In the harsh winter, marching in the mountains, several times Görgei and his troops escaped the encirclement by the Austrian troops (at one point they escaped by opening a formerly closed mine tunnel, crossing it to the other side of the mountain), then on 5 February 1849 broke through the mountain pass of Branyiszkó, defeating General Deym in the , and uniting with the Hungarian troops led by György Klapka on the Hungarian plains. According to the military historian Róbert Hermann, the one and a half months of Görgei's campaign to the East through Northern Hungary was a strategical success, because: thanks to his way towards North, he prevented Windisch-Grätz to attack with all his forces towards Debrecen, where the Hungarian Committee of National Defense (which temporarily functioned as an executional power in Hungary after the resignation of the Batthyány-Government at 2 October 1848) took refuge, and put an end to the Hungarian revolution, providing enough time to the concentration of the Hungarian forces behind the Tisza river, "cleaned" the Szepes region from the enemy troops, assuring with this the whole territory between Szeged and the Galician border as a Hungarian hinterland for the future counterattack. During his retreat he fought five noticeable battles, from which he won two (Igló at 2nd, and Branyiszkó at 5 February 1849), lost two (Szélakna at 21st, and Hodrusbánya at 22 January 1849), and scored a draw at Turcsek 17 January 1849). The supreme command was conferred upon Henryk Dembiński by Kossuth, who did not want in any way to give the main command to Görgei. Many officers from Görgei's Army of the Upper Danube (György Kmety, Lajos Aulich) were astonished at Kossuth's decision and sought to protest, but Görgei ordered them to accept it. One of the first decisions of the Polish commander were to order to many of the Hungarian units under the lead of Görgei and Klapka, to retreat, enabling the Austrian troops of General Franz Schlik to escape from their encirclement. But when Dembiński, after making mistake after mistake, lost the Battle of Kápolna on 25–27 February 1849 (in which Görgei's VII corps could not participate, because of Dembiński's wrong placement of the troops, the VII corps arriving at the battlefield only after the battle ended), the Hungarian officers revolted against the Polish commander, demanding his dismissal and a Hungarian general in his place.