Dennis Showalter (1942–2019)

I have been reading and researching military history for almost thirty years, most of that with an emphasis on German history, devouring thousands of books. On top of that I have also read thousands of other history books, fiction, classics, books of poetry, childrens books, fantasy series, etc.

This is my favorite book. It became my favorite book shortly after I read it over a decade ago, and it remains so today. Showalter is a renowned and reputable military historian, and his art comes to show more full fruition here. Page after page of dense, academic text, relating geopolitical, administrative, and military events with nary a picture and hardly a map in site.

And it's brilliant. It works. It grabs you and before you know it you're deep in Bismarck's mind as he wrestles with managing delicate international diplomacy while finessing domestic foes and dealing with an unpredictable kaiser. Showalter's writing style is top notch; a large theme in the book relates to Prussia's attempts to develop and use a repeating bolt-action infantry rifle before their foes had that same weapon. It might seem hard to believe that relating the history of invitations to bid on Army contracts in mid-19th century provincial Germany could provide for gripping reading, but this book does it.

I don't even care if you like history; if you appreciate a quality, well-written book, one that will entertain, interest, educate, and delight you for years to come, pick this up. show less

The problem with the German Army in World War One, argues Dennis Showalter, is that it was an instrument of war and not for war.

It started with the insouciance of Prussian War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn. On July 5, 1914, he told Moltke the Younger (known as “Gloomy Julius” to the higher ranking members of the German General Staff) – after, of course assuring the Kaiser that the German Army would support the Austro-Hungary Empire’s ultimatum to Serbia -- that nothing would come of show more this war talk. The man who planned the railroad timetables clocking how the German Army would go to war, Wilhelm Gröner, took a July holiday.

It ended with Ludendorff’s spring 1918 offensives which had little more by way of specific objectives than punch a hole in Allied lines and see what happened.

Germany pursued war with a too casual appraisal of strategic ends. It concerned itself with the operational scale of war, not the strategic. Battles were to be won. And the next battle would be won and …

But this was the German Army, regarded as the best in the world. It was Germany’s pre-eminently competent institute. After all, it had wrapped up the 1866 war against Austria and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 quickly and with few casualties. There was no “mythology of sacrifice and victimization” as came out of the Crimean War or the American Civil War.

Sure, there was an 1895 staff report stating an offensive against France would result in a limited advance and eventual tactical stalemate.

But duty called. There had to be a “next war”. Russia was getting stronger. France was an enemy. It was not pure paranoia that they thought themselves surrounded by enemies. German honor was at stake.

In the second through sixth chapters of the book, Showalter shows how that war played out, how the German Army evolved and failed, changed the Second Reich and planted seeds for later German policies in World War Two. Each of those chapters covers roughly a year of the war.

Two important areas covered.

First, the book counterpoints the impression of Allied futility and slaughter on the battlefield after the trenches were dug. Massive Allied casualties in stalled offensives on the Western Front seemed, to the German Army, a slowing raising sea lapping at the shore and forever taking ground. To them, the Somme looked like a near run thing and not futility. The opening artillery barrage of the offensive seemed, to German soldiers, like the end of the world. German lines almost ruptured. By September 1916, two months into the battle, the Germans were at the limits of endurance. “A necrology of the irreplaceable” dead began to fill German accounts. In November 1916, Allied officers noted the Germans now were not the Germans at the beginning of the battle.

They begin to question the competence of their nation and army.

The war dragged on for two more years, of course, because the Germans became masters of defense and innovated in other ways. In particular, they developed the portable MG 08/15 machine, a complicated defense system, stormtrooper tactics, and better airplanes. They did not, even though they got their hands on an Allied tank very quickly after its deployment, develop effective tanks. Why bother? It was an offensive weapon and, by 1917, Germany was planning defense.

