Page 303 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

303
aCta
ances” as such as well as on the basic behaviour and the use of weapons were included in the
drill regulations for the imperial and royal infantry troops of 1873.
Only in 1908 the binding regulation “Instruction concerning the demand, provision and
use of military assistances” was finally published, which remained more or less valid until
the end of the war in 1918. In this regulation a reserved position was taken as to the use of
weapons to bring about tint of all a de-escalation or dissolution of uprisings. The troops of
the military assistance should in no way have themselves provoked to use their weapons in
a careless way. Contrary to these regulations for the civil field the regulations on uprisings
within the army comprised restrictive rules, which in the case of “mutinies” or “uprisings”
demanded martial law and the use of weapon .
The provision of “military assistances” naturally depended on the available contingents
during World War i. With regard to assistance tasks during civilian uprisings, demonstrations
and strikes it became necessary to employ troops deployed in the hinterland. These troops
comprised above all the reinforcement troops of the field regiments, which had the task to
gather new recruits, convalesced as well as repatriated prisoners of war (POWs) in so-called
“march formation” - the reinforcement of the front units. Especially at the beginning of the
war the reinforcement troops of the regiments were deployed in the respective regiment
reinforcement district. During the war, however, units of Czech, Italian , Romanian or Serb
nationality were deployed outside their original garrison towns because of strong nationalist
concerns. It was thought that when “military assistances” were formed to fight unrests there,
unreliability based on nationalist reasons could be prevented therewith. Therefore, Czech
reinforcement troop were deployed above all in Hungary, German or Hungarian one in Bo-
hemia. The first great test of the “military assistances” came in January 1918 when measures
had to be taken to suppress and turn down the so- called “January strike”. The reason for
this enormous strike movement was the miserable food situation, which had reached a cata-
strophic stage, especially in the industrialized areas of the Austrian part of the Empire. The
daily flour rations for the population in the hinterland had partly sunk to 165 g of flour per
day. Strikes continued to spread to all industrial centres of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy
so that about 700,000 workers were on strike. The sudden strike wave completely surprised
both, the civil administration authorities as well as the military territorial command. With the
police and gendarmerie forces available in the hinterland the situation could not be handled
so that already in the first days of the strike hinterland formations of the armed forces were
demanded for military assistance. It became clear that in January 1918 out of the army, the
austrian Landwehr and the Hungarian Honvéd only about 330 companies were ready for as-
sistance purposes, as the soldiers to be recruited for that n purpose were to have completed
a basic education of at least nine weeks. Via the territorial commands more and more and
assistance companies were demanded by the political administration authorities. As the gar-
rison towns of the reinforcement troops were mostly not directly situated near the strike
centres, numerous movements of troops had to be carried out. In the course of the strike it
became clear that the forces present - around 700,000 workers on the one side, and about 35
to 40,000 “assistances” on the other - were barely enough. The Ministry of War considered it
especially dangerous that most of the strikes were organized ones and could not so easily be
dispersed mostly because of party-political influences. Therefore, the Ministry of War turned
to the army high command with the request to strengthen the assistance forces by employ-