Why the Germans Lost

The Rise and Fall of the Black Eagle

Bryan Perrett

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781781591970
• eBook ISBN: 9781473831353
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book examines the history of the German Army which, for the best part of two centuries, influenced the course of events in Continental Europe. It was an army that studied the conduct of war at the highest levels, planning for the destruction of its opponents during the early stages of a war. On some occasions, this principle succeeded brilliantly. On others, its details were flawed and the results were disastrous.This new and exciting publication from seasoned historian and author Bryan Perrett charts the ups and downs of the German army from the days of Frederick the Great to the dying days of World War Two. It passes through the Napoleonic period, takes in the growth of war machinery under the leadership of Clausewitz and Moltke and acquaints the reader with the various victories won against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870. It then moves forwards into the twentieth century, following the course of the Imperial German army, its successes and ultimate failure in the Great War, its recovery in the inter-war years and its final destruction under the leadership of Hitler.rnrnThe book is written for the professional and the general reader alike in the easy, readable style that has ensured Bryan Perrett's international popularity as a military and naval historian.

CHAPTER 1

The Feldherr and His Army

At the end of the seventeenth century the area of northern Europe known as Prussia was poor, backward, barren and of little or no interest to the powers of the day. One of the few ambitious families living within it were the Hohenzollerns, who were feudal lords of the small enclave of Brandenburg. By degrees, they expanded their holdings partly by purchase and partly by services undertaken for the Holy Roman Emperor, whose subjects included all of the German nobility. In due course, by adding force to his methods, the Elector of Brandenburg had won a major concession from the Emperor in that he was granted the right to call himself King of Prussia.

In 1713 the Prussian throne passed to Frederick William I, who was aged twenty-four. In character he was vigorous, energetic, determined, ruthless, violent and capable of inspiring great fear among his subjects. His ambition was to raise his country’s status to that of one of Europe’s great powers. To do that he recognised that he must acquire two things, namely wealth and military power. He promptly set about placing his national finances upon a sound footing and increased the strength of his small army to 89,000 officers and men. This he did by conscripting officers from his nobility and squirearchy and either impressing his own subjects or offering incentives to foreign recruits.

Training was thorough, drill was constant and discipline harsh. One means of punishment was the wooden ‘horse’, on which the defaulter was seated on its painfully thin back, consisting of three or four sloped planks each side, with heavy weights strapped to his legs. Even more painful was the ‘pole’, which had a spike on either side of its base or two rings near its top. The defaulter stood with his bare heels on the spikes and his wrists were pushed through the rings and fastened together. Granted that strict discipline was necessary given the nature of the battles fought, the sheer cruelty of this sort of punishment made the British Army’s employment of flogging as the major corrective seem mild by comparison. Nevertheless, it was Frederick William’s intention that his soldiers should be more afraid of their officers than they were of the enemy. Drill and parades were his passion, to the extent that it was said, privately, of course, that he would have been just as happy if he had been born a drill sergeant. Certainly, he was as crude and foul-mouthed as the contemporary worst of the type.

However, even foreigners agreed that no infantry regiments in all of Europe’s armies could be considered to be as ready for war as Frederick William’s, with one notable exception. That was known by the rest of the Prussian Army as the Riesen Garde, or Giants’ Guard. It was a grenadier regiment in which all the men were well over six feet, and sometimes even seven feet, tall. The king’s agents scoured Europe from Ireland to Russia for such men and were paid handsomely for the recruits they brought in. By no means all came voluntarily; more than a few had to be sandbagged and carted away unconscious and under guard, including at least one priest. The regiment’s running costs amounted to eight times that of a normal regiment. This might be surprising when one considers that the king was one of the meanest men alive, but it was his pride and joy and he fed its members better than he did the Hohenzollern princes. The problem was that it was utterly useless when it came to active service. Height apart, many of the men suffered severe ailments of the heart, other organs and the digestive system and were in generally poor health. Apart from giving drill demonstrations for distinguished visitors to the Prussian court, they would have been physically unable to stand the rigours of campaigning for more than a few days. When Frederick William died the regiment was reduced in size and those of its members who were released did their best to find their way home.

