle was impossible to fight under Kossuth's conditions.
Now Kossuth, dissatisfied with Görgei because of his answer and the surrender of Győr, he wrote a letter to his opponent, Perczel, urging him to confront the Austrians. Only unity and unity for God's sake! The homeland is in great danger. [... Please give me] some victory, my sweet Maurice! The continuous retreat has dampened the spirit of the army, - an attack, a victory must necessarily take place before the decisive battle!,Bánlaky József: A moóri ütközet (1848. december 30-án). A magyar nemzet hadtörténete XXI Arcanum Adatbázis Kft. 2001 – he wrote to the hot-headed general, for whom that was more than enough to take a hasty decision.
Perczel received both Kossuth's and Csány's letters on 30 December. He called a War Council and against the advice of his more learned officers, decided to accept the battle with the enemy. His decision was allegedly influenced also by the fact that he was informed by the commander of one of his divisions, whose soldiers still had no rifles, Lieutenant Colonel István Szekulits, that if the enemy is not held at Mór, he will not be able to take a comfortable distance from the pursuing enemy, thus they will arrive at Székesfehérvár at the same time.Hermann Róbert: Perczel Mór dunántúli hadjárata és a móri ütközet Aetas 2001 (volume 16, nr. 2), pp. 82-83 Perczel, however, failed to reconnoiter the enemy's forces, and similarly failed to inform Görgei about his plan to fight Jelačić. He did not inform even the brigade commander, Lieutenant Colonel János Horváth, sent by Görgei to maintain contact between their armies, who only learned of the battle from the sound of the cannonade.Hermann Róbert: Perczel Mór dunántúli hadjárata és a móri ütközet Aetas 2001 (volume 16, nr. 2), pp. 83
According to the memoirs of Major General Ferenc Meszéna, he warned Perczel of the disadvantages of the army's deployment at Mór:The position at Mór is not favorable, it has no advantage for defense, and is [also] dangerous against an enemy who advances out of the forest from the direction of Kisbér, as he can surround the position from all sides. He considered the army's position particularly dangerous because of the forest within a cannon shot distance towards Kisbér, because this forest is so sparse that the troops and guns can move freely in it in all directions.
Meszéna tried to warn Perczel of these dangers, but his commander was undeterred. All that Meszéna succeeded in doing was that Perczel sent the corps' road engineers (sappers) forward on the road to Kisber, and had made a barricade of a couple of cut trees, to prevent the enemy from advancing.
Due to the contiguous forest, the Hungarian corps could be bypassed unseen by the enemy also from the north. According to a post-operation diary written in 1850, Mór lies on the side of Csóka Hill in a narrow valley through which the small Gaja stream flows. The elevated plain on which the country town lies descends on three sides and forms a gentle curve with the opposite slopes of the Sárkány Ridge to the north, which is cut across by the main road. The hills surrounding the valley are covered with forest, from which the highway emerges about a thousand paces away from the village. Only one side of the Csóka hill is planted with vines. The exit from the forested gorge on the side of Sárkány can be therefore hit [with cannons] even more effectively from the Mór hill. The enemy, however, did not tie himself to the road, as the forest to the west of it was very sparse and could be traversed with little effort by artillery, and, moreover, the position from Mór was dominated from the opposite heights. So it wasn't hard to calculate that such a position was almost undefendable... According to an officer, The hills and forests to the west of the city were ceded to the imperialists, [thus] our whole army stretched like an open book [in front of them] along a huge plain. Another participant in the battle wrote that our position was extremely bad; the forest was not far from us, in which the enemy could arrange his army to attack without being harmed or even noticed.Hermann Róbert: Perczel Mór dunántúli hadjárata és a móri ütközet Aetas 2001 (volume 16, nr. 2), pp. 83-84 Mór Perczel's opinion on the defensibility of the Mór position was supported only by his brother Miklós Perczel: our position was so beautiful and good that if our artillerymen were not scared, we would have beaten [the enemy] brilliantly.
In his war report written after the battle, Perczel described his position at Mór as on the one hand, I had not to fear of being outflanked, on the other hand, I dominated the whole countryside with my cannons, and finally, the enemy, who had a huge number of cavalry, could not deploy in front of me because of the forest...Hermann Róbert: Perczel Mór dunántúli hadjárata és a móri ütközet Aetas 2001 (volume 16, nr. 2), pp. 84