A Mad Catastrophe by Geoffrey Wawro

Author:Geoffrey Wawro [Wawro, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465028351
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Hungarians of the late-arriving Austrian Second Army hurrying to the front near Lemberg in August 1914.

Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

Ever mindful of his image, Conrad knew that scapegoats would be needed for the loss of Lemberg. He fired Brudermann’s general staff chief, General Rudolf Pfeffer, along with several corps, division, and brigade commanders. In his memoirs, Conrad would blame the defeat on the “passivity” of Brudermann, who had failed to implement the chief’s otherwise winning plan of campaign.31 But there was no winning plan, and Brudermann would have had a hard time executing such a plan even if it did exist, for the Austrians found themselves all but immobilized by Russian fire and their own creaky logistics. As in Serbia, the whole Habsburg army was limping along at a snail’s pace thanks to its overlarge corps (forty-five battalions each) and its superfluous supply trains.

These Austro-Hungarian armies contained one horse-drawn wagon for every three combatants. Efforts before the war to create lighter, more mobile corps had stalled in the irreducible face of Habsburg bureaucracy, and so the army marched with gargantuan impediments. One disgruntled general noted that whereas Japanese officers had fought the Russians for a year and a half without baggage—two Japanese officers sharing a single suitcase for the entire campaign in Manchuria—Austro-Hungarian generals in 1914 were each allotted two entire “personal wagons” for clothing and other effects as well as three additional wagons for their divisional or brigade headquarters. Each of those headquarters was, in turn, allotted sufficient wagons to carry fifty-three hundred pounds of additional baggage—twice the luggage carried by an entire five-hundred-man battalion—for just three men, the general and his two aides. Overall, an Austro-Hungarian division trailed about 105 of these wagons as well as 45 for the troops, 45 more for their ammunition, 7 for food, and then field kitchens, bakeries, and ambulances. It was a wonder the generals could even locate their guns among the trunks of clothing, books, crates of wine, and canned delicacies.32

With impediments like these, it was hardly surprising that Archduke Friedrich now cabled the German kaiser urgently demanding a German relief offensive and “loyal fulfillment” of Berlin’s alliance obligations, whatever that meant in this vast, fluctuating war. Conrad wired Moltke four times in the last week of August demanding that a dozen German divisions—four corps—be detached from the Western Front and committed to operations here in the east.33 The Germans, fully engaged on the Marne against a million French troops and having already shattered two Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes (northwest of Conrad’s Russian front), were thunderstruck.

At German great headquarters in Koblenz, the Austro-Hungarian military liaison, General Joseph von Stürgkh, noted a sharp deterioration in relations with his ally. The operation Conrad proposed was impossible; with the unsubdued armies of the Russian Northwest Front on his flank, Moltke could not very well order Hindenburg’s Eighth Army to plunge southeast to aid the Austrians. This was the view even of Austrians in German headquarters, who now spoke of conflicting “party lines”: Conrad’s, and everyone else’s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.