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  More Advance Praise for A Mad Catastrophe

  “A distinctly unique and long overdue contribution to the historiography of early World War I. The aficionados of Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August and Istvan Szabo’s film Colonel Redl will find this a marvelous, engrossing, and distinctly well-written read that gives necessary balance to the already well-covered narrative of World War I’s Western Front. Understanding the challenges and ultimate fate of the creaky, polyglot, decrepit yet also curiously progressive Austrian-Hungarian Empire is essential for comprehending the furies that erupted and boiled over the subsequent century within the vast, complicated, multi-ethnic expanse it spanned. Master historian Geoffrey Wawro does a tour de force job in colorfully bringing this to light.”

  —Brigadier General Peter Zwack, US Army

  “Geoffrey Wawro has done a superb job in explaining and describing how the Habsburg Empire, in trying to save itself, provoked a great war and then destroyed its army through a combination of incompetence and pretentiousness.”

  —Norman Stone, author of World War One: A Short History

  “Geoffrey Wawro has produced a gripping and highly recommended account of Austria-Hungary’s descent into the carnage of the First World War’s first year. Unprepared but self-confident, divided by nationality, religion, and interest, the Habsburg armies got an unexpected thrashing that anticipated the demise of the rickety monarchy. This is a very instructive primer on imperial overreach, political irresponsibility, and the dreadful cost in human lives that was the epitaph for old Central Europe.”

  —Ivo Banac, Bradford Durfee Emeritus Professor of History, Yale University

  A Mad Catastrophe

  Also by Geoffrey Wawro:

  The Austro-Prussian War: Austria’s War with Prussia and Italy in 1866

  Warfare and Society in Europe, 1792–1914

  The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–71

  Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East

  A Mad

  Catastrophe

  The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire

  Geoffrey Wawro

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Copyright © 2014 by Geoffrey Wawro

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

  Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Designed by Jack Lenzo

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wawro, Geoffrey.

  A mad catastrophe : the outbreak of World War I and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire / Geoffrey Wawro.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-465-02835-1 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-465-08081-6 (e-book)

  1. World War, 1914–1918—Causes. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Balkan Peninsula. 3. World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Galicia (Poland and Ukraine) 4. Habsburg, House of. 5. Austria—History—Franz Joseph I, 1848–1916. I. Title.

  D512.W38 2014

  940.4'14—dc23

  2013039393

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Judith Aileen Winslow Stoughton Wawro

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  The Sick Man of Europe

  Chapter 2

  Between Blunder and Stupidity

  Chapter 3

  The Balkan Wars

  Chapter 4

  Murder in Sarajevo

  Chapter 5

  The Steamroller

  Chapter 6

  Misfits

  Chapter 7

  Krásnik

  Chapter 8

  Komarów

  Chapter 9

  Lemberg and Rawa-Ruska

  Chapter 10

  Death on the Drina

  Chapter 11

  Warsaw

  Chapter 12

  The Thin Gray Line

  Chapter 13

  Serbian Jubilee

  Chapter 14

  Snowmen

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Franz Joseph I strolling in the Hofburg

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Emperor Franz Joseph

  Franz Ferdinand and Potiorek at Bosnian maneuvers

  General Oskar Potiorek

  Austrian infantry liquidating Serbian villagers

  Austrian trooper entering a Galician village

  Austrian cavalry search for the Russians

  General Moritz von Auffenberg

  The Grand Duke, Sukhomlinov, and the Tsar

  General Viktor Dankl

  The grisly result of an Austro-Hungarian “storm attack”

  Austro-Hungarian wounded receiving first aid

  General Rudolf Brudermann

  Troops of the Austro-Hungarian Second Army hurrying to the front

  Ukrainians executed by the Austrian army in Galicia

  Archduke Friedrich and Conrad on a rare visit to the front

  General Svetozar Boroevic

  Serbian prisoners taken by the Austrians

  Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Ludendorff

  Russian POWs

  General August von Mackensen

  Cossacks dancing in camp

  Jewish refugees flee the war zone

  Archduke Friedrich and Conrad at Teschen

  Austro-Hungarian infantry under fire in Serbia

  Entrenched Austrian infantry repulse a Russian attack

  Freezing Austro-Hungarian troops in the Carpathians

  Captured Austrian officers, with their Russian captors

  An Austro-Hungarian general with his German minder

  Resting German troops in 1915

  The German kaiser meets the new Austrian emperor

  List of Maps

  Europe, 1914

  The Nationalities of Austria-Hungary

  The Balkans, 1878–1908

  The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913: Serbia’s Vast Annexations

  Recipe for Disaster: The German and Austrian Deployments in 1914

  Potiorek’s First Invasion of Serbia, August 1914

  Conrad’s Mad Plan of Attack in the East, August 1914

  Illusory Victory: The Battle of Komarów

  The Rout of the Austrians at Lemberg and Rawa-Ruska

  Potiorek’s Second Invasion of Serbia, September 1914

  The Battles of Warsaw and Lodz, October–November 1914

  Potiorek’s Third Invasion of Serbia, October–December 1914

  The Eastern Front, Winter of 1914–1915

  National Self-Determination: The Breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1918–1919

