Tag: military culture

War, Gender, and Nation in 19th-Century Europe: A Preliminary Sketch

June 23, 2017

War and Society
I wrote this preliminary introduction for a thematic handbook article that was not to be. Looking back at this 2015 draft, I think it contains enough ideas to make it worth sharing.¹

If military service had become a rite of passage for young men in much of Europe well before the mutual slaughter began in the summer of 1914, neither its ubiquity nor its meaning to those it embraced were foregone conclusions. To be sure, the fundamental challenge offered by the declaration of the levée en masse in revolutionary France in 1793 represented an important first step, as did monarchical Prussia’s turn in 1813 to the near-general conscription of those men considered young and fit enough to join the fight. Indeed, Prussia’s response to the Napoleonic challenge intertwined military service, citizenship, and manhood in the gendered construction of a nation at war that bore a striking resemblance to those ideals manifest in the mobilizations of 1914.² Nonetheless, near-universal manhood conscription took many more decades to predominate on the continent (never mind the United Kingdom, which did not resort to it until 1916).³
Moreover, the path was not at all direct, not from the state’s and army’s side nor from the general population’s. For the state and its military leadership, big citizens’ armies could be desirable for fighting a foreign enemy, but they could also present a threat to the domestic-political status quo because they might not allow themselves to be used to suppress protest or insurrection at home. A further decisive factor was technology and how military leaders came to use it. Especially important were the railroads and the development of strategic thought and organizational structures that placed a premium on mobilizing large numbers of men at once for a decisive blow of the kind Helmuth von Moltke pulled off for Prussia at Königgrätz (aka Sadowa) in 1866 and at Sedan in 1870 during the wars that produced a German nation-state.⁴

Of course, an approach to war of this kind also required large numbers of trained conscripts and experienced reservists. But first things first. The men targeted by conscription (and then the reserves) and the families and communities in which they had been raised first needed to learn to see the state’s call to the colors as legitimate and inescapable, let alone perceive value in the prospect.

Nineteenth-century discourses and attitudes regarding conscription were informed by normative assumptions about manhood in connection with a wide range of topics—civic or national duty and martial sacrifice, forbearance and manliness, masculinity and bravery, willpower and human flesh versus modern weaponry (especially later in the century), the impact of length of service on soldiers’ relationship to civilian society, civilian upbringings and soldiers’ political reliability, the reputational impact of military service on veterans returning to civilian life, and so on. The gendered matrix of military service and citizenship was integral to warfare and its sociopolitical effects in Europe. This matrix is the subject of the first of three thematic sections comprising this [unrealized] chapter. Ordinary men in uniform occupy the center of this analysis, but other men and women who joined or supported the armed struggles—interstate and intrastate—are also considered.

The importance and meaning of conscription in this period was also affected by the increasing cachet of nationality as an organizing principle for the European state system, or at least as a cultural manifestation that states could leverage.⁵ Whether in the ranks as conscripts, as substitutes for conscripts, as wartime volunteers, or by vocation, soldiers were beginning to be identified—and even identify themselves, at least in wartime—with the nation-state or the national cause that they served. Many fought in conflicts that had national resonance among the general population, such as the Crimean War (1853–56), and many others fought in wars that led to the creation of the Italian and German nation-states (achieved in 1861 and 1871, respectively). The last case also entailed the national humiliation of France—widely felt in that country—in a series of disastrous defeats (1870–71).

These conflicts did not just involve soldiers in the service of the state, however. The rise of nationality and “the people” as relevant factors saw men (and even women) join irregular formations to attain their national goals or, in the case of Italy, at least redeem their nation’s honor, whether that meant overturning a foreign or particularistic ruler (especially during the European revolutions of 1848) or defending their nation against a foreign invader or dying in the attempt. Or so the nationalist narratives went, even if some probably took up arms to defend their home and locality against the privations of requisitioning and marauding.

