Looks like Lvov was quite the rail-hub too... Galicia was probably the least-developed part of Cisleithania, but between the oil and the burgeoning industries, it could've been a real asset in a surviving A-H...
AHC: Austria-Hungary as Industrialized as France by 1914
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I'd imagine the reason for that is that the big blank space in between wasn't actually part of the Empire until 1908
They could have connected it through Croatia.I'd imagine the reason for that is that the big blank space in between wasn't actually part of the Empire until 1908
Also they'd been administrating and militarily occupying Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1878.
Deleted member 1487
I did a thread on this general theme a long while back:
Go with this and you'd get a long way there without any additional territory.
The Economic Spurt That Succeeded
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_von_Koerber What if Ernst von Koerber's economic plan had actually been carried through in Austria-Hungary? After becoming Prime Minister in 1900, Koerber tried to overcome the nationalist divide in Cisleithenia (Austrian half of the Empire) through a great...
www.alternatehistory.com
Go with this and you'd get a long way there without any additional territory.
No. It was Conrad changing the plan in the middle of mobilization which threw off the time tables. Certainly some mistakes were made too by local officials (one poor guy was so distraught for making a mistake he committed suicide), but they were minor and didn't really disrupt the overall process by much.
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Good point - and they did have a good line running from Budapest through Zagreb to Fiume.
Although it wasn't that unusual for nations (or their private corporations) to invest in rail Iines on neighboring territory, especially if it was in their own economic interest, there might've been a little reluctance to invest too heavily on territory that you don't (yet) have "free and clear title" to...
Terrain is a factor too... even now the Balkan road and rail network is pretty sparse compared to the rest of Europe.
Another thing to note reagarding Dalmatia, that there was an extensive use of sea transportation following coastline, which made the development of railways somewhat less necessary. Ferries and such shipped the materials from and to the major ports that actually had good railway connections with the heart of the Monarchy quite efficiently.
Deleted member 94680
That’s a fair point. By the way travel time increases nearer the borders of the Empire (although measured from Vienna, as you say) it looks like there are fewer railways though.
But the infrastructure and rail network of the Empire was such that it couldn’t adapt to the change. Trains had to go all the way to their original destinations before turning around, owing to a lack of lines to allow them to redirect quicker, IIRC.
That South there is very hilly terrain and sparsely settled, even today. Dalmatia outside of the tourist season is a large collection of ghost towns.
Deleted member 1487
That's a pretty gross generalization and not applicable based on what I've been able to find about Habsburg mobilization. Maybe in some less well developed areas, but there had been pretty heavy investments in rail infrastructure in the Empire.
Deleted member 94680
And "It was Conrad changing the plan in the middle of mobilization" isn't a gross simplification? Why is it so hard to accept that the rail infrastructure - generally mentioned by almost all major histories when they come to speak about Austrian mobilisation - had a part to play in the problems the Austrians faced in July/August '14?
Deleted member 1487
Not really. I can cite the pages from "The Eastern Front 1914-17".
If it is mentioned in so many places how about you quote some relevant passages that you think prove your point?
Deleted member 94680
Can you please? That link just takes me to the amazon page for the book.
Apologies for the typed nature of the quotes, but the computer I'm on isn't letting me do screen shots for some reason.
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 mobilisation plan could be switched up to the fifth day of mobilisation. In the summer of 1914, this was 1 August.
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’. 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.
…
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 mobilisation, although announced on 31 July, could begin only on 4 August.
…
Conrad, with assistance from his military rail experts in Vienna and Potiorek in Bosnia, had this squandered any opportunity to keep pace with the Russian mobilisation and, without gaining any advantage elsewhere, had weakened his already inadequate force in Galicia, the Empire’s most important theatre of war.
Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918. Alexander Watson.