  Acknowledgments

  A century ago my Austro-Hungarian grandparents landed on Ellis Island from a dusty little village in Galicia near Tarnopol. It was just the sort of enervating outpost—I’ve been there—that would have driven one of Roth or Zwe
ig’s Viennese cavaliers to drink, dice, despair, or all three. Had my grandparents chosen to shake the dust of Galicia from their boots any later, those hard-working Ukrainian peasants—Vasil and Anna Wawro—would almost certainly have been consumed by the Great War. Mobilized in 1914 with his Austro-Hungarian 15th Regiment, Vasil would have plunged immediately into the cauldron of Lemberg. Reading this book, it’s hard to imagine that he would have survived, for his outflung III Corps bore the brunt of the Russian onslaught. Anna would have been occupied by the Russians, whose Third and Eighth Armies passed on either side of her village in August 1914. Food was always scarce in Galicia, the age-old “kingdom of the naked and the starving,” and it became even scarcer in wartime. Anna might have starved, or died of the camp diseases that stalked civilians near armies in the field. This book draws much of its inspiration from the memory of my paternal grandparents and of their great American son, my father N. William Wawro. They have all rested for years in a peaceful cemetery in Connecticut, having created so much by their flight and hard work in America.

  A Mad Catastrophe is dedicated to my mother, Judith Stoughton Wawro, on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday. She’s been a tremendous source of love and help to me over the years, most recently throwing open the doors in New England whenever the Texas summer bites and looking after me and my two sons, Winslow and Matias, with stupefying cheerfulness, efficiency, and grace. I’ve visited the villages of my father’s parents in eastern Galicia thanks to my mother, who gamely rented a car in Vienna and drove with me all the way to Zbaraz, sharing the potholes, watery beer, bribes, thefts, and other tribulations (including being struck and nearly obliterated by an army jeep at an intersection in Bukovina). Together, we found the villages, just as they’d been described, and a cemetery filled with Wawros: the quick (all looking exactly like my father) and the dead (Wawro in Cyrillic, Babpo, etched on the headstones).

  Readers of my acknowledgments in previous books will recall my picaresque drive as a grad student with my mother through Bohemia and Moravia to view the battlefields of 1866. On later trips, we also toured some of the battlefields described in this book, from Tannenberg down to Przemysl and Lemberg. I have an indelible memory of her in the passenger seat of our rented Opel, peering at grainy photocopies of old Habsburg general staff maps, patiently cross-referencing them with modern maps, and affecting not to notice as I slewed around country lanes roaring things like: “Mother, for the hundredth time, Hradec Králové is Königgrätz!”

  These, of course, are just the most immediate of her contributions. Mother took total responsibility for a large and challenging family after my father’s early death in 1978 (an accident that she barely survived herself) and shepherded all seven of us into adulthood. Like some wise Ottoman vizier ruling over brawling tribes, she did this with ineffable fairness and decency, and now presides over a vast, generally contented family of children and grandchildren. We’ve just celebrated her ninetieth birthday at a family reunion and the outpourings of love, admiration, and respect from every quarter were a striking testimony to her goodness, acuity, and leadership. As the youngest of seven, I probably leaned hardest on her over the years, and she’s been a stalwart to me, providing emotional support, but also the sort of logistical assistance—described above—that military historians can only dream of. Her love for travel and adventure is infectious. There’s not one Ruritanian corner that I’ve had to visit in the course of my research that she wasn’t eager to see as well.

  I finished the research for this book two summers ago in Vienna. It was not nearly as much fun as earlier research trips; I was older; I had children back in the States; I was living alone (not with the Falstaffian roommate the Fulbright Commission had arranged for me twenty years earlier), and I was working daily in the grimy suburban seat of the new Vienna archives, quite unlike the stately old Baroque venue in the heart of the city. I’d return every day to my apartment, jog morosely around the Augarten, prepare some insipid dinner on my single-burner stove, and then stare at the walls. One evening—as I drained this cup of bitterness while shuffling notes around my desk—the laptop rang and it was . . . Mother. She had read between the lines of my e-mails, installed Skype (no mean feat for a woman who still calls computers “word processors”), and called me, a kindness she would perform almost every evening until my return.

  Marianne Cook has been my best friend for many years. As I was making final revisions to this manuscript—and chuckling over General Conrad von Hötzendorf’s overreaction to the flu—I contracted the flu myself, and within hours of the first symptoms Marianne was at my bedside with vitamin C, zinc, DayQuil, Gatorade, and even a dog, her lab Abby, who she kindly gave me for a week to take the edge off my quarantined loneliness. That’s the sort of person she is, and she’s made me very happy over the years. Marianne also shared many of the travels involved in this book. Though she has a clear preference for the islands and vineyards of Croatia, she joined me for an unforgettable climb to the summit of Montenegro and a hair-raising descent (on the slender Austrian military road) to the great Bay of Kotor. It’s hard for me to imagine life in Dallas without Marianne.

