Why did Austria-Hungary have such a terrible WWI record?

Snake Featherston

Banned
Most WWI CP victory scenarios focus for very good reason on the Germans, who did at least overrun entire countries in this war when nobody else managed that. This thread, however, concerns the other German monarchy of WWI, namely Austria-Hungary. IOTL Austria-Hungary had its military strength smashed twice, requiring the Germans to bail them out against Russia and ultimately to take over their entire military structure. They invaded Serbia three times and got walloped every single one of them. Their only successes were defensive successes in Italy, both of their offensives against the Italians failed, as did the Black and Yellow Offensive against Russia.

Yet A-H did have some very high-quality weapons, particularly in terms of artillery, and did have the ability to win battles when under German command. So, why from a historical perspective did A-H so utterly fail at war, and how from an AH perspective would it be possible to have the army of Franz Josef be more than the whipping boys of everyone else in Europe?
 

Berus

Austro hungarian soldiers were not good trained and the weapons were rather outdated, i think thats one of the main reasons why the army was relativly weak.
 

Danth

No solidarity
Individual units spoke Severn languages :confused:
Poor equipment
Poorly trained
Infighting
Bad planning
 

Berus

welll 11 languages in onbe unit is not so true, units were often divided for example there were polish speaking units, german speaking units, croatian speaking ones etc.
 

BlairWitch749

Banned
the austo hungarians spent no money on defense prior to the war, had horrible commanders and were saddled with the empires social and political boundries

ex

austria only conscripted 30 percent of service age men for compulsory training and familiarization before the war; compared to 50 for germany and 85 for france (although france had only been doing 85 for a couple years, and it created a gigantic crises due to not having enough officers and sucking up money better spent on modern howitzers/uniforms/field kitchens/machine guns etc etc etc

the social boundries also made the army horribly inflexible due to needing to group the language and culture groups together;
 

Torn but Flying

They fought well on the Italian front, albeit in very favourable defensive terrain and against poorly led and motivated opposition.
 

Alternate History

Banned
In addition to the above reasons, I would imagine low morale played a part as well. Austria-Hungary was essentially a proxy for Germany's continental ambitions and its nationalities often felt more sympathy with the enemy than with their own nation (what with the large Serbocroatian and Romanian minorities in Austria-Hungary).
 

Kabraloth

The Russians had pretty much all information about the AH mobilisation and strategy they could ask for, thanks to a high level spy. Seems to have helped the Serbians a lot too in repelling the AH invasion.
 

Deleted member 1487

AH was in the middle of a modernization process with its army, which had been badly underfunded for years. Artillery was from the 1880's and had very limited stocks of ammunition and was in the process of being modernized, but the process was years from completion in 1914.

Political grindlock had left its military without adequate recruits, so was exceptionally small and reliant on older reservists.

It had a terrible commander, which Franz Ferdinand, his champion, had finally realized and was only a few months from replacing, but a bullet got in the war.

Franz Ferdinand was the overseer of the modernization program, as his uncle was totally checked out of any sort of real governance of the Empire and gave his nephew control over the army. FF death removed the one man that was actually in a position to do something about the flaws of the AH during the war, but his death touched it off. In fact Conrad was quoted as saying that had FF been around after the initial defeats in Galicia, which was caused by Conrad and his hand picked buddies/generals, FF would have had Conrad shot.

During the war production was very poor, especially in the beginning mainly due to political issues with the structure of the Empire. After the first three months of fighting AH had run out of artillery shells and weren't able to start making more until 1915 and even then in small amounts, seeing as they were totally reliant on Germany for explosive and partially reliant for shell production due to pre-war procurement being with German companies.

During the war the head of state Franz Josef exercised no power over the obviously flawed Conrad and refused to dismiss him, confirming that FJ as virtually senile IMHO. It took his death and the rise of Karl as Kaiser, someone who was serving in the army and realized how awful Conrad was, replacing him with someone far more suited to command.

Most of AHs problems during the war, even with the production handicaps and pre-war funding/size issues, could have been solved by the removal of Conrad. What that one man did to the AH army is pretty much the cause of all of the army's woes. From bad planning to appointing terrible generals, which he had total control over, Conrad was the albatross around the neck of the army.
When better generals were used, either German or later AH, then the AH fought well; its issues stemmed from the very flawed AOK.
 

