After a fierce battle in the summer of 1942, the Hungarian army captured the Russian town of Stary Oskol, situated on the Oskol river. On the way to the east, and the Don river, the town was of great importance for both the Hungarian and German armies. The captured town housed two military hospitals, where many lives were saved during the war.
The Oskol river flows through Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts in Russia, and through the eastern part of Kharkiv Oblast in Ukraine, where it joins the Seversky Donets river. 
There are several towns along the Oskol river, Stary Oskol is one of them.


Important town of Stary Oskol

Hungarian soldiers file across the newly constructed pontoon bridge over the Southern Bug river in the vicinity of the occupied town of Vinnitsa; Ukraine, 1941.

Across the Bug with dry feet

Gen. Marcel Stomm, was the commander of the Third Corps in the ill-fated Hungarian Second Army serving on the Don front in 1942-1943. During a post-battle retreat, because of the heavily clogged roadways by German troops, Stomm concluded that small groups of men, rather than their large masses, might be more capable of making headway toward safety. On February 1st, 1943, therefore Stomm disbanded the Third Corps, permitting his men to split up into smaller retreating contingents, which then trudged successfully into safer territory. With a few of his officers, Stomm drove off toward the southwest, suffered debilitating frostbite, had to be thwarted from committing suicide, and was captured by the Soviets. Interrogations, an argument with ex-patriot and Soviet collaborator Communist Mátyás Rákosi, imprisonment in Moscow, the amputation of his blackened lower legs, a stint in a Soviet POW camp, and after barely escaping execution, finally years of postwar confinement in a Budapest Communist prison followed. All told, despite his unorthodox and controversial command decision, General Stomm had done his best under trying circumstances to carry on as an honorable soldier. 