The German Wars: A Concise History, 1859–1945

By Michael A. Palmer

“A fine survey of how a nation came to be recognized for its military supremacy—despite losing two world wars.” —Midwest Book Review

In the decades leading up to World War II, the world was in awe of the Prussian-German military, seeking to emulate what esteemed German military history scholar Robert M. Citino has termed “the German Way of War.” Military professionals around the globe became fluent in the tactical jargon: bewegungskrieg, schwerpunckt, auftragstaktik, fingerspitzengefuhl, and of course, blitzkrieg. At the same time, German warfare would become closely associated with the bloodiest and cruelest era in the history of mankind. The German Wars: A Concise History, 1859–1945 outlines the history of European warfare from the Wars of German Unification to the end of World War II. Author Michael A. Palmer looks at political, social, economic, and military developments across Europe and the United States during this crucial period in world history in order to demonstrate the lasting impact of the German Wars on the modern age.

“Palmer has succeeded in creating an outstanding short history of the German wars that influenced the development of Europe and the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s a terrific introduction and overview of the subject.” —Armchair General

“A provocative look at the methods that Germany used to wage war, and why ultimately they failed.” —Military Heritage

“This is an excellent book . . . highly readable. It would be an excellent addition to the library of any military historian, public library, university library as well as personal collection of persons with interest in European or Trans-Atlantic History.” —Kepler’s Military History Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781616739850

Book preview

The German Wars

A Concise History

1859—1945

Michael A. Palmer

To my father, Howard V. Palmer,

who quit high school to serve

in the Second World War and

died on 23 June 2008

Contents

Introduction

Chapter I     The Wars of Italian and German Unification

Chapter II   The Road to Sarajevo

Chapter III  The Great War

Chapter IV  The Interwar Years, 1918–1937

Chapter V   World War II, 1937–1945

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

WARFARE BEGAN A GRADUAL TRANSITION from what strategist Bernard Brodie termed the age of muscle to the age of the machine during the Renaissance, centuries before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. At first, gunpowder weapons had a minimal tactical impact on the battlefield, although large but immobile cannon did prompt a revolution in siege craft. At sea, as on land, cannon did not immediately herald a new age of naval warfare. Not until the sixteenth century did the square-rigged, carvel-built man-of-war, armed with broadside cannon, become the state-of-the-art seagoing weapons system.

As Europe meandered into the Industrial Revolution—the mechanization of production, a shift from cottage-based industries to large-scale factory manufacturing, specialization, concentration of capital and labor, and concomitant socioeconomic changes—in the second half of the eighteenth century, its impact on warfare remained fairly limited. From the late seventeenth century into the middle of the nineteenth century, increased industrial output allowed the European states to field ever larger armies. The numbers of troops on battlefields rose from the tens of thousands to often over 100,000. But while the capability to produce sufficient materiel to maintain these larger armies in the field increased, the actual movement of supplies and reinforcements to the front, and the strategic movement of troops, changed little from the days of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Men moved from point to point and from the rear to the front, by foot and by horse. Armies were often, as had always been the case, supplied locally, either through requisition or outright looting. Smooth-bored, muzzle-loading muskets remained the dominant infantry weapon. There were improvements in the production of locks (match, flint, and percussion) and fitted bayonets (plug, ring, and socket), along with marginal increases in rate of fire. The same was true of smooth-bored, muzzle-loading artillery. Improved carriages increased battlefield mobility while massed production and standardization allowed armies to field ever more cannon. But the rifling of muskets and artillery remained the exception and had minimal impact on battles. At sea, wooden ships of war remained wind driven.

The Industrial Revolution did not transform warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Rifling and breech loading altered the character of infantry weapons, artillery, and battlefield tactics. Initially, rifling slowed the reloading process; only after the American Civil War had ended did rate of fire begin an almost steady increase. The railroad allowed for the more rapid mobilization of troops, along with the movement of supplies, to the frontier, encouraging the development of reserve systems that led to a massive increase in the size of armies. To manage these ever-larger deployed forces and meet the new demands of the battlefield, officer corps became more professionalized, and the European states began to develop general staff systems. The growing European industrial infrastructure generated increasing wealth—Cicero’s sinews of war—to support large-scale industrial conflict.