The king had fourteen children. He disliked thirteen of them but reserved a special hatred for Frederick, the fourth of them to arrive, and who would in due course become known to history as Frederick the Great. Brought up by a governess and tutor, both of whom were French, he developed a preference for French rather than German language and culture. He played the flute, enjoyed literature, studied art and took pleasure in civilised discussions. None of these things, in his father’s eyes, were masculine activities and they earned him frequent thrashings. His father also tried to strangle him with a length of cord, frequently had him whipped and occasionally expressed the wish that he was dead. Thrust into the Army at seventeen, Frederick decided to desert with a friend and escape abroad. The two were caught and imprisoned. The king forced Frederick to watch the execution of his friend and would have executed his son as well had it not been for intense pressure from the diplomatic corps.

On his release Frederick became less rebellious and in 1732 accepted the colonelcy of a regiment, which he commanded from an estate at Ruppin given to him by his father. During this period he developed a friendship with and was greatly influenced by the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. Perhaps the most important result of this relationship was his conviction that the ruler was the servant of his state and that war was an acceptable instrument of policy if the state benefited from it.

Frederick William died on 31 May 1740, leaving behind a healthy treasury containing nine million thaler. It is commonly said that he also bequeathed his heir a magnificent army, but the truth was that this was only true of its fiercely drilled infantry, the quality of which he had further improved by issuing it with iron ramrods that produced a higher rate of fire than the wooden ramrods in use with other armies, which were inclined to jam, bend and snap in use. While moving into action or in action itself, the Prussian infantry moved at the same slow march that can be seen on Horse Guards Parade, London, during the annual ceremony of Trooping the Colour. Frederick did not believe this was fast enough when a change of position, such as moving from column of march to line of battle or from the latter to square as a defence against cavalry was needed, and increased it to seventy-two paces per minute, executed with straight knees and pointed feet. This, he held with some justice, equalled the average beat of the heart and kept the men in a calm frame of mind. It should not be confused with the goose step, in which each foot was slammed on the ground in turn. This was not actually introduced until the period of the German Empire and, while often mocked as idiotic, did strengthen the leg and stomach muscles over a period. In particular, Frederick insisted on absolute precision in the spacing between his advancing columns, the reason being that when the order was given for them to wheel to left or right and so form the line of battle, if the distance between columns had been wrongly calculated, either gaps would appear in the line or the companies would become crowded together in an unworkable tangle.

The Prussian cavalry consisted of heavy and light elements. The heavy cavalry included cuirassier regiments whose members wore breast- and back-plates and were intended to deliver smashing charges against their opponents. Dragoon regiments, originally conceived as mounted infantry and still armed with firearms as well as swords, lacked body armour although they, too, were intended to deliver decisive charges when the moment came. The light cavalry consisted of hussar regiments, recognised by their fur busbies and heavily frogged jackets. The origin of the hussar lay in Hungary and, while a number of hussar regiments formed part of the Austrian Army’s order of battle, they were a comparatively recent inclusion in the Prussian service. The formal roles of the hussar included the provision of vedettes, mounted screens during an advance or withdrawal, reconnaissance, the pursuit of a beaten enemy, providing escorts and, whenever suitable circumstances presented themselves, carrying out aggressive charges against enemy infantry or cavalry. Lancer units also formed part of Frederick’s army from time to time but took longer to establish a permanent place for themselves. Their functions were similar to those of the hussars but, while they were at their most effective and dangerous when carrying out a pursuit of the enemy, they were at something of a disadvantage in a close-quarter mêlée with other types of cavalry.

