Destroying Your Own Army Isn't a Sign of Military Genius

I've just finished reading a book about the war in the Carpathian Mountains in 1915. Essentially what happened was that the Austro-Hungarian high command having lost about seventy percent of their army fighting the Russians in the first six months of the war decided to freeze the rest of it to death.

History isn't particularly kind to the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army in the First World War. If they're mentioned at all there is a throwaway line about them bungling the invasion of Serbia (which started the whole mess) and then having to be supported by the Germans as their army disintegrated under Russian attack.

I would like to set the record straight unfortunately it pretty much is straight. They did bungle the invasion of Serbia (the commander was the same guy who made the security arrangements for Archduke Franz Ferdinand's visit to Sarajevo) and the Russians stomped all over them in Galicia. Of course there were reasons for this and the principal one seems to be mind buggering stupidity in the high command. If you get into a war with Serbia and Russia where do you think you should put your main effort? Anybody who answers Russia, go to the top of the class. Anybody who answers Serbia, congratulations the Austro-Hungarian army has a job for you.

The truly bizarre thing is that the commander of the Austro-Hungarian army knew perfectly well that he should have ignored Serbia and thrown all his forces against the Russians, he just didn't. This man, Field Marshal Count Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, screwed up his initial deployments so badly that he wound up attacking the Russians with an inferiority of numbers while still not putting enough men on the Serbian front to guarantee victory. The result? Austro-Hungarian forces thoroughly hammered and driven out of Galicia (then a Habsburg province, now not) and back onto the Carpathian Mountains.

The Carpathian Mountains were rugged, freezing, poorly supplied with roads and railways and were thoroughly dreadful terrain to fight in. Conrad took one look at them and decided they were the perfect place to launch his counteroffensive. To raise stupidity to an artform he decided to do it in Winter. The Austro-Hungarians shambled through snow drifts higher than a man with disintegrating supply lines and disintegrating boots (it turns out that making combat boots with soles of cardboard might save money but doesn't do much for foot warmth in the snow) and virtually no artillery support (you try carrying a howitzer up a snowy mountainside in mid Winter). The rations were usually cold and sometimes frozen but that didn't matter so much because they frequently didn't arrive at all. It is estimated that half of Conrad's force died of exposure and the Russians took care of the rest. That artillery support was a real bugger, the empire did have specialist mountain artillery that would have been useful but guess where they were? That's right, Serbia.

What was left of the pre war Austro-Hungarian army either froze or was ground to bits launching ill conceived attacks against well prepared Russian positions, frequently in blizzards. Once it was obvious that they could attack no more the Russians attacked back and nearly drove them out of the Carpathians completely for which they were probably grateful. Many men surrendered (it was their best chance of a hot meal) and the High Command muttered darkly about the unreliability of various nationalities in the army. True the Czechs, Romanians, Bosnians, Slovaks and Croatians didn't want to be there but frankly the army command can consider themselves lucky that all these guys did was desert. If it had been me I would have been voting for launching an offensive against my own headquarters.

Ultimately despite the ghastly casualties and even ghastlier leadership the war didn't end for the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915. By appearing beatable they encouraged the Russians to try and beat them. This meant that the Russians took their eye off the Germans, always a bad idea. With the Austro-Hungarians backpedalling the Russians followed up and exposed their flank to the Germans who proved how silly that was in the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnow which drove the Russians not just out of the Carpathians but also out of most of Galicia.

The real problem with the Austro-Hungarian army was that it was out of date. I don't mean simply that its equipment, training, doctrine and leadership were old fashioned (although they were) the army itself belonged to an idea that had had its day. As Europe came out of the Middle Ages and into was is laughingly referred to as the modern day the monarchies of the continent survived by reinventing themselves. Previously it had been them that defined the territories they ruled. Now the territories defined them. A German Kaiser, a Russian Tsar, an English king. Not so in Austria-Hungary which I usually refer to as the Habsburg empire because that is really the most accurate term. The empire of the Habsburgs was a disjointed collection of territories that the family had acquired by one means or another (usually marriage) over the course of a couple of centuries. There was nothing to bind them together and indeed the population of most parts cordially disliked the population of all the rest. The only unifying force was the person of the emperor himself and such personal loyalties were rapidly becoming a thing of the past as people more and more identified themselves with a particular nation. The Habsburg emperor couldn't define himself by a nationality as doing so would simply piss off all the other people in the empire (secretly though they were German).

