"Death of the Wehrmachtl"

Robert Citino's Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 is not as good as his earlier The Getman Way of War. That makes it only the third-best work of military history I have read in the past half-decade or so (behind Adam Tooze's truly brilliant The Wages of Destruction).

Brad DeLong http://delong.typepad.com brad.delong@gmail.com

Comments

[David Lloyd-Jones]

.


Coincidentally,

I just got the excellent Heinz Guderian's autobiography, Panzer Officer, in the mail from Amazon this afternoon.

On page 152, preparing for the campaign against Russia, he writes:

"Shortly after the opening of hostilities the OKW sent an order direct to all corps and divisions concerning the treatment that was to be given to the civilian population and to prisoners of war in Russia. It specified that in the event of excesses being committed against civilians or prisoners, the responsible soldier was not automatically to be tried and punished according to military law; disciplinary action was only to be taken at the discretion of the man's immediate unit commander. This order was obviously likely to have the most unfortunate effect on the preservation of discipline. The Commander-in-Chief of the Army had apparently realised this himself, for an appendix to the order, signed by Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, stated that the order would only be carried out if there was no danger of discipline suffering thereby. Since both I and my corps commanders were immediately convinced that discipline must suffer if the order were published, I forbade its forwarding to the divisions and ordered that it be returned to Berlin. This order, which was to play an important part in the post-war trials of German generals by our former enemies, was consequantly never carried out in my Panzer Group. At the time I dutifully informed the Commander-in-Chief of the Army Group that I was not publishing or obeying this order.

"The equally notorious, so-called `Commissar Order' never even reached my Panzer Group. No doubt Army Group Centre had already decided not to forward it. Therefore the `Commissar Order' was never carried out by my troops either.

"Looking back one can only deeply regret that neither the OKW nor the OKH blocked these two orders in the first place. Many brave and innocent soldiers would have thus been saved bitter suffering, and the good name of Germany would have been spared a great shame. Regardless of whether the Russians had signed the Hague Agreement or not, whether or not they had approved the Geneva Convention, German soldiers must accept their international obligations and must behave according to the dictates of Christian conscience...."

Cheney, Feith, Rumsfeld to The Hague.

. -dlj.

[Robert Waldmann]

Brad some would consider "the third-best work of military history I have read in the past half-decade or so " to be very faint praise indeed. There is no third best work of military history I have read in the past half-decade or so as I haven't read 3 works of military history in the past half-decade or so (or one or in the past decade or ...).

I think you might indicate roughly how many works of military history you have read in the past half-decade or so. I know you like to hint that you read twice as much as anyone else ... can believe is possible for a human being to read. However, I'm not falling for that. I know you and I know you read 4 times as much.

[Steven Rogers]

Do you consider those works to be Superior to Gerhard Weinberg's "A World at Arms"? or Clay Blair's "Silent Victory"? Those are older, in Blair's case much older than five years, but I wonder how the three you mentioned stack up.

[A World at Arms is excellent, but it is #4. Silent Victory I have not read...]

[Steven Rogers]

"Silent Victory" is about the American submarine warfare campaign against Japan. It is certainly worth your while to read. It is fairly old, however, so you may have trouble finding it.

[Ralph Hitchens]

[Downfall is indeed brilliant. I haven't read _Guadalcanal_]

Up there with Citino's books I would place Richard B. Frank's _Downfall_, a comprehensive analysis of the end of the Pacific War. Frank seems to be neglected among contemporary military historians, but this book (like his earlier _Guadalcanal_) is a masterpiece that synthesizes a broad array of scholarship. I do agree, though, that Tooze's book ranks at or near the top of the heap.

[mwg]

The Typo Police want to know: the "Getman" way of war? Is that a typo or should I just keep my mouth shut?

[Roger Albin]

Tooze's book is brilliant and is required reading for anyone interested in modern history. Its in no way a conventional military history, most of the book is careful analysis of German economic statistics. Its also written quite well. It'll change the way you think about the Third Reich and WWII.

The Citino, Frank, and Weinberg books mentioned are all excellent but probably won't change the way you think about WWII.

Frank's Downfall, which is quite convincing, should be read in conjunction with Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy. Both are devoted to the end of the Pacific War and offer somewhat contradictory interpretations. In important respects, however, they are complementary.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

mwg: That should be The *German* Way of War.

[pim]

A number of excellent books on WWII come to mind, but I will cite two: John Erickson's two volume history of the eastern front and Peter Padfiield's War Beneath the Seas

[Robert J. Gordon]

I am currently writing a book review of the impressive Tooze book "Wages of Destruction". Contra Brad's description, this is not military history but rather economic history. My initial criterion to assess the value of the book is to ask "what is new" as compared to the Abelshauser chapter in the Mark Harrison edited (1998) volume on the Economics of World War II.

