Robert M. Citino

What I said about Citino's book of the German army's war in 1943 and what the conduct of the war said about the German's officer corps' corporate culture applies, if anything, to a greater degree for this book. This is in that the first half of 1942 was largely about a German army that while apparently on the ropes at the end of 1941 picked itself up and got on with the business of generating the operational victories that would be the prerequisites of any possible strategic victory. That show more the German military after all it had been through and all its limitations still came within a tantalizing margin of delivering victory at Stalingrad, in the Caucasus region and in North Africa is why it fascinates to this day. A particular virtue of this book over its successor dealing with the events of 1943 are really excellent end notes that are themselves a fine survey of the state of play of the historiography of the war in Europe at the time of publication. show less

Besides being the culminating point of a career spent writing about the German military that fought World War II, and an examination of the death of the Prussian way of war, this book also represents Citino's coming to grips with the collapse of the Cold War myths of a "clean" German army and the recognition that the criminality of the Nazi regime was enabled by the German officer corps. In this analysis the paradigmatic German general is not Erwin Rommel, Gerd von Rundstedt, or even Heinz show more Guderian. Citino nominates Ferdinand Schorner for this position. Schorner being a man who was always willing to unquestioningly follow Hitler's orders, who continued to execute his men for nebulous failures in discipline even after Hitler's suicide, and who abandoned his post to try and surrender to the Americans; only to find himself unceremoniously handed over to the Soviets. Recommended. show less

I'm probably not the person who this book is aimed at, as I've already read a significant portion of Citino's bibliography. However, for the reader seeking to move beyond the chestnuts of the popular historiography of the Second World War this is a very useful book indeed, as Citino makes the fruits of the new operational history of the last twenty or so years accessible to a wider public. In particular, Citino is very interested in strategic culture and always ties events back into the show more Prussian aspiration to short and lively wars where larger opponents were kept off-balance by mean of audacious movement and cold nerve; this is except for the small problem of facing a larger enemy willing to fight to the bitter end and with no shortage of their own will. If nothing else the events of 1943 represent the death of a way of life for Citino, and he writes about this in an entertaining and trenchant fashion. show less

One of Citino's earlier works, this accounting of the evolution of doctrine in the German army of the Weimar period emphasizes how much work was done to create the concepts and units that executed what was referred to as "blitzkrieg," even before the creation of the Third Reich. As this monograph is now a generation old one does wonder what questions Citino would handle differently in retrospect, one such question might be whether the criminality displayed by the German officer class during show more World War II might have had some roots in the scofflaw mentality cultivated in the period before the Nazi seizure of power. show less