Conrad hints, in his memoirs – and other writers have gone further – that the railway-technicians had behaved incompetently. This was unfair: the railway-technicians had simply behaved according to a plan that Conrad had prescribed for them. II Army did, in fact arrive in Galicia on schedule – about the 24th day of mobilisation – although with a few exceptions that had nothing to do with the technicians. On the other hand, the technicians failed in do far as they did not respond to the crisis with any imagination. A more rapid despatch of II Army could, probably, have been attained. But the technicians behaved with incurable routine-mindedness, impenetrable smugness. … They acted according to out-of-date ideas of what the railways could do. No military train had more than fifty carriages, the lines’ capacity being supposedly capable of only this. In practice, the great Nordbahn from Vienna to the north and Cracow usually took a hundred-waggon trains. The military failed to use with any intensity the line between Budapest and Przemyśl, supposing it to be a poor, mountain railway, not a double-tracked line capable of taking quite fast and heavy trains on most sections. … Moreover, troop-trains were arbitrarily halted for six hours every day for ‘feeding-pauses’, despite their having field-kitchens with them in the trains. Since stations with the necessary equipment did not regularly occur on the lines, this meant that troops would travel for hours without being fed, then to be given two square meals, more or less in succession, in the middle of the night.
The Eastern Front 1914-1917, Norman Stone.
Emphasis in both quotes my own.
As I said,
this is what I meant. A better or more involved investment in the railway network would be useful to the Common Army in the July Crisis. More railway expansion might even encourage the General Staff to believe the railways were more capable then their outdated ideas of what it could achieve.
How did taxation and state investment differ in the Austrian and Hungarian portions of the empire? From what I've been told by others on this site, Austria depended more on the acceptence of ethnic minorities into administration and politics in order to gain internal stability, while Hungary tended to subject those under its control to Magyarization and otherwise restricting the political liberties of non-Hungarians. If true, then I should think this latter strategy ties an arm behind the back of one half of the empire. While Hungary itself can get rich quick by extracting wealth from its minorities, but it's more difficult to raise taxes to pay for public infrastructure to support industrialisation (from canals and railways to schools to develop the skills of the population), and to even decide to undertake those projects at all, if the people who set the budget are controlled by people who are perfectly served by just keeping the same extractive status quo.
As The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith would argue, autocratic governments, where a few oppress the many, just aren't as willing as democracies to fire at all cylinders and commit to massive projects, be it investing in infrastructure or winning a war, because as the size of the ruling coalition of a state shrinks, the sacrifice of private goods (low taxes, not having to ration, banquets and parties, enjoying the status of being an officer of the army while avoiding the danger of actual war) that each member of the ruling coalition would have to make in order to secure the public goods produced by collective effort (victory in war, a more developed infrastrcutre or school system) becomes greater, and so they are unwilling to direct the state towards demanding those sacrifices. They also can't expect those outside the ruling coalition to sacrifice even more, at least not by much and not for long, because they are already sacrificing as much as can be taken from them without them waging rebellion.
(Austria-Hungary is here listed as simply 'Austria', btw)
So, if all of what I said/relayed is true, then Hungary is something of a ball and chain that is restricting the rate at which A-H as a whole can improve things.
As The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith would argue, autocratic governments, where a few oppress the many, just aren't as willing as democracies to fire at all cylinders and commit to massive projects, be it investing in infrastructure or winning a war, because as the size of the ruling coalition of a state shrinks, the sacrifice of private goods (low taxes, not having to ration, banquets and parties, enjoying the status of being an officer of the army while avoiding the danger of actual war) that each member of the ruling coalition would have to make in order to secure the public goods produced by collective effort (victory in war, a more developed infrastrcutre or school system) becomes greater, and so they are unwilling to direct the state towards demanding those sacrifices. They also can't expect those outside the ruling coalition to sacrifice even more, at least not by much and not for long, because they are already sacrificing as much as can be taken from them without them waging rebellion.
(Austria-Hungary is here listed as simply 'Austria', btw)
So, if all of what I said/relayed is true, then Hungary is something of a ball and chain that is restricting the rate at which A-H as a whole can improve things.
