*When we think of military incompetence in the First World War, our minds turn instinctively to the Western Front—to Haig, to Passchendaele, to the “lions led by donkeys” thesis. But the Habsburg army, which fought the Russians and the Italians across vast and challenging theaters, offers an even starker case study in structural weakness and strategic fantasy.*
The Manpower Problem
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a patchwork of nations and ethnicities, and this presented unique challenges for military recruitment. As Alexander Watson writes in his superb Ring of Steel:
> “The common army’s biggest problem with its men was it simply did not have enough. Its 1,687,000 strong field army was dwarfed by the 3.4 million soldiers of the mobilized Russian force. Additionally, the low proportion of the male population drafted in peace meant there was a relatively small pool of trained reserves to act as casualty replacements in war.”
The manpower pool was deeply uneven. In the German-speaking west, educational standards and acceptance of state authority were comparable to Western nations. Draft evasion here stood at just 3%. In the Czech lands—disgruntled but well-educated—it rose to 6-7.3%. Among Hungarians, who still bore grudges from the brutal suppression of their 1848 revolution, the absentee rate before the war exceeded 25%.
The worst cases were Galicia and the South Slav lands. Here, illiteracy was high, irredentist movements simmered, and emigration was rampant. Young men with the most to offer—the fit, the ambitious, the restless—were getting on boats and heading to America. In the decade before the war, over one third of those mustered in these regions failed to present themselves for service.
War changed the calculus, of course. Punishment for disobedience became more severe, and a wave of patriotism did briefly sweep the empire. But as Watson notes, “it was inevitable that units raised in different parts of the empire would, in war, display wildly different capabilities and performance.” The Habsburg War Minister’s aide-de-camp captured the prevailing scepticism when he remarked of South Slav reservists on the eve of war: “They will arrive at their depots all confident, but they’ll already be less willing when the time comes to march. When they attack over the last thousand metres, no-one can give any sure guarantee.”
Material Shortages
Yet Watson argues persuasively that the army’s main deficiencies in 1914 lay not in the loyalty of its Slav soldiers, but in “inadequate support, poor training, and as the campaigns would reveal, spectacularly incompetent higher leadership.”
The greatest material shortage was in modern artillery. This was partly a consequence of inadequate funding—the Hungarian parliament’s intransigence on military budgets is well documented—but also of “indecision and infighting about specifications for new weaponry among the army’s senior commanders.” This is remarkable given the relative prosperity of the Austro-Hungarian economy. As Christopher Clark points out in The Sleepwalkers, the empire’s internal market was highly coherent. Yet this never translated into military effectiveness.
The numbers tell the story. Habsburg common army divisions had 42 field artillery pieces—8 to 10 more than first-line Serbian divisions, but far fewer than the 60 supporting Russian divisions. Worse still, only two-thirds of these guns were modern 80mm cannon. The rest were obsolete 100mm field howitzers without recoil mechanisms for quick aiming and firing, or armoured shields for the gun team’s protection. The heavy artillery was similarly old-fashioned. All Habsburg gun barrels were cast of bronze rather than stronger steel, which made them heavy and limited their range. Even in Serbia, the 150mm howitzers, which could fire 5,000 metres, found that the enemy’s heavy artillery could outrange them by no less than 3,000 metres.
The army did have some excellent specialist artillery—superb mountain guns, state-of-the-art 305mm Skoda super-heavy mortars. But these were the exceptions. Only four of the 52 mountain batteries had received the new mountain gun by 1914. And ammunition stocks were desperately inadequate: just 330 rounds per howitzer and 550 rounds per field gun, around half what the other great powers had stockpiled.
The Logistical Nightmare
Mobilisation is not glamorous. It is depots and barracks and railways and railway yards—the boring infrastructure that makes it possible to move thousands of men and millions of tons of equipment. The Habsburg army lacked this infrastructure. The funding freeze imposed by the Hungarian parliament meant there were no surplus depots, no spare equipment, no capacity for orderly expansion.
Most continental conscript armies followed the Prussian model: three lines of troops, with active units filled by men undergoing peacetime service, reserve regiments for men aged 23-32, and territorial units for rear-area duties. The Habsburg army, by contrast, treated its Landwehr and Honved regiments as first-line from the start, leaving no surplus to form second-line reserve units. To supplement its weak front line, it was forced to rely on the Landsturm—scratch militia composed of men aged 32 to 42, issued with obsolete rifles and peacetime uniforms, or even just armbands in imperial black and yellow.
