School of War - Ep 68: Peter H. Wilson on the Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Peter H. Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls, Oxford, and author of Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, joins the show to talk about Germany, Germans, and German-speakers at war. ▪️ Times  • 01:52 Introduction  • 03:07 A dominance myth?  • 06:58 The Holy Roman Empire  • 10:33 HRE longevity • 12:38 The Thirty Years War • 15:31 Westphalia • 21:24 Prussia rising • 24:09 Prussia and Austria  • 27:56 Napoleon  • 31:43 The Imperial legacy  • 34:42 Bismarck’s wars   • 37:06 1914 vs 1940  • 40:03 Blitzkrieg

In the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the German government announced that it was finally getting serious about defense, that it would, for example, meet its NATO obligation to spend 2% of GDP on its military, among other measures. This announcement met with something like wide acclaim in the West, which in the long run of things is surprising, given how, shall we say, mixed a United Germany's contribution to international security has been over the last few hundred years.

After all, no less a figure than Margaret Thatcher once had concerns at the end of the Cold War about German reunification on similar grounds, those grounds being in essence that a united Germany was vulnerable to currents of aggressive militarism, probably Prussian in origin, that could resurge at any moment, as indeed they had in the past. Our guests today will help us understand those currents and what there is and is not to be said about concerns regarding German militarism. It is a prescription for war. Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I'm delighted to be joined today by Peter Wilson. He is the Chicholay Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous, intimidating scholarly tomes of which the most recent is the extremely impressive Iron and Blood, a military history of the German-speaking peoples since 1500. Peter, thanks so much for joining the show. Well, thank you for inviting me. So I've been very much looking forward to our conversation today for a couple of reasons, one of which is that your book challenges a number of preconceptions that I had been carrying with me, basically my whole life. They're sort of overdetermined. My father fought in the Second World War in Europe and very much had the impression that the Germans

were, for cultural and historical reasons, basically folks you need to keep your eye on, that there was something naturally martial at work there. This was commingled with the respect he had, or they're not a term he would have used necessarily, but we'll just say operational excellence, their ability at war making. And then I as a young officer was trained in, in a way of thinking about warfare that my instructors explicitly ascribed to Prussia and to German blitzkrieg and German war fighting methods of previous centuries.

And I take that your book amongst its aims seeks to, at the very least, propose that this notion of crushing driven militarism and unique militarism and a kind of military excellence innate to Germany is at the very least simplistic and maybe even misleading, I will start by asking you to explain why I have been wrong my whole life.

Well, I think, I wouldn't say you've been wrong, and that's really part of the book. So, yes, militarism, the Prussian story, the idea of a quick size of victory, that's certainly part of the broader part of German military history. But I think if we hone in on that and we try to read everything through that lens, then we end up with a distortion,

and that ultimately is confusing and misleading. gives us that false impression. So the key part of the book is to explain that wider story that's lost, but also to try to understand why it's that we've come to have the view that you and so many other people, and indeed myself, before I started on this, I also had that sort of view. And I thought the story would be more conventional when I set out. But on closer inspection, I think we are confronted with a more complicated, but also a more interesting picture.

I want to go through, I mean, to the extent that one can go through, it is really a magnificent and extensive history. So we'll do our best here in 45 minutes or so. But before we get into the chronology a bit, why has this notion of sort of, I'll defer to you to phrase it, how you think best, but sort of unique and effective military spirit and militarism, this general notion of Prussian dominance in Germany, in German military dominance. Why is it so sticky? Why has it stuck?

Well, I think it dates from a time when professional history emergence. So do you think, you know, often presented as the father of modern historical writing, Leopold von Lanca, you know, these are people writing in the sort of middle of the 19th century. And that is the period of the wars of unification, so-called. And that's the period when Prussian military dominance really emerged. So in 1866, where the showdown with Austria, you know, all the bets are on an Austrian victory. So this is not a foregone conclusion. It's not necessarily what people expect.

