Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  THE HABSBURG WAR

  The Habsburg army fought a vicious and unusually unsuccessful war in the summer of 1914. Its leadership, which for so long had demanded hostilities and pushed strongly for them again after the Sarajevo assassinations, proved curiously unsure and irresolute when war finally came. The Chief of the General Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, who organized the military deployment and, under his titular superior the Archduke Friedrich, led the army against the Russians in Galicia, and the commander of the Balkan forces, General Oskar Potiorek, displayed unrealism, incompetence, callousness and selfish ambition. For years after, Habsburg staff officers would insist that their Empire’s early defeats were the fault of anybody but themselves: the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments, the peoples, diplomats, railway experts and their German allies. Yet ironically, it was these men, the Empire’s most loyal defenders, who brought catastrophe upon it.112

  Conrad bore the greatest responsibility of all, for not only had he pushed for war, produced an ill-conceived mobilization plan and bestowed on his army a tactical doctrine unfit for purpose, but he also bungled the force’s deployment in July 1914. His worst mistake was to persist for too long in prioritizing the Balkan deployment, ‘War Case B’. When deployment only against Serbia was ordered on 25 July, with the first day of mobilization designated for 28 July, it made sense as immediate general mobilization would have been a clear provocation towards Russia. Yet Conrad received numerous warnings of Russia’s war preparations from 26 July onwards, and he later admitted having ‘full clarity’ about its intentions when news of its partial mobilization arrived shortly after midday on 30 July.113 Nonetheless, rather than respond by implementing ‘War Case B+R’, he ordered against the advice of his rail staff, who had not planned for this scenario, that transports heading towards the Balkans should be prioritized, but that A-Echelon should immediately begin to concentrate in Galicia. On the following day, however, a chorus of disapproval rose from the Central Powers’ political leaders. Emperor Franz Joseph’s admonition that Habsburg strength should be deployed against Russia was supported by Minister President Tisza and Austria-Hungary’s alarmed German allies. Accordingly, late on the evening of 31 July, Conrad tried to revert to the planned deployment for ‘War Case B+R’.

  The Habsburg Chief of Staff’s strange decision to prioritize the attack on Serbia while a mortal threat gathered in the east was, like the German gamble against France, the product of a short-war illusion. However, whereas Moltke succumbed to but never wholly believed in the mirage of a six-week victory in the west, and planned obsessively to make it possible, Conrad’s focus on Serbia was wholly emotional. The desire to fight the war he wanted against an enemy he hated was overwhelming. The fruits of victory too were alluring: the destruction of Serbia, immediate diplomatic realignment in the Balkans, the entry of Bulgaria and Romania into the war, and (so the theory went) renewed inner vitality for the Empire. More personally, Conrad hoped that coming back a war hero would at last let him marry his mistress Gina von Reininghaus, the wife of a Viennese industrialist whom he had obsessively pursued for seven years.114 Of course, these were all dreams, yet dangerous ones when the lives of men and an empire were at stake. For the Emperor and Tisza, it was clear that Russian troops would flood the naked Galician front long before their army could disengage from Serbia. Even so, Conrad probably believed that he still had time to make his decision. The former head of the Railway Bureau had told him in November 1913, and Conrad had repeated to the Common Ministerial Council on 7 July, that the mobilization plan could be switched up to the fifth day of mobilization. In the summer of 1914, this was 1 August.115

  Conrad’s shock is thus easy to imagine when, on the evening of 31 July, his attempt to change the deployment to ‘War Case B+R’ was firmly rejected by the War Ministry’s new Transport Chief, General Staff Colonel Johann Straub, who warned that any such attempt would cause ‘chaos on the railway lines’.116 The most that could be done, Conrad was told, was to return the transports destined for the Balkans to their bases, and restart the whole deployment. Even the Chief of Staff, who was notoriously obtuse about public opinion, could see how silly the army would look if soldiers who had just departed with great fanfare were to steam back to their stations. For the sake of home morale and the glory of the army, it was therefore decided instead to allow the troops to proceed on a 1,000-kilometre diversion through the Balkans and up to Galicia. Conrad should have pressed his Transport Chief. On 31 July only vanguard traffic had departed; most trains were still in sidings. With a little imagination, it should have been possible to send the troops directly to the east.117 Yet Conrad did not contest his railway experts’ judgement. His acceptance was probably made easier by their assurance, which itself was a testimony to how mad peacetime planning had been, that B-Echelon’s joyride to the Balkans should not matter. If the pre-war plan had been followed, it would anyway be sitting in barracks while ‘A-Echelon’ concentrated in Galicia. General mobilization would not be delayed.118

