History RaeTold

 The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; or, How a Shower of Incompetent Idiot Teenagers Changed the Course of world History forever

I’m sure you all learned in school that WWI was started with a single shot, when Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot and killed, sparking a chain reaction of events that would begin the biggest war in history. What is less widely publicised is that it was actually started by TWO shots, in what was the biggest, most idiot-riddled clusterfuck of an assassination in history. 

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not only a mediocre Glaswegian indie rock band (that’s the only joke I’ll make about that. It’s cheap and tacky and I apologise), he was also the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, famously one of history’s most boring empires. He was married to a noblewoman called Sophie, who his uncle (the Emperor) deeply disapproved of because she wasn’t noble ENOUGH (so not, like, his cousin or something). They handled this by being petty and passive aggressive, making Sophie enter the room last at parties and sitting her at the worst table, much like you would when your mate brings their shit girlfriend to your wedding. They also disinherited Franz and Sophie’s children for having filthy only-slightly-noble blood, but Franz ignored all of this because he was so deeply in love with Sophie (which was pretty uncommon at the time, where most noble marriages were political unions). Adorably, our boy Franz was quite the romantic.

He was also super racist.

As with most empires, there were large chunks of people who weren’t happy with the whole situation. One such chunk was the Serbs, who were dicked on endlessly by their Austrian overlords and pretty much everyone else, purely for being Serbs. So a group of them, known hilariously as the Black Hand Gang, led by a Bosnian Serb called Danilo Ilic, decided they were going to assassinate someone. 

They hadn’t decided who yet, but gosh darn it they were going to do an assassination.

Bear with me, because I am about to bombard you with a lot of names and most of them are going to be Serbian and loads of them are really similar and you’re going to get hella lost.

The initial plan was to assassinate Bosnian Governor Oskar Potiorek, so they sent a carpenter-slash-assassin called Muhamed Mehmedbašić to go sort him. While travelling to Bosnia-Herzegovina from France to do the assassinate, the police searched Mehmedbašić’s train for entirely unrelated reasons and he panicked and threw all his assassin gear out of the window.

This is just the beginning of the cacophony of utter incompetence that eventually triggered the biggest war in history.

When he finally got to Bosnia, Ilic summoned him and was like “look bro, we changed our minds for some reason; we’re going to assassinate Franz Ferdinand instead” and Mehmedbašić was like “yeah dude, whatever, that’s totally fine. I’m not picky about who I kill as long as I get to kill SOMEONE”. They then recruited a bunch of literal teenagers to join in their assassinating gang, and they were called (brace yourselves for this) Vaso Cubrilovic, Cvjetko Popovic, Trifko Grabez, Nedeljko Cabrinovic (not to be confused with Cubrilovc, who was an entirely different man) and Gavrilo Princip.

Remember all of these names because there will be a test later.

So this rag-tag team of endlessly named teens all prepared themselves for glory. They armed themselves with bombs and guns and suicide pills, and placed themselves at intervals along the route Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade would take when he visited Sarajevo. Ferdinand was actually warned in advance that there were plans to kill him, but he went ahead with this trip anyway, in an open-topped car, because he was an idiot. This is on you, Franz.

However, he very nearly didn’t have anything to worry about, because all of his assassins were raging fucking morons. Mehmedbašić, the first assassin (who you may remember as the guy who previously chucked all his stuff out a train window for no reason) stood there, holding a bomb, and did absolutely nothing. Cubrilovic (not Cabrinovic), who was next, also did nothing, despite having a bomb and also a gun.

So far so useless, lads.

Then they reached Cabrinovic (not Cubrilovic) who, to give him credit, didn’t just stand there like a glaikit twit. He threw his bomb at the car. But obviously, because the Black Hand Gang was a complete shower of fuckwits, the bomb bounced off the back of the car, rolled under the vehicle behind, didn’t go off for a while due to the timed detonator, then finally explored, injuring a couple of people but killing no one. Having thrown his bomb, Cabrinovic took his suicide pill like a good conspirator and flung himself into the Miljacka River.

Unfortunately, the cyanide pills they’d been given were super old, so they just made him throw up a bunch. And due to it being summer, the river was only 13cm deep. So there’s Cabrinovic (not Cubrilovic), lying face-down in five inches of water, damp and vomming but very much not dead. As he was beaten by the crowd and dragged away by the police, he shouted “I am a Serbian hero”, which feels bold for a wet, vomiting man who has just failed to kill literally anyone, including himself.

Stunned by this act of utter incompetence, the following three assassins followed the earlier trend and stood there, doing nothing. So, somehow, Cabrinovic (not Cubrilovic) was the least useless of the lot. Good work all round from the Black Hand Gang.

But this is where things get really wild.

Obviously, following the very loose assassination attempt, they rerouted the Archduke’s car. He decided he STILL wasn’t going to leave Sarajevo, because, as mentioned, he was an idiot, and instead went off to visit the soldiers injured by the bomb in hospital. He even made a full speech, which was covered in the blood of those same people, at the town hall. It was then raised by the sole sensible person in this entire situation (I don’t know their name. My research is not comprehensive. Some guy) that they should wait for troops to arrive before Franz went back on the road, but Governor-General Oskar Potiorek, the MILITARY PROFESSIONAL in charge of the operation, said no, because the soldiers wouldn’t have the right uniforms. So we can technically argue that the entire First World War was caused by fashion anxiety. Besides, they had already caught the assassin. The general argued “do you think Sarajevo is full of assassins?”

So Franz and Sophie got back in their car and continued on their merry way. BUT THEN the driver, who was also an idiot (seeing a theme here), took a wrong turning and started off down some weird back road. When he realised his mistake, he stopped the car to perform a three-point turn and get back onto the proper route. The car stopped in front of a deli.

A deli where one of the would-be assassins, Gavrilo Princip (the one who wasn’t as sexy as originally thought) JUST HAPPENED to be getting a commiseration sandwich following their failed assassination attempt.

And then the car stalled.

Princip came out of the deli, mouth full of sandwich, to find the Archduke’s car sitting right in front of him. Somehow, he managed to get hold of his gun without tripping over all eight of his brain cells, and shot twice, hitting Franz and Sophie and killing both almost instantly.

And that was how WWI was started.

Morons.