Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef has been on the imperial throne for a long time.
In fact, among European monarchs in history, only Louis XIV had a longer reign.
Franz Josef came to power in 1848, and was pretty young at the time, having been born
in 1830 and he has seen enormous changes in European culture, society, and industry.
It was he at the age of 83 whose declaration of war on Serbia July 28th, 1914 soon spiraled
into this world war, and this week Emperor Franz Josef dies.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week at the Somme, the British captured Beaumont Hamel, Beaucourt, and St. Pierre-Divion,
despite the appalling weather.
On the Macedonian front the Five nation army neared Monastir.
In Dobrogea, the Russo-Romanian forces made headway for a few days but were stopped by
midweek, and in the Transylvanian mountains, the Germans broke through the Romanian lines.
This is what came next.
Well, there was a very big piece of news in the west as the Battle of the Somme, raging
since July 1st, came to an end as winter arrived on the front.
The night of the 18th was the last assault of the campaign – an Allied advance of 1,000
meters on the Ancre River in the mud and snow.
(Gilbert) One of the men there, Lieutenant-Colonel Bernard Freyberg, was awarded the Victoria
Cross for his bravery, and the official history of the 29th division says that his initiative
and leadership were responsible for winning the Battle of the Ancre, the last sub-battle
of the whole big battle.
But he had been wounded in the head, and he looked so bad that he was put in the tent
with those expected to die and given no medical help except painkillers.
Later on he heard a voice telling people to move him to the tent where you were expected
to live and he got help.
Later, though, he couldn’t find out who gave that order, but 25 years later in a hotel
lobby in Cairo he thought he heard the same voice again and asked the guy if he had been
on the Ancre in 1916.
It was indeed the man who’d saved him, Captain S.S. Greaves.
Anyhow, as the Somme ended, each side made plans for new offensives for 1917, in spite
of the enormous toll in deaths, wounded, missing, and men lost as prisoners.
Robin Pryor and Trevor Wilson in “The Somme” claim that one out of every 2 British soldiers
who fought at the Somme either died or were so wounded that they never fought again.
They give figures of roughly half German total casualties of those of the Allies, but estimates
vary considerably in different sources.
Martin Gilbert estimates the death tolls at the Somme as 146,404 for the British and French,
and 164,055 for the Germans , but if you add all of the casualties together, the wounded,
missing, and prisoners, the numbers climb to over a million total men casualties for
the Battle, and just FYI, when the battle ended, the British were still five kilometers
short of reaching Bapaume, which had been the first day’s objective on July 1st.
The death toll at the Battle of Verdun, which was limping slowly toward its conclusion after
nine months of fighting, was estimated by Gilbert of being over 600,000 total by this
point, though many estimates make that number as the number of total casualties.
But if Gilbert is correct, then that is a death toll of a million men for the two battles
so far, which if you choose to divide it over a five month period, works out to 277 dead
men per hour, or nearly five men dead every minute, 24 hours a day.
A great many of those men lost their lives to the machine gun, and a footnote in machine
gun history happened this week when Sir Hiram Maxim, its inventor, died on November 24th.
But his was far from the biggest celebrity death this week.
On November 18th, Austrian Emperor Franz Josef had expressed “keen satisfaction” that
there was talk of peace going around.
On the 20th, even though he was suffering with bronchitis, he still went to work on
his official files, and before bed asked to be woken at 3:30 in the morning.
He was and went to work again, but just after nine that evening, the emperor died.
The new Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary was his great nephew, Archduke Karl, age 29.
The death of Franz Josef was, of course, a great shock to his empire.
He had often in his life been credited with personally holding the empire together.
His son was a different sort of man from a different world.
He had been an active army officer - at one point a Corps commander on the Italian front
- but he was anti-war.
Also, his wife was Italian and had Entente sympathies, so there was deep concern in the
army’s high command.
The first reports that Karl received as Emperor were of the situation in Romania, where an
Austro-German victory and conquest looked like it was in the cards.
After the Germans broke through at Targu Jiu last week, Romanian General Paraschiv Vasilescu
wanted to abandon the region west of the Olt River to make his defense along the river
itself, but his decision was countermanded by King Ferdinand, at the request of French
Major General Henri-Mathias Berthelot.
Berthelot had been invited to Romania after the traumatic loss of Turtucaia as an experienced
liaison officer.
He had even been offered the job of Chief of Staff but had declined.
Anyhow, his and Ferdinand’s decision was pretty much a death sentence for the men that
were ordered to fight to the last man but it had a purpose.
The east-west railway across Romania met, at Orsova, another line coming from Timisoara
in Hungary.
Those railways would be vital for the Central Powers to supply troops south of the Transylvanian
Alps.
Leaving those men behind to destroy the railway and the bridges would buy time for Romania
to get some reserve forces in place.
Sill, by the 19th, Vasilescu wrote the king that his men no longer were able to fight
the enemy in western Wallachia and they were retreating.
The Germans and Austrians were advancing 40km a day, in spite of the snow, ice, and fog
and on November 21st, they occupied Craiova, capital of Western Wallachia.
By nightfall, they were closing in on the Olt.
Meanwhile 320km to the south, General August von Mackensen’s forces began crossing the
Danube the 23rd and as the week ended, and Austrian engineers completed their new bridge,
traffic bringing heavy artillery across the Danube commenced.
But if the Central Powers were on the move in Romania, it was the Allies in the Balkans.
On the 18th the Germans and Bulgarians evacuated Monastir, and the following day, French, Serbian,
and Russian troops entered the city.
French General Maurice Sarrail and Serbian Crown Prince Alexander came up to Monastir
the 21st to congratulate the troops.
The Bulgarians and Germans, for their part, seeing that though they had been driven from
Monastir their enemy was too weak to really pursue, dropped proclamations by airplane
on the town that read, “People of Monastir, be of good heart.
We shall not shell you or bomb you, for we are coming to retake your city.”
Here’s a side note, courtesy of Martin Gilbert - the French cavalry officer who entered the
town at the head of a Russo-French division was one Captain Murat, a descendent of Napoleon’s
marshal who entered Moscow in 1812.
Also, the 19th was four years to the day since the Serbs had taken Monastir from the Ottomans
during the First Balkan War.
And here are some notes to end the week.
On the 21st, the ocean liner Britannic was torpedoed and sunk in the Aegean.
It was being used as a hospital ship.
Only 30 over the over 1,000 passengers died, and one of the survivors was a woman who had
also survived the sinking of the Britannic’s sister ship, the Titanic four years ago.
The Britannic was the largest ship sunk during World War One; its wreck was discovered by
Jacques Cousteau in 1975.
On November 20th, Arthur Zimmerman becomes the new German Foreign Minister.
On the 23rd the Greek provisional government under Eleutherios Venizelos declares war on
Germany and Bulgaria, and on the 24th, Alexander Trepov, a conservative very much opposed to
the influence of Rasputin on Russian politics, became Russia’s Prime Minister.
And a very busy week of war ends, Monastir falls to the Entente, Western Wallachia falls
to the Central Powers and they also begin crossing the Danube, heading for Bucharest.
The titanic Britannic is sunk, there are political appointments on both sides, and the Battle
of the Somme comes to an end.
That battle is one of the three bloodiest battles in world history up to this point
and all three of them were fought this year, at one point simultaneously.
In a war that began when Franz Josef declared war on Serbia.
Now, he died this week 100 years ago and Karl came to power.
I read that Karl was anti-war, but at this point in time, how could he not be?
And if you want to learn more about the reign of Franz Joseph and his long reign, you can
click right here and check that out.
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