AHC: Have Austria win the Austro-Prussia War

Hanoverian forces actually won a major battle prior to Koniggratz at Langensalza, they were simply surrounded shortly thereafter by a superior Prussian force. Reinforcements were reportedly en route from Bavaria and might have been able to strengthen them significantly, had this happened Prussia would have been in serious trouble. If nothing else it would give the French time to assess the situation and threaten war, possibly annexing Luxembourg as part of a peace package.

Germany however was a secondary theatre (as was Italy) The 7 Weeks War was won and lost in Bohemia. Effctively in the initial frontier battles.
 
Could an alt Britain come to the aid of Hanover seeing as Vickie's cousin is the king or would they go with Prussia as her daughter is married to the crown prince?

Or stay out of everything and just trade with everyone?

Britain was not interested in becoming involved in European Wars at this time. She stayed out of the 1864 2nd Schleswig - Holstein War only two years earlier
 
Would an Austrian victory against the French and Sardinians in 1859. be enough for a more effective Austrian army? The Austrians took all the wrong lessions from their defeat in that war, which contributed to their defeat against Prussia.
 
If france becomes opportunistic and attack prussia,then this may change things,i am not sure prussia will be able to fight a two front war as well as otl...
 
Would an Austrian victory against the French and Sardinians in 1859. be enough for a more effective Austrian army? The Austrians took all the wrong lessions from their defeat in that war, which contributed to their defeat against Prussia.

The Austrians tended to be exremely conservative. Had they won i 1859 they might not have seen a need to reform the army at all except with new weapons. However, in terms of doctrine they would have continued with the defensive doctrines they used in 1859. Not introducing the stosstaktik doctrine which became gospel by 1866 would have been of great benefit to 1866. It might not have been enough o win the war but Austrian military performnce would have been far more effective than it was.

We must also consider Prussian strategic and operational capabilities, in particular their use of railways.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Hythe!

That's the first thing to do. The great Prussian advantages are rate-of-fire and (more importantly) good aim for their troops. The Austrians simply could not shoot straight for the most part, and they hence got the wrong impression from the Franco-Austrian war. (They concluded that firepower doesn't win wars, shock tactics do).

If they'd instead looked at - say - the difficulties their men had estimating range, and realized that the reason the French assault columns got close was that the Austrians were firing over the heads of the columns (not adjusting range fast enough) then they could have instead kept a firepower-based method and also improved their aim.
The result would be that they wouldn't play right into the Prussians' hands on a tactical level.

So that's step one.


Step two - better artillery. The Austrians actually have this already, with RBL guns while Krupp is still working out the issues with his own pieces.

Step three - which is a luxury - breech loaders. These aren't really required, muzzle loaders will do if you've got the aiming ability to use them (and don't burn through ammunition too fast), but
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wänzl_rifle
could theoretically be done a bit earlier.


Overall conclusion:
The Prussian army works best at mid-range (a few hundred yards), using breechloaders and good aim to shred an enemy as they close in.
The Austrian counter to this would be good aim at long range (500 yards plus for rifles and RBL artillery). This is quite possible with good training (Hythe, Ecole du Tir).
 
Some of you mention a France intervention and the possible reaction from Brittain. Im not sure but IIRC Russia would be more likely to intervene in this case on the Prussian side instead of London.
 
If they'd instead looked at - say - the difficulties their men had estimating range, and realized that the reason the French assault columns got close was that the Austrians were firing over the heads of the columns (not adjusting range fast enough) then they could have instead kept a firepower-based method and also improved their aim.

I'm not sure you can expect much more from the Austrians on marksmanship:
we should always bear in mind that the constraints the Austrian army were working under were far more severe than the Prussian. Training recruits to shoot accurately is much more difficult when they don't even know the 80 German words of command to manoeuvre on the battlefield. People also treat training in marksmanship as if it's entirely costless: in fact, the cost of increasing the number of practice rounds available to Austrian troops to 100 per year was the equivalent of the annual cost of the war ministry's Vienna secretariat, or the officer's pensions bill.

The Austrians aren't that far behind the European curve- you mention the Ecole du Tir in the same breath as Hythe, but actually the French system was nowhere near the British:
it was laid down in a programme issued by the minister of war for the construction of arms, that it was not necessary that the fire of infantry soldiers should exceed 600 metres. The chasseurs alone have movable sights capable of being adjusted for long distances. The Ecole du Tir, the system of musketry instruction, originated also with them; but they seem to have halted at an early stage, and to have refrained from carrying it to its fullest development. The French soldier of the line is only trained to fire up to 400 yards, and instead of using a sight, is taught to make allowance for the different distances by aiming at different points of the target, or different parts in a man's body; and it is evident that they do not consider this method to be of much avail beyond 300 yards. (source)

The Austrians might have more success if they split the responsibilities post-1859. Train a limited number of men per platoon solidly in range estimation, and have them inform the rest of the platoon what the range is. Simplify the Lorenz sight, to make it easier for the soldiers to aim. Perhaps even drop the "battalion divisions" system in favour of something less manoeuvrable but less complex. Really, anything that's not adopting assault tactics would help.

Step two - better artillery. The Austrians actually have this already, with RBL guns while Krupp is still working out the issues with his own pieces.
The Austrians have RML pieces, similar to ones the French used against them in Italy. It's probably unrealistic to ask much more of them given how well they perform during the war- as things stand, they're one of the few components of the Austrian army which comes out with an enhanced reputation. Existing flaws in Prussian artillery doctrine should be enough.

