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Austria-Hungary's military reputation in World War I is not exactly a positive one. Its initial attempt to conquer the much smaller Serbia was a complete catastrophe and many of its efforts on the Eastern Front were equally as bad. Its navy struggled to achieve much of value and its military casualties were incredibly high. Not to mention the fact that numerous times throughout the conflict Germany had to bail the Austro-Hungarians out to prevent their collapse. And so, given the fact that Vienna was the first power to declare war, this raises the obvious question: Why was Austria-Hungary so poorly prepared for this conflict? Why did the Austro-Hungarian Empire perform so
abysmally in the First World War? So, before beginning it's important to remember that whilst the Dual Monarchy's armed forces are seen as a bit of a joke, this doesn't necessarily mean that its army and navy were terrible in every single way. It's not simply a case of incompetent generals leading cowardly men with poor equipment to realize stupid objectives on behalf of short-sighted politicians all of the time. It's only many of those things much of the time. Anyway, it won't surprise you to learn that one of the issues with the Austro-Hungarian military was the fact that it worked as a part of the political and administrative nightmare that was Austria-Hungary. As many of you will know, Austria-Hungary wasn't actually
one empire but two distinct states in personal union under Franz Joseph, who was amongst other things the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary, both of which shared control over Bosnia and Herzegovina. And besides this, the only shared competencies between the two halves of the empire were military and foreign policy. Now, you'd think that this centralized control would be used to build a streamlined military, but fun fact, no. Franz Joseph wasn't the commander-in-chief of one army but three. There was the Imperial Army from the Austrian half of his domain and the Royal Army from the Hungarian half, which acted as the respective national guards of each. The third army as you'd
expect but was called the Common Army. Whose soldiers, mostly conscripts, came from across all of Austria-Hungary and they made up the permanent standing army of the empire. There was also the navy which was shared but not really. Because Hungary never had a history of being a naval power nor did it desire to be one. As you will no doubt be aware, Austria-Hungary was a multi-ethnic, multilingual empire and its military reflected that. Across the war roughly 27% of the empire's soldiers were German speakers, mostly Austrians with about 22% speaking Hungarian. 14% were Czech, 3% Slovakians and 9% Polish. 8% were Ukrainian / Ruthenians, 1% Italian, 6% Romanian, 7% Serbian and 3% spoke
Slovene. And by the way, they weren't grouped up into regiments based upon shared language but instead was based upon where you lived in the empire which meant that languages were often very dispersed. Now, you'd think that the sheer number of languages spoken would make communication in the thick of battle difficult and you'd be right. Many soldiers didn't understand the men that they were serving with and to make matters worse, the majority of the Austro-Hungarian officer class were Austrians and well, Hungarians. You see, the government didn't want to have because if they ever rebelled then said veteran strategist could make things harder for Vienna and Budapest. As such,
men from said minorities were often led by officers who could barely communicate with them. Well, they technically they were required to learn the language of the subordinates. However, many didn't because they often despised the minorities that they were leading and considered their languages to be beneath them. And those who did learn were mostly part of the outstandingly high casualties in the early months of the war and their replacements didn't have time to learn before deployment. The same went for the lower ranks, too. They were supposed to learn a series of either German or Hungarian phrases and commands to heed in battle. But this wasn't exactly foolproof, especially
given the rates of illiteracy amongst these populations. Now, there's a commonly held belief that the national minorities in Austria-Hungary were all just itching to rebel. But when the war began, Vienna were shocked to find that the overwhelming majority was still loyal and answered the summons. As time went on though, casualties mounted which caused morale to drop and discipline became a major problem for the army. The diversity of imperial soldiers also created issues for where soldiers could be deployed. For example, Galicia was 50% Polish and 45% Ukrainian and many of these didn't want to fight their fellow Poles or Ukrainians in neighboring Russia. And so, to head off any potential problems, some had to be
deployed to the other side of the empire to fight people that they didn't know or care about. Which obviously made some deployments take much longer but also presented an opportunity for the Entente. There were numerous examples of Serbian army units claiming to be Bosnians or Croats from Austria-Hungary and ambushing those that they had tricked. Another problem for Austria-Hungary was leadership. You see, the last major war that the Habsburg domains fought was in 1866 against Prussia, which did not go well for Vienna. Yes, they did fight in China against the Boxer Rebellion at the start of the 20th century but the numbers involved were tiny and the conflict wasn't much of a learning experience.