These decades also saw men and women (and youth) in cities resort to violence in order to change constitutional structures or protest economic and social conditions. Whether or not any military experience was involved in the barricade building of 1848, memories of earlier revolts had certainly been passed down to the frequently subaltern generations of that time, a legacy that was also evident during the Paris Commune’s struggle in 1871.⁶ Intertwined with implicit and explicit discourses about citizenship and belonging—and thus about manhood and womanhood, too—these episodes also belonged to the complex, often violent process of nation formation and consolidation. At the same time, in this context of nation-making wars and insurrections, the seemingly contradictory phenomenon of international volunteers serving a national cause must also be considered.⁷

The circles of social actors and norms to potentially include in a gendered analysis of the above mentioned wars and insurrections could be expanded a great deal further, if space constraints and available research permitted it. Whenever gender played a role in constructing or understanding the motivation and practices of those fighting, that role conceptually comprised both masculinity and femininity because gender, like class and race, is a relational concept. If the military world had become almost exclusively male and masculine in the nineteenth century, that manhood still presupposed relationships with women and femininity.

Normative femininity might be embodied in the appearance and comportment of women accompanying the army (in France, holdovers like the cantinère) or nursing the wounded (in the Crimea, Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale). There were also the women at home for whom one fought, or the girl one intended to marry after completing active duty. Normative images of women in the minds of soldiers could affect those soldiers’ reactions to encounters with women in wartime, in the course of requisitioning food from civilians or sleeping in civilians’ homes or outbuildings—or when fighting irregulars or taking a town street by street. Finally, a siege army could not make distinctions between soldiers and civilians, men and woman, adults and children in a besieged city (as in the Prussian-German siege of Paris in 1870–71). On the other hand, policy decisions reached in the besieged city itself (or policy lacunae) could create great differences—between rich and poor, soldiers and civilians (and therefore also between men and women), and so on.

No matter how powerful memories of the levée en masse continued to be in the middle decades of nineteenth century France, to take the most famous example of a nation in arms, patriotism and élan were not enough to win wars. One also needed professional expertise to train and lead men in war or in the suppression of an insurrection. With different educational levels and frequently a more elevated social background, officers might well embody masculinity differently than the men in their charge, especially if they were noblemen. Furthermore, as military technologies grew and military organizations became more complex, the knowledge required by at least some of the officers expanded. As the job changed, so too could the men doing it.

These developments were accompanied by public and internal debates about military leadership. What qualities did officers require? From which stock was recruitment most desirable? What training did they require? What was their relationship to their men supposed to look like? How did they treat their subordinates? And what about their relationship to acknowledged social equals and supposed inferiors—especially men—outside the military? How did their expertise and comportment figure into their practice of masculinity and its reception? What did military service and sacrifice mean to these men? How did social background and family history shape that meaning? Finally, what about their private lives? How did marriage and family fit into their military careers? To what extent did the bourgeois ideal of a separate domestic sphere obtain in this context? Of course, each of these questions could lead to more than one answer because officer corps were by no means homogeneous.⁸ Furthermore, some important military leaders did not fit within this framework at all, most prominently Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose biography, relationship to his fighters, and influential public image form an instructive counterpoint.⁹

Moreover, if soldiers were citizens acting on behalf of the nation, their actions might be expected to bear a closer relationship to the values and norms that guided their behavior in civilian life. Actual or alleged practices in wartime that appeared contrary to the predominant normative conception of war—still largely informed by the metaphor of a dual between two equal and honorable parties—exposed the perpetrator to charges of acting in an unmanly or unwomanly way and, by extension, his or her nation to charges of dishonorable, uncivilized behavior. Purported atrocities and other perceived wrongdoings also created opportunities for soldiers to exact revenge with drastic countermeasures that could contradict taboos on destroying property and even those on killing women.

Of course, such measures were never just about the attitudes of soldiers, but also the command climate, discipline, and policy goals. Furthermore, gendered contemporary reports and commentaries on the violence could be more about demonizing the enemy than about actual events or understanding what happened. The main examples explored in this section involve face-to-face encounters between German soldiers and French civilians in 1870–71 and the extreme use of violence by Thiers’s forces against the Commune in 1871.¹⁰

All three sections [so was my plan] proceed from the fundamental premise that practices and experiences of manhood and womanhood are historically contingent, that men and women change over time, that normative masculinities and femininities change with them. The seemingly natural in their attitudes and behaviors is cultural and therefore a product of history. The second corollary premise is that war and warriors are creatures of their times, influenced by—and influencing—them. Contrary to many narrowly conceived histories, not to mention widespread ahistorical elements of popular culture, there is no universal soldier or military leader.¹¹ Here, too, biology need not be destiny, whereas culture, if not properly analyzed in historical context, very well could be.¹²

