To be a commander during wartime requires certain skills and attributes, as you may
imagine, and one of those must of necessity be a belief in your own abilities and a belief
that your forces can accomplish their tasks, especially on the battlefield. But what happens
when that belief is at odds with reality? When your belief in your abilities becomes
overinflated and ignores the basic facts of war? You’ll see this week.
I’m Indy Neidell; this is the Great war.
Last week we saw the German army finally reinforce the desperate Austrians and hold off the Russians
in the Carpathian Mountains, the Russians were victorious, though, in Armenia, the French
gained some ground, Italy raised its voice, and the South Africans were on the move. Here’s what followed.
On the Western Front, this was a week of aerial bombardment. Ostend was bombed by 15 allied
planes on the 15th. The same day a French airship bombed Freiburg and the next day Strasbourg.
And on the opposing side there was a Zeppelin raid on East Anglia and a German airplane
bombed Faversham and Sittingbourne.
But the men in the trenches were going nowhere. Actually, in the East it seemed to be the same story for once.
There was heavy fighting throughout the week as the Russians repeatedly tried and failed
to take the Uszok Pass in the Carpathian Mountains. Now, just a couple of weeks ago it looked
like the Russians were going to smash the Austro-Hungarian army, break through the mountains,
and overrun the Hungarian plains below, but at the eleventh hour the Austrians had been
reinforced by the newly formed German Beskidenkorps, troops specially trained to fight in the snowy
mountains, and the Russian breakthrough had been prevented, at least for the moment. But
even though the Russians couldn’t take the pass, they still made progress elsewhere this
week in the mountains, southwest of the Rostoki Pass, and were still threatening as the week ended.
The Austro-Hungarian Imperial army was now playing defense, but for nearly three months
it had mounted offensive after offensive against the Russians high in the frozen mountains.
These offensives were the brainchild of army chief of staff Conrad von Hotzendorf, but
were so incredibly badly conceived that they brought the entire Imperial army to the brink
of destruction. The Austrians had neither the men, the equipment, the training, nor
the strategy to maintain even a single offensive against Russian mountain troops from Siberia, let alone three.
The biggest objective of those offensives had been to free the trapped Austrian garrison
at the fortress of Przemysl, a symbol of Hapsburg military might, but Conrad’s troops never
stood a chance of achieving this. The fortress had surrendered to the Russians nearly a month
ago, over 120,000 prisoners of war, but the Austrian army had taken over 800,000 casualties
in its attempts to break them out. If you can somehow justify that, then tell me how,
because I can’t. I think the real lasting tragedy from Conrad’s
machinations was the mental and physical trauma caused on both sides by what was the first
example of “total warfare” fought in mountains. This was in many ways the Stalingrad of WWI.
But people weren’t just being killed by the enemy; we had a situation where, I’m
not kidding, upwards of 100,000 people froze to death in the mountains. The White Death.
I’ve talked a lot about it over the past few months, but Conrad’s complete obliviousness
to the reality of the offensives was staggering. And it had a price, other than the loss of
most of his troops; on April 13th, Conrad agreed to put his Austro-Hungarian 3rd and
4th Armies under the direct command of German army chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn.
He couldn’t really do worse than Conrad, and the timing was appropriate in other ways
too, for the Russian counter offensive was now developing some of the many logistical
problems that had befallen Austria. When they were in the lower mountains they had had shorter
supply routes and fairly good railroad connections, but as they pushed the Austrians back, they
began to deploy troops in inhospitable terrain; regions that seriously limited mobility and overextended supply lines.
It might have been a blow to Conrad’s prestige to give up direct command of his troops, but
it did free him up to deal with other matters, such as the Italian question.
Last week, Italy had responded to Austrian offers of territory in exchange for Italian
neutrality with a huge list of other territorial acquisitions and demands that Austria would
have to agree to to preserve that neutrality. This week, the court at Vienna declared those
proposals unacceptable. Italy then turned from the central powers and began offering
terms to the Entente, who agreed to negotiate. Now, Italy had 800,000 men in its army, and
if it joined the war it could send them against Austria in yet another front. What would Conrad
do in that case?