Anyway, Austria's loss in 1866 led to the Austrian Empire morphing into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in order to stop it from disintegrating. And the lack of war-making in the half century that followed meant that from a practical standpoint, the Austro-Hungarian military leadership had little valuable experience. Whereas Russia had last fought a major war in 1904, Italy in 1911 and Serbia in 1913. Meaning that Austria-Hungary's soon-to-be opponents had a much better understanding of modern warfare. Also, unlike the Habsburg domains, those armies weren't led by a certain Conrad von Hötzendorf, whose abilities did not help the Common Imperial and Royal Armies' performances. So, like many of his contemporaries,
Hötzendorf believed in the cult of the offensive, seeing it as being the most efficient way to utilize soldiers. The idea being that soldiers sitting on the defensive were prone to laziness and desertion, whereas soldiers on the offensive were too busy trying to not die to lose focus. As such, when the war broke out, Hötzendorf and his subordinates believed that the best way to win the war was to launch two simultaneous all-out offensives against Serbia and Russia. Hötzendorf was also unconventional in how he approached warfare. He was a man of big ideas and so wasn't going to let small details like weather and terrain get in the way of his planned offensives. He demanded his soldiers get where he wanted them to
when he wanted them to be there and he expected them to fight with 100% efficiency and tolerate catastrophic losses whilst maintaining unshakable morale. This didn't happen and his plans fell apart numerous times. Now, the problem was that Hötzendorf was the one in charge of hiring and firing people and he figured that the issue wasn't his lack of strategic ability but that his underlings were incompetent and were stifling his obvious genius. He also didn't work well with German military leaders, mostly because they considered him to be an inept Now, I know what you're thinking, once it became clear that Hötzendorf wasn't working well, surely the emperor could have just dismissed him. Well, by 1914, Franz
Joseph was one very, very old and wasn't really in the best health to be meddling in the day-to-day running of the military and two, the last time he had personally run a war it was in 1859 against the French and Sardinians and it didn't end well, thereby giving him ample evidence that he wasn't personally suited for military strategy and so he opted to mind his own business. And things were made much worse by the numerous problems across Austria-Hungary's political system. As previously said, the Dual Monarchy was formed after the disaster of 1866 and saw Vienna give major concessions to the Hungarians in order to save the empire. As such, the Hungarians had a lot of say over policy because they could and often
would withhold consent for things unless Vienna backed down. And notably, this included military spending. The Hungarians didn't want to spend lots of money on increasing the preparedness or size of the military because that money could be spent on them instead. This meant that Austria-Hungary spent much less on their army than the great power peers. The government wasn't allowed to conscript as many men because Hungary wanted its population to do more economically productive work. Furthermore, both states within the empire focused their military spending and training on their own separate armies because neither fully trusted the other. And the Hungarians were concerned about the Austrians trying to use force
against them as they had done previously. In the end, all of these ceaseless political squabbles led to an army containing less men with less military experience. With some only having fired a weapon a couple of times during their service because of budget restrictions. And another political problem was the ruling classes' obsessive hatred of Serbia. The primary goal of politicians at the time was the complete crushing of Belgrade, which given the fact that the city was about a 15-minute walk from the border should have been quite easy. This is why Hötzendorf devoted twice as many soldiers to the Serbian front as the Russian one expecting a quick victory. And when combined with the communication
issues between the soldiers, the Serbian Croats not wanting to fight their fellow countrymen, military leadership not knowing much about the effectiveness of machine guns whilst being keen on the idea of just marching packed groups of men straight towards them, further compounded by their opponents being more clued up on the reality of modern warfare. And when combined, these factors meant that the opening actions of the war were unbelievably costly for the Dual Monarchy. The initial invasion of Serbia in July 1914 was undertaken by about nearly half a million soldiers and by the end of that year, half of those men were casualties. Similar scenes were seen on the Eastern Front, most notably
in Galicia, which led to the death or capture of many of the empire's regular, actually somewhat trained soldiers. And by mid-1915, the army was so degraded that it needed constant help and oversight from the Germans to keep it running and barely, a position from which it would never really recover. And whilst of course it wasn't all bad, the issues from before the war and in its opening months were so great that there was very little chance that Austria-Hungary could have performed well afterwards. Hence why its new emperor's attempts to turn things around didn't result in much improvement and still, the empire collapsed. I hope you enjoyed this episode with the special thanks to my patrons, James Bizenet, Sky
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