Goerlitz - History of the German General Staff 1657-1945 Illustrated

HISTORY OF THE GERMAN GENERAL STAFF 1657-1945By Walter Goerlitz

Preface
By Walter Millis
To two generations of Americans the German General Staff has stoodas an object of hatred, fear and revulsion. In the two greatest of ourwars Germany was our principal opponent; twice in a lifetime we haveseen our normal world, if not our national existence itself, imperilled byher formidable and ruthless armies. Through the whole thirty yearsfrom 1914 to 1945 we were to live more or less under the shadow of thegrimly expert, professional militarism by which those armies were leda tradition nurtured, and in the world's eyes personified, by the German Great General Staff.
This remarkable organization seemed so much a thing of evil in itselfthat its extirpation became a chief object of the Treaty of Versailles. Duly it was abolished, and Germany forbidden ever to recreate such an instrumentofmilitarypower;apparently,theonlyresultwasthattwenty years later it was functioning as it always had, managing stillgreater armies, launching them with still greater precision and moredeadly effect upon a shattered world society. The General Staff, whichtraced its origins to the armies of Frederick the Great, did not finallycease to exist until that apocalyptic moment in the ruins of the Reichskanzlei, when Germany was at last left without an army of any kindthrough which it might operate.
That it had left an indelible impress upon our national life, our historyand our future was obvious enough. Less obvious and certainly farless clearly understood was the earlier influence which it had exertedupon our own institutions, in common with those of Western society asa whole. In the late Nineteenth Century it was far from seeming the evilpower which it was later regarded as being; in the days of the elderMoltke it was, rather, a model, earnestly imitated by all the greater nations as they sought to bring their military systems and policies intoline with the revolutionary changes which sociology and technologywere working in the ancient art of war.
The Napoleonic era had posed, or clearly foreshadowed, certain fundamental military problems of great complexity. It had combined the invention of the democratic, popular mass army with the beginnings of atechnological revolution which was to make possible the mobilization,supply, deployment and maneuver of such masses on an unparalleledscale. Both the ideological foundations and the technical apparatus hadbeen provided for a "total" outpouring of the national energies in warto an extent which would have seemed incredible even as late as themid-Eighteenth Century. How were such tremendous potential forcesto be controlled; how were they to be commanded; how, in particular,were they to be related to the political and social ends of the state,which they were supposed to serve?
It was still just possible in Napoleon's time for individual genius (aidedby such improvisations as the divisional system of command and theembryonic staff officer) to direct the new forms of military actionwhich were coming into existence; but even with genius available, theresults were not too happy. And a generation later it was already apparent to the thoughtful that something else would have to be developed tomeet the growing problem of generalship in the modern technologicalstate. The inevitable answer in war as in commerce, industry or civilpublicadministrationwassystem,organizationandspecializedtraining. And, rather curiously, it fell to the Prussian general staff, itself already an anachronism in more ways than one, to provide thatanswer in what for nearly a century was to seem its most efficient practical form.
The Prussian staff, as the opening sentences of this book observe, was"a product of a specific phase of European development. It grew out ofthat combination of absolute monarchy with standing armies which became so typical a phenomenon after the Thirty Years' War." But perhaps it was just because the roots of the institution ran so deep in an ordered past, that it survived into the tempestuous future of the Nineteenth Century as an example on which nearly every great militarypower not only in Western Europe but in Japan and the UnitedStates as well tended to model its military policies and systems.Not a few of the basic precepts and traditions worked out by the Prussian and later the Ge man Great General Staff were to enter into themilitary thought of every major military power. The traditions of an almost monkish divorcement of military policy from political affairs, ofthorough preparatory planning for every possible military eventuality(without regard for the influence which the military plan might have onthe political crisis), of corporate anonymity in planning and commandbut of the highest level of individual competence and responsibilitywithin the corporate leadership, of the strictest moral and intellectualand also caste standards maintained within the framework of selflessdevotion to the sovereign and the statethese were the traditions andthe principles developed by the German General Staff through the Nineteenth Century as answers to the basic problems of military commandin the democratic-capitalisttechnological society of the times.That the answers did not work too well is painfully obvious in the lightof later knowledge. But that they were widely admired and imitated isindisputable. The anonymous but overriding authority of the Staff, thesecret preparation of war plans, the division of Staff responsibilitiesand labors, the incorporation of technological advance into militarypractice through Staff study, channelling and guidance, all becamestandard practice in the world that came up to catastrophe in 1914, andmuch of it is standard practice still. While the United States had duringmost of the Nineteenth Century remained outside the main lines ofEuropean military d velopment, it was to the German General Staffthat we turned for example when, after 1898, we realized that wewould have to modernize our military system. And the staff method oforganization, largely based on the German model, which Elihu Root instituted in our own Army in the Theodore Roosevelt era, remains to thisday the basis of American military command and military policy formation.
The history of the German Great General Staff has been a great andpregnant influence in the affairs of Western Europe and America overat least a century and a half. Yet it is a history which few Americansunderstand or are even aware of. It is believed that this translation andcondensation of Walter Goerlitz's massive account is the first book toappear in English which deals at all adequately with the subject. Actually, it is at once rather more and perhaps somewhat less than its titlesuggests. The author's approach is not through the technics of organization or even of plan, but through the succession of great and neargreat or sometimes inferior personalities who, together with the socialand economic backgrounds which produced them, made up the story.This is not an analysis of how the Oberquartiermeister functioned in1699 or of just how the Truppenamt (the name assumed by the GeneralStaff after Versailles) was organized in the period before Hitler. It is thestory of Scharnhorst, Boyen, Gneisenau, Clausewitz, the elder Moltke,Waldersee, Schlieen, the younger Moltke, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Seeckt, Schleicher, Beck, Blomberg, Halder, Rund-stedt, Keitel,Guderian, Jodl and many more, by no means omitting the brilliant vonStauffenberg who organized and gave his life to the conspiracy of July,1944, which sought to erase the madman, Hitler, and, so tragicallyfailed.