August 1912 – January 1913
The Great War opened with several bold, perhaps foolhardy, moves. The Quadruple Alliance had pinned most of its hopes of victory upon The Austrian offensive through Wallonia towards Paris – it was hoped this would knock the mighty French Army out of the war, allowing Austria to shift its entire focus Eastward towards Russia. The Entente meanwhile pinned their hopes upon a general Russian offensive and an Italian invasion of Lombardy removing pressure upon France.
The Western Front
The Battle on the Western Front was not nearly as decisive as Austrian commanders had hoped. Despite major victories in August the Austrian were beaten back from their advance on Paris in September at the Battle of Noyon. Through October and November the Austrians then launched another offensive and at great cost took control of the key French cities of Lille (the second largest industrial concentration in France), Dunkirk (the base of the French Channel Fleet) and Calais (the main ferry route between Britain and France).
For an army that planned to receive a large scale attack from a more powerful foe the French army seemed totally unprepared for the Austrian attack in August 1914. Under the seemingly incompetent command of General Faidherbe the French army was a shambles. The Armee du Nord included 1,000,000 men and was faced with the Heeresgruppe Nord who had twice that number. Yet what should have been a hard battle for the Austrians turned into an utter rout. After facing a significant defeat in the centre of his Front Faidherbe, fearing an Austrian breakthrough that would leave his army exposed to encirclement, began to withdraw his army deeper into Wallonia. However the constant pressure of the Austrian advance coupled with a totally ineffective system of communications left what was supposed to be a strategic withdrawal as a confused amble. At least 100,000 French soldiers were captured during this period whilst those that did avoid the Austrians were left scattered and unorganised.
Had Heeresgruppe Nord advanced more aggressively, as its command Marshal von Falkenhayn had wished, the Austrian flag might have flown above Paris by the start of September. Yet a French counterattack into Alsace-Lorraine left High Command in a panic. They knew fine well that by advancing so deep into French territory the army’s supply lines were dangerously exposed and overstretched, Falkenhayn lost weeks worth of advance due to orders calling for caution. However it is also arguable that had Falkenhayn had his way the entire Heeresgruppe Nord might have been lost and Austria separated from the best part of her army.
On August 10th Britain entered the war on the side of the Entente and quickly sent the BEF across the Channel in hopes of saving France from destruction. The following day Scandinavia entered the war. The delays in the Austrian advance allowed the French and their newly arrived British allies the time required to muster a resistance to the Austrian advance on Paris and on September 12th around 1,300,000 Entente troops engaged 1,700,000 Austrians at the Battle of Noyon.
Between September 12th and the 24th the Battle of Noyon raged. The French fought for the survival of their nation, the British for the freedom of their comrades and the Austrians for total victory. A defeat for the Entente meant the fall of Paris and almost certainly the fall of France, a victory would save the city and the war effort. The Battle was amongst the most bloody and certainly the most decisive of the entire War and was the first example of the human wave tactics that would be used so extensively throughout the war on the Western Front. The Entente invested everything they could afford into this one offensive and convincingly trounced their Germanic opponents as they were forced to withdraw from the battle and abandon hopes of taking Paris in 1914. Around 400,000 Entente soldiers and 350,000 Austrian soldiers died during the 12 day Battle.
Following Noyon the two armies began to form a series of trenches, especially in the area closest to Paris. However the Austrians were able to muster the troops to continue their offensives – this time towards the Channel. Having drawn so much towards Noyon to save Paris the French defense of French Flanders was extremely weak – most of the troops were tired troops from the Battles for Wallonia and newly conscripted greens. Taking advantage of this weakness the Austrians attacked with around 800,000 men (most unused during Noyon) and slowly made their advance towards the coastline. By the fall of Calais on December 3rd (around 2 months after the start of the advance) both the Entente and Austria had trebled the number of troops in the theatre and had suffered around 600,000 losses between them (the majority of those losses being Austrian).
With both armies suffering appalling casualties and neither side securing a decisive advantage both settled into their trenches and prepared for the Spring.
Italian Front
There is a moral to be found somewhere in the Italian Offensive of 1914. Perhaps that moral is that Italy should never attempt a major military operation – it will only end in disaster.
