Graydon Tunstall's Blood on the Snow investigates the three failed—and generally forgotten—Austro-Hungarian offensives in the Carpathian Mountains during January-April 1915. Tunstall catalogs the operations, primarily from the Austro-Hungarian perspective, and clearly shows that these ill-fated attacks accomplished little other than further decimating the mauled Habsburg army. Tunstall argues that Austrian commander General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf obstinately launched these offensives to relieve the 120,000+ Austrian troops encircled and besieged in Przemyśl but failed adequately to prepare, plan, or execute them. Harsh winter weather, rugged terrain, and underdeveloped transportation systems further complicated operational challenges and increased casualties. Ultimately, Tunstall lays the blame for the nearly 800,000 Austro-Hungarian casualties at the feet of Conrad and his devotion to the “cult of the offensive” and concludes that this was “one of the most ill-conceived campaigns of the war . . . provid[ing] a stark lesson about the negative effects of inadequate leadership” (p. 212).
Blood on the Snow describes operations in great detail, including the nearly insurmountable challenges posed by weather and terrain, both for combat formations and logistics and transportation services. Tunstall also discusses the extreme privations suffered by Austro-Hungarian troops fighting in this hostile environment with inadequate preparation and supply. He also chronicles the difficulties Austria-Hungary faced in waging war with a multiethnic conscript army that was inadequately led at all levels, a problem exacerbated by the heavy officer casualties suffered in the initial 1914 campaigns. The book also offers insight into tensions between the Central Powers with the Austrians resenting German presumption and arrogance and the Germans having virtual contempt for the Austrians. All of this is based upon admirably extensive research in both Austrian and Hungarian primary sources.
In spite of the strength of its rich detail and primary source documentation, Tunstall's work suffers from significant weaknesses. Foremost among them is the lack of analytical depth. Tunstall blames the Carpathian debacle on Austrian commander Conrad's “obsession” with liberating the encircled fortress city of Przemyśl. Yet, he also mentions the Habsburg command's desire to achieve battlefield successes to dissuade Italy and Romania from abandoning neutrality and to demonstrate Austro-Hungarian military independence, but he does not evaluate how those motives might cast Conrad's “obsession” in a considerably more favorable light. Nor does he explore the Austrian commander's doctrinal philosophy or his background nor even provide quotes illustrating Conrad's purported “obsession.” Tunstall's chapter and book conclusions offer little more than summaries with no significant attempt to put the campaign into a broader analytical or historiographical context (a fact reinforced by the almost complete absence of citations to secondary sources that might have provided this context).
Tunstall frequently leaves his rich detail incompletely processed and poorly organized; indeed, some sections read more like raw notes than a finished monograph. For example, Tunstall claims that Group Pflanzer-Baltin achieved “the only major victory of the entire Carpathian campaign” (p. 73), but he fails to explain what made this significant. On page 72, he concludes that an Austrian unit might have taken its objectives if it had had more troops, but two pages later, he notes that inadequate railways made moving and supplying troops almost impossible in this area, begging the question of how more troops would have helped. There are numerous references to the “White Death,” but nowhere is this phenomenon specifically described. Likewise Tunstall refers to the Carpathian campaign as “The Stalingrad of World War I” (p. 212) but leaves the connection unexplained (Tunstall duly credits the phrase to Holger Herwig's book on the Central Powers and World War I, but Herwig used the phrase in reference to Przemyśl's surrender, not the Carpathian offensives). Amplifying the confusion created by the inadequately explained mass of information are the few, insufficiently detailed and utterly unreferenced maps.
Blood on the Snow is poorly written. Tunstall frequently uses passive voice (e.g., stating only that a unit “received orders” without clarifying from whom and with what intent based upon what information), and mixes tenses, often writing that a unit “must hold” or “must advance.” Other examples of stylistic sloppiness include references to Group Szurmay, Corps Szurmay, and Army Group Szurmay all within five sentences (p. 47); “the single Second Army's only battle success” (p. 149); and “55,000 VIII March Battalions troops arrived” (p. 187). One paragraph (p. 56) opens by stating that Conrad became agitated at a conference with his German counterpart, General Erich von Falkenhayn, for making decisions without him, but does not explain the content or nature of the decisions before bewilderingly shifting to note that an infantry division arrived at its destination after a seventy-two-hour train ride in a snowstorm. One final example of poor (though inadvertently entertaining) writing explains that “instructions were issued to spare horses and wagons” (p. 59). Such examples are unfortunately sufficiently frequent and numerous both to generate confusion and undermine the book's credibility.
This impression is heightened by the dust jacket's hyperbole that wrongly claims that this is first English account of military operations on the Eastern Front in more than thirty years. Indiana University Press released both Timothy Dowling's Brusilov Offensive and Michael Barrett's Operation Albion in 2008. Even more surprisingly, the jacket has quotes from Dennis Showalter whose Tannenberg appeared in 1991 and Richard DiNardo whose book Breakthrough on Gorlice-Tarnow appeared earlier this year.
Overall, Blood on the Snow is useful for details on the Carpathian campaign, but it lacks the organizational and stylistic clarity, careful editing, and analytical depth that might have made it a more valuable contribution to our understanding of the Eastern Front in World War I or the twilight of the Habsburg military. Ultimately, Blood on the Snow has an unfortunate resemblance to the Carpathian Offensives: both were poorly planned and executed without sufficient attention to fundamental details.