When Frederick first took his army to war at the end of 1740 the cavalry’s performance left a great deal to be desired. In due course it would be rated among the best in Europe and the credit for this belongs to two senior officers. The light cavalry benefited enormously from the leadership of General Hans Joachim von Ziethen, a man of exceptionally small stature and quiet voice but quick temper who would brook no personal criticism. Those who sought some amusement at his expense quickly regretted the impulse as he was reported to have survived no less than seventy-four duels; as to the fate of his opponents, there seems to be no detailed record. Having been born in 1699, Ziethen could reasonably have been regarded as too old for active service, a view with which he strongly disagreed. He retired in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War, but on the outbreak of the War of Bavarian Succession in 1778 he announced that he was quite ready to resume his active service career and had to be restrained by a direct order from Frederick himself. He died in 1786.

The heavy cavalry owed its success to General Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz, the son of a cavalry officer. Following his father’s death, the family’s straitened circumstances resulted in Friedrich being sent at the age of fourteen to serve as a page boy at the minor court of the eccentric Margrave Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt. Here he learned to enjoy the pleasures of tobacco and the opposite sex and became noted for his skill as a horseman. Most of his feats involved riding through or over dangerous obstacles at the full gallop, on one occasion passing through the sails of a windmill turning at full speed.

In 1740 he received a commission as a cornet in the margrave’s cuirassier regiment. Two years later, now a lieutenant, he was surrounded by Austrians but put up an incredibly tough fight before being overwhelmed and captured. This was witnessed by the king, who offered to exchange a captured Austrian captain for him. Promoted captain himself in 1743, he transferred to a hussar regiment and brought his squadron to such a pitch of efficiency that by the end of the Second Silesian War he had been promoted major at the age of twenty-four. In 1752 he became commander of the 8th Cuirassiers with the rank of lieutenant colonel. The regiment quickly became recognised as the best in the Prussian Army and its methods were adopted as standard.

It was, however, as a general officer that Seydlitz made the Prussian cavalry as highly regarded as any in Europe. Time and again, at the head of large numbers of cavalry squadrons, he inflicted disorganisation and rout on the enemy, or held off their pursuit when the Prussians were themselves compelled to retreat. On the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 he was appointed inspector general of cavalry in Silesia, where much of the Prussian cavalry was stationed in peacetime. His worth can be appreciated by the fact that Frederick sent his most promising officers to him to learn the finer points of their profession. Seydlitz retired shortly after being promoted to the rank of general of cavalry in 1767 but his later years were marred by a quarrel with the king and an unhappy domestic life in which neither his wife nor his two daughters considered fidelity to be compatible with matrimony. He died in 1773 but his name was commemorated in one of the Imperial German Navy’s most famous battle-cruisers.

Superficially, Frederick’s artillery resembled that of most contemporary European armies. On paper, it seemed numerous but closer examination revealed that some of the bigger guns were simply dinosaurs from another era, their performance neither justifying the effort of bringing them onto the field nor the expenditure of excessive powder. Most of the guns, however, were known as battalion guns and fired a three-pound projectile. Two were issued to each infantry regiment and manned by infantrymen, often with the assistance of a professional gunner. In action they were manhandled by their crews, conforming to the movements of the battle line, for which they provided immediate support. The dinosaurs were soon retired and although the battalion guns continued to serve for some time, Frederick standardised most of his artillery to 6- 12- and 24-pounder guns, which fired solid shot or anti-personnel canister rounds, and 10-pounder howitzers, which fired explosive shells. These weapons were manned solely by professional artillerymen and served in batteries deployed along the battle line. In 1759 Frederick formed a 6-pounder horse artillery regiment to provide support for cavalry operations, but his favourite weapon was the 12-pounder gun, which was considered to be a battle winner. On the other hand, he was not a little impressed by the performance of the high angle 10-pounder howitzer, one of which formed part of the equipment of every battery. Depending upon wind and weather conditions, it had a maximum range of 4,000 paces and its shells burst with shattering effect, making it particularly useful in the counter-battery role. Another high-angle weapon was the short mortar, which also fired explosive shells and was usually employed against buildings and fortified towns.

