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Kirchubel on Citino, 'The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: the German Campaigns of 1944-1945'

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Kirchubel on Citino, 'The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: the German Campaigns of 1944-1945' H-War Kirchubel on Citino, 'The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945' Review published on Saturday, May 5, 2018 Robert M. Citino. The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945. Modern War Studies Series. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. Illustrations, maps. 632 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-2494-2. Reviewed by Robert Kirchubel (Purdue University)Published on H-War (May, 2018) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air War College) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51318 Robert M. Citino, presently at the National WWII Museum, has again teamed up with the University Press of Kansas for his latest installment on modern German military history. The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand investigates Germany’s final battles against the Soviet Union and the Western Allies to its east, south, and west. As we have come to expect from Citino, the book is thoroughly researched, clearly narrated, and tightly argued. While Wehrmacht’s Last Stand synthesizes a great number of secondary materials—a review of its bibliography reveals only a couple pre-1945 German military journals that could be considered primary sources—it is full of new insights and thought-provoking interpretations of key events in late World War II.[1] Citino takes military historians to school by demonstrating how operational history should be written, at a time when elements of the academy consider that subdiscipline passé and of doubtful utility. The Wehrmacht had a good run during the first two years of the war, then a couple years of transition (notably against the USSR), but in Wehrmacht’s Last Stand it is reeling backward on every front. By early 1945, German soldiers were defending German soil, not someone else’s. For the sixteen months under study here, the Wehrmacht bent but did not break until thesauve qui peut during the last weeks of the war. Citino therefore asks, “What kept the German Army going in such an increasingly hopeless situation?” (p. 3). The answer should not be surprising: loyalty to Adolf Hitler.[2] As in his earlier works, Citino’s frame of reference is what he calls Germany’s “way of war” (p. 229). This is not the same as strategy or doctrine but instead represents an “ingrained and traditional military culture, imposing repetitive patterns of thought and behavior” spanning centuries (p. 299). Consistent with his emphasis on the traditional point of view, Citino frequently invokes the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Carl von Clausewitz, and other German military luminaries of yore to demonstrate the Wehrmacht’s continuity with its Prussian ancestors. Central to Citino’s German way of war framework is his assertion that the “war of movement” was its preferred technique. Actually, he goes beyond saying that movement was merely preferred, and claims that it was the only form of fighting at which they could excel. The contrasting “positional war” was anathema to the Prussian/German way. This one-sided approach might have worked in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, when a few weeks of marching culminating in a couple day-long battles could decide a campaign or, in some cases, a war. Starting with the American Civil War, however, this was no longer possible when considering wars between modern Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kirchubel on Citino, 'The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945'. H-War. 05-05-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/1794555/kirchubel-citino-wehrmachts-last-stand-german-campaigns-1944-1945 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-War industrialized states and alliances. Unfortunately, Citino’s emphasis on movement cherry-picks the brief episodes of exertion, adrenaline, and glory (or terror) that punctuated weeks or months of often boring, static positional or defensive warfare, which routinely dominated the remaining 90+ percent of an army’s existence—the case regardless of whether we are talking about Frederick II, Gebhardt von Blücher, Wilhelm II, or Hitler. Wehrmacht’s Last Stand is organized into an introduction and ten chronological chapters arranged geographically: the war against the Red Army (chapters 1, 4, 6, 9-10), in Italy (chapter 2), and across northwestern Europe (chapters 3, 5, 7-9). Citino’s overall conclusions are tucked into the last half dozen pages of chapter 10. The bibliography is a who’s who of works on the German military, and historiographical footnotes on various armies, battles, personalities, etc., will be very useful for scholars wanting to focus on these subjects. Looking at the three main combat theaters from least to most important, we can