The German Way of War Revisited

Abstract

The German Way of War Revisited Robert M. Citino (bio) MILITARY HISTORIANS MAY NOT HAVE ALL TAKEN THE cultural turn, but cultural dynamics are certainly prominent in recent military historiography. One of the most important of these is the notion that there are distinctive "ways of war" that reflect various cultural traits in nations and their militaries. According to Lawrence Sondhaus, this line of thinking can be traced to the influential interwar military thinker Basil H. Liddell Hart, who argued that the traditional British way of warfare was characterized by an "indirect approach." Ways-of-war thinking has evolved in several intellectual directions to become a major theme of military historical reflection and analysis. In June 2010 a group of distinguished military historians ran a lively session on comparative ways of war (German, American, and Chinese) at the Historical Society's conference held at George Washington University. In the following roundtable we publish revised versions of their conference papers. In the last decade there has been a general agreement among scholars that understanding "culture" is one of military history's most important tasks, and that one way of doing that is to posit the existence of separate national "ways of war"—military cultures that are said to determine how individual nations and their armed institutions fight. Today we can see scholars following at least three separate paths forward. One is to analyze "institutional military culture"—the manner in which a given military establishment sees itself, its calling, and its history, and especially how it does so during peacetime. This path is best represented in Brian Linn's work, especially Echo of Battle. A second might be termed "battlefield culture," focusing specifically on warfighting and attempting to note repetitive patterns that cross conflicts and cross time periods. My own German Way of War is an example, dealing as it does with Prussian and German wars from the time of the Great Elector in the 1650s to World War II. Finally, some historians have sought to survey the much broader field of "national culture," the matrix out of which military institutions spring. Here we might consider the book by Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction, written at about the same time as German Way of War, which looks at very different sources but reaches conclusions that are in many ways similar. Now, we have to admit that these three paths are different. And yet, while they differ in approach, they do share a commonality of outlook. In all these cases, "culture" or "way of war" serves as the water in which the human actors swim, filled with unstated assumptions and default settings of which they may be only dimly aware; it is the envelope of possibilities and expectations in which they live; it is "the box," and "thinking outside of it" is not as easy as it sounds. Click for larger view View full resolution Before the Battle of Jena, 1806. From Poultney Bigelow, "The German Struggle of Liberty," Harper's New Monthly (July 1895). I sometimes feel guilty for starting this whole thing. Russell Weigley, of course, wrote American Way of War a long time ago. It was a seminal work, and while it started a vigorous debate, we can't really say that it started a historiographical school. More recently, in 2001, Richard W. Harrison wrote The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904-1940. It, too, is a work of high scholarly tone and importance, but as the subtitle indicates, it actually deals with doctrinal reform in the Russo-Soviet army during a relatively brief period of time. German Way of War appeared in 2005, and to my mind was something new: an attempt—successful or not—to puzzle out long-term characteristics of the Prusso-German military tradition, to look at those commanders and armies while on campaign, and to see if, for all the time and energy armies expend on military reforms in peacetime, they still tend to fight all their wars more or less the same way every time out. The book stimulated both strong agreement and strong disagreement and continues to do so, but it also benefited from timing: the renewed debate over American warmaking generated by...