Watson’s description is damning: “Lacking training equipment, cohesion and leadership, the March battalions and Landsturm brigades predictably achieved little and suffered horrendous casualties.” These were not soldiers; they were civilians thrown into battle with no chance.
The Cult of the Offensive
The French army’s offensive à outrance is usually held up as the classic example of pre-war tactical madness. But the Austro-Hungarian leadership was, if anything, more fanatical. This was largely due to Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Chief of General Staff, who was regarded within the army as a tactical genius. His key work on tactics had appeared in 1890, and a quarter of a century later he clung to the same principles.
> “Energy, decisiveness and action were his answers to firepower. The attack, he insisted, is the action most suited to the spirit of war.”
To prepare his men for the war of manoeuvre he expected, Conrad put them through ferocious route marches. But disastrously, unlike his German ally, he denied the necessity for combined arms tactics. His regulations of October 1911—the last issue before the war—insisted that foot soldiers could win “even without support from other weapons and against enemy numerical superiority, even viewed with confidence and aggression and equipped with unbendable steadfastness of will and the greatest physical toughness.”
The only concession to the destructive effects of firepower was to recommend that troops be deployed in loose skirmish lines. In practice, even this was frequently disregarded. Foreign observers at pre-war manoeuvres repeatedly criticised the Habsburg troops’ slow movement and close formations. Officers stood upright behind their firing lines or remained on their horses, offering ideal targets. The German military attaché’s verdict was damning: mere cannon fodder.
The Recklessness of Leadership
Watson concludes:
> “The Central Powers campaign in the summer of 1914 was unrealistic in the demands that it placed on both armies. Capable though it was, the German military was asked to achieve the impossible, a victory over France in just six weeks. Even Moltke lacked confidence in the chances of success.”
The Austro-Hungarian army, led by Conrad—”an even more vociferous advocate of preventative war”—was grievously unprepared to face Serbia and Russia combined. The decade-long funding freeze imposed by the Hungarian parliament bears much responsibility. Yet Conrad and his generals were reckless in accepting the task of holding the Russian army, contributed to the delay in their forces’ re-equipment with modern artillery, and imposed a tactical doctrine divorced from the reality of the twentieth-century battlefield.
> “Fatally, neither the German nor Austro-Hungarian military leaders were willing to acknowledge their forces’ limitations in operational planning, and the soldiers would pay for these illusions.”
The Russian Comparison
When we look at the causes of the Russian Revolution, we tend to focus on Russian military deficiency—the disasters of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the loss of Poland. But Russia’s biggest rival to the west was Austro-Hungary, and the incompetence we’ve examined here is not far off what we see among the Russians. The Russian army was much larger, and in some respects better equipped. But in terms of competence, the Austrians were not much different. The French, British, and German armies were all better logistically organised. The Austrians and the Russians, in many ways, matched one another.
The difference was that the Russians, despite their catastrophic defeats, had the depth to absorb losses. The Austro-Hungarian army, brittle from the start, never recovered from the blows of 1914. By 1918, the empire itself would cease to exist—a casualty not just of war, but of the structural weaknesses that had crippled its army from the beginning.
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Transcript
One popular way of thinking about the First World War is the question of competence. The great debate around the First World War that rages for much of the century afterwards in Great Britain is around characters like Haig and French and people like that. The generals, and the question of whether they were competent, whether they were fools. There was this kind of revisionist argument by people like Gary Sheffield that, sure, they were on a bloody learning curve, and they figured it out in the end.
And then when we talk about the causes of the Russian Revolution, military incompetence and defeats on the battlefield certainly make the Tsar’s rule less and less durable. But today we’re going to look at the military preparations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and ask ourselves why it had such profound weaknesses in its manpower and material before it went to war in 1914.
Hi there and welcome again to the Explaining History podcast. Today we’re taking a step back a little bit. I’ve talked about the current crisis a lot in the last few days on here and over on Patreon where I’m adding the odd little bit of video. And on that subject, some possible exciting—exciting for me maybe—ideas for the future. The platform I use now allows video uploads, so I might be doing a few more video things on the podcast, and you should be able to get those in your regular RSS feed. More on that when it happens, but obviously we do chat with interesting people most weeks, so a bit of that kind of thing is always good.
