Birthday Greetings# 28

Happy birthday to Count András Hadik de Futak or Andreas Reichsgraf Hadik von Futak if you want to be all German about it.  He was a Habsburg army general and would certainly have got a shout out last year if it weren't for the fact that he had the misfortune to share a birthdate with Prince Eugene of Savoy.  Saying Hadik was a Habsburg general is a convenient way of avoiding assigning him a nationality.  He was born in Slovakia which was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary which was then part of the Austrian empire which didn't exist although there was an Austrian emperor but neither Slovakia nor Hungary were part of the empire that he did rule.  I hope that makes everything clear.

Hadik joined the army, specifically a Hungarian hussar regiment at the age of 21 (rather old to go for a soldier in those days) and served in a series of the Habsburg's typically mismanaged wars.  He personally managed to distinguish himself and rose higher in rank until he entered the Seven Years War (with Prussia mostly) as a corps commander.  He proved to be excellent at what was referred to as "small war", what we would nowadays call a combination of guerilla actions and special forces operations.  With his hussars at his back he raided outposts, bushwacked messengers, cut up supply lines and generally made a thorough nuisance of himself.  Strangely for such a stodgy, by the book empire the Habsburg monarchy was well known as being particularly good at this "small war" (big war, not so good).  The Habsburgs achieved this by recruiting the most recalcitrant of their far flung subjects and saying something along the lines of, "that stuff you've been doing to us.  We'll pay you to do it to other people."

Hadik's greatest moment of glory came when Frederick the Great of Prussia marched his army south to do battle with the Habsburg forces.  Hadik snuck around behind him and led five thousand hussars on a raid on Berlin.  Having extorted a ransom of 200,000 thalers for not burning the place to the ground he made a clean getaway.  High decorations and a promotion to lieutenant field marshall followed and apparently Frederick the Great was so embarrassed by the action that he refused to speak to Hadik even after peace had been made.  There is a military barracks in Slovakia named after him.

The information on this blog entry was provided from a combination of books I have on the Seven Years War, wikipedia and a rather disturbing Hungarian white supremacist site I stumbled over by accident while researching him.