  My two sons, Winslow and Matias, have also been a great help to me. They are so full of energy, life, and quicksilver passions, and their onrushing, competitive adolescence always puts me in mind of a quarrelsome Austro-Hungarian headquarters and makes me cringe and laugh by turns. As they’ve matured, Win and Mati have become good friends as well, able to discuss my work and theirs, and the many mysteries of life. I feel certain that my occasional outbreaks of ennui—traceable to that bleak Galician root—are as helpful to them as their raw joy and enthusiasm are to me.

  Research assistance from the University of North Texas enabled me to research in European archives and tour the battlefields described in this book in Poland, Ukraine, and Serbia. Many years ago, I won a research prize and travel grant from Oakland University, which also paid for some of the research in this book. Ukraine—today’s Galicia—always was and still is the land of broken roads, and so there I relied on the car and guide services of Jarek Vitiv and Igor Holyboroda, who patiently drove me (at the speed of a loping peasant) around all of the battlefields of Lemberg and Rawa-Ruska. Ivo Banac (of Yale and Zagreb) and his wife Andrea Feldman were very good to Marianne and me in Dubrovnik, Ston, and the Peljesac Peninsula, enlarging our knowledge of Balkan history and Croatian wine.

  Lothar Höbelt at the University of Vienna let me stay with him during an early research trip, and more recently, was very helpful to me in the archives. Lothar was also kind enough to introduce me to Christian Ortner, the director of the Austrian Military History Museum. Christian, in turn, connected me with Peter Enne and Werner Scherhaufer in the museum’s excellent photo archive. These two gentlemen let me use their office for days on end to choose many of the photographs for this book. I must collectively thank the many archivists in Kew, Vincennes, Vienna, and College Park, who facilitated the research for this book.

  David and Caroline Noble were kind enough to let me stay with them in London for some of the research for this book, as did Jun Hiraga. In Paris, my nephew Marc Bataillon was a generous host during the Vincennes research. Closer to home, Michael Leggiere, my good friend and deputy at UNT’s Military History Center, has helped me more than he knows with his hard work at the center and his good cheer and friendship. Thanks also to my brothers and sisters: Peter, David, Mark, Jill, George, and the memory of Robin. Growing up in a large family is a blessing, a statement I know that certain of my siblings will stare at in (feigned) amazement.

  My agent Tina Bennett at William Morris Endeavor helped me pull the book proposal together and has been a wise reader and consigliere as always. Simon Winder, author of Danubia, also helped shape the proposal in the early days, especially by his insistence that I return to the archives to delve deeper into the Eastern Front. My editor, Lara Heimert of Basic Books, has made this a far better volume by stemming my lust for illustrative anecdotes. The boo
k would be twice as long but half as good without Lara’s astute intervention. I must also thank Alex Littlefield, Katy O’Donnell, and Melissa Veronesi at Basic for their excellent work editing and producing the book. Phil Schwartzberg made the excellentmaps for this book and bore up patiently under the barrage of obscure place names. Finally, thanks to the great scholars who volunteered to read galleys of the book: Sir Michael Howard, Ivo Banac, Niall Ferguson, Dennis Showalter, Norman Stone, Christopher Clark, Brendan Simms, and Sean McMeekin. Thanks to Brigadier General Peter B. Zwack, US Defense Attaché to the Russian Federation, who gave the book a good read in Moscow and—with his own distinguished Austro-Hungarian ancestry—has been a wise and careful reader of my work since we first met many years ago at the Naval War College.

  Foreword

  In the fall of 1866, the aide to an Austrian general assaulted a Russian diplomat in the delicatessen of the Hotel Sacher in central Vienna. The Russian had been snickering about Austria’s defeat that year in the Austro-Prussian War, a seven-week-long conflict between the two historical allies that had effectively ended that July with Prussia’s decisive victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Königgrätz. Throughout the short war, Russia had watched from the sidelines as its two great-power rivals bloodied each other. Now, annoyed by the Russian official amusing himself at Austria’s expense, the aide took a swing at him.

  That scuffle at the Hotel Sacher flared into an international incident and fired speculation that a war between Russia and Austria was in the offing. While these rumors proved false, they suggested that despite the Austrian Empire’s crushing defeat at Königgrätz, it was still possible for the empire and its Habsburg rulers to contemplate a war with Russia unassisted.

  By 1914, that was no longer the case. Austria—by then part of a Dual Monarchy with neighboring Hungary—had been reduced to a Balkan power, vying with Italy for the epithet “Least of the Great Powers,” and, like the Ottoman Empire, in danger of slipping out of the great-power club altogether. The story of how this stunning and rapid transformation came about is as interesting as that of Austria’s last war—a bloody, reckless disaster from beginning to end.