To Arms
Page 41
Foch did not fight the sort of battle which he imagined he fought. After all, the Entente success was defensive, not offensive. Furthermore, the ground on which the lines eventually rested reflected this attacking intent, not the needs of protracted defence: too often they were sited on forward slopes, observable by German artillery, or were indented by local German gains. But the hand-to-mouth nature of such expedients had a wider benefit. When the battle closed, British and French units stood intermingled along the perimeter: adversity under fire had forced co-operation and trust.
Falkenhayn had, for all his independence of the Schlieffen school, fought Schlieffen’s battle. He had continued, despite the Marne, to seek a rapid victory in the west. He had done so by moving towards the right flank, in the hope primarily of envelopment, but secondly of breakthrough should the enemy line weaken elsewhere. However, the Entente had constructed a solid and continuous line from Switzerland to the sea. Envelopment was no longer possible. Neither the shells nor the men were available to attempt a breakthrough. On 25 November he ordered the German armies in the west to form defensive positions, and to hold the ground which they had already conquered. His instructions gave method to position warfare, and anticipated its adoption for some months. But its purpose remained that of enabling the creation of fresh forces for mobile and decisive operations.184 For both sides, trench warfare continued to be a matter of expedience, not a foundation for strategy.
4
THE
EASTERN FRONT IN 1914
WAR PLANS
The reputation of the Austro-Hungarian army was honourable but ambiguous. ‘Although, of course, the Austrians had been victorious in all the wars in their history,’ wrote Robert Musil, himself a former officer of the Habsburg army, ‘after most of these wars they had had to surrender something.’1 Distinguished conduct on the battlefield had been accompanied by narrow defeats. In 1866 victory over Italy had been negated by Königgrätz. And in the subsequent half-century the imperial army had not seen action. Its chief of staff from 1906, Conrad von Hötzendorff, had never been under fire. His career was founded on his abilities as a teacher and theorist. The Germans after the war were wont to say of their allies that peacetime training had elevated knowledge over leadership.2
Like many peacetime armies, appearances seemed to outweigh substance. And yet bands and uniforms, the impression of military strength, constituted their own substance. A major role of the army since the late eighteenth century had been domestic. Its high profile constituted a source of unity in the polyglot empire. Conrad shared with his mentor, Franz Ferdinand, a firm conviction that a solution to Austria-Hungary’s internal problems should precede any attempts to deal with those that were external, and that the army should lead the way in this process. Hungary’s prolonged resistance, from 1903 to 1912, to the new army law made the inconveniences of the dual monarchy a threat to military efficiency as well as to imperial unity. Magyar intransigence jeopardized the integrity of the army in ethnic terms and its size in manpower terms. Thus, for Conrad, political reform could not be divorced from professional considerations.
Although a German, Conrad was also—at least occasionally—a federalist. The army of which he was the professional head was made up of 25 per cent Germans, 20 per cent Magyars, 13 per cent Czechs, 4 per cent Slovaks, 9 per cent Serbo-Croats, 8 per cent Poles, 8 per cent Ukrainians, 7 per cent Romanians, 2 per cent Slovenes, and 1 per cent Italians. Over three-quarters of its regular officers, and a comparable number of NCOs, were Germans. And yet, once officers, non-Germans found their nationality little bar to their advancement. Officers perforce owed their primary loyalty to the empire as a whole. Although German was the language of command, Regimentsprache embraced the native tongues of the soldiers, and officers had three years in which to master them. Most battalions had at least two recognized languages, and some had three or four. Of the 142 units that were monoglot in 1914, German was the recognized language of only thirty-one. Conrad himself spoke seven languages. But such multiculturalism aroused distrust when fashion favoured nationalism. The officer corps was pilloried as German by the Magyars, as insufficiently German by the Austro-Germans, and as anti-Slav by the Slavs.3
