Roger Evans; A Descent into Hell - A History of The World War: Penguin Publishing
The Hapsburg's shame - The Balkan Front in 1912
When Austria-Hungary declared war on Bulgaria on the 10th of September, she seemingly had every reason to be confident of a quick and easy victory. Most crucially, she possessed an enormous numerical advantage over the Bulgarians, with Bulgaria’s respectable (for a secondary power) 700,000-man army dwarfed by Austria-Hungary’s fully mobilized strength of 2 million. Even Ivan Fichev, Bulgaria’s regent, recognized that “in the long run, we shall be drowned in a sea of Hapsburg bodies”. Austro-Hungarian chief of general staff Conrad von Hötzendorf had hoped for a war such as this, where Austria-Hungary was given a relatively free hand to prosecute a war against an enemy that he was confident of defeating with relative ease. Alone Austria-Hungary possessed a vast numerical superiority, but she also possessed allies in the Balkans in Serbia and Romania, the former of which were ready to subordinate what was left of their battered army to Hapsburg control. The time had come, as Conrad von Hötzendorf put it, to “beat the rascally Bulgarians into submission, and establish once and for all our position as the only Balkan power”. This confidence was shared by much of the upper brass of Austria-Hungary’s military and civilian establishment.[1]
The exuberant mood in the Austro-Hungarian high command would not last, however, as the weaknesses of the empire would soon become all too evident. A critical weakness of the Austro-Hungarian army was the sub-par railway system of the empire, which was poorly organized. Conrad’s pre-war plans called for a speedy mobilization which would swiftly deploy over a million men on the border of any enemy nation within weeks of mobilization. The harsh reality soon confronted the Hapsburg army, as the trains requisitioned by the army trundled along single-track lines at low speed. Czech nationalist politician Tomáš Masaryk ridiculed the slow pace of mobilization, claiming in parliament that he had seen a young boy on a bicycle outpacing a train carrying soldiers to the front. The poor planning of the railway mobilization was often compounded by the opposition to mobilization, which was keenly felt among the Slavs of the empire. In Bohemia, women often stood in front of trains carrying their husbands and sons off to war. Romanian soldiers proved so unreliable and liable to desert that von Hötzendorf wondered if it would be worthwhile mobilizing them at all.[2] Austro-Hungarian officers noted the poor physical state of the army and bemoaned that the factory workers and city boys in the army were made of poor stuff compared to the hardier peasant soldiers.
By contrast, Bulgaria’s army had already been mobilized since the beginning of August, and following her defeat of Greece, reinforcements were already arriving in Serbia to try and occupy the whole of the country before Austro-Hungarian forces could come to the aid of her Serbian client. Upon the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war, she held a local superiority in Serbia, and Bulgaria’s commanders were determined to make the most of this superiority while they still possessed it. While the infrastructure in Bulgaria was worse than that of Austria-Hungary, what railroads she possessed had been used effectively to mobilize and move troops from one front to another earlier in the war with the Balkan League.
Although poorly clothed and equipped compared to the Austro-Hungarian troops who would soon face them, the Bulgarians nevertheless showed their tenacity in combat
Bulgarian forces pushed up the Morava Valley of Serbia, pushing back the demoralized Serbian forces as they had done with the Greeks in Thessaly. The efficiency of the Bulgarian army was noted by observers, most happily by the Germans who had adopted a similar artillery-based doctrine. Bulgarian forces were able to coordinate particularly well between different branches of the army, and the modern French 75mm guns used by the Bulgarians proved to be particularly useful at saturating concentrated enemy formations with fire, breaking them up and inflicting grievous casualties. European general staffs excitedly noted that Bulgarian success proved that the offensive was still the best way to win a war, though few noticed the inability of the Bulgarians to hit Serbians who sheltered behind elevated ground. By the 21st of September, the Serbian government agreed to abandon Belgrade and cross over the Danube to Austrian territory, hoping to conserve their strength for a later pushback across the river. Bulgarian troops occupied Belgrade on the 23rd of September, finding it largely devoid of opposition. Had the conflict remained limited to the Balkan League and Bulgaria, it would have represented a tremendous victory for the Bulgarians. Considering the escalation of the conflict, however, all it meant was that the Bulgarians had some breathing room to prepare for the coming storm.
Austria-Hungary’s first offensive against Bulgaria could scarcely be described as a storm, however. Von Hötzendorf’s initial plan had called for the Austro-Hungarian army to build up its strength along the Danube and Sava rivers before pushing into Serbia once the Austro-Hungarian army was sufficiently strong to overwhelm the Bulgarians. Bulgarian success in extinguishing resistance within Serbia made the Austro-Hungarian political establishment nervous, and it was soon decided by von Hötzendorf that offensive operations should be undertaken as soon as possible to seize the initiative from Bulgaria. For their part, the Bulgarians had deployed much of their strength to Serbia, and now had three armies with a combined strength of around 450,000 men occupying the country. The Bulgarian army had attempted to treat the civilian population of the country leniently, stressing to its troops that as fellow South Slavs, the Serbian civilians were to be treated “as their own countrymen”. While dozens of examples of murders and looting took place, the Bulgarian military authorities undertook measures to punish the Bulgarian troops involved.[3] The atrocities which did take place found their way quickly onto the newspaper pages of Austria-Hungary, in which journalists exhorted the authorities to punish the “brutal Bulgarians” as soon as possible and liberate Serbia.