Italy had had assurances from France that some sort of attack would take place in the Alpine Front (French troops did outnumber the Austrians 2-1 there). However early success of Austria to the North quickly ended any hopes of a French attack as their men were sent streaming towards the Western Front. It was reckoned that in order to be sure of victory in the Alps the attacker would require 3 times as many men as the defender, neither Austria nor France wished to risk attacking the other’s Alpine fortifications without those numbers and neither had them.
The Austrian Esercito Lombardia was 1,000,000 men strong, the entire Italian army was 1,500,000 men strong and that included their reserve army. Hopes of a quick liberation of Lombardy (a land totally opposed to unification with the South) were never based on facts and realism but rather emotions and fantasy. The Austrian commander Marshal Volta had been given strict instructions to avoid advancing into Italian territory (High Command wished to keep its commitments in the Italian theatre light) but his utter annihilation of the Italian army between August and early September convinced him to advance without orders and seize the Italian border forts. Now without a defensive line to fall back on the withering Italian army was highly exposed to Austrian attack. Initially High Command had wished to remove Volta for disobeying order, however being the only ethnic Italian in the Austrian Army to hold the title of Marshal gave him political protection from any such dismissal.
Black Sea Front
The Battle for the Black Sea went largely as was expected. The Russian Black Sea Fleet was confined to its harbours, the Crimea was safe behind its defences, the 4 Greek cities of Circassia were under siege but safe (supplied by the Greek Navy and guarded by fortifications), the Circassian countryside had been largely abandoned with only token Greek resistance and the Caucus line (a line of powerful forts between Cricassia and Pontus through the Caucuses) was simply too strong for Russia to contemplate an attack.
The Eastern Front
In the Eastern Front the Russian Army had preformed above all expectations. Following defeat in their defence of Riga in August and the worrying Polish defeat at Kowel much of the German army was shifted away from Prussia to prevent Poland from collapsing. This in turn left Prussia exposed to the Russian invasion in September and October.
The Polish plan of quickly occupying Ruthenia was initially very successful as in just two weeks the country’s two largest cities (Premzyl and Lvov) fell. However on August 23rd disaster struck.
At the Battle of Kowel a full ½ of the entire Polish Army was killed or captured as the Russians launched a large scale invasion of Poland. With its own armies in tatters the Poles sent a plea to their Austrian and German allies, 100,000s of troops from those two armies soon moved into Poland to shore up the front.
However following the loss of Riga the Germans had pulled back into East Prussia (leaving their non-German Baltic lands). Only the Prussian Army, the most elite fighting force on earth, defended the Eastern outpost of Germanic culture in Europe.
A Russian Army thrice the size of the Prussian Army launched an invasion of East Prussia in mid-September, having been halted in Poland.
The two sides met at the crucial Battle of Tannenberg. Facing such a numerically superior force Max Hoffman (General of the Prussian Army) would have been required to show outstanding command to save his army. That was something he lacked and the Prussian Army was utterly destroyed.
Around half of the Prussian Army was captured by the Russians, the cream of Germany’s officer core and ground troops were now lost. Over the course of the next couple of weeks the Russians went on to seize the psychologically significant cities of Konigsberg and Memel.
On October 4th Marshal Hindenburg was lured out of retirement after the German Kaiser sent a personal plea to his former General to come to save the Northern Reich. Hindenburg was given command of the remnants of the Prussian Army, much of the Reserve Army and around 100,000 Austrian soldiers with which he was tasked with preventing the Russians from taking advantage of their victory in East Prussia and pushing deeper in German lands (and therefore outflanking Quadruple Alliance forces in Poland). Hindenburg atleast ended hopes of Russian advances by defeating them at the Battle of Elbing between October 19th and 22nd.
The Rest of the World
Elsewhere the Jutland Peninsula was taken over the course of a couple of weeks in August. The Italians advanced around 100 miles into Egypt from Libya before being forced to stop having outrun their supply lines. In East Africa both British and French colonies were occupied. Britain also saw their lands in India and Patagonia occupied by soldiers loyal to Vienna. However in the wide front between the opposing sides in Central Africa and South West Africa there was little fighting. Many skirmishes took place but no real effort was made to launch an invasion.