During the First World War, Austria-Hungary faced enemies on more fronts than any of the other great powers of Europe. Graydon Tunstall argues that “Habsburg armed forces were, quite simply, incapable of conducting modern warfare” at a level needed to withstand such threats, and yet somehow “the army muddled through multiple battlefield defeats,” avoiding collapse until the end of October 1918, barely two weeks before Germany sued for peace. His task, as he defines it, is to explain how “the army remained battle-worthy until almost the end of the conflict” (25).
Tunstall spends nearly half of the volume covering the pre-1914 background, the July Crisis and declarations of war, and the initial campaigns of the summer and autumn of 1914 in Galicia and the Balkans. He surveys the unique political structure of the multinational Habsburg empire after the compromise of 1867 and the challenges it posed for the armed forces, which featured a common Austro-Hungarian army but separate Austrian and Hungarian reserve formations. The Dual Monarchy spent less per capita on the military than any other European power and maintained a relatively small army for a country of its size, weaker than its potential adversaries in artillery and machine guns. When it came to infrastructure, the inadequacies of the rail network, especially in the eastern and southern lands of the empire, caused problems for the initial deployment of troops to the front lines and for their supply and reinforcement throughout the war.
The nationality problem, of course, made everything worse. Even though regiments were recruited from territorial districts, few were monolingual and some had as many as four official languages. Tunstall highlights the “prewar prejudice against Slavic troops” and the corresponding “Czech resentment toward the Habsburg regime” as further centrifugal factors (7). After the army deployed to the front lines, Czech soldiers numbered among the army's first, and most eager, deserters. As Tunstall notes, cohesion suffered all the more from the “severe losses . . . during the opening battles of the war” (33). Reserve officers lacked the language skills of the professionals they replaced, skills essential to maintaining the functionality of the multinational army.
Given the author's previous scholarly work in Austro-Hungarian war planning against Russia and Serbia, the Carpathian “Winter War” of 1915, and the siege of the southern Polish fortress of Przemyśl in 1914–15, it is not surprising that his sections on the army's flawed mobilization and subsequent disastrous opening campaigns on the Eastern and Balkan fronts are especially thorough. In contrast, the Italian front receives scant coverage, at least for 1915, after Italy's entry into the war, and for 1916. Tunstall focuses his attention on Austria-Hungary's war in the Alps and along the Isonzo River only for 1917 and 1918, when there is relatively little action elsewhere to discuss. He overstates Austro-Hungarian weakness in the Adriatic Sea, which an American observer called “an Austrian lake” as late as January 1918. If it were true that “Habsburg naval forces were overwhelmed once Italy declared war” (397) then the Allies would not have conceded the Adriatic to Austria-Hungary, a costly strategic decision that allowed Germany to run submarine operations out of bases there, which sank millions of tons of Allied shipping in the Mediterranean.
This volume is the seventh in the Cambridge series Armies of the Great War, which began to appear in 2014, on the centennial of the outbreak of the First World War. Previous volumes have covered the armed forces of each of the other European great powers plus the United States. Tunstall's work conforms to the high standards of the series in being based on extensive archival research as well as an exhaustive reading of published primary sources and secondary works. The number and quality of maps is not adequate for the level of detail in which operations are discussed, and the index is not particularly useful. Figures include photographs of the leading personalities mentioned in the text. In the end, there is nothing here that would surprise a reader already familiar with the Austro-Hungarian war effort of 1914–18. Tunstall's impressive body of research only confirms what we already know, that the army of the Dual Monarchy was ill-prepared to fight against other great powers on multiple fronts, and the empire as a whole was too weak to survive a war of such length and magnitude.