Step three - which is a luxury - breech loaders. These aren't really required,
I'm not sure it is a luxury, in the context of Prussian tactics. If the Austrians deploy skirmishers with minie rifles against swarms of Prussian skirmishers with the Dreyse, they're going to get overwhelmed. It might be feasible, though expensive, to arm the Jaeger battalions with a good, solid breech-loading conversion of the Lorenz (or even the Dreyse itself) and the remaining battalions with minie rifles. The problem is that the Prussians can still deploy more skirmishers, and they'll be better-trained than the Austrians.

Of course, it's entirely plausible that the Austrians do all the right things, and the Prussians still adapt to it: for instance, putting more emphasis on flanking to avoid head-on assaults. They do something similar when battle-plans start to fall apart during the Franco-Prussian war.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Thanks for the corrections, Rob.

It does sound like adopting range estimation would help and be achievable. The main problem, then, seems to be how to handle those bloody skirmishers...
...are cavalry any help? My gut says maybe not, but then again unformed troops are the ones more likely to panic against cavalry charges.
 
The main problem, then, seems to be how to handle those bloody skirmishers...
If the main problem was skirmishers, the Austrians would have been laughing: they've got a number of serious competency issues from the top down. However, their strategic position isn't terrible, and it's possible for them to hand out a few early defeats on the Prussians as they emerge from the Bohemian passes using their advantage of interior lines. It probably needs more competent personnel than Benedek, Krismanic and Henikstein, though.

On the skirmishers point, although cavalry might help clear them away it'll be costly against infantry armed with breech-loaders, even more so if said infantry manage to form rally squares. Ironically, the best solution would probably be spherical case with timed fuses... which is even more technically complex than the sights on the Lorenz.
 
Have a shorter American Civil War with gatling guns and show them cutting down rebel charges in front of European observers. Austrians get impressed, get some Gatling guns while Prussia ignores the gun calling it a weapon that makes mobs efficient. Austrians cut Prussian charges with Gatling guns and win the war.

Or you could just replace the Austrian general with more decisive commander in the battle of Königgrätz
 
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Saphroneth

Banned
Have a shorter American Civil War with gatling guns and show them cutting down rebel charges in front of European observers. Austrians get impressed, get some Gatling guns while Prussia ignores the gun calling it a weapon that makes mobs efficient. Austrians cut Prussian charges with Gatling guns and win the war.

Or you could just replace the Austrian general with more decisive commander in the battle of Königgrätz
I don't think you can have both "a shorter American Civil War" and any kind of wide scale deployment of Gatling guns.

Also, the Prussians didn't charge in mass - that would be the Austrians.
 
Short and simple

Have we had ... Helmuth von Moltke drops dead!

About the only realistic chance the Austrians have, and extremely unlikely since he lived to 90.

Its a One Man premise, which requires changing very little else, or does it.

How important was Moltke the Elder?
He was head of the Prussian General Staff for THIRTY YEARS!
Quite possibly history's most successful, and overlooked?, general, he conclusively won three major wars. (He also spoke seven languages, was widely travelled, a popular author, archaeologist, poet, musician, theatre lover and a prolific artist)

Without him the Prussian Army and its campaigns would have been very different.
 
Also, the Prussians didn't charge in mass - that would be the Austrians.
Yeah, Prussian tactics were to deploy a heavy skirmish screen and continually push men forward from the supports to keep it fed (similar to the tactics Tulloch was suggesting here). The mitrailleuse didn't do a great job of suppressing these skirmish screens in 1870- certainly not as good as the Chassepot, at least- but the Gatling may not have had the same problem of pumping twenty bullets into a single man rather than dispersing them liberally across the line of skirmishers.

Have we had ... Helmuth von Moltke drops dead!
Alternatively, have King Wilhelm step down as a result of the parliamentary deadlock over the military budget in 1862; Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm would almost certainly have felt compelled to overhaul the civilian and military personnel of government when he came in. The problem is that it's hard to envisage an overhaul which manages not to butterfly away the Austro-Prussian war, but does manage to weaken the Prussian army sufficiently to make them lose the war.

EDIT:
I remember reading somewhere that France was actualy planning to intervene on the Prussian side, since everyone though Prussia was going to lose.
You might be mistaking this for the mediation offer. On 2 July, the Austrian foreign minister Mensdorff contacted Paris to ask them to mediate, and on 5 July they ceded Venetia to France as a sweetener. The French contacted the Prussians about mediation on 4 July, so the need to get the peace signed before the French can stick their noses in is the reason why King Wilhelm doesn't get the victory march through Vienna and the territorial annexation he wants. He was pretty unhappy about it though: at different stages of the process of talking him round, Bismarck apparently considered both resignation and jumping out of a window.

Come to think of it, the latter would make a pretty eye-catching (albeit rather unrealistic) point of departure. I imagine that continuing the war might leave you with a French army collaborating with the South German VII and VIII Corps on the Rhine; the shattered remains of Benedek's army trying to collaborate with Austrian corps despatched from the Italian front under the leadership of the newly-appointed Archduke Albrecht; and maybe even a French offensive against Italy as part of an active and pre-emptive defence of Nice and Savoy.
 
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I remember reading somewhere that France was actualy planning to intervene on the Prussian side, since everyone though Prussia was going to lose.
 
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