Artillery and engineer officers were drawn from a slightly lower strata of society than their counterparts in the infantry and cavalry. This, and the technical nature of their work kept them a little apart from the rest of the Army’s officer corps. There was, too, an aura of the sulphurous black arts about the artillery, inherited from the Middle Ages, which a number of arcane, and probably illegal, customs did nothing to dispel. The Prussian artillery, for example, exercised what they considered to be a right to the church bells of captured enemy towns. These were sent to the Army’s gun founders in Berlin who cast them into new guns. No doubt money changed hands at some point in the transaction and if the clergy raised objections they were told to discuss the matter with St Barbara, who was the patron saint of artillerymen.

In addition to becoming known to historians as The Great, Frederick had another title, employed as the highest compliment possible in German military circles, who would refer to him as The Feldherr. The term does not have an exact translation, for while the dictionary will simply put its English equivalent as ‘General’, this is somewhat bald and fails to describe the full scope of what was involved. It would, in fact, be almost impossible to encapsulate it in a single word, for the Feldherr, at his simplest, was a commander of well above average abilities who instinctively recognised how to employ terrain and the qualities of his troops to obtain a decisive victory. When Frederick first went to war these qualities were not apparent, but as time passed they became the hallmark of the Fredrician battle, notwithstanding uneven results.

CHAPTER 2

Mistakes and Methods

On 20 October 1740 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI breathed his last. Lacking male children, he had ensured his succession with a measure known as The Pragmatic Sanction under the terms of which the Empire was to remain intact and be ruled by his daughters in accordance with the principles of primogeniture. This had originally been accepted by all the major European powers, with the exception of Bavaria, but when Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of the late Emperor, assumed the throne, objections were raised not only by the Elector of Bavaria, but also by the kings of Spain and Saxony.

In Prussia, Frederick believed that a situation had developed that he could employ to his country’s benefit. He generously recognised Maria Theresa’s right to the succession, and indeed offered to assist her in the event of her being attacked by rival claimants, but only on condition that he occupied the prosperous and populous province of Silesia, to which Brandenburg had an ancient and unproven claim. Naturally, the Empress rejected the proposal.

Frederick, therefore, invaded Silesia on 16 December 1740. During the next two months Prussian troops established control over the province, with the exception of a few towns held by Austrian garrisons. On 9 March 1741 the most important of these, the fortress town of Glogau, fell to a successful assault. In the meantime, the Austrians had not been idle and were assembling an army in neighbouring Bohemia under General Count Adam Neipperg. Frederick was convinced that the Austrians would not move while the mountain passes from Bohemia were still under snow, and in this he was gravely mistaken. Neipperg began his advance in March 1741 and before Frederick could concentrate his own troops from their scattered winter quarters the Austrians had not only relieved their besieged fortress of Neisse but also severed their opponents’ communications with Prussia.

Despite being caught wrong-footed, Frederick reacted quickly. The two armies met at Mollwitz on 10 April, the Prussians with 22,000 men and the Austrians with 19,000. The latter, however, included 8,500 good quality cavalry while the Prussians could only field 4,000 of mixed quality. In later life Frederick was fond of commenting that he never repeated his mistakes, but at Mollwitz he made one serious error that was only corrected by another.

Both armies deployed in what had become something of a tradition, with the infantry in the centre and the cavalry on either wing. Unfortunately, on the right wing of the Prussian army, the last infantry units to deploy from column of march found their designated places in the line of battle occupied by cavalry regiments which refused to give ground to the right. Consequently, the infantry units were forced to halt at right angles to the rest of their army. What happened next might have ended in a disaster. After winning a short exchange of fire, the cavalry on the Austrian left charged home and drove their opponents into a confused retreat. Frederick, situated close to the scene of action, was promptly advised by his senior general, the elderly Field Marshal Count Kurt von Schwerin, to leave the field, which he did, accompanied by his escort.