OK, so we’re talking today about the Habsburg Empire during the mobilization period, during the July crisis in 1914. Obviously the war between the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Serbia—the mobilization against Serbia—is the key factor that triggers the cascading effect throughout Europe in the summer of 1914. And so it’s always interesting to look at the Austro-Hungarian army. Not enough is said about it really.
One of the problems with First World War public history—the way it’s publicly perceived—is that generally we look at the Western Front. Most of the time when you look at famous novels like All Quiet on the Western Front and biographies by people like Robert Graves, and war poetry and movies, the literature and culture of the First World War focuses for the most part on the Western Front and the madness of the trenches. So combatants like Austro-Hungary that fought the Italians and the Russians, and were in various other theaters as well, rarely get a look-in—or an adequate one at the very least.
So I’m pleased to return to it. There’s a book I keep coming back to: Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson. It really is a significant contribution to the writing on the First World War in Europe. It’s about ten or twelve years old now, but the work has really stood the test of time. This is the sort of thing I concern myself with—history books that were pretty good then and are still pretty good now.
We’re looking at the problems of mobilizing men in the Habsburg army. Obviously the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a multi-ethnic empire—as Austro-Hungarian implies—and it dominates a patchwork of nations and ethnicities from central to southeastern Europe. This presents challenges in recruitment and mobilization, actually more severe than, say, the British Empire, which had soldiers on the Western Front from Newfoundland and India and everywhere in between.
Alexander Watson writes:
> “The common army’s biggest problem with its men was it simply did not have enough. Its 1,687,000 strong field army was dwarfed by the 3.4 million soldiers of the mobilized Russian force. Additionally, the low proportion of the male population drafted in peace meant there was a relatively small pool of trained reserves to act as casualty replacements in war.
> “The manpower pool from which the army recruited was very mixed. In the West of the Empire, educational standards and the acceptance of state power were little different from that of Western nations. In peacetime, just 3% of German-speaking Austrians attempted to evade the 3-year and from 1912, 2-year military conscription. In the disgruntled but well-educated Czech lands, 6-7.3% of men ignored the summons to the colors. By contrast, Hungarians, who still bore grudges for the Habsburg soldiers’ brutal suppression of their 1848 revolution and disliked the common army, had an absentee rate before the war of a little over 25%.
> “Worst of all were the Galicia and South Slav lands, areas with much illiteracy and irredentist movements, as well as high emigration. Resistance in the decade of peace had risen to the point that over one third of those mustered failed to present themselves.”
So lots of your potentially best young men were getting on boats and going to America, and a variety of other places, but mainly America.
> “Of course, war was a very different situation. Punishment for disobedience was more severe, and a wave of patriotism did sweep the empire as hostilities broke out. Nonetheless, it was inevitable that units raised in different parts of the empire would, in war, display wildly different capabilities and performance.
> “Skepticism about the loyalty of some peoples also prevailed. As the Habsburg War Minister’s aide-de-camp remarked of the South Slav reservists on the eve of war: ‘They will arrive at their depots all confident, but they’ll already be less willing when the time comes to march. When they attack over the last thousand meters, no-one can give any sure guarantee.’
> “The army’s main deficiencies in 1914, nonetheless, lay not—contrary to what is often claimed—in the loyalty or willingness of its Slav soldiers, but rather in inadequate support, poor training, and as the campaigns would reveal, spectacularly incompetent higher leadership.
> “Its greatest material shortage was in modern artillery, a consequence of both inadequate funding and indecision and infighting about the specifications for new weaponry among the army’s senior commanders.”
This is actually a real travesty, given the relative levels of industrialization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the—as Christopher Clark points out in Sleepwalkers—highly economically coherent internal marketplace of the empire, which was a relatively prosperous polity overall. It’s interesting to speculate why the German Empire, the Kaiserreich, doesn’t really have this degree of disorganization and incompetence, but the Austro-Hungarians do.