quickly dispense with the chapter on Italy for three reasons: the front was tertiary in the worst sense of that word (for both sides), the mountainous boot was no place for flashy movement, and in general Citino is dismissive of the campaign there. Chapter 2 concentrates mainly on two large Allied undertakings: the landings at Anzio and Operation Diadem, plus the German responses. It dispenses with the final nine months of World War II in Italy in a paragraph. The Germans had certainly encountered materiel superiority before D-Day, on the so-called eastern front, but this did not prepare them for fighting the Western Allies, backed as they were by American industrial and managerial might. In chapter 3 Citino does a superb job explaining pre-invasion issues, the Allied landings, and ineffective German reactions on D-Day. Chapter 5 details the battles around the expanding beachhead and the Allies’ breakout and pursuit, to include Omar Bradley’s demonstration of operational acumen, Operation Cobra, where he turned the tables on the outclassed Germans. Walter Model, who we suspect Citino would not want for a bridge partner, arrives in chapter 7 to staunch the flow. By this stage of the war, however, Wehrmacht’s Last Stand tells us, the Wehrmacht was “eating itself” (p. 327). By chapter 8 German operational panzer capability was a pathetic shadow of its 1939-41 self. Just like offensives in 1914, 1918, 1941, and 1942, Hitler’s Battle of the Bulge “petered out short of achieving anything decisive” (p. 381). Half of chapter 9 covers the battle for western Germany. Additionally, for a German army that during this period could not show itself in daylight and mainly fought at night, Citino tells us, it was “time to face facts” (p. 402). I would assert that the German officer caste had a spotty record of clearheaded facing facts since at least 1914. Wehrmacht’s Last Stand gives pride of place to the war against the Soviets, where the Third Reich absolutely had to win or die trying. As shown in chapters 3 and 5, the Red Army was now capable of conducting nearly year-round offensive operations, with completely obliterating Army Group Center in June 1944 as its crowning achievement. Citino uses this event, rather than action in Normandy (as some other historians have done), to discuss the July 20 bomb plot. As he ably explains, this last in a long line of Rube Goldberg assassination attempts (butchering millions of innocents was OK, just do not ask a German officer to go Jack Ruby on his führer) deeply affected the German officer corps. Citino also demolishes the vacuous “sacred oath” fig leaf by demonstrating that selective Prussian/German obedience to orders and adherence to oaths goes back at least to Frederick and Hans David von Yorck. By chapter 6, Model, now commanding two army groups, again came to the rescue. As is the rule during this stage of the war, unfortunately for the Germans, “a local success by the Wehrmacht usually meant a big hole [in its lines] somewhere else in the front” (p. 277). Citino Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kirchubel on Citino, 'The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945'. H-War. 05-05-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/1794555/kirchubel-citino-wehrmachts-last-stand-german-campaigns-1944-1945 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-War hammers the final nails into the Wehrmacht’s coffin in chapters 9 and 10. Somehow the German army maintained itself in the field and occasionally even mustered enough strength for a local counterattack. However, this sort of tactical “saga is impressive only within the context of yet another miserable German operational collapse” (p. 432). Citino concludes with the assessment that only loyalty to Hitler, in particular by generals like Model and Ferdinand Schörner, kept the Wehrmacht together and fighting until the rubble of Berlin. When forced to choose between Hitler, the men under their command or even the German nation, most senior German leaders threw in their lot with the first. This represents a drastically different choice than their predecessors made in 1918. Citino’s body of work, the Wehrmacht’s Last Stand plus its siblings, both older and yet unborn, is essential reading for those taking study of the German military operations to the next level. His writing is refreshing: he tosses in twenty-first-century US military jargon like “full spectrum dominance,” and one can imagine him smile as he writes phrases such as the Tiger’s “fuel tanks were sucking air” (pp. 172, 46, it is no wonder he is a popular lecturer). He includes discussions of all three levels of war, and his numerous mini-bios of key generals sprinkled throughout add a human element. Citino is as comfortable both praising and criticizing Model as he is Bernard Montgomery. He likewise refuses to gloss over German atrocities, adding that we cannot legitimately call these “excesses” since murderous brutality “emerged from policy and doctrine” and from which few men wearing field-gray demurred (p.
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