  In fact, this mistake mattered a great deal. Austria-Hungary did not have sufficient locomotives to carry B-Echelon to the Balkans and A-Echelon to Galicia simultaneously, so general mobilization, although announced on 31 July, could begin only on 4 August. Time, and with it any hope that the Habsburg army might achieve even parity on the Eastern Front, was thus squandered. Already on the eighteenth day of its mobilization, 17 August 1914, the Russian army had gathered thirty-five infantry and twelve and a half cavalry divisions on the Galician front, whereas the Austro-Hungarians had fewer than thirty divisions. A fortnight later, the Russians had fifty-three and a half infantry and eighteen cavalry divisions against thirty-seven Habsburg infantry and ten cavalry divisions.119 Worse still, B-Echelon, once dispatched to the Balkans, was subsequently not all released to the Galician Front. Already on 31 July, Conrad had decided to detach the Prague VIII Corps and leave it in the Balkans. He also allowed Potiorek to use B-Echelon, now renamed Second Army, during its ten-day sojourn on Serbia’s northern border for a ‘demonstration’; a limited action aimed at distracting enemy forces from the offensive to their west, which was scheduled to begin on 12 August. However, Potiorek was determined to keep as much of the army as possible, and embroiled the Budapest IV Corps in fighting. In consequence, only two of Second Army’s four corps left as intended on 18 August for Galicia, the IV Corps departed on 24 August and the VIII Corps remained in the Balkans. Conrad’s indecision and Potiorek’s selfishness brought about the worst result possible, for the forces kept in the Balkans were insufficient to swing the balance against the Serbs, but their removal from Conrad’s order of battle, along with the lateness of Second Army’s arrival, left the eastern wing of the Habsburg armies in Galicia fatally weak.120

  Conrad, with assistance from his military rail experts in Vienna and Potiorek in Bosnia, had thus squandered any opportunity to keep pace with the Russian mobilization and, without gaining any advantage elsewhere, had weakened his already inadequate force in Galicia, the Empire’s most important theatre of war. As if to guarantee catastrophe, he made one other calamitous change in that theatre. In March 1914 it had been discovered that a homosexual Habsburg General Staff officer, Colonel Alfred Redl, had been blackmailed into betraying the Empire’s offensive mobilization scheme. Conrad had therefore altered the plan, choosing a defensive deployment along the San and Dneister Rivers, which cut diagonally through Galicia. The north-eastern third of the Crownland, including its capital Lwów, was to be left to the Russians. In mid-July, as war approached, he had told the railway staff that the troops should be concentrated for this defensive stance, and rail schedules had therefore been hurriedly altered. However, when Conrad decided on 31 July to transport units from the swing ‘B-Echelon’ to Galicia, he returned to an offensive conception. Yet it was then too late to move the unloading points back to the border, so troops who would otherwise have journeyed by rail to their concentration points disembarked in the middle of the Crownland and then marched hundreds of
kilometres to the borders. This not only wasted more precious time. It also meant that the Habsburg army was exhausted even before it entered battle.121

  The Habsburg army’s two opening campaigns, although thousands of kilometres apart, led by different generals, and fought in dissimilar terrain against two distinct enemies, nonetheless shared two defining characteristics. First was extraordinarily poor higher leadership. Neither in Serbia nor in Galicia did Habsburg senior commanders prove capable of matching the limited resources at their disposal to their ambitious goals. Operational planning was also extremely poor. The aims of both offensives were ill-defined, logistical constraints were ignored and the expectations about what the troops could achieve proved wildly optimistic. The result was military disaster. Against Serbia, an opponent that the Habsburg force felt confident of beating, it experienced humiliating defeat. In Galicia, a bungled mobilization, poor planning and numerical inferiority led to an early catastrophic rout. Second, the Habsburg army proved exceptionally murderous in both campaigns. The history of east-central Europe and the Balkans as the continent’s ‘bloodlands’ did not begin with Fascist and Communist regimes later in the twentieth century. Already in 1914, decades before the advent of genocidal totalitarian states, military action, racial ideology and ethnic conflict turned them into killing grounds, broke taboos and sowed the seeds of later exterminatory warfare.122

