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Managing an ‘Army of Peoples’: Identity, Command and Performance in the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1914–1918

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

ALEXANDER WATSON
ALEXANDER WATSON*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW; [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines the officers who led the Habsburg Army during the First World War. It highlights the complexity of their identities, demonstrating that this went well beyond the a-national – nationalist dichotomy in much historiography. It also argues that these officers' identities had a profound impact on how their army functioned in the field. The article first studies the senior command in 1914–16, showing how its wartime learning processes were shaped by transnational attitudes. These officers had belonged in peace to an international military professional network. When disaster befell their army at the outset of the First World War, it was natural for them to seek lessons from foreign armies, at first from their major enemies, the Russians, and later their German allies. The second half of the article explores the changing loyalties of the reserve officers tasked with frontline command in the later war years. It contends that the officer corps' focus on maintaining social and educational standards resulted in an influx of middle-class junior leaders whose conditional commitment to the Empire and limited language skills greatly influenced the Habsburg Army's record of longevity but mediocre combat performance.

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Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 25 , Issue 2: Agents of Internationalism , May 2016 , pp. 233 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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67 Annexe to Summary of Intelligence, British Expeditionary Force, Italy, 16 Aug. 1918. The National Archives, London: WO157/ 639.

68 The former officer Robert Nowak recognised this in his unpublished study of the Habsburg Army in 1914–16. ‘Efficient commanders could make an elite unit out of substandard soldiers, the less gifted were not able to manage it’. See R. Nowak, ‘Die Klammer des Reiches’, 533. KA Vienna: NL Nowak, B/726/1.

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71 See, for example, [U.S.] Army War College, ed., German and Austrian Tactical Studies. Translation of Captured German and Austrian Documents and Information Obtained from German and Austrian Prisoners from the British, French and Italian Staffs (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918), 205–20.

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