100 Years Ago Today

Wait, you just can’t stop. I NEED my daily fix!

Sure I know what happens next, but not as you describe it!

Thanks for the kind words, all. It’s much appreciated!

Let’s sort of do a “Where are they now”…or more accurately, a “So then what happened” final recap.

Let’s start with Austria-Hungary, at the center of everything. Foreign Minister Berchtold, the layabout rake who was thrust into the middle of this mess didn’t get himself fired for bungling the lead up to war. In 1915, the war well underway, Italy was mortgaging its options for which side to throw in on. They really, really wanted those ports in Tyrolia inside Austrian territory. Berchtold was given a choice of either declaring war on Italy or ceding that part of Austrian territory to placate the Italians (and the Germans, who didn’t want to spend the war propping up Austria). Berchtold had seen enough of war by then and refused and got sacked. He retired to a nice chateau to live out his life in lazy pleasure.

Conrad, the general who was itching to teach Serbia a lesson, may have been the most incompetent general in the war. Ignoring the pleas of the Germans to let Serbia alone for a while, he ended up splitting his forces dangerously by arraying them against Russia and Serbia both. Then Conrad actually decided on simultaneous offensives in August of 1914 against both Serbia in the south and Russia across the Carpathians to the northeast. Both ended in disaster. Insisting that both moves go forward before proper supplies arrived, his Serbian offensive moved forward well for a time…and then hit a brick wall of Serbian resistance in the mountains. Conrad got his forces cut off, out of supply, and what might’ve been an orderly repositioning turned into a rout with the remnants of the army retreating in disorder back to Austrian territory. In Galicia against Russia, pretty much the same thing happened, only worse. In the first month of the war, Conrad lost somewhere between 60-75% of his experienced field officers and non-coms. An army can’t work without those guys.

And so it’s November of 1914. The war is about three months into what will be four years of awfulness. Germany has sold out every one of her own interests to prop up Austria. To what end? By the end of November of 1914, Austria is done as a fighting force. Yes, they have men. They’ve got guns. What they don’t have is training, experience, or morale. They’ll never launch another offensive on their own in the war. Luckily, they threw in with the right guys in Germany, and their allies will prop them up until war’s end. As for Conrad, he’ll stay in charge of his skeleton army until war’s end, then die by 1925, a sick, bitter old man who never ever got to teach the Serbs the lesson he thought they had coming.

Austria-Hungary is broken up after the war. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland…they all get a piece of the pie. Sad old Franz Joseph dies during the war, likely happy to have gone. He’s briefly replaced by Charles I of Austria (seriously, naming yourself “Charles” and putting yourself on the Hapsburg throne is some dedicated wishful thinking.) Charles abdicates on the day the war ends. After a brief postwar fling with the Hungarian throne goes badly, he’s exiled to the island of Madeira where he dies of pneumonia at age 35. He’s the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary, the last member of the 850-year Hapsburg dynasty to rule a country or territory.

How did things go for for Russia?

First an odd and creepy premonition. Let’s turn back the clock a bit to late July of 1914. Sazonov, the Russian generals, and the Tsar are debating whether to mobilize. Off way away from this discussing is one of history’s famous weirdos, the Mad Monk himself: Rasputin.


(“How long until heavy metal chicks and goth girls make me cool?”)

Rasputin is recuperating far from St. Petersburg from wounds suffered in an assassination attempt. No one outside the Tsarina really trusts him anymore, but she trusts him implicitly. The crazy monk sends a wire that July to the Tsar. In it, he warns that war will be a disaster, and tells the Tsar that he’ll seal his own doom if he heads down that path. The warning is ignored. Crazy monks.

One of the things ignored by many histories of World War I is just how eager the Russians seemed to be to declare war here. Remember, these guys got their asses handed to them by Japan–hardly a world power–just a decade earlier. Germany in 1914 isn’t Japan. It’s almost like getting your guy killed in GTA playing on normal difficulty and then deciding to crank things up to “impossible” level and taking another go at it. So…why was Russia so eager to mobilize here? Well, it’s like this: they had two giant armies already performing maneuvers in what is now Poland, fairly near the German border. It was nearly 500,000 men. The Russian general staff figured they had a real shot at being in Berlin by October and forcing Germany to sue for peace.

When the war started, Russia stunned Germany by launching a quick offensive right away with these two armies. Germany thought they had at least two weeks here. The single undersized German army defending the eastern side of the country was put under the command of Paul von Hindenburg and his able assistant Erich Ludendorff. They managed to separate the two Russian armies (who, despite being on maneuvers, had been doing so with large portions of their force without guns, ammo, or even shoes and invaded in that state before supplies could arrive.) The Russians got routed, Hindenburg became a national hero and explosive blimp. They’d never gain any ground in Germany again.

