Graydon Tunstall certainly means well. He writes about the Austro-Hungarian army and the challenges it faced with a certain amount of empathy but not without criticism. This book is a competent summary of conventional wisdom, including all the pitfalls to be expected from conventional wisdom. It will certainly be useful for Anglo-Saxon readers who do not want to wade through the eight volumes of Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, the official history published during the interwar years.
But Tunstall's comments on political developments fall little short of clichés, such as Charles I's “Canossa” at Spa in 1918 that was supposedly “fateful” – even though the author realizes that “nothing concrete emerged from it” (337). Or the complaint about the emperor's lacklustre government that failed to solve the nationality problem. One of the main projects cutting across domestic and foreign policy, the never-ending debate about the “Austro-Polish solution” is only mentioned once, in half a paragraph wedged between two phases of a minor Italian offensive (343). Jozef Pilsudski and his Polish Legion fighting for the Central Powers are completely ignored. There is a rambling chronology of the disintegration of the monarchy and its aftermath, including some dates that are simply wrong, and the tantalizing question: How can a currency collapse by 300% (as mentioned on page 385)?
The war economy kept deteriorating, we are regularly told. But there is no discussion of the ups and downs behind that blanket judgment. The food shortage is blamed on harvest failures, the blockade, and the favourite contemporary scapegoat, the Hungarians. But neither the confiscatory policies of the Austrian government that provided no incentives to producers nor the impact of the Romanian war on supplies are taken into account. The Austro-Hungarian army may have started the war with obsolete equipment – yet in 1914 it had at least as many machine guns per capita as the Germans, and more in absolute terms than the Italians in 1915. Some of these oversimplifications could have been omitted.
The Austrians are sometimes regarded as unique (even though one wonders whether a “concept of service and loyalty” [29] among officers qualifies for that adjective). For all that, the book suffers from a lack of a comparative perspective. The Austro-Hungarians were unprepared for the sort of war they were going to fight, but that holds true of almost all the warring powers. Austrians were not supposed to fight British professionals or German heavy artillery, but Russians and Italians with lots of problems of their own. In the end, Russia collapsed much earlier than the Habsburg monarchy, and Italy nearly followed. It might have been fascinating to analyse those different shades of grey. When did the Austrians catch up (e.g., when they reequipped their artillery in 1915–1916?), when did they lose ground (e.g., when the Italians drew ahead in terms of air power, as Tunstall rightly notes)?
Austria-Hungary had a bigger population than France and fielded fewer divisions. How come? Austria-Hungary's losses are usually given at more than one million dead but only about half of them were killed in action. At any given moment, a disproportionate number of Austrian soldiers seem to have spent time in hospitals or training institutions. Admittedly, the question has never been systematically analysed, but in Tunstall's book it does not even merit a fleeting reference. He does not deal with any of these broader statistical problems apart from emphasizing the big losses in the early stages of the war.
The straightforward history of the major campaigns that forms the book's core suffers from two defects. One is massive front-loading: Tunstall draws on his earlier research on the Austro-Hungarian winter campaigns of 1914–1915. By the time we have reached the middle of the book, the first year of the war has not ended yet. The second problem is the lack of focus on either the strategic or the tactical level. In Tunstall's narrative, strategic decision-making does not precede campaigns but is fed piecemeal to the reader during the breaks of fighting. Thus, in the context of this rather impressionistic style, there is no clear account of the tug-of-war that ended in what both Erich von Falkenhayn and Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Chiefs of Staff respectively, regarded as a second-best solution but which, in fact, resulted in the biggest single victory of the war, the Tarnow campaign and the conquest of Poland in the summer of 1915. Nor is there any in-depth discussion of the impact of weaponry. After all, the number of machine guns increased tenfold during the war – but loss rates actually declined.
The book was published in 2021. Yet, even if they are listed in the bibliography, there are scarcely any references to studies completed after 2014, exactly when the historiography on World War I was reaching an all-time high. A book published at that precise point in time could have incorporated – and sometimes maybe rejected – the findings and hypotheses of these years of research, but it should not have ignored them. The result is one of those missed opportunities such as veterans kept talking about for such a long time.
