Afterword Citino Afterword

500 Afterword Citino Afterword

Robert M. Citino

The German Way of War

Trying to evaluate outside or foreign influences on a neighboring country’s “way of war” might seem contradictory, like trying to square a circle. After all, a national military culture is by definition home-grown. It arises out of domestic factors such as history, politics, and especially geography. It is a product of a sustained internal discourse, in other words, and foreigners usually need not apply.1 Certainly all these things were true with regard to Germany. Nature made it die Macht in der Mitte, “the power in the middle,” crammed into a relatively tight spot in Central Europe, without much in the way of natural or defen- sible boundaries.2 The Rhine River in the west is nicely broad and deep. Unfortunately, Germans live on both sides of it, and if a western enemy ever reached the Rhine, Germany had already lost a key strategic region in terms of population, resources, and industry. We might say the same for the Elbe River in the east. If an enemy managed to fight his way to the Elbe, the German people were in deep, deep trouble. International politics, as they so often do, reflected the geographical problem. Germany has historically sat ringed by enemies and potential enemies: France to the west, Austria to the south, Russia to the east, and, for much of German history, we might even add mighty Sweden to the north.

1 The term “ways of war,” with its corollary of separate and unique national military cultures, appeared first in the seminal work of Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York, 1973), but has become much more prominent of late in military historical discourse. See, among others, Robert M. Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Lawrence, KS , 2005); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY , 2005); Brian McAllister Linn, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (Cambridge, MA , 2007); and Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (Cambridge , 2008). For a useful introduction to the topic, see “Comparative Ways of War: A Roundtable,” Historically Speaking, 11, 5 (November 2010), 20–26, including contributions by Citino, “The German Way of War Revisited”; Linn, “The American Way of War Debate: An Overview”; Lorge, “The Many Ways of Chinese Warfare”; and James Jay Carafano, “Wending Through the Way of War.” 2 See Michael Stürmer, The German Empire: A Short History (New York, 2000), 12–13.

The combination of all these factors led to the rise of a distinctive “German way of war.”3 It was born in the Duchy of Brandenburg in the 17th century, flowered in the Kingdom of Prussia in the eighteenth, dominated military planning in the unified German Reich after 1870–1871, and would lead Germany into two world wars. Its bedrock conception was the vulnerability of the home- land. Incapable of defense, German armies had to attack. They could not fight and win a slow war of attrition, since their neighbors could always form a coali- tion to outnumber and outproduce them. Rather, the Germans had to fight a high-tempo war of maneuver, one designed to seek out and destroy as much of the enemy force as possible in the opening weeks of the fighting. They called it Bewegungskrieg, the “war of movement,” and its principal purpose was to keep Germany’s wars kurtz und vives (short and lively), in the memorable phrase of its most successful practitioner, Frederick the Great.4 The foundations of Bewegungskrieg were rigorous training, aggressive, risk- taking leadership at all echelons, and an independently minded officer corps expected to think for itself in battle. The last component was crucial. Standing alongside the supreme commanders was a feisty officer corps, men such as Georg von Derfflinger, Otto Christoph von Sparr, and Joachim Hennigs von Treffenfeld for Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, and a whole host of them for Frederick the Great: Otto von Schwerin and Peter Du Moulin, Hans Joachim von Zieten, and Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz. Allowing the initiative of subordinate commanders free rein on campaign, a trait that military historians call Auftragstaktik, although the Prussians were more likely to refer to it as the “independence of the subordinate commander” (Selbständigkeit der Unterführer), was a force multiplier for such a small and relatively impoverished state.5

3 For a more complete evocation of this argument, see Citino, German Way of War. 4 “Unsere Kriege kurtz und vives seyn müssen, massen es uns nicht konveniret die Sachen in die Länge zu ziehen, weil ein langwieriger Krieg ohnvermerkt Unsere admirable Disciplin fallen machen, und das Land depeupliren, Unsere Resources aber erschöpfen würde”: Hugo von Freytag-Loringhoven, Feldherrngrösse. Von Denken und Haldeln bevorragender Heerführer (Berlin , 1922), 56. 5 See, among numerous examples from the German literature, Major Bigge, “Über Selbstthätigkeit der Unterführer im Kriege,” Beihefte zum Militär-Wochenblatt 1894 (Berlin, 1894), 17–55, from the text of a lecture given to the Military Society in Berlin on 29 November 1893. See also General von Blume, “Selbstthätigkeit der Führer im Kriege,” Beihefte zum Militär-Wochenblatt 1896 (Berlin, 1896), 479–534. For a twentieth-century example, see Erich Weniger, “Die Selbständigkeit der Unterführer und ihre Grenzen,” Militärwissenschaftliche Rundschau 9, 2 (1944), 101–115.