Common Army
The Common Army (German: Gemeinsame Armee, Hungarian: Közös Hadsereg) as it was officially designated by the Imperial and Royal Military Administration, was the largest part of the Austro-Hungarian land forces from 1867 to 1914, the other two elements being the Imperial-Royal Landwehr (of Austria) and the Royal Hungarian Honvéd.
Established on 15 March 1867 and effectively disbanded on 31 October 1918 when its Hungarian troops left, the Common Army formed the main element of the "armed power" (Bewaffneten Macht or Wehrmacht) of the new dual monarchy, to which the Imperial and Royal Navy (k.u.k.
(German: "kaiserlich und königlich", Hungarian: "császári és királyi", i.e. "Imperial and Royal") introduced in order to make the distinction clearer between the new Austrian army, the k.k.
After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 15 March 1867 the army and navy were no longer institutions of a single state, but of the new double monarchy, which was composed of two countries on an equal footing: the Empire of Austria (Cisleithania) and the no longer subordinate Kingdom of Hungary (Transleithania); the two being joined together in a real union.
Overall command still lay with the monarch who communicated with the army through the newly established Military Chancellery of His Majesty the Emperor and King.
The Austrian act of 11 April 1889 (a law with identical content was passed in Hungary),[2] which superseded the defence act of 1868, amended in 1882, stated clearly in section 2 that: The armed forces are divided into the Army, the Navy, the Landwehr and the Landsturm.In section 14 the annual recruiting quota for the Army and Navy was set at 103,000; of which 60,389 had to come from the "kingdoms and lands represented in the Reichsrat".
The quotas were to be adjusted to meet requirements every ten years by political agreement between Austria and Hungary and by associated laws.
[4] In the long period of peace during the final decades of the 19th century, the army and navy were increasingly neglected.
The monarch agreed a compromise in the 1867 accord: the two halves of the empire should be allowed their own territorial forces in addition to the common army.
Hungary immediately began to establish the Royal Hungarian Landwehr, usually called the Honvéd, even in German.
But Emperor and King Franz Joseph I mainly focused on the unity of the Army and Navy enshrined in the Compromise, and reinforced this in 1903 after further attempts by Hungary in his army order of Chlopy (a training area in Galicia):[5] True to their oath, all My armed forces are progressing down the path of serious fulfillment of their duty, imbued with that spirit of unity and harmony, which each national character respects and before which all opposition melts, by exploiting the individual attributes of each people for the sake of the greater whole .
[6]In 1898, when Archduke and heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, was entrusted by the Emperor with an analysis of the armed forces of the monarchy, the overdue need to rejuvenate its rather elderly General Staff quickly became apparent to him.
[7] The investment proposals of the heir were implemented for political reasons but only to a small extent; in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian army was far less well-equipped than the armed forces of the confederated German Empire.
After the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, in the summer of 1914 the 84-year-old Emperor appointed Archduke Friedrich as the Army's Commander-in-Chief, as he himself had no longer wanted to hold this role in wartime since 1859.
The "armed power" (Army, Navy, Landwehr, Honvéd) was under the command of the Emperor and King in his capacity as "the supreme warlord" (allerhöchster Kriegsherr).
The 30-year-old Emperor Charles I, who succeeded to the throne in the middle of the war, took the term commander very seriously and tirelessly visited the front and his troops.
As a result, the traditional relationship between a regiment and a specific place and local population could not be formed (as was promoted, for example, everywhere in the various armies of the German Empire).
After greater efforts had been made, in the years before the First World War, to build new barracks and renovate existing ones, this practice reduced markedly.
Thus, the earlier Lorenz muzzle-loading system was converted to breech-loaders based on a proposal by Vienna master gunsmith, Karl Wänzel.
Subsequently, the tabernacle lock, developed by Joseph Werndl, provided an entirely new solution in the shape of a fundamentally groundbreaking breechblock system.
The system developed by Ferdinand Mannlicher had a straight-pull bolt action and magazine of 5 cartridges in the centre of the stock.
Furthermore, a standard M1853 engineers' sabre was produced which, with its wide, heavy blade functioned more as a cutting tool than a weapon.
These were the two high caliber guns developed by Leopold Gasser: the 11mm M1870 Army revolver and, four years later, the improved model M1870/74.
In Austria-Hungary in 1890 Archduke Karl Salvator and Major Georg Ritter von Dormus developed the so-called mitrailleuse.
In the multinational state of the Imperial and Royal monarchy, German was the official, common, language of command and control.
Only a small proportion of army units spoke German exclusively; and in the navy, Italian was spoken by the majority of sailors.