Particularly worrying for the army were the concessions made to Magyar military identity. Hungarian insistence on an independent military status and on the use of Magyar as the language of command in Hungarian units threatened to replace unity through a German-dominated federalism with duality. After 1907 the Honved, the Hungarian territorial forces, and the Landwehr, Austria’s counterpart to the Honved, had their own artillery and support units. Thus, the effect of the Honved’s increasing independence of the common regular army was to create a three-part division in the empire’s land forces—the common army, the Landwehr, and the Honved—with neither of the last two constituting the true reserve for the first which their titles suggested. The confusion that followed on mobilization in 1914 was predictable. In one territorial reserve battalion of the Honved, composed of Romanians, none of the three regular officers spoke Romanian, and some soldiers (having done their service in the common army) regarded German as the language of command while others (having been in the Honved) were accustomed to orders in Magyar.4
MAP 9. THE EASTERN FRONT
Even more damaging were the consequences of Budapest’s postponement of the new army law until 1912. The law of 1889 had fixed the total annual recruit contingent at 135,670 men,5 who served for three years in the regulars (although in reality they were given leave for the third) or two in the Landwehr or Honved. A proportion of those not conscripted received ten weeks’ training in the Ersatz reserves. Thus, the army’s size kept pace neither with the growth in population nor with the expansion of other armies. By 1900 Austria-Hungary was training 0.29 per cent of its population, compared with 0.35 per cent in Russia, 0.37 per cent in Italy, 0.47 per cent in Germany, and 0.75 per cent in France. Nor did quality compensate for quantity: the military budget remained low, 14.6 per cent of the total in 1906. In 1912 the annual recruit contingent rose by 42,000 men a year and the period of three years’ service was reduced to two for the infantry. The fact that the army was prepared to accept that it therefore had less time to inculcate Habsburg loyalty shows the urgency it attached to the manpower problem. But the decade lost could not be made up by 1914. Those untrained before 1912 could not now be trained; a new bill planned in June 1914 would not reach its full effect, with an annual contingent of 252,000, until 1918.6 When war came, Austria-Hungary had simultaneously to repair the losses incurred in combat and make up for the relative neglect of the pre-war years.
The combined strength of the common army, the Landwehr, and the Honved rose on mobilization from 415,000 men to about 2 million. The Landwehr and the Honved were not complements to the common army but alternatives. Put positively, this meant that Austria-Hungary’s principal reserve units were unequivocally integrated into its front-line forces: thus the pay-off for the Magyars’ enthusiasm for their own army was that the dual monarchy was spared the debate on the operational role of reserve formations which so dominated France and Germany. Put negatively, it meant that Austria-Hungary had no reserve organization comparable with that of Germany. The sixteen corps each absorbed one or two Landwehr divisions (except in Bosnia-Herzogovina), but there was no provision for the creation of reserve corps or divisions. And, even if there had been, there would have been no adequate troops to form them. Virtually the entire stock of trained reservists, kept small by the 1889 army law’s survival, was absorbed by the initial expansion. Only a quarter or a fifth of an infantry company on mobilization was composed of active troops; units had only one regular NCO for seventeen men.7 A further 1 million men, in the Ersatz reserves and in the Landsturm (former active soldiers now aged between 33 and 42), had either little or no recent training. In one Landsturm brigade, its platoons were commanded by rural policemen and its men were equipped with five different types of rifle.8 Thus the field strength of the Austro-Hungarian army i
n 1914—forty-eight infantry divisions, two Landsturm divisions, eleven cavalry divisions, and thirty-six independent brigades—was approximately half the size of that of France or Germany; and not only was it smaller, it was also qualitatively inferior.
