Austrian Infantry Regiments by region

 In the time I was waiting for the Hat Austrian sets to come out I dug into any information I could find about the Austrian army, the most relevant parts of which I have stored in the Excel file that has all my plastic soldier inventory and OOB.

The geography of the Austrian Army’s units was one of these subjects.  Managing a multi-ethnic/lingual army presented certain challenges to the Habsburgs; from basic issues of communication to more complicated considerations like moral and level of interest/investment in (or in the case of their Polish subjects of Galicia in 1809, outright opposition to) the Habsburg’s interests/continued rule over them.  From what I understand, the Polish units serving in the Austrian army suffered much higher desertion and surrender/capture rates than regiments of the other Habsburg regions.  In the Polish theater these men helped swell the Duchy of Warsaw’s new army, but in the the main Hauptarmee this higher attrition rates are noticeable.

Looking at the Infantry Regiments it is interesting to see how heavily the Hapsburg army relied on their non-German and non-Hungarian populations.  Inner & Ober Austrian together account for less of the infantry regiments than less reliable Galicia, while the Bohemians & Moravians/Silesia (which I see I misspelled in the above chart) provided almost 40% of the regiments.  Meanwhile Hungary-proper provides only 7 regiments, less the the 2 other “Hungarian” regions together do.  The Hungarian nobility and their historic privileges severely limited their contribution to the Habsburg’s military.  

It was rare in 1809 for regiments from different regions to be brigaded together for obvious reason, but it happened. This included brigading Ober Austrian IR #45 de Vaux with the Hungarian IR #32 Esterhazy in the VI Korps; a rarity of “German” and “Hungarian” regiments in the same brigade.

Of further interest is the mix of Korps IRs

I Korps; 6 Bohemian & 1 Moravian 

III Korps; 5 Moravian & 2 Galician 

VI Korps; 2 Ober Austrian, 1 Slovak & 2 Transylvanian 

V Korps; 2 Galician & 2 Moravian