Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf
Franz Xaver Josef Conrad von Hötzendorf, sometimes anglicised as Hoetzendorf, was an Austrian general who played a central role in World War I. He served as K.u.k. Feldmarschall and Chief of the General Staff of the military of the Austro-Hungarian Army and Navy from 1906 to 1917. He was in charge during the July Crisis of 1914 that caused World War I.
For years he had repeatedly called for preemptive war against Serbia to rescue the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was, he believed, nearing disintegration. Later on, he came to believe that the Dual Monarchy had taken action at the eleventh hour. The army was also unprepared and he had resorted to politics to further his goals. He was unaware that Germany would relocate the majority of its forces to the Eastern Front, rather than in the Balkans.
Conrad was anxious about invading Russia and when the Tsar's armies had captured the Carpathian mountain passes and were on the verge of invading Hungary, Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies. The Austro-Germans cleared Galicia and Poland during the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive in the summer of 1915 and later conquered Serbia in October with the help of Bulgaria. From 1915 his troops were increasingly reliant on German support and command. Without support from its German allies the Austro-Hungarian Army was an exhausted force.
In March 1917, Charles I dismissed him as Chief of Staff after Emperor Franz Joseph died and Conrad's Trentino Offensive had failed to achieve its objective; he then commanded an army group on the Italian Front until he retired in the summer of 1918. He died in 1925.
Life
Conrad was born in Penzing, a suburb of Vienna, to an Austrian officers' family. His great-grandfather Franz Anton Conrad had been ennobled and added to his name the nobiliary particle von Hötzendorf as a predicate in 1815, referring to the surname of his first wife who descended from the Bavarian Upper Palatinate region. His father Franz Xaver Conrad was a retired colonel of Hussars, originally from southern Moravia, who had fought in the Battle of Leipzig and took part in the suppression of the Vienna Uprising of 1848, wherein he was severely wounded.Conrad married Wilhelmine le Beau in 1886, with whom he had four sons.
In the latter part of his life, he was known to hold doubts about his fitness for office and occasionally suffered severe bouts of depression. These worsened after the death of his wife in 1905. In 1907, while attending a dinner party in Vienna, Conrad met and quickly became enamoured of Virginia von Reininghaus, an Italian aristocrat. In the weeks following this, he made many attempts to court Reininghaus, despite the fact that she was already married and with six children, which eventually resulted in the two conducting an affair. This illegitimate pairing continued until their marriage in 1915.
Upon his death in 1925, a journal titled "Diary of my Sufferings" was found. The journal compiled over 3,000 letters written to Reininghaus, some over 60 pages in length, detailing the extent of Conrad's love for her. In order to prevent a scandal breaking out from a potential leak, Conrad kept the letters private and they were never sent to their intended recipient.
Military career
Conrad joined the cadet corps of the Hainburg garrison and was educated at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. He developed a strong interest in natural science, especially in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. In 1871, at age 19, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in a Jäger battalion. After graduating from the Kriegsschule military academy in 1876, he was transferred to the General Staff Corps of the Austro-Hungarian Army.In 1878–1879, upon the Treaty of Berlin, these duties brought him to the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sanjak of Novi Pazar, when those Ottoman provinces were assigned to the military administration of Austria-Hungary. He was
a Captain and served as a staff officer during the 1882 insurrection in the Austrian Kingdom of Dalmatia. In 1886, he was appointed Chief of Staff of the 11th Infantry Division at Lemberg, where he showed great ability in reforming field exercise. In the fall of 1888, Conrad was promoted to major and appointed professor of military tactics in the Kriegsschule in Vienna, a position he prepared for by touring the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War. Conrad proved to be a good teacher who was quite popular among his students.
Return to command and Chief of Staff
In 1892 he requested transfer back to command and took charge of the 93rd Infantry Regiment at Olomouc. From 1895 he commanded the 1st Infantry Regiment Kaiser at Kraków and from 1899 the 55th Infantry Brigade in Trieste, promoted to a Generalmajor. After acting against a major Italian uprising in the city in 1902, he was made Feldmarschalleutnant and took command of the 8th Infantry Division at Innsbruck in 1903.By the time of his appointment as Chief of Staff for the Austro-Hungarian military forces at the suggestion of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in November 1906, Conrad had established a reputation as a teacher and writer. Like other Austro-Hungarian officers of his generation, he had little or no direct combat experience, but had studied and written extensively about theory and tactics. His published works on infantry tactics sold well and were printed in multiple editions. He was a tireless campaigner for modernization of the armed forces. He was made General der Infanterie in November 1908.