In fact, argues Showalter, the German Army got in the habit of defense and was ultimately too used to it when it launched the Michael Offensive on March 21, 1918. It was not, argues Showalter, disrupted by starving German troops looting overrun Allied supplies. It was doomed by troops often years out of practice in offensive operations, a supply system that pushed supplies to the moving front on a pre-planned schedule and not on real-time demand, continued offensive operations killing experienced assault troops and requiring more men to hold area behind the line, and so many men down from the “Flanders flu” that Ludendorff complained it was his subordinates’ excuse for failure. The offensive even failed due to a lack of fresh horses because this was the one time on the Western Front horse cavalry might have been able to operate in the open and make a difference.

Tactically Michael was a stunning success. The line advanced 14 miles in a day – more than any other day in the war. Planning had started on it exactly one year before the war ended, November 11, 1917. The tactics were partially based on the stunning – perhaps the most perfectly realized German offense of the war – German victory at Riga September 1917. General Bruchmuller’s planning showed the way to new combined arms tactics.

But, arguably, the Germans should have stopped when they were ahead, consolidated their advances, went back on defense. Douglas Haig even entertained notions briefly of peace negotiations. But Showalter says Ludendorff’s offensives were not impressive in success but in “the limited nature of that success”. Allied counterattacks began on July 18th, and one German general marked the date as the turning point of the war.

The book’s second strength is showing the life and psychology of the German soldier. A member of a citizen army and serving in units from the same area, they bonded like families. The captain of the company was father and the first sergeant mother, and a joke went that a recruit’s expected reply out of what he wanted from the army was to be an orphan. It was less ideology or country that motivated them that living up to German idea of masculinity and gaining the respect of one’s peers.

Serving successfully as a soldier, enduring what had to be endured, accomplishing a mission, was a rite of passage for a German man.

They were not robots. Quite the opposite. Individual initiative was expected out of soldiers even at the beginning of the war and particularly after 1915 under the new German defensive doctrine of “resist, bend, and snap back”. German workers in factories carried out complicated tasks together with minimal supervision. They carried that teamwork and initiative and intelligence into battle. Showalter says that the war on the Western Front in 1917 has been called a factory of death,L but the German Army developed a “artisanal approach to modern war”.

Institutions of knowledge-sharing, practical experience gained in battle, were created. The German Army expected a lot of its men. Even during wartime, its number of commissioned officers was not increased.

Officers didn’t hand out the harsh punishments of armies from more democratic countries. Less than a 100 German soldiers were executed in the war. A certain amount of high spirit was expected in the troops. In fact, a soldier who hadn't spent a few days in the guard house or on punishment detail almost couldn’t call himself a real soldier.

Officers regarded it as their duty to look after their men even if the officers were aristocrats. They also thought never giving an order you knew would be disobeyed a good rule. The combination may have led to looting by German soldiers in the hot, humid, thirsty days of August 1914 when supply trains could not keep up with the rapid movement.

Showalter doesn’t ignore the bodies of the German soldier. He mentions how, in those hot days, the Germans marched to the Marne with their pants down – from dysentery. German soldiers suffering from diarrhea at Verdun had the same problem and had to venture out to the hellish zone of war to relieve themselves during breaks in the hellish shelling. The young German soldier, we are told, often away from home for the first time and with his peers, exhibited a peculiar Teutonic fixation on bodily functions. He was in a peculiar zone outside of the hierarchies of civilian life where he could prove himself.

In the later days of the war, tensions crept in. Old, experienced soldiers didn’t appreciate young officers. The 1916 census of Jews in the German Army, never officially released, created resentment by Jews – disproportionately represented in the Army – and non-Jews alike who regarded them as fellow participants in battle.

There was also the always present resentment, in war, of front line troops for those in the rear. And, since the German Army was, for the duration of the war, on occupied ground, a large number of troops were thus engaged. Almost a million troops were on the Eastern Front after Russia left the war.

Being on occupied ground also psychologically ground the troops down and made them paranoid. They also decorated the tombs of their fallen comrades – when they had them – more than the French or English troops did.

Showalter doesn’t talk much about the Eastern Front, though he wrote the acclaimed Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914, but he talks about the impression Eastern Europeans, especially Jews, made on the Germans. It wasn’t a favorable one. They regarded the conquered members of the East as dirty – they were by German standards – and ignorant. One Jewish soldier even remarked that if these Jews of Russia were his co-religionists, he thanked God he was German.