To the south, after they pretty much massacred or captured the Austrians in Conrad’s offensive, they appeared to be on the verge of a major breakthrough in 1915 after the winter snows melted away. The Austrian army was in tatters, and all it would take would be a little push and they’d romp across the frontier to Budapest and then Vienna and endanger Berlin. Germany, strapped for manpower, was able to send only 10 divisions–barely a full corps to help out.

But…they also sent this guy:


(They’re not giving out hats like that to just anybody. Only badasses need apply)

That is general, soon-to-be Field Marshal August Von Mackensen. He is one of the great badass motherf***ers in all of modern history. Mackensen took his undersized army and the remnants of the Austrian forces huddling in fear in Galicia and launched a fierce offensive at the Russians, who weren’t expecting any such thing to happen. Mackensen threw the Russkies out of the Carpathian mountains and routed them back deep into Russia over the course of the summer of 1915.

And thus the Russians–just as eager for war as General Conrad and his Austrians–ceased to be much of a fighting force by 1916. The Tsar and his generals, heedless of all this, kept conscripting farmers and factory workers into their army. That made the Russian army huge–nearly 10-15 million men. Unfortunately, there was no way to feed them, since no one was tending any farms, and no way to arm them, since factories were running at low capacity.

Thus, after a year of getting pummeled by small German/Austrian forces along that front, Russia collapses into rebellion. Mutiny is widespread. The Tsar and his family are arrested and kept in a luxurious house arrest, awaiting the arrival of those who will help them escape to exile. Instead of that, the entire royal family and some loyal retinue are executed by firing squad and bayonet in July of 1918. Russia has a revolution. Lenin sweeps into power. Behold the birth of the Soviet Union.

Shoulda listened to the crazy monk.

Holy shit, that hat.

Nitpick: Tsaritsa, I think, wasn’t it? Not the Tsarina?

You are correct! That’s on me.

Mackensen might be one of the more fascinating dudes in that period. I’m looking for more dedicated biographical stuff about him.

He wore that hat as part of the elite hussars unit he was in when he was in the Prussian army. That was part of their uniform, and yeah, it was a shock troop fear thing.

Right when Hitler came to power, they’d trot him out in his old uniform as a sort of Nazi propaganda ploy. He wasn’t a Nazi though; he was a die-hard monarchist. thumbed his nose at Hitler by going to the Kaiser’s funeral. Wouldn’t play ball.

Died at age 95, just a few months after Germany surrendered in World War II. Lived through being a Prussian subject, a member of the First German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the provisional government at the end of WWII.

The face underneath it is pretty impressive, too.

Died at age 95, just a few months after Germany surrendered in World War II. Lived through being a Prussian subject, a member of the First German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the provisional government at the end of WWII.

Echoes of Moe Pa there—who was not, I was sorry to discover, eaten by bears after all.

He looks like Terrance Stamp. With a white mustache and a badass hat. Cast him for the biopic!

Awesome work Triggercut. I’ve really enjoyed this.

Anyone up for recapping key dates as they occur over the next 12 months?

I’m happy to do the 25th of April since that’s pretty important to us in this part of the world.

Yeah, very well done, triggercut. I’d probably keep reading an entire year’s worth of these updates from you.

Of course, there’s a lot of dead time in there, but if you wanted to write up any of the significant events from later in the war, that would be awesome too.

I think I’ll finish up by recapping Germany, France, and Britain and the results of their respective failures in July of 1914.

One thing that World War I introduced to things was the concept of the long battle. When we think of the Civil War, for instance, our named battles typically occur over a single day. Antietam, Chancellorsville, Bull Run, etc. Shiloh and Gettysburg are outliers (with definitive character on each day, it should be added) and then Grant and Sherman at the end of the war kind of introduced the irregular battle to things.

World War I is filled with these kind of irregular fights that start on a sort of indeterminate date and don’t so much end as peter out a few weeks or a month later. You do still have some major, finite fights, especially in the east and at Gallipoli, as was referenced earlier.

If we want to use this thread for some of the outlines of the major offensives (and seriously, they start to get depressing after a while) I’m all for it though! Just not sure I’d be the best to do it.

I’d just like to add to everyone else who’s said how great these updates have been, triggercut. I’ve really enjoyed reading them over the past month or so, very well done.

Still eagerly awaiting that final recap for the remaining big three powers! :)

Also, like someone else earlier in the thread stated, I too have been building a Word document compiling this whole thing. I’ve taken the time to format the dates into separate “chapters”, as well as get the pictures and captions nicely lined up on their proper pages. If any of you (especially Triggercut!) are interested in me sending you the final version, just pm me your email address and I’ll send it your way once the last recap is done and I complete the document.

It’s currently 76 pages in length and just over 4MB in size.

Simply outstanding job, Triggercut.

This thread over-delivered!