New fronts were still springing into being, and the war was still growing larger and larger in scale.
It was fairly obvious to all by now that there would soon be a new front at the Dardanelles,
the gateway to the Black Sea. The Turks were building their defenses like crazy as the
allied forces gathered in Egypt and the Aegean Islands. An easy victory at Gallipoli was
seen by most of the allied command as a foregone conclusion, but on April 12th, there was one
warning note by Maurice Hankey, on the British War Council, who wrote to Prime Minister Asquith
that the military landings on Gallipoli were entirely based upon “the supposed shortage
of shells and inferior fighting qualities of the Turkish armies.”
The Ottoman forces had, it is true, suffered defeat after defeat, and actually, this same
week there was a sort of confirmation of the prevailing attitude, as Ottoman forces attacked the British in Mesopotamia.
The Battle of Shaiba was a series of engagements fought between April 11th and 14th when Turkish
and Arab forces descended on Basra. There were preliminary bombardments on Qurna and
Shaiba the 11th, but the main thrust of the attack was to outflank the British on the
13th across the floods that separate Basra from Shaiba. This was unsuccessful, even though
the attackers had the advantage in numbers. But they were routed the 14th suffering heavy losses.
Now, General Sir John Nixon had become commander in chief of British forces in Mesopotamia
a few weeks before this attack, and he was charged by his superior, General Sir Beauchamp
Duff, Indian Army Commander in Chief, with not only securing Basra and the British oil
fields, but also of mounting a “forward defense”, which basically meant organizing
a campaign toward Baghdad. London had no knowledge of this plan and actually had specifically
said no advance beyond Basra would be sanctioned. So one hand really didn’t know what the
other hand was getting up to and a Mesopotamian campaign was now in the cards.
And a rather more sinister campaign was growing this week in Anatolia.
Last week, Armenians had begun to be deported from their homes. Now, on April 15th, the
Armenian community formally appealed to the German ambassador in Istanbul for official
German protection. This was denied by Berlin, who did not wish to offend the Ottoman government.
Meanwhile, thousands of women, old men, and children began to be deported across the mountains
southward to Cilicia and Syria. This week, on April 12th, there are widespread attacks
and looting of Armenian villages in Bitlis and Erzerum, and on the 15th, Armenian refugees
arrive in Van from the surrounding area claiming that 80 villages in the province have been
attacked and over 20,000 Armenians have been killed in the past three days.
And that’s where we stand. Bombs raining from the British and German skies, the Russians
failing at the Uszok Pass, the Ottomans losing in Mesopotamia, but building up near their
capital, and the Italians now considering turning from their former allies and joining the Entente.
Hubris. During war. The belief that many of the leaders of this war had that they were
infallible. That their decisions and actions were correct, simply because they were THEIR
actions and decisions. It was not possible for them to be wrong, and if their actions
proved disastrous for their nations or armies, then it was not their fault, no matter how
much reality screamed at them that it was, time and again. Whether it was Conrad performing
human sacrifice on a gargantuan scale, closing in on a million causalities in almost comical
repeated attempts to rescue a fraction of that number of men, whether it was Winston
Churchill, already parceling out lands in the Middle East because a great victory at
Gallipoli was a foregone conclusion since, of course, the Turks couldn’t fight, or
whether it was Enver Pasha, whose guiding hand led Ottoman forces to complete destruction
in the Caucasus during the winter, and who not only refused to shoulder any of the blame
for his catastrophic defeat, but laid it at the feet of the convenient scapegoat, the
Armenians, it was the same thing, a foolish, no- a STUPID belief in one’s own infallibility,
and it would inevitably lead down the same path- millions of men dead for vanity.
If you want to find out more about Conrad von Hötzendorf’s hybris and the reason
why the Ottoman Army was seen as weak by Churchill check out our episode from January 8 right here:
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