We’ve talked before about shock troops and shock troops tactics, and even done specials
on the German storm troops and the Italian Arditi, but they weren’t the only warring
nations with units like these.
Austria - Hungary had its Jagdkommandos.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about Austro - Hungarian Jagdkommandos
and the First World War.
Actually, they had their origin well before the war.
The concept behind them was Russian.
Russia established hunting commandos by decree of the Tsar in 1886.
That year the Russian army field manual included instructions for creating scouting units of
four men per Infantry Company, artillery battery or cavalry squadron.
These men were to be brave, resolute, and self-reliant, and their name - translated
as hunting commandos - came from their training program, which involved hunting predators.
They were developed to prevent enemy ambushes, as the increased firepower and accuracy of
weapons in the late 19th century made ambushes a costly affair.
This unit development was soon also taking place in Austria-Hungary to combat guerrilla
warfare in Dalmatia in the late 1880s, and these units were primarily for scouting and
patrolling.
Austrian historian Christian Ortner writes that the Austrian army increasingly developed
the Jagdkommandos as a response to the Russians since Russia seemed the most likely enemy
in a major war.
However, there were no central army directives for Jagdkommandos, no specialized training,
and no overall place in army doctrine.
In fact, official Austrian army doctrine had not changed since the 1860s.
Emphasis was on infantry and there was, for example, no coordination with cavalry and
artillery.
Training emphasized marksmanship and physical fitness, and the infantry was supposed to
win on the field by means of all-out, vigorous attacks.
Willpower and courage were enough to overcome things like artillery or machineguns.
Austrian army Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf was convinced of this idea, and he was not
alone.
The French also subscribed to it.
This resulted in devastating losses for both nations in the early stages of the war when
infantry attacked modern weaponry and expected to win by willpower alone.
Jagdkommandos did not play any significant role in those early months of the war, but
once it descended into trench warfare, cavalry was often no good for scouting, and large-scale
maneuvers could be suicidal.
So Austrian Jagdkommandos were increasingly trained to overcome battlefield obstacles
like barbed wire and to use explosives like hand grenades, but they were still deployed
as scouts, not assault troops.
Soon though, the Austrian 5th Army under Svetozar Borojevic von Bojna created a special training
ground where sapper and pioneer units trained new tactics and skills for trench warfare.
High Command was impressed and soon all Austrian army commands had training grounds on Borojevic’s
model.
These laid the groundwork for the Austrian shock troops, and in the winter of 1916, officers
and men were sent to learn German storm troops tactics and an offensive doctrine began developing.
There were obstacles, however, to developing storm troops at battalion - sized levels.
This was all happening just after Russia’s Brusilov Offensive, which had severely hurt
the Austrian army to the point where it teetered on the brink of collapse.
There was an overall shortage of equipment, especially machine guns and steel helmets.
The results over the winter were disappointing.
However, by May 1917, Borojevic had one storm battalion for training, and 7,700 other men
trained in close combat tactics.
During the 10th Battle of the Isonzo River that month, Austrian storm troops conducted
local counter attacks for the first time against the Italians, and they made a great success,
taking all objectives with minimal losses.
After this battle, the units were expanded and equipped with mortars and flamethrowers.
In some cases, though, the army had to strip the front line defenses of equipment to give
to the storm troops.
This was no longer a problem a few months later after the capture of enormous stockpiles
of Italian equipment during and after the Battle of Caporetto.
That battle was in many ways the high water mark for the Jagdkommandos, being the first
large-scale Central Powers attack in which they played a central role.
It was also a huge success, and after the battle it was the Italian army that was now
on the brink of collapse.
Then, the Austrian stormtroops were refitted for a summer offensive in 1918, to be launched
simultaneously with German summer offensives on the Western Front.
On June 15th, the Jagdkommandos attacked the Italian defensive lines on the Piave River,
but this time failed to break through.
The Italians had learned from defeat and had organized into a defense in depth system in
three zones.
This was unanticipated by the Austrians, and though their stormtroops captured the forward
Italian trenches, they took heavy casualties when they reached the second zone, which was
made up of strongholds instead of linear defenses.
This failure tarnished the reputation of the Jagdkommandos and they really disappeared
from the public consciousness once the war was lost and their empire dissolved.
The concept did live on in Austrian military tradition, though, after the Second World
War, when the army chose the name for its special forces in 1962.
Despite everything that happened in terms of the military leading up to the First World
War, storm troop tactics and true storm troops were something that were in fact born from
the war.
Much like their counterparts in other armies, the Austrian Jagdkommandos were one of the
first such specialized units, trained in infiltration and assault tactics, and 100 years ago you
could point to them as they went into action and really say, “This is modern war”.
We want to thank Rudolf Brujins for the research of this episode.
If you want to learn more about more about the German Stormtrooper doctrine and development,
you can click right here for that.
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