Dismissal of Conrad

On 16 July 1918 the official Wiener Zeitung announced changes in the highest commands of the Austro-Hungarian army. The most important concerned Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, commander of the army group in the Tyrol. Emperor Karl I removed him from his post. The British official history and some Italian studies state that the decision was taken on 14 July, when the emperor summoned Conrad to his residence at Eckartsau. According to Austrian biographers the dismissal took effect from 15 July and was made public a day later.

At this point the British chronicle of the war calls Conrad the Austrian commander-in-chief. This is inaccurate. Conrad had been Chief of the General Staff, and in practice the army’s principal commander, since 1906, with a short break. At the beginning of March 1917 the young emperor, who had himself assumed supreme command, replaced him with General Arthur Arz von Straußenburg. Conrad, promoted to field marshal back in November 1916, was then given command of the front in the Tyrol, to which the 10th and 11th Armies were subordinated in 1918.

Scapegoat

The immediate cause of the dismissal was the defeat of the June offensive. On 15 June Conrad’s troops struck from the Asiago plateau and from the Grappa, while at the same time the armies of Field Marshal Svetozar Boroević forced the Piave. The division of forces between two army groups proved fatal. The attack in the mountains collapsed on the very first day, and a week later the Austrians also withdrew behind the Piave. According to the Austrian official history the monarchy lost about 118,000 men on the Italian front.

After the defeat people began looking for culprits both in Vienna and in Budapest, while in the army desertions multiplied, soldiers failed to return from leave, and the exhausted units were decimated by influenza and malaria. The British official history writes that Karl removed Conrad, who “was not persona grata at court”, and sacrificed him for the good of the dynasty, just as General Ludwig von Benedek had been sacrificed in 1866 after Königgrätz. The emperor had long distrusted the old field marshal, who before the war had called for a preventive war against Italy. Boroević, who had commanded on the Piave, kept his post.

Count and colonel of the guards

So that the dismissal would not look too harsh, Karl at the same time gave the 65-year-old Conrad the title of count and appointed him honorary colonel of all the bodyguards in Vienna. Command of the army group in the Tyrol was taken over on 15 July by Archduke Joseph August, until then commander of the 6th Army, which in June had fought with heavy losses on the Piave for the Montello hill. The 6th Army was taken over on 16 July by General Prince Alois Schönburg-Hartenstein.

For Conrad this was the end of a military career which had begun in 1871. He soon retired, and after the war, in the five volumes of his memoirs Aus meiner Dienstzeit, he defended his plans and argued that the monarchy had fallen because his warnings had not been heeded. He died in 1925. The change of commander changed nothing at the front. After the defeat on the Piave the Austro-Hungarian army was no longer capable of an offensive, and in October, at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, it disintegrated together with the monarchy.