Strategically, he took the opposite approach to his countryman Carl von Clausewitz. Where Clausewitz had described war as "policy... carried on with other means", Conrad, seeing conflict as always inevitable, viewed the role of politicians and diplomats as solely to create favorable conditions for successful military endeavors. "The fate of nations, peoples, dynasties", he wrote, "is decided not at diplomatic conferences but on the battlefield."
Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria conferred the noble rank of a Freiherr on Conrad in 1910. Conrad's differences with Foreign Minister Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, who objected several times to Conrad's suggestion of a preventive war with Italy, ultimately led to Conrad's dismissal as Chief of Staff in 1911, partly under the pretext of objection to Conrad's affair with von Reininghaus, whom he later married. After Aehrenthal resigned and died the next year, Archduke Franz Ferdinand urged Conrad's re-appointment, which took place during the Balkan Wars in December 1912.
Although Conrad's ideas had considerable impact in the decision making process of the government, especially in the lead-up to the First World War, historian John Leslie describes him as a "loner" who did not easily win friends or influence people and was politically inept. In the wake of the Balkan Wars, he regularly took the initiative to urge war on the government, often without provocation from the putative enemy or regard for the readiness of Austrian troops, believing that Serbian independence had led to a "foul peace" that the empire needed to correct if it was to have any chance to survive in the long term.
Conrad was a Social Darwinist, and believed life consisted of "an unremitting struggle for existence" in which the offensive was the only effective form of defence. The power of the Magyar elite within Austria-Hungary troubled him, as he believed it weakened and diluted what he saw as an essentially German-Austrian empire. He worried about Italian ambitions in the Balkans. His greatest ambition was for a pre-emptive war against Serbia in order to neutralize the threat that he believed they posed, and at the same time change the political balance within the Dual Monarchy against the Magyars by incorporating more Slavs in a third Yugoslavian component under Austrian control, denying the principle of self-determination. According to Hew Strachan, "Conrad von Hötzendorf first proposed preventive war against Serbia in 1906, and he did so again in 1908–09, in 1912–13, in October 1913, and May 1914: between 1 January 1913 and 1 January 1914 he proposed a Serbian war twenty-five times".
First World War
Planning
Conrad and his admirers took special pride in his elaborate war plans that were designed individually against various possible opponents, but did not take into account having to fight a two-front war against Russia and Serbia simultaneously. His plans were kept secret from his own diplomatic and political leadership — he promised his secret operations would bring quick victory. Conrad assumed far more soldiers than were available, with much better training than they actually had. In practice, his soldiers were inferior to the enemy's. His plans were based on railroad timetables from the 1870s, and ignored German warnings that Russia had much improved its own railroad capabilities. He additionally disregarded von Moltke's regular exhortations to focus on Russia as the most pressing threat and set aside his emotional plans for war on Italy and Serbia.In addition, Conrad's preparations for war fell far short of what was needed. In the kind of large continental war in which Austria would likely fight Serbia or other European powers, close cooperation and coordination with its closest ally, Germany, was essential. Yet Conrad and his German counterpart, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, held few meetings and were only able to agree that in that situation Germany would concentrate on fighting France while Austria-Hungary focused on Russia. As a result, when World War I did break out, the two allies both came to expect more from each other while delivering less than promised. Conrad also failed to restructure the Austro-Hungarian Army from one designed mainly to maintain domestic political balance into one that could fight the kind of wars he wished to. Despite being aware that his troops were insufficiently trained for those wars, as pre-war Austria spent the least on its military and the least time training its soldiers of any major European nation of the era, he never attempted to rectify that situation.
Conrad assumed the war would result in victory in six weeks. He assumed it would take Russia 30 days to mobilize its troops, and he assumed his own armies could be operational against Serbia in two weeks. When the war started, there were repeated delays, made worse when Conrad radically changed plans in the middle of mobilization. Russia did much better than expected, mobilizing two thirds of its army within 18 days, and operating 362 trains a day – compared to 153 trains a day by Austria-Hungary.
During the July Crisis upon the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Conrad was the first proponent of war against the Kingdom of Serbia in response. Germany is thought to have requested an immediate invasion of Serbia, but Conrad delayed for over a month. Many Army units were on leave to harvest crops and not scheduled to return until 25 July. To cancel those leaves would disrupt the harvest and the nation's food supply, scramble complex railroad schedules, alert Europe to Vienna's plans, and give the opposition time to mobilize. Meanwhile, Emperor Franz Joseph went on his long-scheduled three week summer vacation.