Plans Are Doomed to Fail - The Battle of Galicia I THE GREAT WAR Week 6

Intro

After a month of fighting, the nations of Europe now all knew that this was a new type

of war, with carnage on a scale never before seen, but the technology and logistics of

modern warfare also brought with it a whole slew of unforeseen problems, especially as

the war was about to go global and truly become a world war.

War in the East

I’m Indy Neidell and this is the Great War.

Here’s how the war looked at the beginning of the week:

A Russian army had been spectacularly destroyed by the Germans at Tannenberg. The British

and French were retreating to regroup around Paris, the Germans on their heels, and the

whole world was now talking about tales of German and Austrian executions of civilians

in occupied territories.

Traditional war had always had its fair share of difficulties, right? Transportation, supplies,

and communications always seem to go wrong, and World War One was no exception, but we

begin to see that almost anything could screw up the best-laid plans on an extraordinary

scale. Let’s look at the war in the east:

The Russian army may have just suffered a catastrophic defeat against Germany, but they

were doing a lot better against Austria-Hungary. The Russians outnumbered the Empire roughly

750,000 to 500,000 in troops and had an even greater advantage in machine guns and artillery.

Austria-Hungary had won two quick victories over the Russians, but it was all downhill

from there. Austrian Chief of Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf was over-confident, and he

had a complicated plan to let the Russians in the south advance and then swing round

them in the north. Hotzendorf was one of the major Austrian war hawks, dreaming of a glorious

empire that stretched down to Africa and even to the Middle East, but in practical terms

he was a terrible general.

He sort of ignored the fact that the Russians were heavily reinforcing

in the north, and by September 1st they began to bear down on Conrad with close to twice

as many men as the Austrians had. Russia took Lemberg- one of the largest cities of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire- on September 3rd and Austria was forced to retreat to the Carpathian

foothills.

So far this war, Austria-Hungary had been in a constant state of disaster, partly because

of overstretch and partly because of incompetence. This wouldn’t change, but there were also

totally unforeseen problems- chronic language difficulties being a big one. The Austrian

army had soldiers from all the many nations of its empire, Hungarians, Czech, Bosnians,you

name it, and troops from one region would repeatedly attack others of its own army,

mistaking them for Russians because of their unfamiliar language. And the Slavic troops

would simply desert at times because of being made to fight other Slavs, and sometimes even

join the Russian army.

There were also the huge open spaces of eastern Europe- units would become lost, sometimes

for days, and just finding the enemy was a daunting task.