Deleted member 1487

Kabraloth said:
The Russians had pretty much all information about the AH mobilisation and strategy they could ask for, thanks to a high level spy. Seems to have helped the Serbians a lot too in repelling the AH invasion.
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No, he provided them with outdated information and AH changed their plans to be safe anyway. The Russians based their offensive deployments in Galicia on this faulty information, which resulted in the strength of both armies being deployed in two different places during the 1914 campaign.
 

Berus

didnt know about that guy, it would certainly be a advantage if that guy never becomes a officers or maybe he could die because of a accident.

With whom did franz ferdinand want to replace conrad von Hötzendorf ?
 

Hörnla

BlairWitch749 said:
the austo hungarians spent no money on defense prior to the war, had horrible commanders and were saddled with the empires social and political boundries
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Still more than they could afford. The key problem is in the commanders here, right down from Franz Josef (old....errr....antique and on the verge of senility) and Hötzendorf who apparently had little clue what to do with the war he wished.

---

Concerning the Russian knowledge on mobilization: well, nobody could have guessed the way the Austro-Hungarians completely botched their mobilization; re-directing armies halfway through the process due to an inability to decide which emphasis to give the Serbian resp. Russian enemy, and anyways planning with train-velocities which were in some cases as low as 4 km/h.
 

Admiral Matt

Well I'd put it pretty much entirely down to the Augsleich. They were fighting below their weight. IIRC, they had the same military budget straight through from sometime around 1890 until the end of the war, and that was because the Hungarians kept vetoing everything that moved.
 

miketr

Admiral Matt said:
Well I'd put it pretty much entirely down to the Augsleich. They were fighting below their weight. IIRC, they had the same military budget straight through from sometime around 1890 until the end of the war, and that was because the Hungarians kept vetoing everything that moved.
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Balkan Wars got the budget clamps released but that was too late.

Problem is that the Hungarians wanted Hungry as a nation so they could oppress the ethnic Romanians, Slovaks, Croats, etc. After 1866 the German elite didn't think it was a hot idea to try to return the favor on the Hungarians. Nation had structural problems that there was no good solution for.

Michael
 

Deleted member 1487

Berus said:
didnt know about that guy, it would certainly be a advantage if that guy never becomes a officers or maybe he could die because of a accident.

With whom did franz ferdinand want to replace conrad von Hötzendorf ?
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Redl wasn't a handicap, it actually enabled the AHs to win early battles, because they mobilized about half of their army quicker than the Russians and got the jump on them; it could have been a complete victory but for a few cock-ups.

FF had not yet made a selection, because if he had Conrad would have been gone. He was looking and Conrad was the interm guy. Conrad was so distasteful that he was replaced in 1911-1912, but his replacement wasn't up to the task of handling the Balkan Wars as a potential for conflict, so was recalled as the only man with enough experience in the role and was better than the last guy. When the Balkan Wars ended in August 1913 FF was focused on other things and didn't look hard for a replacement. Finally though Conrad was obviously too crazy for command, so FF started to quietly shop around, but still hadn't found anyone he liked by July.

Apparently in 1914 at a German army maneuver FF and Conrad attended FF ended up screaming at Conrad in front of the German staff about something. The relationship was pretty strained.
 

Kabraloth

wiking said:
No, he provided them with outdated information and AH changed their plans to be safe anyway. The Russians based their offensive deployments in Galicia on this faulty information, which resulted in the strength of both armies being deployed in two different places during the 1914 campaign.
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Pray tell, that's news to me. Where can I read more about it, the books I have mention it the other way around (i.e. it damaged the AH war effort)?
 

Deleted member 1487

Awilla the Hun

From what little knowledge I have, several issues.

-Lack of industry. Whilst weapon quality was fairly high (Bohemia would later become Czechslovakia, a major industrial centre after WWI, and I remember some primitive tanks were being considered as war broke out), and the economy was doing relatively well in some areas (Galician oil springs to mind, but there were some others), it was inadequate for the demands of the Great War.

-Leadership. Conrad von Hotzendorf was known as a superb strategist when war broke out due to his intricate Austrian plans. This didn't translate into effective performance.

-The polyglot nature of the Habsburg Army. When units relied on a cadre of highly experienced, multilingual officers, things inevitably start to break down when such capable men die and are replaced by less knowledgeable leaders. This led to issues in coordination. In addition, many soldiers were poorly motivated due to nationalist tensions. Connected to this was the illiteracy of many of the troops.
 
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