Reading about WW1 is depressing. You feel as though it was the war that didn’t have to happen, and then when it does it is made up of idiocy because the military strategy of the day hasn’t kept up with the changes in military technology. The story of WW1 is full of stupid, soldier grinding attacks and battles that serve no end.

At least with WW2 there are more obvious good and bad guys, more evil to point to, more “reason” to defeat the evil. It is hard to pinpoint the evil in WW1.

It’s hard to pinpoint the good. Evil and it’s close associate, stupidity, is a lot easier to find. Though from the standpoint of stopping a specific evil, not so much.

Yea, I guess that is more what I meant. The line between good and evil is drawn much less clear in WW1.

You should put it online somewhere. I can put it on my dropbox if no one has a better place for it. :) Also, this was seriously great, triggercut. Thanks for writing it!

Germany. Germany, Germany, Germany.

So close to coming out looking like the noblest of Great Powers, and yet so far.

A few things that many pre-1970s history books tend to overlook or simply ignore about the month leading up to World War I: Germany was the very last of the continental Great Powers to actively engage its military. If blame for war can be assessed in childish ways, Germany at least might have been able to say “They threw the first punch” about their enemies in the forthcoming conflict.

However, any goodwill the Germans might earn for calm behavior in July of 1914 would be permanently surrendered in August. It was in August of 1914 that the Germans sowed the seeds of their own destruction and colored worldwide opinion against them for over a generation.

It wasn’t so much that the Germans invaded two neutral countries, although that was bad. Invading Belgium and Luxembourg brought Britain right into the war, sure, but that wasn’t the half of it.

The worst part of it was that the German officer corps, normally a bastion of iron discipline and iron will, lost its collective mind. As the Germans went through Belgium, they didn’t just occupy it. They destroyed it. They raped women. They lined up men and boys and executed them en masse. In the Franco/Prussian War, apparently priests aided French resistance behind enemy lines. For some reason this became a thing with the German officer corps who allowed their enlisted ranks to happily murder priests and burn churches to the ground. In later years, Weimar Republic German scholars would suggest that tales of these atrocities were Entente propaganda. Forensic historical records and hard data today tells us that no, these sickening things absolutely happened. And, they happened because Germany’s officers not only tacitly allowed them to happen by not disciplining rambunctious enlisted ranks. It happened because Germany’s officers actively encouraged and participated in this barbarism.

France and England made sure the world of 1914 and beyond knew all about this. Germany’s actions in August of 1914 sealed the deal with Britain. Until these things happened, it was likely as not that the UK would enter the war with her navies alone, keeping her small ground forces at home. After Belgium, England went all in. By the end of the war, over 5 million Tommies would serve in the British army.

Worse for Germany, when a 1918 allied counter-offensive (coupled with open mutinies and rebellions at home in Berlin) caused the German army to sign what they believed to be a cease-fire, the Germans found the terms severe to the extreme. The Germans never expected the punishments of the Treaty Of Versailles. History says the Treaty was likely a huge overreach by France, England, and the US. However, those harsh terms were almost certainly a direct result of the German army’s conduct in Belgium in 1914 and the lasting stigma that created.

It didn’t have to be that way. The Schlieffen Plan was nearly successful, but in the final analysis has to be considered an unmitigated disaster. Von Moltke The Elder’s smarter plan to sit in entrenched lines and mow down lines of Russians and French invaders would have had much greater likelihood for success. It would have still toppled Russia. It might’ve kept the UK out of things or at least kept only their navy involved. The separate peace sued for by Russia may have led to France agreeing to peace as well.

The younger Moltke–head of the German general staff–had scrapped any plan that wasn’t the Schlieffen offensive of occupying Belgium by 1913. His tunnel vision and lack of imagination cost him his job by 1915 when the German offensive was stalled in stalemate, and Moltke the younger died of poor health in 1916.

The Kaiser, for his part, was like a millstone hung around the neck of every German general in chief who followed Moltke. The meddlesome Kaiser just wanted to celebrate victories, which were simply hard to come by. Once mutinies and rebellion broke out in the fall of 1918, the Kaiser’s advisers informed him that he was in real danger of ending up like his cousin Nicky, who’d been executed by Russian revolutionaries in July of that year. Wilhelm abdicated and fled to the Netherlands where he’d end up living out his days. Although the French pushed to try him as a war criminal, the Dutch flatly informed the world they’d refuse to extradite him. Thus ended 400 years of the Hohenzollern/Brandenburg dynasty standing astride Germany and Prussia.

The Kaiser lived in exile on a country estate in Holland in no small amount of splendor. He denounced Hitler frequently and bitterly, although Hitler’s pogroms had their roots in the Kaiser’s own anti-semitic views. He kept fans in Germany, although those monarchists learned to shut up when the brownshirts were around. He finally passed away in 1940.


(The Kaiser, looking for all the world like a fellow selling buckets of extra crispy, in 1933.)