How marked were these developments? Imagine a Prussian army of 50,000 men from 1756 being mysteriously transported through time to an 1806 battlefield, there to confront another comparably sized Prussian army of the latter date. Despite the advance of fifty years, the 1756 force would still give a good account of itself. If better led, it might conceivably triumph. But imagine a similar event carrying a French army of 100,000 men from 1870 onto a battlefield of 1920, there to combat a comparably sized French force equipped with quick-firing 75-mm field guns, long-range howitzers, poison gas, flamethrowers, machine guns, and tanks, and supported from above by ground-attack aircraft. The 1870 force would be slaughtered.

A similar contrast can be seen between the armies of Europe and those of the non-Western world. The growing inability of local African, Middle Eastern, and Asian forces to compete with those of Europe, even when the former possessed a large numerical advantage, became increasingly marked. While indigenous forces on occasion overwhelmed European armies, the Zulu victory over the British at the battle of Isandlwana (1879) being an example, such defeats were so notable because they were so rare. Increased rate of fire combined with other Industrial Revolution advances—steam power that opened river systems to navigation and medical advances that contained the threat of heretofore debilitating diseases such as malaria and yellow fever—allowed European imperialists to advance from the coastal regions of Asia and Africa, where they had remained for centuries, deep into the interiors of these continents.

Within Europe the military impact of the Industrial Revolution arrived in force during the mid-nineteenth century, but under false colors. Most general staffs and commentators believed that the increasing industrialization of warfare would make conflicts more decisive. A few thought otherwise, citing examples from non-European wars, such as the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the Boer War (1899–1902). But the seeming decisiveness of the short wars of German unification (1866–1871), fought by the Prussian army against the Danes, Austrians, and French, suggested that first-class armies, once engaged, would quickly battle to a decision. Moreover, the direct and indirect economic expense of a conflict made the concept of a long war unthinkable to some critics. The costs of an extended clash would most certainly outweigh the likely gains. Economic competition was overtaking military rivalry. Surely, the European states, with their seemingly ever-expanding prosperity and popular governments, had entered a new and enlightened era.

But in 1914, the realities of industrial-era warfare shattered the self-confidence of the Europeans, dealing them a psychic blow from which they have never truly recovered. They soon discovered that conflict among modern industrial powers was more destructive and costly than pre-industrial warfare and far from decisive. The attritional nature of warfare reasserted itself, and the targets for that attrition were not only the opposing military force, but also the enemy state and supporting society. While neither of the two world wars lasted as long as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the somewhat shorter chronological extent of the conflicts was more than offset by colossal casualty lists, widespread destruction, enormous economic costs, and often societal disintegration. The first of the two world wars (1914–1918) led directly to the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. The Second World War led to the redivision of Germany (united in 1871), the physical destruction of most of central and eastern Europe, and the deaths of not only millions of combatants, but also scores of millions of noncombatants, often as the result of campaigns of intentional and industrialized genocide.

Central to the history of this entire period is Germany. Between 1859 and 1945, there were few inter-European wars, and none of them general, that did not directly involve the Germans. Several peripheral conflicts took place in the Italian and Balkan peninsulas. The Second War of Italian Independence (1859) pitted France and Sardinia against the Austrian Empire. The Third War of Italian Independence (1866) pitted the newly unified national state of Italy against Austria and was fought as part of the latter’s struggle against Prussia. The Serbo-Turkish War (1876), Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), and the First and Second Balkan Wars (1912–1913) completed the process, underway since the late seventeenth century, of rolling back the European frontiers of the the sick man of Europe—the Ottoman Empire.

Germany set the military example for the states of industrial Europe. By the 1870s, the successes of the Germans were influencing not only the militaries of Europe, but also those of the entire world. General staffs modeled on the German system proliferated. Reserve systems multiplied. The Ottomans, who had survived the nineteenth century primarily through the support of Great Britain, looked to the German Empire as their new ally. Even the American military shed its fascination with things Napoleonic and French, epitomized by the kepis of the Civil War period, and embraced the pickelhauben. The Prussian-German general staff was the first modern bureaucracy to become the object of fascination, imitation, and eventually fear and loathing. At the end of the Great War, the Entente outlawed its reestablishment. At the end of the Second World War, the victorious Allies dismantled the entire Prussian state apparatus.

