Austrian General Staff Work Volume 3

Volume 3, The First Silesian War


This volume covers events from the Landtag at Pressburg speech of the Queen of Hungary Maria Theresa, in which she inspired Hungarians to come out in force in her favor, up to beyond the Battle of Chotusitz, which is in the area of page 600. The whole volume runs to maybe 997 pages, including appendices of almost 200 pages.

After that come the peace talks and treaty from June and July 1742, which ended the First Silesian War to allow Maria Theresa to focus on the remaining wars in the west and in Italy. The price to thus free up her hands was to hand Silesia over to Frederick, and then he pulled out of the war and left his allies to shift for themselves.

This volume is available in both the Google Books format and the archive.org format. They may or may not both work for you, depending on where you are in the world.

We have reports from the UK and the Netherlands that the archive.org version works better there for these books. In Australia something works, anyway, not sure which. I am in the US, and both work, although not all volumes seem to be available.

Another option is openlibrary, and it may also be possible to find the actual books in certain libraries or to purchase. Keep an eye out at market stalls, one may get lucky sometimes.

The actual books include full-sized maps, diagrams and tables of important data such as orders of battle, casualties, etc. Online versions may have a little of this towards the end, but typically they scanned without unfolding the sheets. Someone owning the books may be inspired to share that data with the public one day.
I own Volume 11 of the Prussian Work on the 1759 campaign and I lost the entire packet of maps!

Some links follow. There will be more later. All volumes do not seem to be available in any format, but I will post those that I can.

Austrian General Staff Work, Vol 3, Harvard version (Google Books)

Austrian General Staff Work, Vol 3, Stanford version (Google Books)

Austrian General Staff Work, Vol 3 (archive.org)


I noticed that in the archive.org version you can click for different formats. The 'read online' option appears like a book with tools to zoom, turn pages slowly, etc. In other versions it may be harder to follow where you are, but easier to get to page 600. Some readers may only have patience to get to the good part at once. Sorry about the folded-up centerfolds. There is still a lot here.

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