  The Habsburg commander in the Balkans, General Oskar Potiorek, was one of the most respected, if not well-liked, soldiers in the Common Army. His life had been dedicated to the military. He had grown up in a cadet institute, came top of his class during general staff training at the Habsburg War School, and was only narrowly beaten by Conrad to the position of Chief of the General Staff in 1906.123 As Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, he had also been to blame for the lax security arrangements on the day of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Potiorek thus had much to prove in July 1914. His minimum goal, as laid down by Habsburg military headquarters, was to defend home territory against Serb incursions. However, this fitted neither his ambition nor the offensive drive of a Habsburg General Staff officer. Instead, encouraged by Conrad, Potiorek favoured an ambitious plan for the invasion of Serbia. ‘I am fully aware that the operation appears risky,’ he told Conrad in a letter of 12 August, ‘but nothing else is possible given the general situation.’124

  Potiorek’s invasion scheme envisaged an assault by three armies on Serbia. The Habsburg Fifth Army would advance from Bosnia into the north-west of Serbia, while the Second, composed of three corps from the B-Echelon, would attack from Croatia in the north. As these forces drew in Serb strength, the Sixth Army would launch a decisive blow in the south-west from Herzegovina, taking the enemy in the flank.125 On paper, this looked brilliant. Closer examination, however, reveals it less as ‘risky’ than reckless. Potiorek’s forces lacked the strength for the scheme. The army he fielded in August 1914 totalled 282,000 infantrymen, 10,000 cavalry and 744 guns. He thus had a small but significant numerical advantage over the Serbs’ 250,000 soldiers and 528 guns supported by militia. The problem was, however, that this superiority would exist only for the first week of operations. With the departure of Second Army on 18 August, Potiorek would lose 60,000 infantry, nearly half his cavalry and around a third of his guns. The urgent need for these troops in Galicia prevented the attack from the north, so Potiorek instead had to hope that a weak ‘demonstration’ here would suffice to distract the Serbs from the main threat in the west. There too, however, flawed thinking prevailed. The Fifth and Sixth Armies not only had to cross extremely difficult mountainous and marshy terrain but they were also deployed too far apart to enable mutual support. The lack of roads in the area of operations would hamper the resupply of food and munitions to the advancing units. What made Potiorek’s scheme so irresponsible was that all these problems had been identified in war games, the latest of which he had organized in April 1914. The exercises had consistently ended in victory for the side playing the Serbs, yet astoundingly, no adjustment had been made to the campaign plan.126

  The invasion began on 12 August with Fifth Army fording the Drina, the river that marked the border between Bosnia and Serbia. For the troops, their commanders’ detachment from reality was obvious from the start: Alfred Fiedler, a howitzer battery officer serving with the 42 Honvéd Infantry Division (HITD) on the army’s south wing, recorded how he and his comrades gaped with ‘despairing feelings’ at the ‘steep, for the most part wooded mountains’ rising behind the Serb bank.127 The initial assault was given a slightly surreal air by the sight of columns of armed men in their underpants wading across the river – a measure necessitated by the army’s lack of bridging equipment. Even once trousers had been pulled back on, belts buckled, and platoon officers had pointed the way, progress was predictably difficult due to the lack of roads, glowering heat and resistance by Serb irregulars, the Komitadjis. Supply lines collapsed within days, forcing men to live off what they could requisition or steal. The Sixth Army began its attack further south two days later. Its Bosnians and Dalmatians were, unlike the Croats, Czechs and Germans of Fifth Army, trained for mountain warfare, but they were nonetheless soon slowed by similar problems. Only Second Army in the north had a little success. Its ‘demonstration’ began with artillery fire on the afternoon of 11 August, which was followed the next day with an infantry advance a short way into Serb territory. The operation captured the towns of Šabac, Mitrovica and Jarak, but failed in its primary object of distracting Serb attention.128

