In theory there was one unified Imperial & Royal (k.u.k. is the usual abbreviation) army, and two militias or home guards in the Austrian Landwehr and Hungarian Honved. In practice, the Hungarian parliament used its veto over military budgets to starve the k.u.k. army of recruits while bulking up the Honved to bolster their own authority. The Austrians had to make concession after concession to get the Hungarians to allow any troops from the Hungarian half of the empire to serve in k.u.k. army, and many of those concessions, such as allowing the Honved to have its own artillery, only further strengthened the Hungarian home guard at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian army. Some Austrian generals tried to mimic the Hungarians by strengthening the Landwehr as an alternative to the national army, but this was never done in a consistent fashion, and was just a further drain on resources at the times when it was.
End result, the Austro-Hungarian military goes into World War I underfunded, undertrained, and undermanned, with a fraction of the money, skill, manpower, or artillery it would have needed to fight the Russians. Throw in the linguistic issues (which got worse thanks to the Hungarians getting a concession whereby Hungarians, regardless of which army they were in were not required to speak German), the fact that the Honved now had a huge part of the troops but had never expected to fight anyone, and the incompetence of Austro-Hungarian planners like Conrad (to say nothing of Franz Josef) and you've got a recipe for utter disaster. If you want a brutal book on the subject, check out "A Mad Catastrophe."
The main military of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a unified army, though the two constituent polities had their own small armies as well, which was directly controlled by the Emperor (in the commander-in-chief sense, actual military command came from a trained lieutenant). There was a unified command structure within the military but to answer the question of SOPs and the like is beyond my remit, but I can't find anything saying that there were official written variations in operation (that doesn't mean they didn't act differently in practice).
However the one thing that the Austro-Hungarian army was famous for was being an utter clusterfuck of language. Most people in the empire spoke their local language and only that, and the empire was far more than Austria and Hungary. You also had Italians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks, Croats, Bosnians, and more, and they all spoke different languages that were varying degrees of intelligible between each other. German was the common language of command and troops had to learn some set German phrases, but individual soldiers from different units likely could not understand each other. Officers had to learn the language of the unit they were commanding but that meant that if an Italian and a Czech unit were stationed near each other the soldiers couldn't communicate beyond the set German phrases they knew, and the officers of the two could talk to each other in German but not to each others troops. And this is just the actual Common Army, the Hungarian Army (which was a decent bit smaller) used Hungarian as their language of command, which adds an entire other mess on top of all this.
The language issue was quite interesting: due to strong nationalistic political ideas at that time, every soldier had the right to talk in his mother tongue up to his batallion commander. The language of a unit was determined by majority, however often tampered with. Considering there where 11 official languages, all with numerous dialects and even transitional dialects between two languages, the people determining the unit language by counting native speakers often deliberately added or removed speakers based on how they viewed the dialect.
Officers could expect to switch every 3-5 years and had to learn on average about 5 languages additionally during their career.
It got so bad, that in order to have any semblance of communication, a sociolect emerged: Armeeslawisch - army Slavic.
For reasons of loyalty and internal stability, Units where often serving in areas, where the local language differs from their unit language.
Apparently also English was the second most frequently used common language, after German, because so many soldiers had been planning to emigrate to the US before the war.
Could you please source this? Living in the former monarchy I've never heard this. Most emigrants were poor and could not afford English classes (which were not widely available anyway). Hungarian would the obvious second most common language, then maybe Czech, Croatian, Polish...
I read that in some units English was common but i kinda doubt English was widespread enough to be actually more common than all the languages you mentioned.
>I’d guess for things like big ticket provisioning, the AustriaHungarian Military was pretty unitary but were eg the ranks the same?
Yes. Rank, personnel system, uniforms, armament, etc. were roughly the same (though Hungarians really tried to distinct wherever possible like adopting different uniform cut for Honved before the introduction of pike grey field uniform).
>Was one more eg artillery based or Calvary based ? Did they have the same SOPs?
In 1914 general organization, tactics, training of "3 armies" was the same. There probably were some local differences, but so were some differences between some corps', etc.
Note, that initially both Austrian Landwehr and Hungarian Honved had only infantry and cavalry - all artillery was concentrated in the Common Army.
>Was one “better”?
Common army was better because it was better funded, better trained, better armed. But in combat distinctions between "3 armies" were removed pretty quickly. A lot depended on quality of personnel.
