Austro-Hungarian military mission in Persia
The Austro-Hungarian military mission in Persia was concerned with the establishment of a military unit in Persia from 1879, which is considered part of the efforts to reform the Persian army under Nāser ad-Din Shah and to establish a standing army in Persia. The formation to be established should have the strength of a corps .
Founding history
A corps is a large military unit that consists of several branches of service. The establishment of the corps set up by the Austro-Hungarian military mission was part of a process of modernization of the Persian armed forces that was implemented with the help of Austrian military experts.
Due to the good relations of the first interpreter of Nāser ad-Din Shah , the Armenian Mirza Dawud (David) Khan, to the Austrian court in Vienna and the connections of his former personal doctor, Jakob Eduard Polak , Nāser al-Dīn Shahs became Austrian on the second trip to Europe Officers recruited to reorganize the Persian army. The arrival of Nāser al-Dīn Shah in Vienna on July 5, 1878 was like a true folk festival. Johann Strauss had composed a Persian national anthem on behalf of the Viennese court in order to receive the guest appropriately. The hymn is performed today under the title "Persian March".
First, Nāser al-Dīn Shah visited the Vienna arsenal to see the guns developed by Major General Uchatius . The Shah was apparently so impressed that he immediately ordered 12 guns. He also bought 26,000 rifles and agreed with the Austrian government to send a military mission. One certain Colonel Adalbert Schönowsky of Schönwies head of the mission, on 29 October 1878, 30 additional officers to Tehran departed. On November 12, 1878 the mission had arrived in Tarnopol , where military bandmaster i. R. Julius Gebauer joined the mission with the instruments he had bought in Vienna for a Persian musical train. The 14 participants in the mission then traveled by train to Odessa with luggage weighing 2.4 tons , by ship to Poti , again by train to Tbilisi , from there to Baku and across the Caspian Sea to Rasht . The mission arrived in Tehran in January 1879. The mission was accompanied by Albert Joseph Gasteiger Baron von Ravenstein and Kobach , who had already served the Shah for several years in Persia.
The task of the mission was to reorganize the Persian army on the model of the Austro-Hungarian army . The first thing to do was to set up a corps of 7,000 men in total, including a musical train. The training of the soldiers should be completed by March 1881. The Austrians managed to get the Persian soldiers of the corps paid better than the other soldiers; and that the salary was paid regularly. In spite of attacks by the clergy against the unbelievers, a corps spirit evidently soon developed which seemed to make the training a success.
On May 22, 1879, Nāser al-Dīn Shah visited the corps established by the Austro-Hungarian military mission for the first time. He was greeted with a Radetzky march, held a parade and visited the barracks of Abd ol-Asim, which he had obviously never seen in such a clean condition. The good mood of the Austrian officers was, however, clouded by the fact that Russian officers arrived in May 1879 and set up a Persian Cossack brigade . The fact that in the end the Persian Cossack Brigade outstripped the corps built up by the Austrians and later formed the core of the Iranian army may have been due to Reza Khan, who later became Reza Shah Pahlavi .
However, everything still looked like the Austro-Hungarian military mission would be successful. At the end of July 1879, the corps had a staff of 90 officers and 1,400 men. In January 1880 the head of the mission, Schönowsky, was recalled and replaced by Colonel Schemel v. Kühnritt, a former regimental commander of the Kuk hussar regiment "Friedrich Leopold of Prussia" No. 2 , replaced. In May the corps consisted of 2,000 men who were armed with Austrian uniforms and weapons. In April 1880 there were already 260 officers and 6,000 men who were serving in the “Austrian Corps”.
Persian army
The plans for the Persian army were as follows with a total strength of a corps of 7,000 men:
- 6 battalions of infantry with 800 men each
- 1 battalion of hunters with 800 men
- 3 batteries (artillery) with 200 men each
- 1 genius company (pioneers) with 200 men
- 3 music corps with 50 men each
Mission history
The first deployment of the "Austrian Corps" took place in October 1880. In Azerbaijan , under the leadership of Sheikh Ubeydallah, there was an uprising by the Kurds against the central government in Tehran. The commander of the detachment Captain Wagner was v. Wetterstädt, who already served in Mexico under Maximilian I and was battle-tested. The uprising was put down. Captain Wagner stayed in Urmia with the artillery to defend it against further attacks.
The successes of the “Austrian Corps” led to further plans. The entire army was to be given Austrian uniforms and armed with new rifles and artillery pieces. But nothing came of this because Nāser al-Dīn Shah lacked the necessary resources. In May, 1881, the corps' pay was reduced and on August 5, 1881, all officers resigned. The end of the "Austrian Corps" had come. In the autumn of 1881 the last officer of the military mission returned to Austria.
Wagner v. Wetterstädt returned to Austria in 1881 and retired as a major from the Austrian army in 1885 . At the request of Naser-al-Din Shah, Wagner v. Wetterstädt returned to Persia in 1886 and entered the Persian army with the rank of general . He continued to build the army and received the title of Khan. As commander of the army, he led numerous missions and accompanied the Shah to the World Exhibition in Paris in 1889. He only returned to his home in Transylvania in 1901 for health reasons, where he died on September 30, 1902 in Sibiu .
