Monday, 2 September 2019

A Hopeless Struggle: The Austro-Hungarian Army and total war, 1914-1918

Austrian-Hungarian troops storm & capture an artillery position of the enemy.
This dissertation, by J.R. Schindler, "... is an institutional study of the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. It analyzes the operations of five infantry divisions, fighting on several different fronts, to reach conclusions about the wartime performance of the multinational Habsburg Army. The dissertation focusses on both tactical and socioethnic aspects of battlefield effectiveness. It is therefore a novel approach, combining operational and social history - This dissertation contradicts the prevailing historical perception that the wartime Austro-Hungarian Army was crippled by the nationalities issue. Instead, this revisionist work suggests that purely military shortcomings, principally poor high level leadership and a lack of industrial capacity, were the main causes of Habsburg defeat, and that the army actually performed respectably throughout the First World War despite its inherent weaknesses."

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