The German Army instituted delousing plans for the conquered East. Ludendorff, Hindenburg, and the Kaiser dreamed of colonizing its new lands. All these and the use of forced labor by civilians and POWs to build, in 1916 and 1917, the Siegfried Line, Showalter acknowledges, planted seeds for the Third Reich’s behavior.

There is much more including the effects of what was, basically, a Ludendorff and Hindenburg dictatorship which included mandatory work for all able-bodied German men. Militarism and the erosion of democracy may have been the result, notes Showalter, but no other leaders were available to lead the war and its required industrial production.

Not a book for the World War One newbie. Reading a good general history of the Great War is needed to put things in context though Showalter approaches things chronologically. Surprisingly, for an Osprey Publishing book, there are no maps. A few events post-armistice are very briefly covered.

There is an index and 23 pages of photos.

Definitely recommended for those with an interest in the Great War and a valuable redress to the Allied-centric histories in English. show less

Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk. The Turning Point of World War II by

Dennis E. Showalter

Random House

August 27, 2013

316 Pages

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8129-9465-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-6677-3

542 Nonfiction History Military History & Affairs World War II

Publisher Contact: Steven Boriack, sboriack@randomhouse.com

Reviewer: Thomas E. Nutter

Dennis E. Showalter is a scholar and educator who has practiced his craft at Colorado College since 1969. He also has taught at both the United States Air Force show more Academy and the United States Military Academy, and has served as President of the Society for Military History. He has written the award-winning Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, as well as many other books and professional articles in the field of military history.

Showalter’s most recent work is Armor and Blood, a detailed narrative of the planning, preparation, execution and ultimate failure of Operation Citadel, arguably Adolf Hitler’s greatest military gamble. And gamble it was, as Showalter constantly reminds the reader by liberally sowing his text with references to games of chance and the points in them at which an individual player must make a decision upon which the game’s outcome will be determined.

Citadel was rife with vital points of decision for both sides. The first of these, and the one that set the dominoes in motion, concerned whether the Wehrmacht should undertake offensive operations in the East in 1943. That such an issue should present itself in the first instance, and in less than six months following the greatest debacle in German military history, was due to the uncanny ability of the Wehrmacht to resurrect itself in the face of disaster.

To the casual eye, the successful offensives of the Wehrmacht in Russia during the summer and autumn of 1942 suggested that the German armed forces had recovered from their first defeat and returned to their former selves, masters of the cut and slash of Blitzkrieg. In truth, however, the Red Army had gutted its German counterpart during the summer and autumn of 1941, beginning a decline in the substance and capabilities of Germany’s armed forces that inexorably accelerated during the next four years.

Manpower levels in German units declined by at least a third, causing the Germans to “recruit” men from the occupied territories, many of whom were not at all motivated to fight for the Third Reich. Allied bombing reduced German production of weapons and ammunition, often forcing the German Army to rely upon captured French and Russian equipment, with a resulting decline in German fighting power. The result had been the disastrous defeats at Stalingrad and Alamein.

Nevertheless, the German Army and Air Force were resilient enough to at least partially recover from even these events, and German industry remained sufficiently productive to arm some powerful elite formations. The question on the table in the early spring of 1943 was whether these units should be shepherded and used defensively to take advantage of the large areas of Russia still under German control, or offensively in one more effort to crush the Red Army and bring the country to its knees.

Adolf Hitler, whose opinion carried the greatest weight, believed that an opportunity to achieve the more aggressive purpose lay with the huge salient in southern Russia left by the Red Army’s post-Stalingrad offensive. At the center of that salient lay the city of Kursk, and the Fuehrer became enamored with the idea that German forces on either side of the salient would pierce it, meet at or near Kursk, and destroy enough Soviet forces to cause Russia to leave the war, or at the very least reduce its fighting power sufficiently to allow Germany to defeat the anticipated Allied invasion of western Europe.