The third premise is that although the dual political and technological revolutions of the nineteenth century match up chronologically with the emergence of “total war” in the twentieth century, the journey never involved only a single plot line that led inexorably to 1914. Focusing on the role of gender—a fundamental component of human culture—can help to make other formative strands of the story visible. It then becomes possible to complicate Stig Förster’s powerful typology of warfare’s development in the modern era—cabinet war, people’s war, industrialized people’s war, and total war—whose emphasis on parallel developments in war and politics can resemble a teleology, one subverted by events after 1945 and hard to reconcile with developments in warfare in other eras and cultures.¹³

Featured image: Detail from “Combat at the military station: Of Chateau d’ Eau, 24th February 1848 / combat au poste: Du Château d’ Eau, 24 Févr. 1848,” Library of Congress PPOC, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90716191/.

See “Historiographical Impasse,” November 9, 2015, on this blog. I only made some small modifications to the draft for this venue. Mainly, I broke up longer paragraphs to improve the online reading experience, added a comment in square brackets, and fixed the most obvious glitches in the prose. But I resisted the impulse to add further examples or citations. ↩

See Karen Hagemann, Männlicher Muth und teutsche Ehre: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht in der Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preussens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001). ↩

See esp. Christian Jansen, ed., Der Bürger als Soldat: Die Militarisierung europäischer Gesellschaften im langen 19. Jahrhundert: Ein internationaler Vergleich (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2004); David M. Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766–1870 (2002; London: The Royal Historical Society/The Boydell Press, 2013); Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 2001); and Dierk Walter, Preußische Heeresreformen 1807–1870: Militärische Innovation und der Mythos der “Roonschen Reform” (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003). The history of military service still requires much more research, especially if one wishes to talk about Europe as a whole. ↩

On the implementation of this technology in this era, see Dennis E. Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1975); and Arden Bucholz, Moltke and the German Wars, 1864–1871 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001). ↩

The literature on nationalism in nineteenth–century Europe is vast. Some good starting points: E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1789: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (1992; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Culture, and Identity since 1775 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). ↩

See Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); Robert Tombs, The War against Paris, 1871 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014). ↩

Gilles Pécout, ed., International Volunteers and the Risorgiment, special issue of Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14, no. 4. (2009): 413–90. ↩

For these issues in Germany with a focus on the period after the German nation–state was forged, see Mark R. Stoneman, “Bürgerliche und adlige Krieger: Zum Verhältnis von sozialer Herkunft und Berufskultur im whilhelminischen Armee–Offizierkorps,” in Heinz Reif, ed., Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschand II: Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 25–63; idem, “Wilhelm Groener, Officering, and the Schlieffen Plan” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2006), chaps. 1–2. ↩

See Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). ↩

On the first example, see Mark R. Stoneman, “The Bavarian Army and French Civilians in the War of 1870–1871: A Cultural Interpretation,” War in History 8, no. 3 (2001): 271–93; and idem, “Die deutschen Greueltaten im Kriege 1870/71 am Beispiel der Bayern,” in Sönke Neitzel and Daniel Hohrath, eds., Kriegsgreuel: Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008), 223–39. On the second example, see Tombs, War against Paris; and Merriman, Massacre. ↩

See John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), Kindle edition, preface (entitled “Requiem for the Universal Soldier”). ↩

Consider, for example, the powerful myth of the fallen soldier; George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). ↩

By way of introduction to these issues, see the earliest and the latest volumes to arise from a series of international conferences whose subject matter extended from the mid–nineteenth–century nation–making wars to the twentieth–century total wars and then back to the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (New York: German Historical Institute/Cambridge University Press, 1997); Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds. War in the Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 (New York: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2013). The latter cites other volumes and debates arising from the conference series. ↩
Preparing to Fight the Last War? Maybe Not

December 17, 2016

History of Knowledge, Past and Present, War and Society

Prussian War Academy ca, 1900 via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been taking some time to think more about a slow-moving article on Wilhelm Groener I’ve been working on. It has received a big boost recently from the GHI’s new focus on the history of knowledge.

A truism holds that generals prepare to fight the last war, not the next one. Unable to peer into the future, they make do with the lessons of the past. Fair enough, perhaps, but this common-sense wisdom presupposes that military leaders will necessarily understand the salient features of the last war without preconceptions about war and officering affecting their discernment. In other words, the truism fails to account for the effects of prior training, experience, and acculturation in the production of knowledge about war. Instead, it implicitly assumes the existence of universal soldierdom, as if officering and soldiering—but for technology—were not culturally and historically contingent.

Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939) offers a case in point. A general staff officer in the German army who rose to prominence quickly in the First World War, Groener became an important spokesman in the interwar period for the so-called Schlieffen school, offering an interpretation of the war seemingly at odds with what actually happened. Instead of deriving new lessons from the stalemate, as his contemporary Erich Ludendorff did in a nightmarish vision of politics serving war instead of vice versa, Groener doubled down on the knowledge he had internalized in peacetime Wilhelmine Germany. Issuing from neither a military outsider nor an original thinker and steeped in antebellum military thoughtways and culture, Groener’s interpretation of the First World War can be analyzed in relation to his prewar training and wartime experiences to show the inner logic of the professional military knowledge and culture in which he was steeped.
A Few Notes on the History of Knowledge

July 8, 2016

Historiography, History of Consumption, History of Knowledge, War and Society
One of the new research focuses at the GHI since our director, Simone Lässig, began her tenure last October is the history of knowledge.¹ The study of knowledge in its societal context (as opposed to thought experiments about truth in the discipline of philosophy) has some tradition in sociology and anthropology, but it is still a relatively new focus in English-language historiography, at least in my experience here in the U.S.²
A good introduction for me was Peter Burke, What is the History of Knowledge (polity, 2016). It says more about what the field can encompass than it does about historiographical debates or plausible narratives. Still, for an outsider like me, the book offers helpful vocabulary and categories with which to begin thinking about this subject. A different kind of text that I also found useful is Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008). If the focus is on the West and elite knowledge, and if it offers generalizations that specialists might pick apart, it has the merit of offering a narrative that helps the reader to think about the production, preservation, transmission, and consumption of knowledge over a long span of time. I find such historical narratives absolutely necessary when first getting my feet wet in a subject.

Knowledge history can encompass faith traditions and the academic disciplines, of course, but it can go well beyond that to all walks of life, whether the knowledge is explicit or implicit, published or produced and transmitted in a workshop, and so on. With its interest in what people know and how they produce, use, and disseminate this knowledge, knowledge history does not feel all that strange from the perspective of social and cultural history. Indeed, knowledge history seems capable of dovetailing productively with these more familiar approaches.

In Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction (Cornell UP, 2006), for example, we learn that army officers in Imperial Germany shared a certain understanding and approach to war despite their diverse training, career paths, and experiences; however, we never learn how they came to share this common military culture. If we consider what these men knew about war, we still have a phenomenon whose cultural logic can be unpacked, but now we can also start asking about the education, training, and acculturation that helped transform young men into military professionals. In other words, we can begin to think about how and what officers learned and knew as well as how they produced and transmitted this knowledge. In this way, a static image of culture becomes dynamic, capable of changing over time.

The history of knowledge is not all that foreign to the business and consumption history I edited under the previous director either, even if that history has not been written with the history of knowledge in mind or in the vein of cultural history. The most interesting book of this type I encountered was Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton, and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., The Rise of Marketing and Market Research (Palgrave, 2012). The titles of its individual chapters might sound highly specialized, but together they show how different social and economic actors came to conceive and understand the markets in which they were operating in ways that modernday ideological adherence to capitalism as a natural, ahistorical phenomenon remains oblivious. The subtitle of the introduction includes the term “information” (not “knowledge”) but many of the examples in the book show entrepreneurs and others producing knowledge, that is, coming up with new ways to understand society and gather and use data to sell goods.

In hindsight, I think I found this particular book so interesting because of the knowledge aspect of the topic. For example, in “Making the Ledgers Talk: Customer Control and the Origins of Data Mining,” Josh Lauer shows how U.S. department stores in the early decades of the twentieth century had credit departments—not necessarily profitable—as a service to their customers. Yet some people in these departments came to understand how much sales data they were sitting on and began to use it to target specific kinds of customers with direct mail campaigns, based on their specific purchase histories. In other words, these credit departments took information already on hand and transformed it into new knowledge about their customers that could be used to increase sales.

Featured image: Boys learning to typeset in Boston, MA, 1909. Source: Library of Congress, PPOC, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ncl2004000884/PP/.