> “Habsburg common army divisions had 42 field artillery pieces, 8 to 10 more than first-line Serbian divisions, but far fewer than the 60 supporting Russian divisions. Worse still, only two-thirds of these guns were modern 80mm cannon; the others were obsolete 100mm field howitzers without recoil mechanisms for quick aiming and firing, or armoured shields for the gun team’s protection.
> “The heavy artillery, which comprised 8 99-04 150mm howitzers in each corps, was similarly old-fashioned. All Habsburg gun barrels were cast of bronze, rather than stronger steel, which made them heavy and limited their range. Even in Serbia, the 150mm howitzers, which could fire 5,000 metres, found that the enemy’s heavy artillery could outrange them by no less than 3,000 metres.
> “The common army had some excellent specialist artillery. The force had designed a superb mountain artillery gun, although only four of the 52 mountain batteries had received it by 1914. The army was also equipped with some state-of-the-art fortress-busting 305mm Skoda super-heavy mortars. Neither weapon compensated for deficiencies elsewhere, however, nor for the army’s inadequate ammunition stocks. Just 330 rounds per howitzer and 550 rounds per field gun were available—around half that stockpiled by the other great powers.”
This is crucial. The stockpiling of artillery is a really important consideration. By the end of 1914, most powers didn’t imagine they were going to be fighting a war that would last several years. Most had planned for short wars. Yet the rapidity with which other powers could convert their industrial base—Britain being the classic example—to a wartime production economy was one of the key factors in victory in the end. The extent to which it would be an artillery war—artillery was the number one cause of death on the battlefield—was perhaps underestimated. But it does speak to a deep-seated structural incompetence that these deficiencies were there in 1914.
I did a piece a while back about the disorganisation of the Russian army by 1905, which was considerable, and its inability to learn its mistakes between 1905 and 1914. To be less organised than that is quite a feat.
> “The tactical skill of the Habsburg infantry was unlikely to compensate for this deficiency in material. The army not only lacked professional NCOs, it also relied more on reservists whose martial skills were rusty than was wise.
> “The German army kept its peacetime units at two-thirds strength so that on mobilisation only the two youngest and most recently trained classes of reservists needed to be called to bring them to their full complement. In Habsburg infantry companies after mobilisation, by contrast, only 20-25% of the complement were active soldiers undergoing peacetime military training. To fill the ranks, men who had not seen service for a decade had to be drafted.
> “So great was the army’s need that even the Ersatzreservisten—men who had received no more than an annual eight-week military training—were called up. The army, denied funding through Hungarian intransigence in the last decade of peace, also lacked the equipment and infrastructure needed for an orderly expansion on mobilisation.”
You have to put people somewhere. An awful lot of mobilisation is the boring stuff: depots and barracks and railways and railway yards and sheds to put huge quantities of stuff. You have to have quite skilled planners and thinkers organising all of this logistical infrastructure so that when a regiment needs to march, its gear is there. When they need to get somewhere by train—which is how mobilisation in 1914 happens—the train is there, and there are things like food and water and fuel and coal, all this basic stuff.
> “Most continental conscript armies followed the Prussian model of organising three main lines. The active units that composed the standing army and had the best equipment were filled with men undergoing their peacetime service and topped up with the youngest class of reservists. The depots also kept sufficient equipment, NCOs and officers, to permit the building of a second line—reserve regiments containing trained men aged between 23 and 32. A third line of the less well-equipped Landwehr or territorial units, intended principally for rear area duties, was formed from reservists aged 28 to 38. Additionally, older men up to 45 years of age might be allocated to the Landsturm, police or labour units.
> “The Habsburg Common Army, by contrast, treated its Landwehr and Honved regiments as first line by 1914 and lacked the surplus equipment and officers needed to form extra second line reserve units on mobilisation.”
That’s a key weakness. You have to throw everybody into the front line in 1914.
> “To supplement its weak front line strength, it insisted on the Landsturm, or Frontier Brigaden—a scratch-built militia composed of men aged between 32 and 42, issued with obsolete rifles and easily visible peacetime uniforms, or even just armbands in imperial black and yellow colours.”
It feels like the Volkssturm at the end of the Second World War in Nazi Germany.
> “Lacking training, equipment, cohesion and leadership, the March battalions and Landsturm brigades predictably achieved little and suffered horrendous casualties.”