Showalter describes the decision-making process that consumed Hitler and the Generals who would have responsibility for conducting the Citadel operation, illustrating the ambivalence among these men that caused a plague of vacillation among them with regard to whether, if undertaken, the offensive would stand a chance of success. There were important German officers, among them Heinz Guderian, who remained opposed to the plan from start to finish. But the Fuehrer, whatever misgivings he may have had, was persuaded to forge ahead, in part because Field Marshal Erich von Manstein threw his considerable professional weight behind the idea.

Professor Showalter contrasts the success of the Soviet intelligence system in divining both the timing and overall German plan for Citadel, with the chronic failure of German military intelligence, in this case its inability to obtain useful information about either Soviet plans for dealing with the operation or the forces that would be available for the purpose. Indeed, understanding that the Russians knew much of the German plans, and were preparing to thwart them, came primarily through photographs taken during Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights.

What those photographs depicted likely would have persuaded any reasonable person to abandon the enterprise with dispatch and preserve the precious German panzer divisions to fight another day. For the Red Army had begun constructing mile upon mile of interlocking defensive belts, each of which included elaborate systems of trenches, gun positions, wire entanglements, bunkers, anti-tank ditches, and forts whose purpose was to funnel both man and machine into extensive minefields and killing grounds where the enemy’s soldiers and armored vehicles would be destroyed wholesale.

Showalter is truly in his element in describing the reality of the fighting in the Kursk salient, which began on July 5, 1943 and lasted roughly two weeks. But the battle was fought literally around the clock, exhausting men and vehicles alike. The final numbers imply a clear German victory; the most reasonable accounting indicates that the Soviets lost eight times the number of German combat vehicles destroyed in Citadel, and six times the men killed and wounded. Yet the German armed forces clearly failed to meet their objectives, and whereas the Russians could replace the men and vehicles destroyed in the battle, the Germans could not. For the remainder of the war, German ground forces would be incapable of meaningful offensive operations. Likewise the Luftwaffe, whose ground support operations dropped quickly to nearly zero, in parallel with its ultimate failure to defend the Reich from the Allied bombing offensive.

With due regard to the several excellent scholars and writers who have written so well on the same subject, it must be said that Showalter’s narrative of the battle is without peer. Professor Showalter did what any good historian would have done----read the secondary sources, met and spoke with survivors, mastered the pertinent original documents, and cogitated upon the whole----and produced a work that is accessible to both the professional and the casual reader alike. show less

The Encyclopedia of Warfare is an excellent resource for anyone from a casual history buff to a professional historian. It is meant to answer basic questions and point one in the right direction for further research or reading. And to that purpose it is a wonderful success.

First of all, just like any encyclopedia, this is not designed to be read from cover to cover, at least not as a single work. Like my old Encyclopedia Britannica, one will likely skip around and end up reading most of it. show more But also like the EB, each entry aims to offer a very basic who, what, why, when, where with a little more elaboration when the event (battle, skirmish, etc) is more important. Anyone coming to this work expecting it to be something other than a single volume encyclopedia is either unaware of what an encyclopedia is or just likes to hear themselves be negative.

In deciding for myself how much I liked the volume I mostly read the entries for wars and conflicts with which I have more than a passing familiarity. In order to keep this book manageable some things were glossed over or omitted while others were given more space. A reader may well think one battle, for example, is more important than the space it is given. That does not mean either the editors nor the reader are wrong, they probably came at it from different perspectives. My study and research on wars were primarily cultural and intellectual history with enough military history thrown in so I could try to understand when something might have been done for military reasons and when something may have been done for political or appearance reasons. As such, I would probably highlight something that rightfully doesn't warrant it in a volume like this. So keep in mind the title of the book before criticizing it for being what it is not trying to be.

As a big aside, I can picture this being in a fiction writer's office, especially a writer of historical fiction, as a quick easy first step toward including any conflicts that might have been going on and impacted their characters, even if just to make the story more immersive. I personally hope to jump around in the book, mostly in the time periods in which I have the least knowledge, and use it as a springboard for more detailed reading.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less