See Simone Lässig, preface, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC 58 (Spring 2016), http://www.ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/GHI_Washington/Publications/Bulletin58/bu58_3.pdf. ↩

Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge, 1952), https://archive.org/details/essaysonsociolog00mann; Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983. ↩
Terence Zuber, Military History, and Culture

December 7, 2014

Historiography, War and Society
Officers, some on horseback, at a Kaiser Maneuver in 1898. Source: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.

I recently noticed that the English translation of Der Schlieffenplan: Analysen und Dokumente, edited by Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans, and Gerhard P. Groß, is now available from the University Press of Kentucky under the title The Schlieffen Plan: International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World War I. Interestingly, Terence Zuber, who sparked much of the debate on German war planning prior to the Great War, declined to allow his chapter from the German original to be included in this English translation.¹ It wasn’t his best piece anyway, far more peevish than usual, and there is plenty of his work on the supposedly nonexistent Schlieffen Plan already available in English. Be that as it may, if Zuber’s thesis about Schlieffen’s war planning has been conclusively disproven, the assumptions underlying his work have received less attention.² That matters because his work on Schlieffen continues to be widely read and discussed, having made a big splash when it first came out. Moreover, he continues to write and publish books on German military history.
Zuber makes his historiographical assumptions explicit on the “About” page of his website (terencezuber.com) in a section called “Philosophy of writing military history.” The text seems to be for the benefit of potential new customers, but that does not make it any less sincere or interesting. The first important factor he lists is “the careful analysis of primary source material,” which he learned during his graduate studies in Würzburg, Germany. Zuber is talking about the venerable historiographical tradition of source criticism as taught to us in the nineteenth century by Leopold von Ranke. The historian, according to Ranke, is supposed to use primary sources in order to write about “how things really were” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist).

Ranke’s ideas presuppose that the historian can read and understand the sources in context and that their meaning is immutable. If the objectivity question is much more complicated than Ranke’s phrase suggests, trying to understand “how things really were” still informs the professional historian’s ethos.³ But how do we meet this standard on the basis of imperfect documentary testimony? How do we go about reading and interpreting sources whose meanings are frequently ambiguous?

“In military history,” according to Zuber, getting at the past as it actually was “means above all the evaluation of training, doctrine, plans, intelligence estimates, orders, weather, terrain and tactical combat.” I can live with that assertion for the moment, even if it ignores important factors, especially politics. But how can Zuber be so sure that he understands the sources whereas his historical predecessors and present-day detractors do not?

His answer is simple: “As a professional infantry officer, I am able to apply twenty years of military experience to this analysis including three years with a German panzer division. I work through military history as though it were an actual war plan or military operation.” On the face of it, the assumption that his military background is historiographically relevant seems at least plausible insofar as the tools and techniques of warfare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not so far removed from Zuber’s Cold War–era training in land warfare that they could not be understood from that point of view.⁴ Moreover, German operational thought—however vaguely defined and varyingly understood—enjoyed respect on both sides of the Atlantic long after the First World War.⁵ But is that enough? Does Zuber’s military background really guarantee the accuracy of his analysis of military documents from an earlier era?

In his own words, Zuber “work through military history as though it were an actual war plan or military operation.” The key element here is Zuber himself. He is playing out World War One–era military scenarios on the basis of his own military-professional judgement, which he developed in the 1970s and 1980s. This statement certainly comports with an unfortunately common assumption in military history and in writing about war more generally, namely that soldiering is a timeless phenomenon, aside from the obvious changes in technology, organization, and (if the historian is really doing his or her job) politico-economic basis. But as John Lynn shows in his book Battle, there is no such thing as the “universal soldier.” Soldiers and their institutions exist in specific historical contexts, and they change over time. These changes run deep, encompassing not only the externalities of the soldiers’ and militaries’ worlds, but also how soldiers and armies perceive the world around them.

Even if the military historian is concerned exclusively with the age-old question of how well armies fought, Lynn’s argument applies: “the way militaries think is the most fundamental element of their effectiveness.”⁶ We cannot understand what officers in the past were seeing and understanding, unless we first grasp how they thought. Indeed, Lynn demonstrates “the influence of conceptual culture on the reality of combat” for a variety of cultures and eras.⁷ The upshot of culture in general terms is that two hypothetical armies might be similarly equipped, but that in no way means they will understand the same set of circumstances similarly. The choices that the commanders of these armies perceive are shaped by culture, whether that is military culture in the broadest sense, specific aspects of military culture such as strategic culture and leadership culture, institution-specific cultures, or broader cultural “givens” that trancend the boundaries of the military.