The officer corps had not rejected the professionalizing trends evident throughout European armies between 1871 and 1914, but in doing so it had jeopardized its social status, its numbers, and even its political homogeneity. Friedrich Beck established the general staff on Prussian lines in the 1880s. Aristocratic domination was dented by the incorporation of men from business and bourgeois backgrounds: Beck’s own father was a university professor of surgery. But the shift was in part involuntary—an indication of the growing nationalism of the empire’s nobility and of a distancing between the officer corps and its emperor. The combination of a declining social cachet with continuing low pay and high indebtedness deprived an army career of many of its attractions. In 1897 3,333 potential officers had enrolled in the dual monarchy’s nineteen cadet schools, but by 1911 this figure had dwindled to 1,864. A combined officer corps of 60,000 in 1914 proved inadequate for forces that mobilization soon pushed close to a total of 3 million.9
The other armies, in coping with the rustiness of their reserves’ training, with their lack of field-craft, their tendency to bunch in the attack, relied on artillery as a substitute and as a cover. But the Austro-Hungarian army was the most under-gunned in relation to its (already inferior) strength of any army in Europe. A common army division had forty-two field guns compared with fifty-four in a German division, and the Landwehr and Honved divisions only twenty-four (including no field howitzers in the case of the Honved). Technically Austrian guns could match their rivals’: the 30.5 cm Skoda heavy mortar, designed to tackle Italian forts, was outstanding. However, only in the case of the 1905/8–model 76.5 mm field gun had good design been transformed into mass production. This was a by-product of the failure to increase the recruit contingent, which had left a surplus for the acquisition of quick-firing artillery. After 1912 the growth in the army’s manpower was achieved at the expense of its armament.10 The field howitzer was still the outdated 1899 model, without a recoil mechanism, and possessed of a bronze barrel and a fixed carriage; the guns of the heavy artillery (two batteries per corps) had similar characteristics. The excellent new mountain guns—the 70 mm and the 100 mm howitzer— had by 1914 only been issued to four out of fifty-two batteries. The artillery regiments themselves were below strength, even on their peacetime establishments: they were short of 110 officers and 10 to 15 per cent of their gunners.11 Finally, a better-prepared artillery arm in 1914 would not necessarily have profited the Austro-Hungarian army, which still lacked the doctrine to exploit it. The 1911 regulations emphasized that infantry could act independently of other arms; the foot-soldier’s principal resource was his own determination.
The emphasis on the offensive, and the centrality of morale to its achievement, found in Conrad one of its most vociferous advocates. As a social Darwinist, Conrad believed that victory would fall to him who seized the initiative, even if his forces were inferior. As a realist, however, Conrad had to acknowledge that the Habsburg army was of a size suitable only for a Balkan war. His advocacy of preventive wars against Italy and Serbia was a reflection of both traits. Austria-Hungary would have to fight to preserve its great power status, to protect itself from irridentism within the empire; on the other hand, it could only win a local, limited war. It should, therefore, choose its ground and its time. Implicit in all this was the realization that Austria-Hungary could only undertake war with Russia in conjunction with Germany. Least of all did Conrad—any more than had Beck before him—entertain the prospect of simultaneously fighting all three putative opponents—Russia, Serbia, and Italy.
Nature had provided Austria’s Galician frontier with excellent defences. The major barrier to invasion, the Carpathians, lay to the west of the river lines of the San and the Dniester. However, both cost and doctrine limited the enhancement of these natural obstacles with man-made additions. Beck was anxious not to leave all the spoils of victory in Russian Poland to Germany. He therefore fortified Cracow and Przemysl in the late 1880s, but as concentration points for an Austrian advance, not as the hubs of Galicia’s defence. Lemberg was not completed, and fortification—like artillery—became a casualty of the competing demands of the defence budget. His analysis of the Boer War led him to reject the use of defence at the operational level, and instead to apply to strategy his tactical thinking on the offensive.12