Throughout the period of this study, Europe, and much of the rest of the world, stood in awe of the Prussian-German military. Innumerable states sought to emulate what Robert M. Citino has termed the German Way of War, albeit often with rather limited success. Little wonder: even the Germans, to their great dismay, could not equal the results they achieved in 1866 and 1870.

The conventional images of the world wars remain subject to a degree of confusion and distortion. In general, people view the First World War as an indecisive struggle marked by attrition and outright slaughter, and epitomized by trench warfare and inconsequential big pushes. By contrast, we often think of the Second World War as a conflict notable for its decisiveness and mobility. You can visit Europe and easily spot the scars of the western front and its trenches on the physical landscape. But that is only because Europeans did not rebuild fields in Flanders the way they rebuilt central European cities leveled by aerial bombing between 1939 and 1945. The reality is that both world wars were horribly destructive struggles of attrition. Maps are nothing more than spatial data—a measure of a conflict’s progress. Maps of the western front during the 1914–1918 war reinforce the popular image of deadlock, whereas maps of the 1939–1945 war reveal rapid changes of position and blitzkrieg. But if you examine other and more important measures of data—calendars, casualty statistics, civilian deaths, wholesale physical destruction, and wealth expended—the Second World War was a longer and far more costly war of attrition that ended only with the final collapse of the German National Socialist state.

In fact, the German-dominated near century from 1859 to 1945 was the bloodiest of eras, if not also the cruelest, in the history of mankind. In the two world wars alone, at least seventy-five million people—military and civilians—died. Countless others, numbered in the millions, met their ends in other small, and not-so-small, wars in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Great empires such as the Hapsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman collapsed. When Adolf Hitler’s rapacious Third Reich threatened to plunge the world into a savage dark age, only history’s bloodiest and most costly conflict delivered mankind from the abyss of a global Dachau. The Soviet Union and its archipelago of Gulags survived, born in 1917 with the demise of the Tsarist empire, only to collapse a half century and tens of millions of lives later.

Even after 1945, despite Germany’s defeat in a pair of world wars, the fascination with the German military nevertheless continued. United States military professionals read Carl von Clausewitz and studied the wartime operations of their former enemy. American army officers became fluent in the jargon of what could be termed germilspeak, spewing tongue twisters in the original German—bewegungskrieg, schwerpunckt, auftragstaktik, finger spitzengefuhl, and phrases such as klotzen nicht kleckern. Even the helmets of the American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan share (albeit, for sound safety reasons) the basic shape of the successor of the pickelhauben, the stahlhelm. For the foreseeable future, like it or not, we will associate the Germans with the world wars and European warfare in the industrial age.

Unfortunately, the military legacy of the Germans is often overstated, at times grossly. The German military performed exceptionally at the tactical and operational levels of warfare. There is, as a result, much to be learned from the study of German doctrine and methods. But at the strategic level, despite the reputations and seeming brilliance of Clausewitz and the famed German general staff, Germany’s military strategy failed to evolve along with the growing power of the state. That failure undermined, and eventually undid, whatever miracles the Germans achieved at the tactical and operational levels. The proverbial bottom line was that the Germans convinced themselves and many others that quick and decisive victories were achievable in the age of industrialized warfare. They were not. The belief that such victories were possible led the Germans to plunge Europe, and the entire world, into a pair of ghastly world wars that killed millions of people, nearly destroyed Europe, and in 1945 left Germany shrunken and once more divided. It is impossible even to speculate how history would have progressed and how different the world would look today had the Germans been more cautious in their employment of military power.

Walter Millis wrote in his 1956 classic Arms and Men that by 1815 war had begun to lose its one virtue—its power of decision. Millis, of course, had the advantage of retrospection, writing as he did after the end of the Second World War. But there were others who in the decades before the Great War foresaw the realities of modern inter-European war. In 1898, Ivan Bloch, a Pole who had helped develop the Russian railway system, published La Guerre Future (which appeared in English as Is War Now Impossible), a six-volume study of contemporary warfare. Bloch argued that a combination of new weaponry and entrenchments would benefit the defender to the extent that maneuver and assault would become hopeless. If war did begin, it would quickly become a stalemate that would only be won after an extensive process of attrition and the exhaustion of the society of one of the belligerents, perhaps to the point of famine, collapse, and political revolution. In 1910, Norman Angell published The Great Illusion—the illusion being the belief held by many who saw a grand European war on the horizon. Angell argued that the nature of the international financial system would either prevent an outbreak of war or force a conflict to a rapid conclusion.