Without accounting for culture, Zuber’s efforts to “work through military history as though it were an actual war plan or military operation” run the risk of amounting to little more than a war game set in the past, but based on modern-day assumptions. That is how Schlieffen studied the ancient Battle of Cannae, but it is no way for the historian to work who aspires to understand “how things really were.” Yes, there is a need for good, detail-oriented histories on war planning and military operations, but those histories must take into account the different historical contexts, including the professional culture in which operational decisions were made.

See p. 14 of this translation, which was visible to me on the preview offered by Google Books. ↩

Besides offering well-reasoned arguments based on solid evidence, the book reprints sources not considered by Zuber. See also pp. 24–52 of my dissertation, which analyzes the debate as it stood right before the German edition of this book appeared in 2006. ↩

See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). ↩

According to his website, Zuber served from 1970 to 1990. ↩

See Gerhard P. Groß, Mythos und Wirklichkeit: Geschichte des operativen Denkens im deutschen Heer von Moltke d.Ä. bis Heusinger (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012). ↩

See John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), Kindle ed., preface (“Requiem for the Universal Soldier”). ↩

Lynn, Battle, e.g., chap. 4 (last sentence of “Images and Ideals of Combat in the Age of the Enlightenment”). On war and culture, see also Wayne E. Lee, ed., Warfare and Culture in World History (New York: New York University Press, 2011), and Williamson Murray, “Does Military Culture Matter?,” Orbis 43, no. 1 (1999): 27–42. ↩
Why Study Atrocities?

November 29, 2014

War and Society
I study European history, so why did I post about Sand Creek earlier today? And why excerpt seemingly gratuitous violence? I have no expertise in U.S. history, but I am interested in the history of violence per se, which can reveal a lot about peoples and cultures at a given point in history. Further, the U.S. Civil War has some important structural similarities to the Franco-Prussian War, and perhaps to other European wars in the mid nineteenth century.¹ Given the causal relationship between the U.S. Civil War and the expansion of violence against Native Americans out west, there might be a case, for example, to include France’s nineteenth-century colonial conflicts in such a comparison. However, my main interest relates to cultural taboos—or lack thereof—about specific kinds of violence against specific categories of people, assuming those people have not been perceived to violate any important taboos themselves.
In this particular case, the willingness to kill women and children indiscriminately underlines how little value these people’s lives had in the eyes of their butchers. Further, it suggests how utterly alien these Indians were in the eyes of their attackers, how far outside the attackers’ own ethnos or kin-culture community.² Indeed, in Michael Fellman’s account of the guerrilla conflict in Missouri during the Civil War, white fighting men broke more cultural taboos in their fight against Indians than they did when committing violence against free and enslaved black people.³

At the same time, Congressional testimony points to other attitudes towards the slaughtered Native Americans. We hear of white men with native partners and sons, for instance, although the latter were called “half breed.” The paternalistic congressmen investigating the atrocity were also humane, in a certain sense, but a question about how long the witness-cum-translator had lived with the Indians suggests how different that congressman perceived him to be. At the same time, commentators who sided with the Colorado troops responsible for the massacre portrayed their opponents as brave. Of course, it was safer to make the women and children seem like incidental casualties of a battle, but the self-respect of fighting men also requires a worthy opponent. Without one, the act of killing brings no honor and—we are learning in recent conflicts—can leave deep scars in the soldier who pulls the trigger.⁴

Given the tiny source base behind this post, it only represents an approach to such violence, nothing more, especially since such an approach must also consider the specific historical context of this awful American story.

See Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (Washington, DC: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 1997). ↩

On kin-culture communities, see Azar Gat with Alexsander Yakobson, Nations: The Long and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). ↩

Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). ↩

See Sharon E. French, “The Code of the Warrior,” The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History 47 (United States Airforce Academy: Colorado, 2004). French has published a book by the same title. ↩
Command Culture by Jörg Muth

April 28, 2012

Historiography, War and Society

Last week I read Jörg Muth, Command Culture.¹ The book’s main subject is about training U.S. officers for war, and it draws on the German officer corps in the interwar period for its useful comparisons. I can’t offer a review, because my own expertise lies more with the Imperial German officer corps. Nonetheless, the book deserves some comment.