Deleted member 1487
You actually posted the main quote I was going to use below.
Those quotes contradict one another and the second supports my point. The issue wasn't like capacity, it was either a problem of concept or laziness on the part of the staff in question.
Than and Conrad changing deployment mid-stream:
Conrad Waits: a better Austro-Hungarian Eastern Front (v 2.0)
I've decided to rewrite my original version of this TL, so I'm going to start a new thread. I'll keep the original information that is still applicable here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=174905 Just a bit of background: Norman Stone, author of the only decent...
www.alternatehistory.com
If anything your quotes above show that it was more a problem of personnel than development.
Deleted member 94680
Fair enough, just goes to show how one quote can be interpreted differently, I suppose.
I don't believe that they do, but I think that's the crux of our disagreement. I believe an increase of capacity would have prevented many of the problems of OTL developing, or the additional work required would have allowed better plans to have been drawn up in the first place.
Which is more complicated than "It was Conrad changing the plan in the middle of mobilization", no?
Deleted member 1487
It wouldn't hurt to have more, but if you have the same personalities in charge who weren't able or willing to create all new time tables on the fly and pause an ongoing mobilization and switch forces in motion to another front, then all the capacity in the world isn't going to fix a planning problem.
A bit, but Conrad did change the plan mid-stream, which is what caused the problems:
Pre-war Military Planning (Austria-Hungary) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)
Austria-Hungary’s General Staff enjoyed a monopoly on war planning. Its long-time Chief Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf worked hard to improve the Habsburg Monarchy’s war preparations and the basic features of Austro-Hungarian war plans were shaped by his ideas. The unfavorable strategic situation...
encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net
I have to agree with @wiking here. @Stenz, your own provided quote pretty much proves that the railway itself was more than capable to carry out the mobilisation without any issues. The problem laid elsewhere:
1. There was a general underestimation( or out-datedness) of the capabilities of the railway by the Austro-Hungarian leadership, and the mobilisation plan mirrored this. - hence the low speed.
2. The lines might had been fine, however the relative low number of available wagons made to mobilisation process inflexible. - hence the the problems during Conrad's fuck-up.
This is how I see the issue, atleast
1. There was a general underestimation( or out-datedness) of the capabilities of the railway by the Austro-Hungarian leadership, and the mobilisation plan mirrored this. - hence the low speed.
2. The lines might had been fine, however the relative low number of available wagons made to mobilisation process inflexible. - hence the the problems during Conrad's fuck-up.
This is how I see the issue, atleast
Deleted member 94680
Yes, if the capacity is increased in a vacuum. It won’t, obviously, as it will take at least a few years. These years spent increasing the rail network would (hopefully!) allow the General Staff to come up with a better plan. My suggestion wasn’t so much to come up with a better plan on the fly at the end of July, but rather a better plan sometime in 1913 or earlier.
OTL, yes. But the impact of the change of plan was in no way obviated by the state of the rail network. What would have happened if circumstances had forced a change of plan for example? Pretty much the same delay and confusion, I’d wager. An expanded network that would have allowed A-Staffel and B-Staffel to deploy at the same time would have been a boon, for example.
Deleted member 94680
A fair assessment. Given that I originally only stated that an increased network would have been of great help in July/August ‘14, I see nothing that contradicts that. The disagreement expanded when I objected to Conrad being solely blamed for the problems, when, as you say, there was a general underestimation of the capability of the rail network. Conrad may have thrown various spanners in the works with his changes of plan, but it was partly because he was told to change things would be no great impediment (if done early enough). I also believe that the Rail section failed badly when trying to implement these changes and prior to that with their poor planning.
Through the 1900s, the establishment of a separate national bank was quite a huge goal of pretty much all of the Hungarian governments of the time period. Had one of these governments actually succeeded, would such matter have increased the economic prospects of Transleithania? What do you think?