Admittedly, there were many reasons to discount the warnings of Bloch and Angell, writing in Europe at the turn of the century. Neither were professional soldiers; they wrote as amateurs. There were many details in their works that were simply wrong, demonstrably so at the time and, especially, in retrospect. Angell’s warning could be rejected as those of a pacifist. But there were also soldiers who proffered similar warnings, most notably Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke (the elder), the victor of Germany’s wars of unification, who, in his final speech to the Reichstag in 1890, noted:

The age of cabinet war is behind us—all we have now is people’s war. . . . Gentlemen, if the war that has been hanging over our heads now for more than ten years like the sword of Damocles—if this war breaks out, then its duration and its end will be unforeseeable. The greatest powers of Europe, armed as never before, will be going into battle with each other; not one of them can be crushed so completely in one or two campaigns that it will admit defeat, will be compelled to conclude peace under hard terms, and will not come back, even if it is a year later, to renew the struggle. Gentlemen, it may be a war of seven years’ or of thirty years’ duration—and woe to him who sets Europe alight, who first puts the fuse to the powder keg.

Obviously, Bloch, Angell, and others who considered a major war a near impossibility were mistaken, because war not only began, but also failed to end quickly. Nevertheless, Bloch’s and Angell’s rational analyses of why war should have been unthinkable were accurate; by the twentieth century, the prospect of an industrialized war resolving in some cost-effective manner any of the great-power problems in Europe was an illusion. The tragedy was that it took two world wars and millions of deaths before Europeans reached that same conclusion. And the fact remains that it was primarily, though by no means exclusively, the Germans who through their excellence managed to convince themselves and many others—not once, but twice—that the possibilities of rapid and relatively inexpensive decision were not chimerical, but within reach. The wars that afflicted Europe and the world between 1859 and 1945 were, undeniably, the German wars.

CHAPTER I

The Wars of Italian and German Unification

DURING THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, the industrializing world struggled with innumerable problems—rapid industrialization, population expansion, growth of the state, and political turmoil. The United States descended into a bloody civil war. In Europe, the principal political factor undermining stability was not the issue of slavery, but the question of nationalism. The rise of nationalistic sentiments undermined the legitimacy of the old dynastic regimes, many of which—most notably the Ottoman, Romanov, and Hapsburg empires—were multinational in character. National forces ultimately shattered the European empires at the close of the 1914–1918 war, and nationalism as a political force continues to play a major role in European, and non-European, politics to the present day.

In 1859, only one of the major continental European powers could be termed a true nation-state—France. Its population was overwhelmingly French, and the majority of French-speaking Europeans found themselves within the borders of their state. Prussia could be termed a nation-state, but only to a degree because its population included a sizeable minority of Poles. Moreover, millions of German-speaking Europeans found themselves living as members of other states, both small and large. The Austrian Empire was a polyglot realm, ruled by German-Austrians (primarily) and Hungarians, but containing millions of Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Ukrainians, and assorted other Slavic peoples in the Balkans. Other Christian Slavs in the Balkans still lived under the heel of the Ottoman Turks. To the east, the Russian Empire was an enormous multinational operation, containing within its European borders Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Poles, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and other minorities.

The increasing tendency of European peoples to identify themselves, and often to organize themselves, politically along ethnic lines threatened the stability of the existing European order. Nationalism had come to the fore during the period following the French Revolution, and it had played a significant role in the revolutions that had swept across the continent in 1848. The political reaction that followed only temporarily squelched the forces at work. A decade later, stronger nationalistic forces emerged. These forces triggered a series of wars in central and eastern Europe that continued until the very eve of the Great War in 1914 that remapped the boundaries of the continent. The most significant of the national struggles centered on the question of the leadership and national political organization of the German-speaking people of central Europe. Would they be united? And if so, would it be under the banner of the Prussian or Austrian empires?

The first of the national wars began in 1859 when the Italian kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia began its ultimately successful attempt to unify the states of the Italian peninsula. The Piedmontese undertook their efforts with the support of the French Empire of Napoleon III. The emperor, a nephew of Napoleon I, had pretensions of imperial greatness, but lacked virtually all of his uncle’s talents. Italy had been the scene of General Bonaparte’s early triumphs over the Austrians, who still dominated northern Italy. In June 1859, at the battles of Magenta and Solferino, the French and their Italian allies defeated the Austrians and set in motion the convoluted and prolonged process that led to the unification of Italy under Piedmontese rule.