This was both an enjoyable and a frustrating read, but the frustrating part had more to do with my own preferences. Muth (who I know and value) takes West Point in this period to task for some pretty lousy education (Fort Leavenworth, too) and awful hazing. I have no problem with such well-sourced assertions, but I can’t help but think there might have been a deeper cultural logic to these things that Muth does not seek to uncover, because it apparently did not relate to military effectiveness, which is his topic, not, for example, the deeper character of leadership, education, and masculinity in the United States more generally.

I don’t have the expertise to critique Muth’s interpretation of officer education in this period, and I’m convinced he knows what he is talking about. But my guard goes up when I read works that are not only critical, but also assume an air of being smarter than their human subjects. It seems to me that we historians need to be more modest than that. Still, this is a question of personal style, and Muth is by no means alone in following such an approach, especially in military history, which straddles a line between historiographical traditions, sometimes trying to understand the past on its own terms (as I was trained to do in a program and profession in which, unfortunately, “military history” can even be a dirty word), but also trying to judge what worked and didn’t work, a worthy question that interests Muth and many other military historians, to say nothing of policy makers, military professionals, and the lay public.²

Let me provide an example from the Imperial German period. In his conclusion Muth writes,

The German Great General Staff saw a steady steep decline in performance after its founder and mentor, Moltke the Elder, retired. His successors tried in vain to emulate the habits and outward appearance of the great old man but failed miserably in their basic tasks—to provide leadership, strategic planning skills and sound advice for the head of state—until the whole organization collapsed in the apocalyptic defeat of a two-front war, which every sane staff officer would have thought to prevent with all its might (181-82).

I interpret the General Staff’s professionalism and competence differently,³ but Muth’s take is certainly consistent with a great deal of historiography. Indeed, his comment points to the need for me to participate in this debate with more scholarship of my own. The part that bothers me, though, is the last dependent clause in the above quote. Yes, the project that Germany’s leadership embarked on in 1914 seems insane from our own vantage point. It even seems insane based on our interpretation of what was known back then. But denying the rationality of German war planning and the professionalism of its planners amounts to a refusal to take them seriously and enter their thought world in order to truly understand what it was they thought they were doing in 1914.

But this is not the focus of the book. Instead, the Imperial period offers but a foil against which Muth measures German military professionalism in the interwar period, and he uses the latter as a foil for criticizing U.S. military education at the time. Furthermore, Muth is not so much interested in war planning, grand strategy, and so on, as he is in how officers led—or didn’t lead—on the battlefield. This is a crucial question, and his observations on the differences between American and German approaches to military leadership at the beginning of World War II offer plenty of food for thought, which I hope specialists of this period will soon discuss.

One last note: Muth provides the place of education and year of graduation with the first mention of each U.S. officer he names, for example, “General George Smith Patton, USMA 1909” (29). He offers this highly suggestive information to provide readers with a sense of the personal networks that officers developed in their formative years. This makes me wish for further, even prosopographical studies of the U.S. officer corps that employ such data, just as we need more of it in the German case, if with other reference points, such as the first regiment of a German officer, although I have also noticed some tantalizing overlap in the years that Wilhelm Groener and other officers attended the War Academy in Wilhelmine Germany.

Notes

¹ Jörg Muth, Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901–1940, and the Consequences for World War II (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2011).

²For a useful discussion of the tensions inherent in writing military history because of the multiple constituencies it serves, see Stephen Morillo with Michael Pavokovic, What is Military History? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006).

³Mark R. Stoneman, “Bürgerliche und adlige Krieger: Zum Verhältnis zwischen sozialer Herkunft und Berufskultur im wilhelminischen Offizierkorps,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland II: Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 25–63; Stoneman, “Wilhelm Groener, Officering, and the Schlieffen Plan” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2006).
Terence Zuber’s Image of War and the Schlieffen Plan Debate

February 11, 2012

Historiography, War and Society, Webby World

When writing my dissertation, I was forced to confront Terence Zuber’s claims that Wilhelm Groener and others had “invented” the Schlieffen Plan, and I wrote a section on the issue. The debate has continued since that time, with new evidence and articles emerging, but I have not seen any significant reason to alter my basic conclusions. Thus, I feel the section I wrote still has value for anyone trying to understand this debate. I mention that here and make the dissertation freely available because some of the most important scholarship is locked behind the pay walls of professional history journals. That is fine for those of us with access to well-stocked university libraries, but not everyone is so fortunate. Zuber himself has been canny about this limitation of modern scholarship, which so often engages other scholars but does not reach out to the general public. He has rehearsed his arguments in an affordable book for the mass market called The Real German War Plan (The History Press, 2011). While this will not earn him points in academia, it serves the useful function of engaging the public, which more of us should do.