These atrocities only increased the pressure upon the Austro-Hungarian army to respond, and Von Hötzendorf launched his offensive into Serbia on the 3rd of October. After only a few hours of fighting, it quickly became apparent to the Austro-Hungarians how poorly prepared for a modern war they truly were. Austro-Hungarian soldiers attempted to storm across the Drina and Sava rivers but were met not only by storms of rifle fire coming from concealed Bulgarian positions but also from Bulgarian artillery. One Honvéd officer described, “even on the far side of the river, our soldiers withered under a hail of bullets from the other side of the river. We scrambled for cover and looked in vain for the muzzle flashes coming from our adversaries”. Austro-Hungarian troops had been told that they would merely need to charge at the under-supplied and ragged Bulgarian forces, and they would flee, but instead, they were confronted with the strength of modern defensive firepower. Many of the Austro-Hungarian troops were city boys, used to the relatively comfortable life of the city rather than the privations of warfare. General Alfred Redl reported to his superiors that, “amongst the soldiers, only the peasants are worth anything as soldiers. The clerks and factory workers are dead weight and serve as nothing more than target practice for our soldiers”.[4] The Bulgarian army, by contrast, which had recruited almost entirely from its vast peasant population, ensured that many of its soldiers were hardened, strong and not averse to digging, which would prove to be a critical skill in the coming months.
Despite the Austrian shortcomings, by the 5th of October, Redl’s 1st Army had established bridgeheads over the Sava, and he reinforced his position before continuing onward. The Austrian 2nd and 3rd armies were similarly making progress, and by the 10th of October, the Austro-Hungarian armies were beginning to make progress in Serbia. It was the turn of the Bulgarians to fall back, but they did so in relatively good order, losing little in the way of heavy equipment such as artillery. While von Hötzendorf described a great victory in the making in his reports to Emperor Franz Josef, other Austro-Hungarian commanders worried about the lack of prisoners or even enemy corpses that were recovered. Though the Austro-Hungarian armies were taking ground, there were relatively few engagements with the Bulgarians, and these were usually holding actions or ambushes on the part of the Bulgarians, wanting to extract a price in blood for the ground that they were giving up. On the 20th of October, the same day that Vienna newspapers cheerfully repeated the army’s fanciful claims that over a hundred-thousand Bulgarians had been killed, wounded, or captured, the Bulgarians launched their counter-offensive.
Ivan Kolev’s 2st Bulgarian Army struck back at the advancing Hapsburg forces near Aranđelovac on the morning of the 20th, opening with an artillery barrage that stunned the unprepared Hungarians on the Austro-Hungarian side. Within a few hours, the Bulgarian forces had already routed Austro-Hungarian enemies in the area. This defeat threatened to snowball into a disaster of epic proportions, as the Bulgarian 2nd army threatened to split Austro-Hungarian forces within Serbia, leaving the Austro-Hungarian 1st Army isolated and at serious risk of being encircled. Von Hötzendorf’s gamble to attack before his forces were sufficiently prepared had now failed. He began to sink into apathetic depression, and it was left largely to General Alfred Redl to coordinate his fellow commanders into pulling back to a fallback line, hoping to maintain a foothold on the Serbian side of the Drina and Sava rivers to facilitate a future offensive back into Serbia. This task he managed to achieve, but it did little to salve the demoralizing blow that the Bulgarians had inflicted on the Austro-Hungarians.
Redl's competence would not be met with a equal reward
The Bulgarians had inflicted a stinging defeat on the Austro-Hungarian forces, forcing them back and severely impacting their morale, but this looked likely to be the high point of Bulgarian success. Although they had inflicted heavy casualties on the Austro-Hungarian forces, their own forces were exhausted, running out of ammunition and increasingly struggling to find reinforcements to fill the gaps left by those killed or wounded. Hard pressed on their own fronts, the British and French had little in the way of materiel to send to Bulgaria, and her own minute war production capacity was totally incapable of fulfilling the demands of her army.
Conrad von Hötzendorf’s failure in Serbia would come with consequences for his career. Kaiser Franz Josef had been incensed at what he saw as Hötzendorf’s dishonesty in his reports about the situation at the front. It was here that the Byzantine politics of the Austro-Hungarian army worked against it. The court had increasingly come to see General Alfred Redl as a suitable replacement for Conrad von Hötzendorf. As this possibility began to look increasingly likely in November, Hötzendorf used his trump card. Beginning on the 18th of November, a series of newspaper exposes were published which identified Redl as a notorious homosexual. He was described as a profligate spender, often seen accosting young men near Prater Park. Redl’s competence in command was insufficient to overcome the revulsion amongst the Austro-Hungarian establishment, and not only were his dreams of promotion dashed but he was replaced with the incompetent pencil-pushed Oskar Potiorek. What would come to be known as the “Redl Affair” would come to represent to many in the empire the moral decay of the empire, though even at this point there were some who believed that homosexual or not, Redl should have at least been given a chance to serve.[5]
[1] – This of course mirrors the confidence that the Austro-Hungarians had in defeating the Serbians in 1914 in OTL. Of course, despite numerical inferiority, the Austro-Hungarians of our time launched three fruitless offensives against Serbia while their armies in Galicia were annihilated. At least they don’t have a Galicia front here.
[2] – Considering the position of Romanians in Hungary, I cannot say I blame them.
[3] – This of course could be a point of controversy in TTL depending on the outcome of the war. Some atrocities in history receive more attention than others.
[4] – Huh, Redl got named dropped again, I bet nothing bad happens to him… though I guess you already know that if you made it this far.
[5] – Earlier gay rights movement in Austria-Hungary confirmed. Or maybe not.
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Author's notes - Austria-Hungary did about as well in 1912 in TTL as she did in 1914 in our own timeline. Don't think she's down for the count yet though. After all, she only has Bulgaria to defeat and even if the Italians were to join the war, they would be unlikely to present much of a threat to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. If she can avoid internal collapse, Austria-Hungary may still do quite well out of this war.
