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The Initial Campaigns 183
front, consisting of four armies, which converged on Galicia and Bukovina in a type of
semicircle, with the 4th Army (under A.E. Salza) and the 5th Army (under A. E. Pleve)
on the left flank, and the 3rd Army (under N.V. Ruszki) and the 8th Army (under A. A.
Brusilov) to their right. This amounted to 800 kilometres of front under the control of
the commander of the Russian south-western front, General Nikolai I. Ivanov. The su-
preme command over all Russian troops was given to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich,
an uncle of the Tsar. The aim of the Russian front in the north was to overcome the
German forces, which were far inferior in number, and to occupy East Prussia. The goal
of Ivanov’s troops was to destroy the Imperial and Royal armies before conquering the
Carpathians and finally advancing through to the Hungarian plains. The offensive was
due to begin on 18 August, Emperor Franz Joseph’s 84th birthday.
The Initial Campaigns
While the Austro-Hungarian cavalry divisions were still reconnoitring in the east, in
the southern theatre of war, the Imperial and Royal armies were already attacking. Gen-
eral of Artillery Oskar Potiorek, who on 6 August had been named commander of all
the Imperial and Royal troops in the Balkans, cut a type of Gordian knot, since time
and again, it had appeared that Conrad might after all overturn his plans once again.
On 31 July, he had given the troops to be relocated to the Serbian theatre of war pri-
ority over those formations that were rolling towards Galicia. On 1 August, however,
he wanted to suddenly redirect not only the 2nd Army, which was to come to the
Danube, but also to deprive Potiorek of parts of the 5th and 6th Armies.433 Two days
later, Potiorek presented his plan of operations to the Army High Command. However,
on 6 August, he was told definitively that the 2nd Army would again be removed. The
remaining armies were given the ‘minimum task’ of preventing incursions into the terri-
tories of the Monarchy. But what was the maximum task to be ? Ultimately, everything
was left to the judgement of the commander at the theatre of war, and he was also given
permission to use the 2nd Army until it was withdrawn. The only restriction was that it
was forbidden to cross the Danube. By their very nature, such vague commands could
lead to nothing other than endless confusion. Indeed, they were not in fact commands,
but an invitation to do this or that, unless perhaps there was some reason or other not to.
When Potiorek had still been Chief of the Operations Division on the General Staff,
prior to his nomination as the regional commander of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he had
already written a first draft of the Balkan operational scenario. This plan assumed that
action should be taken from Bosnia and Herzegovina against Serbia and Montenegro
with one army, respectively. However, another army was to pincer Serbia from the north.
On the assumption that the Serbian Army would concentrate south of the Danube,
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Title
- THE FIRST WORLD WAR
- Subtitle
- and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918
- Author
- Manfried Rauchensteiner
- Publisher
- Böhlau Verlag
- Location
- Wien
- Date
- 2014
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-205-79588-9
- Size
- 17.0 x 24.0 cm
- Pages
- 1192
- Categories
- Geschichte Vor 1918
Table of contents
- 1 On the Eve 11
- 2 Two Million Men for the War 49
- 3 Bloody Sundays 81
- 4 Unleashing the War 117
- 5 ‘Thank God, this is the Great War!’ 157
- 6 Adjusting to a Longer War 197
- 7 The End of the Euphoria 239
- 8 The First Winter of the War 283
- 9 Under Surveillance 317
- 10 ‘The King of Italy has declared war on Me’ 355
- 11 The Third Front 383
- 12 Factory War and Domestic Front, 1915 413
- 13 Summer Battle and ‘Autumn Swine’ 441
- 14 War Aims and Central Europe 469
- 15 South Tyrol : The End of an Illusion (I) 497
- 16 Lutsk :The End of an Illusion (II) 521
- 17 How is a War Financed ? 555
- 18 The Nameless 583
- 19 The Death of the Old Emperor 607
- 20 Emperor Karl 641
- 21 The Writing on the Wall 657
- 22 The Consequences of the Russian February Revolution 691
- 23 Summer 1917 713
- 24 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts 743
- 25 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein 769
- 26 Camps 803
- 27 Peace Feelers in the Shadow of Brest-Litovsk 845
- 28 The Inner Front 869
- 29 The June Battle in Veneto 895
- 30 An Empire Resigns 927
- 31 The Twilight Empire 955
- 32 The War becomes History 983
- Epilogue 1011
- Afterword 1013
- Acknowledgements and Dedication 1019
- Notes 1023
- Selected Printed Sources and Literature 1115
- Index of People and Places 1155