Reading Recap: Fall of the Double Eagle
The Battle for Galicia and the Demise of Austria-Hungary
I happened to see this book in Barnes & Noble while there with my family on Father’s Day. It being MY day, I felt entitled to get a book for myself. Because, you know, I definitely need another book on by To Be Read pile. Of course I do. And you know, I’d been thinking about writing this little alternate history story about Austria-Hungary that I wrote about in a recent post.
Make Austria-Hungary Strong
I enjoy history a lot, as I’ve talked about over and over and over. But this is niche, even for me. I know (or knew) very little about Austria-Hungary.
What I know mostly came from an episode of an old World War 1 documentary. This particular episode is titled Shackled to a Corpse. What a cheery name, right? There’s a video link to the episode below, although it’s age restricted and won’t play unless you go to YouTube’s website.
Like many historical documentaries, this one painted with a broad brush and ignored a great amount of detail. But in this book John Schindler has put together a remarkable history of Austria-Hungary in the run up to and in the first year of World War 1 that delves deeply into those details.
Shackled to a Corpse frames the battles on the Eastern Front as ‘Slav vs. Teuton’ while Schindler shows that Austria-Hungary is a far more multicultural society than most have appreciated. It was also uniquely far more tolerant of cultural and religious diversity than almost any other nation in that time period. As a blend of German, Italian, Polish, Ukranian, Serbian, Romanian peoples of Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim faiths the country was truly polygot.
This came with weaknesses, for sure. One of the most challenging was language. In the K.u.K. (The Imperial and Royal Army) if more than 20% of the men in a regiment spoke a language then that became one of the official languages of the regiment. All officers were required to gain fluency in that language and were regularly tested on it. [stats on regimental languages].
But the real thrust of the book is the absolute disaster Austria-Hungary experienced in the opening months of the war in Serbia and Galicia. With a detailed account of the criminal bungling of the Serbian invasion, Schindler sets up the coming disaster against the Russians. Then with detailed and vivid descriptions, he shows how in a single short campaign, Austria-Hungary suffered horrific casualties from which it would never recover.
“From the approximately 900,000 Austro-Hungarian troops committed to battle against Russia in late August, only slightly over half of them reached the safety of the San [River] in mid-September. In three weeks of fighting, Conrad [commanding general of Austro-Hungarian Army] had lost approximately 420,000 men, including over 100,000 killed, about 100,000 in Russian captivity, and some 220,000 wounded. The overall loss was equal to the size of Austria-Hungary’s prewar standing army.”
Chapter 9, Page 254
Using information dredged out of Austrian archives in Vienna, German archives in Berlin, others in Budapest, Warsaw, and Moscow, Schindler paints a picture of a Great Power which steadily fell behind its peers, dooming itself to destruction in the fires of the Great War.
And once the conflict gets moving the parade of horror marches unceasingly across the Empire.
“The most telling epitaph for Conrad’s [commanding general of Austro-Hungarian Army] generalship is that more than a million Habsburg soldiers died under his command.
Chapter 10, Page 289
It’s a brutal tale, sparing no blame for those who led Austria-Hungary into the disaster in which it found itself. For context, a million dead is just about 2% of the entire population of the pre-war Austro-Hungarian Empire, or about 4% of the entire male population. It is the highest rate of soldiers killed of any major power in the entire war.
If you like military history, I highly recommend this book. It’s extremely well written, accessible, and cites extensive references. My only complaint is something I get with many history books: the lack of detailed maps, and in this case none whatsoever. Although a small complaint, it would have helped make sense of the geography without having to resort to extensive googling.
Other than that, this is a great book! From a quick search, you can find this book at pretty much any bookseller, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!