The Carpathian campaign of 1915, described by some as the
"Stalingrad of the First World War," engaged the million-man armies
of Austria-Hungary and Russia in fierce winter combat that drove
them to the brink of annihilation. Habsburg forces fought to rescue
130,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers trapped by Russian troops in
Fortress Przemysl, but the campaign was waged under such adverse
circumstances that it produced six times as many casualties as the
number besieged. It remains one of the least understood and most
devastating chapters of the war-a horrific episode only glimpsed
previously but now vividly restored to the annals of history by
Graydon Tunstall.
The campaign, consisting of three separate and ultimately doomed
offensives, was the first example of "total war" conducted in a
mountainous terrain, and it prepared the way for the great battle
of Gorlice-Tarnow. Habsburg troops under Conrad von Htzendorf faced
those of General Nikolai Ivanov, which together totaled more than
two million soldiers. None of the participants were psychologically
or materially prepared to engage in prolonged winter mountain
warfare, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered from
frostbite or succumbed to the "White Death." Tunstall reconstructs
the brutal environment-heavy snow, ice, dense fog, frigid winds-to
depict fighting in which a man lasted on average between five to
six weeks before he was killed, wounded, captured, or committed
suicide. Meanwhile, soldiers warmed rifles over fires to make them
operable and slaughtered thousands of horses just to ward off
starvation.
This riveting depiction of the Carpathian Winter War is the
first book-length account of that vicious campaign, as well as the
first English-language account of Eastern Front military operations
in World War I in more than thirty years. Based on exhaustive
research in Vienna's and Budapest's War Archives, Tunstall's
gripping narrative incorporates material drawn from eyewitness
accounts, personal diaries, army logbooks, and correspondence among
members of the high command.
As Tunstall shows, the roots of the Habsburg collapse in Russia
in 1916 lay squarely in the winter campaign of 1915. Packed with
insights from previously unexploited primary sources, his book
provides an engrossing read-and the definitive account of the
Carpathian Winter War.
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