Birthday Greetings #18

Happy birthday to Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf who was Chief of Staff of the Imperial and Royal Army of the Austro Hungarian empire for most of the First World War. I used to think that the Habsburgs recruited their soldiers without much discrimination but a glance over the past few weeks leads me to believe that they actually appointed soldiers to high command on the basis of when they were born.

Conrad was born in Vienna to minor Bohemian nobility and entered the army pretty soon after he was weaned. Once there he never left. He has been accounted a military genius by some commentators. I can't help thinking these people should read a history of World War I to see which side won. It wasn't Conrad's. Nevertheless it is entirely possible that if Conrad had never commanded in a major war he could have gone to the grave with his military reputation intact (World War I might have been avoided too). Certainly he was intelligent (he wrote a book on tactics that wasn't exposed as idiocy until after it had been implemented), he was also a good lower and medium level commander. During the course of his career whatever unit he commanded was always the best trained and most efficient in the army. He was a firm believer in realistic training at a time when the Habsburg army considered its soldiers battleready if they could parade before the emperor without dropping their rifles. He also had a keen interest in the welfare of his troops and the advantages technology could bring to the army (he tried to get trucks introduced to transport supplies but the idea was scotched when the emperor pointed out they might scare the horses). His tactical and strategic planning was also of a high level but when he exercised it in war he revealed a spectacular flaw. He seemed to possess no grasp of reality.

Conrad's battleplans were brilliant but they took no account of weather, terrain, enemy resistance or the condition of his own troops. Nobody knew better than Conrad the weaknesses of the Habsburg army, he had spent much of peacetime trying to correct them, but when war came he insisted on behaving as though he commanded an entire army of Prussian Guards. When his troops failed him he merely drove the survivors on more ruthlessly thus throwing good lives after bad. The Habsburg army he commanded was not as strong as the German or Russian but it was capable of much in careful hands. Conrad's hands proved to be incredibly reckless. He never learned from experience either, his plans for attacking in Italy in 1918 were as divorced from reality as his plans for attacking Russia in 1914.

Conrad was made Chief of the General Staff (official command of the army was vested in the Habsburg archduke who looked best in uniform) in 1905 at the behest of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the emperor's heir who was building his own powerbase in anticipation of his uncle's death. Foolishly as it turned out, waiting for Franz Josef to die was not a good career move. Pretty much from the moment he got the top job Conrad started agitating for a war. The target of his aggression was charmingly catholic, he advocated a war with pretty much everyone except Germany at some point or other. Italy and Serbia were his top two choices, however. He kept coming back to these and eventually got his way.

My personal opinion is that Conrad, a committed social darwinist, and certain other members of the imperial hierarchy deliberately (consciously or unconsciously) egged the empire on to commit suicide. It was obvious that the empire was decaying, the old loyalties were fading and in their place were nationalistic sympathies that had no home in the polyglot realm of the Habsburgs. A proud man, commanding a proud army Conrad simply refused to go quietly into the night. If the empire must die then it would go down fighting. Not that Conrad meant to lose, he played to win even when he didn't have the cards but his private writings indicate a far more realistic appraisal of the empires chances even at the beginning of the war. Conrad probably thought that a swift, victorious war would revitalise the empire. He may even have been right, temporarily, but his own assessment of the war that he helped to start and its likely outcome is probably his best claim to military genius. From the first day he predicted that his side would lose and the empire would be destroyed.

After the war ended he settled in the rump of Austria and wrote his memoirs where he pointed out that his genius had been betrayed by the inefficiency of his soldiers. Over a million dead Habsburg soldiers could, with more justification, claim that their loyalty had been betrayed by the inefficiency of their leaders.