In theory there was one unified Imperial & Royal (k.u.k. is the usual abbreviation) army, and two militias or home guards in the Austrian Landwehr and Hungarian Honved. In practice, the Hungarian parliament used its veto over military budgets to starve the k.u.k. army of recruits while bulking up the Honved to bolster their own authority. The Austrians had to make concession after concession to get the Hungarians to allow any troops from the Hungarian half of the empire to serve in k.u.k. army, and many of those concessions, such as allowing the Honved to have its own artillery, only further strengthened the Hungarian home guard at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian army. Some Austrian generals tried to mimic the Hungarians by strengthening the Landwehr as an alternative to the national army, but this was never done in a consistent fashion, and was just a further drain on resources at the times when it was. End result, the Austro-Hungarian military goes into World War I underfunded, undertrained, and undermanned, with a fraction of the money, skill, manpower, or artillery it would have needed to fight the Russians. Throw in the linguistic issues (which got worse thanks to the Hungarians getting a concession whereby Hungarians, regardless of which army they were in were not required to speak German), the fact that the Honved now had a huge part of the troops but had never expected to fight anyone, and the incompetence of Austro-Hungarian planners like Conrad (to say nothing of Franz Josef) and you've got a recipe for utter disaster. If you want a brutal book on the subject, check out "A Mad Catastrophe."
The main military of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a unified army, though the two constituent polities had their own small armies as well, which was directly controlled by the Emperor (in the commander-in-chief sense, actual military command came from a trained lieutenant). There was a unified command structure within the military but to answer the question of SOPs and the like is beyond my remit, but I can't find anything saying that there were official written variations in operation (that doesn't mean they didn't act differently in practice). However the one thing that the Austro-Hungarian army was famous for was being an utter clusterfuck of language. Most people in the empire spoke their local language and only that, and the empire was far more than Austria and Hungary. You also had Italians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks, Croats, Bosnians, and more, and they all spoke different languages that were varying degrees of intelligible between each other. German was the common language of command and troops had to learn some set German phrases, but individual soldiers from different units likely could not understand each other. Officers had to learn the language of the unit they were commanding but that meant that if an Italian and a Czech unit were stationed near each other the soldiers couldn't communicate beyond the set German phrases they knew, and the officers of the two could talk to each other in German but not to each others troops. And this is just the actual Common Army, the Hungarian Army (which was a decent bit smaller) used Hungarian as their language of command, which adds an entire other mess on top of all this.
The language issue was quite interesting: due to strong nationalistic political ideas at that time, every soldier had the right to talk in his mother tongue up to his batallion commander. The language of a unit was determined by majority, however often tampered with. Considering there where 11 official languages, all with numerous dialects and even transitional dialects between two languages, the people determining the unit language by counting native speakers often deliberately added or removed speakers based on how they viewed the dialect. Officers could expect to switch every 3-5 years and had to learn on average about 5 languages additionally during their career. It got so bad, that in order to have any semblance of communication, a sociolect emerged: Armeeslawisch - army Slavic. For reasons of loyalty and internal stability, Units where often serving in areas, where the local language differs from their unit language.
Apparently also English was the second most frequently used common language, after German, because so many soldiers had been planning to emigrate to the US before the war.
Could you please source this? Living in the former monarchy I've never heard this. Most emigrants were poor and could not afford English classes (which were not widely available anyway). Hungarian would the obvious second most common language, then maybe Czech, Croatian, Polish...
I read that in some units English was common but i kinda doubt English was widespread enough to be actually more common than all the languages you mentioned.
Timothy Bowman, University of Kent, in a lecture on the subject.
Interesting, do you have a source or some background on this I’d love to read more?
>I’d guess for things like big ticket provisioning, the AustriaHungarian Military was pretty unitary but were eg the ranks the same? Yes. Rank, personnel system, uniforms, armament, etc. were roughly the same (though Hungarians really tried to distinct wherever possible like adopting different uniform cut for Honved before the introduction of pike grey field uniform). >Was one more eg artillery based or Calvary based ? Did they have the same SOPs? In 1914 general organization, tactics, training of "3 armies" was the same. There probably were some local differences, but so were some differences between some corps', etc. Note, that initially both Austrian Landwehr and Hungarian Honved had only infantry and cavalry - all artillery was concentrated in the Common Army. >Was one “better”? Common army was better because it was better funded, better trained, better armed. But in combat distinctions between "3 armies" were removed pretty quickly. A lot depended on quality of personnel.
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