Background
Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf was born in Penz¬ing, near Vienna, on November 11, 1852, the son of an Austrian colonel.
Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf was born in Penz¬ing, near Vienna, on November 11, 1852, the son of an Austrian colonel.
Conrad graduated from the Theresa Military Academy in 1871, and five years later was assigned to the General Staff.
He took part in various campaigns in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Dalmatia in 1878, 1879, and 1882, while officially with the army's cartography department. In 1886 he was appointed instructor in tactics at the War Academy in the grade of major. Next came field command: 1895-1899 as colonel commander of the First Infantry Regiment ("Kaiser"), 1899 as brigadier in Trieste, and 1903 as division chief in Innsbruck. It was in Trieste that Conrad, an ardent champion of the House of Habsburg, developed an intense dislike of Italian Irredentism and hence distrust of the third member of the Triple Alliance. It was also here that he met the heir apparent, Archduke Francis Ferdinand (q.v.), who helped Conrad acquire the post of chief of the General Staff in November 1906. During the next five years, Conrad sought to update the antiquated Habsburg forces, especially the artillery. His distrust of the Italians as well as his belief that the only solution to the South Slav problem rested in a preemptive strike against Serbia brought him into open conflict with Emperor Francis Joseph (q.v.) and Foreign Minister Count A. L. von Aehrenthal in 1911. When Conrad called for a preemptive strike against Italy during the Tripolitanian War that year he was asked to resign. However, new Balkan problems in 1912 again brought him the post of chief of the General Staff. In August 1910, Conrad had been raised into the nobility.
The outbreak of the war in 1914, which Conrad had desired at all costs, placed a heavy burden upon him one that he was not able to master. His armies had to absorb the brunt of the Russian attack in Galicia in order to permit the Germans to score a quick victory in France, as dictated by the Schlieffen plan. Conrad established his headquarters at Teschen, in Austrian Silesia, far removed from the realities of battle, where his staff lived in luxurious isolation with uniformed lackeys, candlelit dinners, and female company. All this might have been forgiven a victorious commander. Conrad, on the other hand, began the war with a colossal blunder: at the last moment he ordered General Oskar Potiorek s (q.v.) Second Army from Serbia to Galicia; this force, according to Winston Churchill (q.v.), left Potiorek before it could win him a victory; it returned to Conrad in time to participate in his defeat" at Lemberg. In fact, Conrad s forces had to retreat to the Dunajec and, in addition to suffering 350,000 casualties, had to clear almost all of Austrian Galicia, thereby seriously endangering the German flank in southern Poland. Conrad finally managed to halt the Russian "steam roller" at Limanowa-Lapanow, but only after the Germans had routed two Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. While Conrad spent the winter months of 1914 in defensive positions in the Carpathian Mountains enduring the sarcastic barbs of German commanders in the east, Potiorek in December was defeated by the Serbs.
Early in 1915 Conrad sought to extricate himself from this series of setbacks with a bold offensive, breaking the Russian lines at Gorlice-Tarnow on May 2, and regaining all the territory lost the previous fall. Yet even in victory there was little to cheer: the campaign had been only nominally under Conrad's command, with power being exercised by General Erich von Falkenhayn through Germany's eastern commanders, Field Marshal August von Mackensen and General Hans von Seeckt (qq.v.). Neither did victory over Serbia in October 1915 proceed smoothly: two strong Bulgarian armies, the German Eleventh Army (Gallwitz), and the Austro-Hungarian Third Army under General Hermann Kovess (q.v.) defeated the Serbs, while a belated Entente bid to help Belgrade by landing an expeditionary force in Salonika was checked by Bulgarian forces. Once again Conrad had been the nominal commander of the operation; and once more the Germans had bypassed him and dealt directly with Field Marshal von Mackensen.
Rebuffed by General von Falkenhayn in his bid for a knock-out blow against Italy in the Trentino, Conrad early in 1916 decided to go it alone. On May 15 two Austro-Hungarian armies attacked across the high plain of Lavarone-Folgaria; by June 17 Conrad had to admit defeat, break off the offensive, and shuttle his troops to the eastern front, where General Aleksei Brusilov (q.v.) had attacked in force on June 4. Conrad's gamble in the Trentino had enabled Brusilov to advance almost at will, and only the timely intervention of nine German divisions prevented the total collapse of the Austro-Hungarian forces. Quickly on the heels of this catastrophe came news on August 27, 1916, that Rumania had entered the war on the side of the Entente; while General Arz von Straussenburg (q.v.) held the passes in Transylvania, two German armies (Falkenhayn and Mackensen) defeated the Rumanians, occupied Bucharest, and forced the remaining enemy units to withdraw behind the Sireth River in Moldavia. These developments did little to bolster Conrad's standing: in Vienna on June 29 he was attacked for the first time in a crown council, and by September 13 the Germans had forced a unified command agreement on Austria-Hungary whereby the German emperor, acting through Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (q.v.), assumed command of the allied forces on all fronts. On March 1, 1917, Emperor Charles (q.v.) relieved Conrad von Hotzendorf as chief of the General Staff owing to his inability to play a subordinate role to the emperor, to his desire to pursue the war, and to his failure to achieve victory. At first set upon retirement, Conrad agreed after a personal plea by the monarch to accept appointment as commander of the South Tyrolean Army Group.
In May and June 1918, Conrad launched his last major offensive, a thrust from the South Tyrolean Alps into the Venetian plain, designed to take the Italian army in the flank. But once again, Conrad's plans looked better on paper than in practice; British and French troops halted the advance on the Piave River, where Entente air power destroyed Conrad's pontoon bridges. Emperor Charles dismissed Conrad in July 15, 1918. In the grade of field marshal since 1916, Conrad assumed the colonelcy of the imperial guards during the last year of the war; he retired from military life on December 1, 1918, rewarded with an earldom, to write his memoirs. Conrad died in Bad Mergentheim, Württemberg, on August 25, 1925, and was laid to rest in Vienna-Hietzing.
Conrad's legacy as a commander remains controversial, with earlier historians regarding him as a military genius, while more recent works characterize him as an utter failure. In military matters, Conrad emphasized the importance of aggressive, well-trained infantry and the strategic and tactical offensive. But historian Gunther E. Rothenberg argued that his unrealistically grandiose plans disregarded the realities of terrain and climate, and that the plans which he drew up frequently underestimated the power of the enemy and the potential of quick-firing artillery forces. Conrad also refused to take responsibility for the start of the war, or for Austria-Hungary's defeat, arguing that he "had been just a military expert'" with no voice in the key decisions".
Quotes from others about the person
As Gunther Rothenberg has put it: "On paper Conrad's plans always had an almost Napoleonic sweep, though he often lacked the resolution to carry them out and also forgot that he did not have the instruments to execute them."