Seite - 183 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

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the judgement of the commander at the theatre of war, and he was also given permission to use the 2nd Army until it was withdrawn.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,