Serbian War Aims and Military Strategy, 1914–1918глава из книги
Аннотация: The Austro-Hungarian declaration of war of 28 June 1914 found both the Serbian government and the General Staff completely unprepared for a major military conflict.In that summer, after spectacular military successes in the Balkan wars (1912-1913), Serbia was still recovering from the enormous financial effort and considerable losses in manpower and military equipment.Although Serbia was on the way to becoming a regional political hub with considerable prestige among South Slavs of Austria-Hungary, her political and military leaders had no plans for armed confrontations in the foreseeable future: tens of thousands of soldiers wounded in the Balkan Wars were still recovering in hospitals and there were shortages of war materiel.After all exports had ceased and the procurement of war materiel doubled expenditure on imports, state revenues had dropped sharply.The total cost of the Balkan Wars, was about one billion francs. 1 Moreover, Serbia needed a substantial period of peace and stability, not only for restoring the agricultural production drained by military campaigns, but also for fully integrating the newly-acquired territories in the south: Old Serbia and Macedonia.Serbia had almost doubled her territory -by an additional 39,000 km 2 , containing some 1,290,000 inhabitants, including often hostile Albanian and Bulgarian minorities.The New Territories were labouring under an Ottoman legacy of a backward feudal-type economy and lacked the rule of law and political liberties. 2 After peace had been restored by the Conference of Ambassadors in London and the Treaty of Bucharest of 10 August 1913, Serbia's immediate concern was to repel frequent Albanian armed incursions from Albania into Kosovo and Bulgarian comitadjis into eastern Macedonia.Apart from the impending border delimitation with Albania, the only (secret) plans on the table in early 1914 were for the merging of two Serb kingdoms, Serbia and Montenegro, into a real union with common military, customs and diplomatic structures. 3 As for any eventual war planning, the delicate international situation, together with the sharpening internal conflict between military pressure groups and the democratically elected gov-1 Cf.
Год издания: 2015
Авторы: Dušan T. Bataković
Издательство: De Gruyter
Источник: De Gruyter eBooks
Ключевые слова: Balkan and Eastern European Studies, Balkans: History, Politics, Society, Military History and Strategy
Открытый доступ: hybrid
Страницы: 79–94