It was in Schwerin’s mind that the victorious Austrian horsemen would abandon their pursuit and simply roll up the Prussian line from the right while it was also under attack from the front. That was, indeed, its intention, but it ran straight into those Prussian infantry units that had been unable to take their place in the formal line of battle and were now facing to the right. Already disordered, the troopers were beaten off by sustained volleys of musketry. Elsewhere, iron discipline kept the Prussians’ line firm and the Austrian attacks simply melted away in the face of a blizzard of musket balls. In the end, though their losses were the heavier, Prussian discipline proved to be the decisive factor and it was the Austrians who backed off. Prussian losses included 3,930 killed and wounded and 690 missing; Austrian losses amounted to approaching 3,000 killed and wounded plus 1,400 captured or missing. The term ‘missing’ at this time might refer to men captured by the enemy, but more probably it meant those who had no wish to continue in the hard life of a soldier and who took advantage of battlefield confusion to make themselves scarce.

A long operational pause followed, but in 1742 Frederick invaded Bohemia and, on 17 May, inflicted a second defeat on the Austrians at Chotusitz. Maria Theresa, believing that Prussia was the least dangerous of her numerous enemies, decided that Frederick could retain Silesia for the time being while she was fully engaged elsewhere and concluded a peace treaty with him, so ending the First Silesian War. Apart from the considerable material gain to the Prussian exchequer, Frederick’s subject population had increased by half, enabling him to increase the size of his army.

Frederick gave much thought to the near disaster of Mollwitz and reached the conclusion that there were better ways of fighting a battle than forming up in a manner which differed little from that employed in the Middle Ages. As finalised, his new system was known as the oblique order of attack. It involved locating the enemy’s chosen line of battle and then overwhelming one flank of it by bringing a superior force to bear upon it. This would involve reinforcing the wing of his own army that was to deliver the attack, while the Prussian centre and other flank demonstrated against the rest of the enemy line, only advancing when the main attack was making good progress. The main attack would be made either by marching diagonally across the flank of the enemy line that had been selected as its target, then wheeling into line of battle once it had been outflanked and partially enveloped, with reinforcements following the advance. The approach would be made in columns, which would wheel together into line to deliver the attack. To succeed, the distance between regiments had to be precisely calculated so that there would be no overlapping or gaps in the line. This required endless drill in battalion movements. Cavalry, deployed en masse, would swing round the threatened flank, isolating it from the rear and denying it any chance of reinforcement. In addition to battalion guns, heavier pieces of artillery would also take part in the attack.

In 1744 it became apparent to Frederick not only that Maria Theresa and her allies were more than holding their own against their opponents, but also that the Austrian empress intended to recover Silesia at the earliest opportunity. He therefore initiated the Second Silesian War by launching a pre-emptive strike into Bohemia, during which he captured Prague. It was soon clear, however, that he was in real danger of being cut off from Silesia by the resurgent Austrian armies. The Austrians, however, were slow to follow up and it was not until the spring of 1745 that a 72,000-strong army, including 12,000 cavalry, under the command of Prince Charles of Lorraine emerged from the passes. Apart from Ziethen’s retiring cavalry screen, there was little or no sign of Frede...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1 The Feldherr and His Army
• Chapter 2 Mistakes and Methods
• Chapter 3 The World Turned Upside Down
• Chapter 4 Picking Up The Pieces
• Chapter 5 Hollow Victory
• Chapter 6 ‘Vorwarts!’
• Chapter 7 Towards the Second Reich
• Chapter 8 Prussia Triumphant
• Chapter 9 Creating an Empire
• Chapter 10 Creating an Empire: 2
• Chapter 11 The Long Peace
• Chapter 12 A Choice of Foes
• Chapter 13 Imperial Endings
• Chapter 14 Land Ironclads and Storm Troopers
• Chapter 15 Poisoned Decades
• Chapter 16 The Blitzkrieg Years
• Chapter 17 Gotterdammerung
• Bibliography