In 1908, reckoning on a slow and staggered Russian mobilization, Conrad planned to push two armies north, between the Vistula and the Bug. By mobilizing faster and concentrating first, he would be able to meet portions of the Russian army with locally superior forces. Having created space to the north, the Austrians would direct two more armies to the north-east, towards Rowno and Ostrow. The 1911 version of the Austrian plan, which united the two prongs in one north-eastern thrust towards the line Kowel-Dubno, extended the major Austrian thrust more to the east. But by 1913 and 1914 Conrad reckoned, in the light of France’s pressure for immediate Russian aid, that Russia’s concentration would be as far to the west as possible, and that the line of the middle Vistula would therefore be pivotal to the defence of the Central Powers’ eastern front. Beginning, therefore, with the 1908 plan, Austria-Hungary had, for the better defence of Galicia and the Vistula river line, and for the further frustration of the Russians’ concentration, planned an initial northward thrust. In its most ambitious forms, the plan envisaged the envelopment of the Russian forces facing Galicia; it did not have at its core nor as its first phase the possibility of a massive Austro-German envelopment combining the whole of the eastern front.13
It was nonetheless true that German co-operation was fundamental to Austro-Hungarian thinking. The staff talks opened with Germany in 1882 clearly indicated the elder Moltke’s intention to adopt the defensive in the west and to mount limited offensives in the east. The Germans said that 100,000 men would be sufficient to hold the western fortifications and that 400,000 men could be allocated to the east. Although in 1887 the eastern figure had been cut by 200,000, Beck was still able to reckon that Germany would divide its forces equally between east and west. Thus, the possibility of Austria and Germany jointly enveloping at least a portion of the Russian army was present from the outset of the two powers’ staff discussions. By 1890 the southern and Austrian prong of this manoeuvre was planned to contain eighteen divisions on a front of 40 to 50 kilometres, thrusting towards Krasnik and Lublin. Although the ultimate objective was convergnce east of Warsaw, none of Beck, Moltke the elder, or Waldersee (Moltke’s successor) saw the plan as aiming for anything more than a victory limited to Russian Poland. It was not a scheme for the annihilation of Russia itself.
Beck’s principal worry was less the intentions of his ally and more the security of his eastern flank. In driving northwards, the Austro-Hungarian army would be exposed to its right to a Russian thrust from eastern Galicia. By securing Romania as a secret signatory to the Triple Alliance in 1883, Austria-Hungary diminished this danger: it was able not only to redistribute the forces allocated to its Romanian frontier, but also to rely on the Romanians to tie down the Russians. With his right flank now secure, Beck was free to develop his plans for a possible Russian war. He moved the direction of the putative Austrian attack further to the east, towards Dubno and Rowno, and so into the Russian areas of concentration and preparation, before turning north. Schlieffen’s intention in 1892, to attack from Posen into western Poland, not from East Prussia, confirmed the possibility of close operational interaction between the two allies.
In the 1880s the biggest block to Austro-German collaboration against Russia had been diplomatic. Bismarck took exception to planning for war against an ally in the east, when the obvious enemy lay in the west. Bismarck’s fall and Russia’s alliance with France eliminated these considerations. But in their stead the operational preoccu
pations of the new chief of the general staff bulked increasingly large. The elder Moltke had feared the slowness of Austrian mobilization, but did not let it shape his strategy. Schlieffen did. Furthermore, by 1895 he was increasingly attracted by the opportunities for defensive manoeuvre which the Masurian lakes presented the Germans in East Prussia. He therefore wanted Austria-Hungary to assume responsibility for operations on the middle Vistula, opposite Poland. The Austrians refused to split their forces. By 1896 contacts between the two staffs had fizzled out. Their legacy, at least in Vienna, was the idea of a joint envelopment.14
Schlieffen’s subordination of strategy to operations was even more evident than in his plans for the west, and it was of course these that were the prime factor in prompting and sustaining the breakdown in communications between the two allies. His thinking created a contradictory expectation of the Austrians, that they should draw the Russians off the Germans’ backs, and so assume the major burden in the east. Schlieffen’s pursuit of an early decisive victory as an end in itself led him to plan to face France first. The Russians, with their ability to trade space for time, with a succession of river lines and fortified bridgeheads to protect their concentration, promised the Germans protracted operations with only partial outcomes. The lack of good rail and road communications on Germany’s eastern frontier favoured its use for defence but limited its value as a base for offence. In 1905, when Schlieffen retired, the decision to concentrate in the west was justified by the slowness of any prospective Russian mobilization and by Russia’s defeats at the hands of the Japanese. Russia would not be able to put its entire weight in the west, and what it did put there would take time to arrive. Thus, the basic premiss of Austrian thinking on a possible war with Russia, that of active German cooperation, was wrong. And yet Schlieffen was loath to confront his ally with the truth: Beck and Conrad continued to labour under a misapprehension. Without either side explicitly saying so, each was expecting the other to take the major burden against the Russians.