I learned two big new ideas from the Tooze book as contrasted to the huge existing literature on Nazi society and economy 1933-45. First, the push to rearmament 1933-39 was consistently forced to face a severe foreign exchange constraint. An oddity of the Nazi economy was its refusal to devalue its currency. Instead, it placed extreme constraints on imports of consumer goods. This was in addition to what everyone already knew, that the Nazi economy held down wages in order to boost profits and stimulate production and hiring.

The second big new idea in the Tooze book, which maybe everyone already knew about but has gotten lost in the focus on the Holocaust, was General Plan Ost. This was a mind-boggling plan to deport (to some unknown destination, mainly death) most of the inhabitants of non-Jewish Poland, Belorussia, and the Ukraine in order to provide "lebensraum" for German settlers. Tooze documents plans to deport as many as 40 million inhabitants. Fortunately, the reverses suffered by the German army starting with the Moscow campaign in Nov-Dec 41 postponed the General Plan Ost. According to Tooze, they tried it out on a part of Poland, and the inhabitants ran away into the forests rather than being subjected to deportation.

Brad talked about his top three WWII military histories of the last half-decade. One of the best new books is Ian Kershaw's (2007) "Fateful Choices" about strategic choices in the major capitals (London, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Washington) in 1940 and 1941. This is deep and wonderful writing about the big issues of WWII -- why didn't the British negotiate with Hitler, why did Hitler decide so early (July 1940) to invade Russia, what was Roosevelt thinking in 1940-41, and the biggest puzzle of all, why did the Japanese decide to attack Pearl Harbor. A related book on strategic planning, but mainly about the U.S., is Michael Beschloss (2002) "The Conquerors" about FDR and Truman. This book's major figure is Morgenthau, and many will be interested in M's efforts to get FDR to take the ongoing holocaust seriously.

[Steven Rogers]

Robert J.Gordon: Fateful Choices! Thank you. That is a book I have been looking for, which is difficult to find when you can remember the subject but no the title or the author.

[Roger Albin]

Robert, the General Plan Ost has been well known for some time. Michael Burleigh (before he left the academic world and became a conservative hack) has a very good essay on what Eastern Europe would have been like if the Germans had succeeded. Poland offers a preview of what the Germans had in mind. No education higher than elementary school, elimination of Poles from many areas of historic Poland, and maintenance of a Polish area to provide cheap, unskilled labor. This, of course, after elimination of all the Jews, Gypsies, and educated Poles. It would have been something in between Apartheid South Africa and the antebellum American South.

[Anderson]

"Fateful Choices" was good, but a bit too prone to show that the way things happened was the only way things could have happened. Which is trivially true, but doesn't make the choices seem very fateful.

In particular, his argument that Hitler already regarded Germany as effectively at war with the U.S., so why not declare war after Pearl Harbor, makes no more (or less) sense than any other explanation I've seen. But I am inclined to prefer the theory of Sebastian Haffner and others, that Hitler realized his chances for a victory over the Soviets were fleeting, and so succumbed to a Wagnerian let-it-all-come-down impulse.

[Bernard Yomtov]

"Looking back one can only deeply regret that neither the OKW nor the OKH blocked these two orders in the first place. Many brave and innocent soldiers would have thus been saved bitter suffering, and the good name of Germany would have been spared a great shame. Regardless of whether the Russians had signed the Hague Agreement or not, whether or not they had approved the Geneva Convention, German soldiers must accept their international obligations and must behave according to the dictates of Christian conscience...."

This is insanity. Spare me concerns for the honor of the Wehrmacht. Soldiers, especially including the generals, who behaved "according to the dictates of Christian conscience," would never have fought for Hitler to begin with.

F**k Guderian, and the Panzer he rode in on.

[David G.]

I've just ordered Tooze's book from Amazon. If, however, he presents Generalplan Ost as a new discovery, I'm surprised. Any remotely well-informed student of WWII has known of this document for decades. I, who am by training a medievalist but with a penchant for German history, read about it about 35 years ago. Here's the current German wikipedia entry on it: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost. My understanding is that G.O. was a series of more or less serious documents prepared by policy planning types in various ministries in Berlin which really had very little connection to actual military or political planning. In any event, the Germans lost the war, so who cares?

[pim]

I have noticed a number comments about Germany's population plans for Eastern Europe. One place to start is with 'Final Solution':Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews by Gotz Aly