Zuber’s ideas are important because he insists on taking Schlieffen’s military thought seriously at a very practical level, instead of accepting that the German ideas of war we commonly hear about were almost insane, informed by marked hubris, or naive and foolish. Zuber looks at the military documents themselves and submits them to a reality test. How could this have worked? Why did Schlieffen write something with so many internal contradictions? Unfortunately, Zuber overreaches the power of his sources and gets things wrong. He also seems to conflate doctrine with strategy. Drawing on his own undoubtedly superb training and extensive experience as a U.S. infantry officer who reached major, he sees things from the perspective of a staff officer or possibly a commander on the battlefield. That is useful, but he forgets what such an officer cannot see, unless he has risen to the very highest levels.

I was reminded of this weakness today in a combative piece he published in German called “Der Mythos vom Schlieffenplan” . In the very last paragraph, he writes, “Krieg und Kriegsvorbereitung sind eine durch und durch nüchterne, praktische Angelegenheit. Es geht um Doktrin, Ausbildung, Truppenstärke, Beurteilung der Feindlage, zur Verfügung stehende Zeit sowie Gelände und Wetter.” I hesitate to translate an American’s thoughts back into English with quotation marks around them, but his basic point is that war is a fairly straightforward thing. Its core elements are doctrine, training, troop strength, assessment of the hostile forces as well as basic factors like time, terrain, and weather. That sounds like a perfect description of war conceived at the purely operational level, which is the only, albeit important level he examines. But what about strategy? What about politics and economics?

It might seem uncollegial to bring up Zuber’s military background, since he is also a trained historian, but he has made a lot of his military profession, which he uses in ad hominem attacks on his history colleagues. In the same piece I just quoted, for example, he dismisses Annika Mombauer’s important findings on Helmut von Moltke the Younger with the remark that she does not understand the terminology and has no military background, whereas he served twenty years in the army.

There’s a reason why U.S. officers (and other officials) attend the War College before they enter the highest ranks of service. They need to expand their vision to the strategic level, which will include politics, economics, and more. Zuber’s own military background cannot have provided him with these insights, although his historical training should have. Indeed, I expect he has plenty of knowledge about such issues, but he refuses to engage the problem of German war planning at that level, instead insisting on the sole relevance of the factors quoted above.

That is unfortunate. To make any real progress in the Schlieffen Plan debate, we need to expand the scope of the discussion to include images of war, ours and those of our historical subjects. Without a firm grasp of such matters, we will talk past each other.

Postscript, February 12, 2012

A useful article on the Schlieffen Plan debate that I managed to miss when I was finishing my dissertation is Annika Mombauer, “Of War Plans and War Guilt: The Debate Surrounding the Schlieffen Plan,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 5 (2005): 857–85. She, too, points out Zuber’s apparent disdain for those without significant military experience.

Regarding the notion of making progess in the dabate, a great deal has been made, of course, and Annika Mombauer might be right to consider Zuber’s challenge over and done with as far as serious scholarship is concerned. (See her article in the Journal of Strategic Studies cited in my previous comment.) But we haven’t got to the point where a general consensus has been reached. And I suspect the great number of publications by Zuber will continue to sow confusion for a long time to come, as he insists on the primary value of his limited source base and his narrow conception of war. After all, academic historians do not have a monopoly on the interpretation and telling of history in the public sphere.
Still Reading the Dissertation

February 5, 2012

Miscellany

I am continuing to reread and ponder the dissertation. After getting over its many weaknesses, I see there is lots of good stuff in it, even if it is clearly in no way close to a book (following William Germano). There’s also no easy way to extract articles from it. These will have to be conceived and written from scratch, although the dissertation contains plenty of useful building blocks for essays on Groener and the Schlieffen Plan debate, military culture and the General Staff, images of officering and professionalism, and so on. First, however, I have to consider the extent to which I should make general arguments based on Groener versus offer work that focuses more narrowly on him, albeit to foster further work for broader conclusions.

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Tag: military culture

Postscript, February 12, 2012

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