So these were people once again being thrown into the front line. There are some horrifying stories of the first engagements of the International Brigades in Spain after 1936. Guys who had never fought before, given a little bit of rifle training and some light equipment—a rifle, a helmet, some other bits and bobs—are thrown into battle. In some cases, 30 to 40 percent of them are killed. Inexperienced officers, men that don’t know the basics of combat. Those that survive become quite proficient soldiers, but it gives you a flavour of what the Landsturm in the First World War must have faced.
> “These deficiencies were multiplied by a misguided tactical doctrine. The cult of the offensive—an overestimation of the superiority of attack and a conviction that raw will could beat firepower—was embraced by all armies in 1914. But those that felt themselves to be behind in the technological and material race extolled it the most.
> “The French army, with its faith in the offensive à outrance, is remembered as the most fervent advocate of these attitudes. But the Austro-Hungarian military leadership was no less fanatical in its belief. This was in large measure due to Conrad, the Chief of General Staff, who was considered in the army to be a tactical genius. His key work on tactics had appeared in 1890 and a quarter of a century later he clung to the same principles.
> “Energy, decisiveness and action were his answers to firepower. The attack, he insisted, is the action most suited to the spirit of war. To prepare his men for the war of manoeuvre he expected, he put them through ferocious route marches. Disastrously, unlike his German ally, he denied the necessity for combined arms tactics.”
So, a combination of infantry, artillery and—to the extent it was operable in 1914—aircraft.
> “His regulations of October 1911, the last issue before the outbreak of war, insisted that foot soldiers could win the victors’ laurels even without support from other weapons and against enemy numerical superiority, ‘even viewed with confidence and aggression and equipped with unbendable steadfastness of will and the greatest physical toughness.’
> “The only concession to the destructive effects of firepower was to recommend that troops be deployed in loose skirmish lines, and in practice even this was frequently disregarded. Time and again after pre-war manoeuvres, foreign observers criticised the Habsburg troops’ slow movement and close formations. Officers stood upright behind their firing lines or even stayed on their horses, offering ideal targets.
> “The obliviousness towards terrain, failure to reconnoitre and lack of cooperation with artillery made these soldiers, in the German military attaché’s view, ‘mere cannon fodder.’”
> “The Central Powers campaign in the summer of 1914 was unrealistic in the demands that it placed on both armies. Capable though it was, the German military was asked to achieve the impossible—a victory over France in just six weeks. Even Moltke lacked confidence in the chances of success. He hoped against reason for a quick victory yet foresaw a horrendous conflict lasting up to two years. He had even, albeit half-heartedly, pushed civil authorities to prepare financially and secure the rights for food supply.
> “The Austro-Hungarian army, led by Conrad—an even more vociferous advocate of preventative war—was grievously unprepared to face Serbia and Russia combined. The decade-long funding freeze imposed by the Hungarian parliament must certainly bear much responsibility. Yet Conrad and his generals were reckless in accepting the task of holding the Russian army, contributed to the delay in their forces’ re-equipment with modern artillery, and imposed a tactical doctrine divorced from the reality of the 20th century battlefield.
> “Fatally, neither the German nor Austro-Hungarian military leaders were willing to acknowledge their forces’ limitations in operational planning, and the soldiers would pay for these illusions.”
Now, it’s quite common when you’re looking at the causes of the Russian Revolution to look at Russian deficiency on the battlefield—the disasters of places like Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, and eventually the loss of Poland and other catastrophes for the Russians. But when we look at it in context, Russia’s biggest rival to the West is Austro-Hungary, and their long-standing resentments towards the Austro-Hungarians have a significant part to play in the tensions that lead to the outbreak of war. But what we’ve read there is not far off the incompetence and the almost magical thinking that you see amongst the Russians.
The Russian army is much, much bigger, but in terms of competence, the Austrians were not really much different at all. And I think it’s important when we consider the context of military preparation not to look at the Russians as being necessarily outliers here. The French, British, and German armies are all better logistically organized for sure, but the Austrians and the Russians quite match one another. In many ways, the Russians actually throw away many of their key advantages because the Russian army was pretty well equipped—it was one of the better equipped armies entering the First World War.
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OK, I’ll leave you there and I’ll catch you on the next podcast. And let’s hope there isn’t some kind of world ending apocalypse between now and then. Take good care. All the best. Bye bye.
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