The 1914 Army of Austria-Hungary
Crossing its borders to fight both Russia and Serbia at the same time the Austrian army in world war one was vastly overextended
Well equipped and fairly modern by eastern european standards, the Army of the Dual Monarchy suffered one of the worst morale problems imaginable.
The country of Austria-Hungary was in effect a small-scale United Europe held together by the super-structure of the Monarchy. This unique country, a dual monarchy in which the emperor K.u.k. Apostolische Majestät Franz Josef I, and was not only Kaiser von Osterreich und König von Ungarn, but also held the title of king of seven other kingdoms of former times, including Bohemia, Galicia and Lodomeria, Croatia and Slavonia, and Dalmatia. The Austrian army was therefore a polyglot army, in which the flame of fierce nationalism from a half dozen different groups ruined morale and efficiency. The Austrian Army and the Hungarian Royal Army ('Magyar Kiralyi Honvedseg') were in fact seperate forces combined into one quilt. It was 47% Slav - of which some 15% were Czechs, 9% Poles, 8% Ruthenians and 7% Serbo-Croats. 29% of the whole were German-speaking; 18% were Hungarians, 5% Romanians and 1% Italians. Some wholly national units such as the crack Tyrolean Jaegers and Hungarian Hussars regiments were comparable to the elite of any army of the time but most of the line units were composed of composite units made of men drawn from several different nationalities. In these units most officers were Hungarian or German speaking Austrian whereas most of the enlisted came from Slavic populations. This resulted in an army that was forced to teach Slavic language speakers a 68 word command vocabulary that limited communication under fire. In an extreme example of this army of Babel, there was a regiment of Austrian officers and Ukrainian soldiers that issued its orders in English as it was found that it was the only language both groups could speak. (The officers knew English from university; the enlisted men were studying it to immigrate to America). It was said that 'The Austrian and the Hungarian soldiers possess no fatherland; they only have a war lord."
The soldier of this army was well armed with the Mannlicher rifle, Skoda machine guns and some of the most excellent artillery pieces in the world. Uniforms were relatively modern and followed closely to the German style of the time with the exception of the flamboyant Calvary regiments who insisted on starting the war in their garish 19th century costumes complete with braid and brass. The Austrian army however was lacking in modern communication and transport, having the fewest airplanes and motorized equipment of any of the 1914 armies. Austria-Hungary had 13 Flieger Kompagnie (Fliks) (flying companies), with a total of 48 operational aircraft, 85 pilots and observers, and ten balloons.
Another overall problem with the Austrian army was in the numbers of officers available. The officer corps was rife with scandals such as the 1910 episode involving Lt Adolph Hofrichter who murdered those officers higher on the promotion lists than him by giving them 'sex pills' laced with poison and that of Col Alfred Redl who in 1913 sold the entire Austrian war plan to the Russians to suport a homosexual lifestyle. The war began with the army short of its needed officers and this problem was aggravated with the fact that more than 40% of its prewar officer corps was killed or captured in the first six weeks of the war. From 1915 onward Austrian units were more likely to be under the command of their imperial German ally rather than Austrian officers. Historically, Austria could not endure a long war. According to historian Colonel Al Nofi, during the nineteenth century Austria engaged in 21 wars that lasted a total of 25 years, for an average duration of just 0.8 years per war.
The strength of the active army during periods of peace was about 350,000 officers and men organized in 53 small divisions. In October 1912 the Minister of War asked for an extraordinary credit of £10,000,000 for war material and the rearmament of the artillery and to expand the intake of conscripts to provide for a larger army upon mobilization. On July 28th, when the Austrian artillery units began to bombard Belgrade in the opening shots of the war, the mobilized army had an approximate strength of 1,147,000. This was to face the bulk of a three million man Russian army, a 400,000 man Serbian force, as well as provide guards for the Rumanian and Italian borders in case of their entry into the war.
Soldiers of the Hapsburgs Empire were more likely to end the war on a Russian farm or factory than in their own army. With low morale and no will to fight, many ethnic Czech units surrendered in mass. Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef had to formally dissolve the entire Czechoslovak 28th Infantry Regiment (1,800 men) which had gone over to the Russians in the Carpathians with their band playing and regimental colors unfurled. Over 50,000 prisoners were recruited to serve in an ethnic Czech Legion unit within the Russian Army. During the entire war less than 1% of the nearly two million Austro-Hungarian prisoners managed to escape captivity even though most were held with little or no guard in the interior of the Russian empire and used for agricultural purposes. These prisoners were the lucky ones, of the Empires 7,800,000 mobilized troops, some 1,020,000 were killed and another two million were wounded. At the end of the war the army dissolved alongside the Empire it fought for.
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