Further development
After lengthy negotiations, Nāser al-Dīn Shah succeeded in recruiting Austrian officers to continue the army reform. This time they went to Iran “on their own account” and were no longer part of an official military mission. As a tribute to the work previously done by the Austrians, the entire army consisting of 10,000 men was equipped with Austrian uniforms and 8,000 new rifles were purchased in January 1882. In 1883 and 1888 several mountain cannons and 20 heavy artillery were added. In Bremerhaven a warship with 6 cannons was ordered and named “Persepolis”. With this ship, Nāser al-Dīn Shah wanted to control the Persian Gulf. The ship was to be manned by a German crew. Since the necessary financial resources were lacking, the construction of the Persian Navy was initially stopped again.
In 1885 a military academy was founded in Tehran , at which the Austrian officers of the Persian army stationed in Tehran served as teaching staff in addition to their military duties. In 1886 Persian cadets were sent to Vienna for further training, and in 1887 Nāser al-Dīn Shah turned to Emperor Franz Josef via the Austrian ambassador with a request for further support in the army reform. An Austrian general should travel to Persia, inspect the troops, lead another Austrian military mission and receive the status of the Persian defense minister. Franz-Josef turned it down because he feared problems with Russia. But he sent General v. Thommel as ambassador to Tehran, who after a brief inspection did not consider the further military support of Persia to be worthwhile and who considered Persia insignificant from a military-strategic point of view. This initially ended the Austrians' official military engagement in Persia.
Austrian officers were also recruited as instructors under Mozaffar ad-Din Shah , the successor to Naser al-Din Shah. On August 7, 1906, Captain Artur Kostersitz von Marenhorst and Major dR Conrad Emil Padowetz arrived in Tehran. Padowetz left Tehran after two years and went to Geneva as honorary consul. Kostersitz, the last Austrian officer in the Persian service, was head of the military academy until it closed in 1911. The graduates were taken over by the Persian gendarmerie , which was newly founded in 1911 . Kosteritz stayed in Tehran until shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.
At that time the Persian army nominally consisted of 72 infantry regiments with 600 men each. The recruits came exclusively from rural areas, as the inhabitants of the cities were exempt from military service. According to the Defense Act, each village was obliged to provide a certain number of soldiers. Conscription lasted between five and twenty years. However, after a few months of basic training, the conscripts could leave the army for an indefinite period in return for paying a bribe to the regimental commander. Those who could not raise money worked on the side to earn an income. The soldiers received neither pay nor food. New uniforms were only issued every two to three years. The weapons were kept in arsenals and only given out for military exercises. Many soldiers had not fired a single shot, which was rarely followed by target practice. Military training of whatever kind took place no more than twice a week. The army officers were usually landowners. Many of them only owed this position to their social position. The officers often had no military training or any other relevant training. Most of them could neither read nor write. Some officers also ran shops in the bazaar to supplement their income. Between 100 and 500 soldiers were stationed in a garrison. Twice a year the War Department dispatched inspectors to the garrisons to check the number of soldiers on the pay lists. When an inspection was announced, all soldiers on the pay list were called up at short notice. To compensate for failures, day laborers were hired for the inspection day, who, armed with rifles and uniforms, lined up with the regular soldiers. The inspectors usually confirmed the presence of all men listed and drove back to Tehran after lunch in the regimental commander's house. In addition to the infantry, there was also an artillery consisting of 16 units. They had 60 heavy Uchatius guns made in Austria and 30 Schneider Creusot high-speed guns, which, apart from a few guns, were stored in the arsenal because nobody could operate them. Some guns had been loaned to the gendarmerie. The artillery did not have its own horses. When an artillery exercise was scheduled in Tehran, horses were borrowed from cabs.
In the state described in detail by Hassan Arfa , the Persian army was ultimately not ready to fight. Even in the conflicts that broke out in Iran after the First World War between the central government in Tehran and separatist movements in the west and north of Iran, the army no longer played a significant role. The suppression of the separatist movements was mainly done by the Persian Cossacks under the leadership of Reza Khan.
From the Persian army until its dissolution by the army reform carried out by Reza Khan, the later Reza Shah Pahlavi , from 1921 onwards, only the uniforms that some generals wore until after the end of the First World War and the yellow paint of the Persian barracks remain .
As the only member of the first Austro-Hungarian military mission of 1879, the military bandmaster Julius Gebauer remained in Tehran until his death. On his tombstone in the Dulab cemetery in southern Tehran you can read:
“This is where Julius Gebauer, General and Music Director, born. March 18, 1846, d. July 9, 1895 "
literature
- Reinhard Pohanka, Ingrid Thurner: The Khan from Tyrol. Albert Joseph Gasteiger, Baron von Ravenstein and Kobach, diplomat, engineer and explorer at the Persian court (1823–1890). Österreichischer Bundesverlag, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-215-06593-2 , pp. 76-90.
- Helmut Slaby: Bindenschild and Sun Lion. The history of the Austrian-Iranian relations up to the present. Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz 1982, ISBN 3-201-01192-4 , pp. 146–206.