Armies Have Been Planning Wars for Centuries

This 19-inch-high bronze of Alexander the Great, inscribed M Amodio Napoli, sold for $5,500 at a September 2017 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

The New York Times recently wrote about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, referring to a “secret plan” to deal with the growing North Korean nuclear threat to the world.

Military historians know that armies make plans. Alexander the Great had a plan for invading the Persian Empire to kill or capture Emperor Darius. Hannibal had a plan in the Second Punic War to elude the Roman navy by using war elephants to cross the Alps into Spain. King Phillip II had a plan in 1588 to defeat England using his impressive armada.

Napoleon is occasionally derided for having a “plan of the year” to guide his activities to defeat his European enemies, which included Egypt, Austria, Italy, Prussia and even Russia. But by 1870, Napoleon II had ushered in a new era of military planning, requiring meticulous details that covered every contingency. Earlier in 1810, Prussia had founded a war academy to train officers in staff duties to expand their basic skills.

After the remarkable Prussian victories over Austria (1806) and France (1870), institutions in other countries were hastily modified to conform, most notably the French École de Guerre in 1880. There would be no equivalent in the diplomatic world. As late as 1914, the British Foreign Office was still choosing entrants on the basis of relationships with ambassadors and other cronies. Diplomacy remained an art taught in embassies and despite being dedicated to national interests, there was not a shared belief that their roles were to avoid war with skillful negotiations.

The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 had been settled chiefly by diplomacy because the crisis had been isolated to national interests, as opposed to the far trickier national honor or prestige. However, in 1914, the weakest of the European powers, Austria-Hungary, was rocked by the assassination of the heir to the throne by a subversive from Serbia. Franz Ferdinand, nephew to Emperor Franz Joseph, had traveled to Bosnia to observe routine military maneuvers. The next day, he and his wife drove to the principal capital, Sarajevo.

This was an era when heads of state were often in grave danger … a Russian Tsar, an Austrian princess and an American president all felled by fanatics or lunatics. In the case of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, it was a group of assassins lying in wait with bombs and a pistol. Someone threw a bomb that bounced off the car, exploding and only wounding an officer. Forty-five minutes later, en route to visit the wounded, the driver made a wrong turn and stopped in front of an assassin with the pistol. Gavrilo Princip stepped forward and killed both Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie.

What followed was an astonishing series of interlocking alliances and mutual pacts that fell like a row of dominos and created a world war … France to go to war on Russia’s side and vice versa if either were attacked by Germany; Britain to lend assistance to France if needed; Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy (the Triple Alliance) versus the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary).

It was a conflict of unprecedented ferocity that ended the peace and prosperity of the Victorian Era, unleashing demons of mechanized warfare and mass death. An unanswered mystery is how a civilization at the height of its achievements could propel itself into such a ruinous conflict. The answer lays hidden in the negotiations among Europe’s crowned heads (all related by blood) and their doomed efforts to diffuse the crisis. By the end of the senseless war, three great empires – the Austrian-Hungarian, the Russian, and the Ottoman – had collapsed. An unthinkable outcome.

Perhaps it is as simple as the often-overused quote by Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan … until they get punched in the mouth.”

Can you hear us Rex?

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Fate Gave Assassins Second Chance to Change the World

sophie-and-franz-ferdinand
Archduke Franz Ferdinand met Sophie Chotek at a ball in 1894. They were married in 1900 and she was granted the title Duchess of Hohenberg.

By Jim O’Neal

Gavrilo Princip was a 19-year-old student at the beginning of 1914, immersed in the study of ethics and politics. He was born to a kmet family (the Serbian version of a serf) in Austrian-controlled Bosnia and grew up in extreme poverty. Like many other young Serbs, he had grown frustrated with the conditions under the Austro-Hungarian empire and dreamed of liberating them to join the Serbian kingdom next door.

Princip chose Sunday, June 28, 1914, to stake his claim on history.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand – heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne – prepared to visit Sarajevo on that date, Princip and six other members of the Black Hand terrorist group planned his assassination. None of them had ever handled a gun and they only knew their target was in line to succeed Franz Joseph.

On the morning of June 28, as Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie climbed into the back of a black convertible sedan, the seven plotters took their positions along a parade route in the Bosnia capital. The first two assassins to encounter them lost their nerve and fled. A third lobbed a grenade toward the car and missed, striking the car behind Ferdinand’s and then bungled his own suicide by not swallowing enough cyanide.

But fate decided to give the murderers another chance.

When Ferdinand resumed the tour an hour later, his driver took a wrong turn and ended up five feet from where Princip was standing in front of a delicatessen. Princip fired two shots directly into the car, killing both Ferdinand and Sophie.

The archduke’s murder triggered a feud between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that prompted Russia to come to the aid of the Serbs. Germany decided to aid the Austrians, and France jumped in to help Russia, and England to aid Belgium (which had been overrun by German troops on the way to invade France). The politicians justified their actions by pointing to carefully worded alliances that required mutual action.

There were some superficial attempts at diplomacy, but at 10 a.m. on Aug. 2, 1914, a group of German cavalrymen attacked a French sentry post on the border town of Belfort and gunfire was exchanged.

World War I, fought over little consequence, had begun and millions would suffer.

Jim O'NielIntelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is President and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].