  The advance was accompanied immediately by violence against the Serbian population. Fiedler saw columns of smoke rising ‘everywhere’ on the Serb side of the Drina on 14 August, as attacking Habsburg troops burned haystacks and peasant huts. ‘A senseless beginning,’ he remarked.129 Worse was to follow. During the thirteen-day invasion, Habsburg troops massacred between 3,500 and 4,000 Serb civilians. Given that the operation was so brief and the armies advanced not much more than 20 or 30 kilometres into Serb territory, this was an extraordinary level of civilian bloodshed. We know something of what happened from an investigation carried out in the months directly after the invasion by a professor at the Swiss University of Lausanne, Archibald Reiss.130 His report was commissioned by the Serb government. It was propaganda intended to influence world opinion in favour of a Balkan state that to a great degree had brought its own fate upon itself. Nonetheless, Reiss was conscientious in gathering evidence. He interviewed Serb eyewitnesses and victims, and personally inspected and photographed sites of massacre and even excavated mass graves. He also talked with Habsburg prisoners of war in order to establish the motives for the violence. The atrocities he uncovered included a wide range of killings. Men had usually been shot, bayoneted or beaten to death. Women, who accounted for around a quarter of fatalities in the districts that Reiss investigated, most often had died by being shut in houses burned by Habsburg troops. The professor believed a ‘very great’ number of rapes to have been perpetrated. ‘In many of the invaded villages,’ he asserted, ‘almost all the women from the very youngest to the very oldest have been violated.’ He also advanced other evidence of sadism and brutality, including accounts of corpses with limbs broken, mutilated faces or genitals cut off. Many of these claims should be treated with scepticism. Similar tales of severed children’s hands and women’s breasts, which circulated on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, were false. Where corpses revealed severe injury, it was often caused by rifle fire or shellfire.131 Nonetheless, a few of Reiss’s more disturbing stories do ring true. The seventy-five-year-old man, for example, found shot with his penis stuffed into his mouth in the village of Tchokeshina, does not fit easily with the usual atrocity fantasies on all sides of females and youthful innocents as mutilation victims.132

  The most awful massacres that Reiss recorded have also been confirmed from Austro-Hungarian documentation.133 The town of Šabac, a trading centre on the south bank of the Danube with a population of 14,000, was the site of a cata
logue of atrocities. The town was taken on 12 August after Habsburg troops had overcome light resistance from soldiers of the Serb army’s Third Levy, who were older reservists with no uniforms. On the first day, the invaders used Šabac’s women as a human shield to help them suppress resistance in the surrounding area. All afternoon, Habsburg troops marched the women in front of them around the town, ordering them to lie down and returning fire when Serb defenders were encountered. Many of the women were imprisoned for five days in a hotel, given only water, and interrogated on the whereabouts of their soldier husbands and the Serb army’s positions. There were beatings and rapes. The men still in Šabac were imprisoned in a church. In the following days, Serb counter-attacks mounted and Habsburg discipline started to fail. Houses and shops were plundered. On the night of 16–17 August, Habsburg units accidentally attacked each other, causing panic and colossal casualties.134 The next morning, with tension at its height and Serbs outside the city, a general ordered that the male captives in the church should be inspected, any Bulgars removed, and the rest killed. The deaths numbered at least 60 but most contemporaries put them higher, at between 100 and 200 killed. Another 1,500 of the town’s residents were interned.135

  The bloodshed in the Balkans, although it shared some causes with the German atrocities, sprang from a different military culture and different battlefield conditions. The Habsburg officer corps’ central trauma had taken place in 1848, when revolutions in Vienna and Prague and secessionist wars in northern Italy and Hungary had almost ripped apart the Empire. The experience stamped this highly conservative force with an abiding distrust of civil society and an aversion to any armed action by civilians. Habsburg officers despised Serbia not only as an upstart parvenu but as a pirate state that was democratizing and nationalizing violence against international law. Its king, Petar Karadjordjević, had come to power in 1903 through a regicide, and its officials armed civilians as assassins and spread a creed of revolt among their compatriots on Austro-Hungarian territory. Habsburg officers had also observed with disapproval Serbian deployment of civilian paramilitaries during the Balkan wars. In a report issued in July 1914, the chief of Habsburg military intelligence, Colonel Oskar von Hranilović-Czvetassin, had outlined the fighting methods of the Komitadjis and advocated harsh countermeasures. ‘The most effective protection against [these] bands is,’ he argued, ‘to regard them as standing outside international law.’ The bands should be entirely eliminated and, he advised, ‘punitive expeditions’ should be undertaken ‘in the most energetic and harshest manner against places which in any way support the bands. Great care should be taken to ensure that knowledge of such ruthlessly executed actions is widely disseminated.’136