The campaign in northern Italy revealed that the two major European powers involved had thus far not only failed to grasp the realities of warfare in the middle of the nineteenth century, but also had forgotten far too many of the lessons learned more than a half century earlier on the bloody battlefields of Europe. The poorly prepared French army moved into northern Italy without its supply trains. Initially, little effort was made to exploit the logistical advantages offered by railroads. Staff work was shoddy. Despite the forethought given to French policy, the military campaign was one of improvisation, at which the French at least proved themselves superior to the Austrians. The battle of Solferino, one of the first to be fought by two armies equipped with rifled muskets, was a contest in mutual butchery that shocked even the vainglorious Napoleon III.

As the Austrians and French bludgeoned each other south of the Alps, to the north the Prussians carefully observed the progress of the campaign. The Prussian military had just completed a round of reorganization overseen by its then acting chief of the general staff, General Helmuth von Moltke. As a cautionary response to the French victories, the Prussians mobilized troops along the Rhine, employing for the first time their railroad net for that purpose. The result was less than spectacular, but Moltke and the Prussian general staff learned innumerable and invaluable lessons from the exercise.

The Prussians had established a general staff as one element of a series of military reforms in the aftermath of their defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806–1807. The purpose of the general staff was to compensate for the military talents that army commanders, be they of royal blood or not, might lack. A general staff was, as one historian termed it, an attempt to institutionalize in a collective body the brilliance, or something approximating it, of a commander such as Napoleon. The various divisions of the general staff spent their time preparing the army and themselves for war. They planned, they mapped, they studied, and they wrote.

Military Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The technological and scientific advances of the Industrial Revolution that made the battlefield so lethal an arena initially failed to produce comparable advances in the area of military medicine. The major breakthroughs of the nineteenth century came later and primarily from scientists, not doctors. Concepts such as germ theory, developed separately by the German Robert Koch and Frenchman Louis Pasteur, had yet to achieve full scientific acceptance, let alone be applied by military surgeons. The latter remained mostly amateurs (though often very caring and conscientious) in their approach to their craft, for they were as yet only on the threshold of true professionalism.

Military surgeons trained in medical schools of uneven quality. The typical school term might last only a few months, usually during the winter when the cold weather allowed study and practice on cadavers that would otherwise rot.

The good military surgeon would work with commanding officers to insist on hygiene within the camp. Cleanliness was a boon to healthiness, even if the intent was to prevent bad air from infecting the men. Nevertheless, infectious diseases could, and on occasion did, sweep through armies, especially in the tropics.

For the wounded soldier, treatment remained limited. Flesh wounds would be cleaned and dressed, and, if the job were done well and infection did not set in, there was a good chance the soldier would survive. Major wounds to the head or torso usually resulted in death, if not immediately, then in a matter of hours or, if the soldier were particularly unlucky, days. Survival after a wound to a limb was problematic. The large-caliber, soft lead bullets of the day would shatter the bones of an arm or leg. Surgical techniques were not advanced enough to repair such damage, and the usual practice was to amputate.

Fortunately for the soldiers of the mid-nineteenth century, surgeons did rely on anesthesia when it was available. A generation earlier, amputees were restrained and, if they were fortunate, plied with alcohol as they suffered through the brutal operation that could take between five and fifteen minutes, depending on the limb in question and the skill of the surgeon. Amputees in the mid-century wars were often (though not always) anesthetized with ether or chloroform. Such practices eased the already difficult tasks of the surgeon and lessened the chance that the amputee would succumb to shock. In the American Civil War, men whose limbs were amputated within twenty-four hours of their wounding had a survival rate of better than 50 percent.

A major development in the area of military medicine followed the June 1859 battle at Solferino, the bloodiest engagement fought in Europe since Waterloo. Among the civilian observers was the Swiss Jean Henri Dunant, who organized help for French and Austrian wounded. Dunant was so shocked and moved by the suffering of the wounded after the battle that he published A Memory of Solferino (1862), recounting his experiences and calling for the establishment of voluntary relief societies in all countries. The book’s publication led, the following year, to the