To effectively (or even ineffectively) run such an empire you needed a cadre of non nationalistic people who would serve the emperor for the benefit of all. This was indeed the theory behind both the Habsburg civil service and most particularly the army. The army saw itself as above nationality, bound only by its personal oath to the sovereign. It tried to impress that fact on its officers and keep aloof from the increasingly fractious civil society. It was at least partially successful but at the price of relevance. Nationalism was the go to idea of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but the army was having none of it. Unfortunately it was this nationalism which provided the almost unbelievable level of patriotism which allowed the armies of Germany, France, Britain and (for quite a while anyway) Russia to sustain enormous losses and continue as a functioning military unit. The Austro-Hungarian army with an aloof and disengaged officer corps and a largely disinterested peasant base could not hope to be as effective as their rivals.

This is not to say the army was useless; the soldiers, like their officers, swore personal allegiance to the emperor and in his name they marched long, fought hard and frequently died well. However they lacked that final bit of edge that would persuade them to go beyond human endurance and just possibly snatch the victory that eluded them. As the horrific casualties wiped out the pre war army the less well trained and motivated troops that replaced them naturally were even less keen. Perhaps more than any other army the Austro-Hungarian relied heavily on its junior and middle grade field commanders. Good, bad or indifferent these were the men that the soldiers knew and they needed these officers to stand up and say "follow me". Personal example had to take the place of patriotism. This resulted in about 90% casualties for Habsburg officers up to the rank of major by 1915. Their replacements were nowhere near as good. For one thing there were about fourteen nationalities and five different religions in the Habsburg army and they all spoke their own languages. The pre war Habsburg army had the most multi lingual officer corps in the world as officers were expected to speak the language of their men. Conrad von Hotzendorf spoke nine languages fluently. When these men died in 1914 they were replaced by men the soldiers didn't know at all and who frequently needed their orders translated.

Perhaps the greatest limitation of the Habsburg army was in its high command. The determination of the generals to keep apart from civilian society and maintain the integrity of their service led to a severe mental ossification. Conrad, who I criticised earlier, was widely (and possibly accurately) regarded as a genius but even he found that when necessary he simply couldn't "think outside the box" and the box was very small. With its high command fossilized and its junior leadership largely dead the Habsburg army degraded as the war went on and every set of casualty figures made the situation worse. At the end however it was the empire that disintegrated rather than the army. As out of date as the army itself the empire couldn't take the strain of total war and in 1918 simply melted away as various nationality groups essentially stopped listening to the orders coming from Vienna. The army was still on the front line when its officers told them the empire no longer existed and they might as well go home.

The Imperial and Royal army had one last bright spot before the end however. In 1915 Italy declared war. It seemed like a good moment, the Habsburg army had been humiliated by Serbia and damn near annihilated by Russia. It seemed like an opportunity for the Italians (who had territorial claims) to peg out some land. Unfortunately for them the Italians were the one people that all the various races and creeds of the empire were united in despising. Furthermore despite their patchy record elsewhere Habsburg troops had a history of victories over the Italians. In his Order of the Day announcing the Italian declaration of war the old emperor reminded his soldiers of "the victories of Novara, Custozza and Lissa which formed the pride of my youth". The emperor was so old he could probably have added "Cannae" and been believed but his soldiers got the message and for the next two and a half years they gave the Italians a thoroughgoing lesson in humility. This is despite the fact that Conrad turned up there as well and proved he had learnt nothing from his Carpathian episode by launching another Winter offensive this time across the Alps. Not surprisingly it didn't get far either.