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When it was announced that Franz Ferdinand, the Heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, would visit Bosnia to attend manoeuvres in June 1914. It fell to General Oskar Potiorek, the military governor to organise the visit.This was a task Oskar Potiorek threw himself into with an extraordinary eye for detail. He over saw all arrangements, from ensuring that the Archduke’s wine would be served ...
Bosnia and Herzegovina was a hotly disputed territory in 1914. It had been annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1910 from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, but was also claimed by neighbouring Serbia and had a growing nationalist movement that wanted it to be part of a South Slav state. The decision to send the crown prince of Austro-Hungary into such an unstable region, to attend army ...
Who ordered the hit on Franz Ferdinand?There are two basic schools of thought about the origins of the plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand. The first is that it was ordered by Colonel ‘Apis’ Dimitrijevic, the head of Serbian Intelligence, to stop Austro-Hungarian interference in the Balkans and allow Serbian expansion. The assassination was organised by his deputy Major Vojislav Tankosic;
Archduke Franz Ferdinand & Gavrilo Princip are two of the most famous names in the 20th century, but little is generally known about them other than Princip assassinated the Archduke and his wife in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914 sparking the First World War. However they both went through an extraordinary chain of events to arrive at Sarajevo.Being heir to the Habsburg throne was ...
The Gallipoli campaign was originally conceived as a naval operation that could be carried out without the use of troops, to clear the costal fortifications barring the Dardanelles Straits. The plan was to gradually reduce the Turkish defences through a systematic bombardment. The way to Russia’s warm water ports, Constantinople (Istanbul) and the backdoor the central powers would then be ...
The Dardanelles campaign in World War One was conceived as a ‘demonstration’ to relieve pressure on Russian troops, fighting in the Caucasus. It quickly developed into a means of opening the backdoor to the Central Powers and to supply the Russians through the Dardanelles, which had been closed when Turkey entered the war.The campaign was originally intended to be a naval operation. When ...
The Dardanelles campaign was intended to be a strategic masterstroke to bypass the stalemate of the Western Front. Instead it has become a byword for missed opportunity and tragedy. Perhaps the greatest of these is that it could have been avoided through a simple bribe.When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War, on the side of the Central Powers, its government was split over ...
By the third year of the First World War, France was growing increasingly war weary. Over a million men had been killed, wounded or captured, with little to show for it. Russia had had a revolution and unrest was spreading through the French Army, fanned by turmoil at home, lack of leave and German propaganda. The failure of the Nivelle Offensive was the last straw and lead to what has become
By April 1917 the Allies and the Central Powers had been locked in the stalemate of trench warfare for nearly three years. Numerous offensives had failed to break through at a terrible cost in men. New tactical and technological innovations were developed with some success. General Robert Nivelle, the French commander in chief, was convinced that he’d developed the ‘formula’ to break the ...
Gallipoli ConspiracyCaptain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, the Director of British Naval Intelligence, launched an operation to bribe members of the Ottoman Government into making peace during the First World War. Hall hoped that would open the Dardanelles Strait to the Allies, allowing them to supply Russia and bypass the stalemate on the Western front. It was, however, superseded by the ...
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was one of history’s greatest turning points, but it happened by accident. Everyone knows the story ends with the death of the Archduke and his wife, Sophie, putting into play the diplomatic crisis that led to the First World War. It is perhaps less well known that the events leading up to the assassination were a terrible comedy of errors that ...
Author Interview
Alan Bardos, what prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in?My first book The Assassins is set just before the First World War and is about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I chose that period because the events ...
Graham Hurley your new novel The Blood of Others, is a thriller about the disastrous raid on Dieppe in August 1942. What was it that drew you to the story?A while ago, as a documentary producer with ITV, I made a series of revisionist films to mark various WW2 anniversaries. The first of them, Comrades in ...