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Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915 by Graydon A. Tunstall Lawrence, KS: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2010 258 pages $29.95
The Eastern Front of the Great War has arguably been the poor cousin of the Western Front as the First World War has been compared with the Second, in terms of renown. Tunstall has gone much further afield in his emphasis on just the Austro-Hungarian Carpathian Winter Campaign of 1915. His work is quite concise, a mere 212 pages of text in only six chapters. The first is the "Introduction," takes about 15 percent of the space, and sets the stage for several key points. He returns to these key points throughout the text. Indeed, he reinforces them immediately and at length in the first chapter entitled "Background to the Battles," which describes the preliminary operations and preparations for the "First Offensive."
Tunstall soon establishes his focus on the Austro-Hungarian forces. He devotes considerable effort articulating the seemingly-insurmountable challenges that confronted the army of Franz Joseph. First, the author reiterates several times that the devastating losses by December 1914 had reduced the Hapsburg army to a militia. The casualties had been crippling, not merely in terms of simple numbers, but in particular among the professional officer corps, trained and educated to deal with a multi-ethnic military. Troops were increasingly older, less hardy, and lacked adequate training. In essence, the Austro-Hungarian Army suffered some 50 percent casualties overall in the opening operations...