Tedious, slow account of Hapsburg misfortunes at the outbreak of WWI. Reads like a hatchet job on poor Austria Hungary, making me wonder about the author's objectivity. shouldn't have finished this one.
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unbelievable and obscene tragedy of wwi ( )

All World Wars have been started and lost by natives of Austria. Is there something peculiar in the water of the not so blue Danube? Budapest is also known as a city of suicides, so self-destructive activities seem to be in the water (see also the Nibelungen saga). For Geoffrey Wawro, Hungary is the key culprit whose destructive behavior in the failed Austro-Hungarian marriage made Austria go postal in the face of a mad Serbian act of aggression.

Wawro chiefly blames Franz Joseph and uses a string of abusive adjectives among which "senile" is still the most friendly. His charge does not make sense, though. If Franz Joseph is some kind of demented King Lear on the throne, his lack of compos mentis restricts his guilt. It was the men around Franz Joseph who took the fatal decisions. Wawro is on much firmer (and traditional) ground in blaming the incompetence, corruption and backwardness of the k.u.k. army, part of which Wawro blames on the undeclared budgetary war of Hungary against Austrian rule by starving the beast to a level that made the army unusable as a tool for war.

The previous books of Wawro were mostly about Germany and Prussia in particular. He therefore sees Austria through the lense of a mediocre Prussia. In reality, the muddling through of Austria was and is the normal state of affairs of most empires and Prussian militarism the exception. Wawro also seems not to be too familiar with Austrian history prior to 1864, so that his judgments are often unfair and incomplete if one considers a wider span of history than the 50 years he tends to focus on. The Habsburg family had managed to hang on for more than 400 years by their strategy on relying more on marriages and diplomacy instead of war. The death of archduke Franz Ferdinand, a firm opponent of war in the Balkans (where "thieves and regicides" lived), was doubly tragic as it put two of the worst generals in history in the driver's seat: Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf and Oskar Potiorek. Wawro is justly scathing about their dismal and inexcusable performance. They wargamed their plans and lost - heavily. Instead of going back to the drawing board and making sure that they had a winning strategy, they executed their dismal plans - and lost as predicted.

One element Wawro does not really deal with is the deadly combination of green troops (mobilized in July, sent into war in August) into a campaign theater with severely deficient logistics. In the Western theater, civilian infrastructure could compensate for the deficiencies in logistics. In South-eastern and Eastern Europe, only the bare minimum of infrastructure existed, so that the green troops quickly began to suffer for any incompetence and idiocy. The latter was in abundance in Hötzendorf and Potiorek's planning - having troops march through Bosnia instead of crossing the Danube opposite Belgrade or having the troops disembark from the trains more than 100 km from their target. Underperforming Russian czarist logistics was no mean feat.

The book actually ends too soon, as the real question is why Austria-Hungary stayed in the war in 1915, having lost nearly half a million men in half a year, decimated its NCO and officer corps as well as lost almost all major battles, especially as it was fighting mostly for honor and no territorial gains. Hatred against Serbia and later Italy certainly was a powerful motivator. The main bloodletting, however, happened in the East against Russia about a territory neither the Russians nor the Austrians cared at all. ( )

An insightful, learned chronicle of how imperial hubris and meaningless slaughter in the First World War brought the crumbling multinational dual monarchy to collapse and the Hapsburg dynasty to an ignominious end. ( )

Distilling down a generation's research for the general reader, Wawro aims to disperse the fog that still allows Vienna to escape its share of culpability in creating the disaster that was the Great War. While if you have read the specialist military history you'll be aware that Habsburg military leaders such as Conrad and Potiorek have come in for their just share of criticism, Wawro ends this book with a meditation on how Emperor Franz Joseph has been allowed to waltz off into history essentially unstained by culpability. What might be disappointing for some readers is that this book essentially ends in with events in the Spring of 1915 and does not deal in detail with the Italian campaign; the point by which the Habsburg polity had devolved into a German puppet state. ( )