Seite - 889 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Mutiny 889 Due to an immediate news blackout and rigorous censorship measures, next to nothing trickled through of the sailors’ revolt. Overriding military interests prevented a discus- sion of the events in the Reichsrat until October 1918. For the command of the war fleet, however, the Kotor sailors’ mutiny had immediate consequences. Njegovan was dismissed and replaced after ten days by the still relatively young Ship-of-the-Line Captain Miklos von Horthy, who went on to become vice admiral and Commander of the Fleet. From this point on, the navy was led more ably. Nonetheless, it was calculated that it would need two months before it was once more operational.2129 However, the mutiny among units of the war fleet in Kotor was not to remain an isolated case. The revolution spread to the hinterland and the replacement personnel. When it began in the command area of General Sarkotić, he claimed that it was a case of an external operation carried out and directed by the Entente troops, whose slogans had been circulated by ‘highly treasonous individuals’. With this, Sarkotić had certainly failed to recognise the true causes. It was rather the case that he hit the nail on the head when he appealed to officers and NCOs not to put their privileges at risk and instead to do everything to help improve the supply situation. The War Ministry had already instructed the military commands in December 1917 to  – ruthlessly  – provide the army with all available stocks. ‘[The] supply situation for the armies requires that available flour stocks in the hinterland are transferred to the army in the field without consideration for the requirements in the hinterland’, as the War Ministry had tele- graphed.2130 But the supply was not enough and the seizure could not be increased with the methods already in use. The 2nd Army in the east, therefore, helped itself in view of the hunger of the soldiers and requisitioned in the rear areas of the front. This very much found its emulators and how it ended could be seen, for example, in June in Stryj in Galicia, where uncontrolled food demonstrations flared up, after there had been no flour in the city for ten weeks and no bread for two weeks and the civilian population had been deprived of their last potatoes by military requisitioning.2131 Here, the drifting apart of the front and the hinterland was visible in its most extreme form ; all consider- ation disappeared. It was now a question of survival. Requisitioning was also taking place elsewhere. Since it was assumed that consider- able quantities were still present above all in Hungary, the Chairman of the Joint Food Committee, General Landwehr, agreed with the new Hungarian Food Minister Prince Ludwig Windisch-Graetz to expand requisitioning in Hungary. Landwehr wanted to make the incursion less painful by making available to Hungary in return all the sugar, petroleum and tobacco that he could find in the Austrian half of the Empire. It was clear, however, that the implementation of the requisitioning required approximately 50,000 men in replacement units and additional field troops. In this way, for those affected  – who saw only their distress and not that of the others  – their own soldiers became the enemy. In the countryside, the silent revolution was gathering momentum.