But after that victory, then on the one hand, the outsiders are thinking, you know, how does Prussia relatively, you know, seemingly one of the weaker of Europe's great powers? How does it successively defeat Austria and then France? You know, France's seen as at that point the best military power, the best army in Europe. And so there is that sense of astonishment and admiration, really, for a Prussian success. And so people are trying to think, well, how do they do it? And then, of course, the Prussian general staff that think they've achieved this victory and to some extent they have, some of its chance and good fortune, they're also, they're trying

to defend their position within a political system where, you know, resources are always scarce. So you're telling the politician, you know, we know how. We know how to fight. We know how to win wars, and you need to give us the resources, and you also need to give us the political freedom to do so. So they come to some extent, some of them, not all, they come to believe that they do have the keys to a certain type of victory, which they also believe is necessary because they are aware

that the country doesn't have the resources to fight a long and protracted war, and then they will lose. So it's partly a story of their own success. but also a recognition of, to some extent, of their own limitations. But that type of bits is really the one they have to go for. So your book begins its account about 500 years ago. Take us back to the beginning of modernity in Germany, broadly speaking, broadly understood, and talk a bit about the Holy Roman Empire of which you were also a historian and its military system.

Where does the story begin? The story begins really when the empire is achieving its sort of final and definitive form. So the form that it's going to have for the last 300 years or so of its existence, which is that of a collective. So from a military perspective, this is a system of collective security and internal peace and conflict resolution. So it's largely a sort of Pacific structure. It's reactive and it's orientated. towards defending itself rather than fighting wards of aggression. So this is one of the reasons why the conventional writing,

certainly in the 19th century, when the empire, by the point once the empire had finished but being replaced by the German confederations, the kind of interior version of it, why those people who felt that leadership should pass to Prussia, why they were so hostile for the empire, because they felt that it was something that had kept Germany weak, and prevented it from becoming a great power. My argument really is it's a different kind of great power,

and it was relatively successful on its own term. So it has a system of collective security where the different components provide military control for common defense. I'd like to ask, we're moving well beyond any kind of field of expertise for me. So it was just a very basic historical question. And why is it that you see consolidation of state power, you know, in places like England and France? And in the empire, you have this continuation of sort of disaggregation and collective security and the phenomena that you were just describing. What is it about Germany that is, if we're talking about a different kind of German exceptionalism later, what is what is the source of the original other kind of exceptionalism?

Well, first of all, I would say that we shouldn't make those contrast to start. So if you open a historical aft and you look at a map of Europe before the 20th century, you look at the centre. The centre of the map looks very confusing. It's that colourful patchwork. Germans divided into seemingly all these different states, you know, Italy the same. So the area then of the Holy Roman Empire, which, you know, was bigger than Germany, included Switzerland and much of Italy and stuff.

It looks a mess. You know, France, Spain, solid colours. Well, the French had 300 different kind of law codes before the era of Napoleon. You know, their country was not as uniform reorganized and united. Didn't they? In the 19th century, there were still many people, if you ask them in France, in which country were in European? Oh, and they wouldn't necessarily identify it.

straight away as France. So, you know, that kind of picture is a historical construct from part of that nation-building process has constructed that story, whereas the German identity has really always been multi-layered. So you have a strong sense of your hometown or your locality. You have a sense of a region, so what would marry the federal states in Germany, and you have a broader sense of being German. And the political structure has usually been aligned to that and the two things are mentally reinforcing. So this sort of decentralization is not so surprising.

And it produced certain benefits. It comes to the cost, but it produces certainly benefits. Well, I guess another way of asking the same question is why does it last, you know, through to Napoleon? Yeah. Well, it lasts really because it does have a measure of success. It's undermined, in fact, as the combination of the internal balance is distorted. On the one hand, Austria, the power that holds the imperial tribal, has become a great power in its own right, because it, by virtue of defeating the Turks and reconquering Hungary and acquiring other parts of Europe beyond the empire.

And Prussia is the other one that does it. So the actual Prussia was outside the empire, formerly part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a chief of sovereign status in 1660, and that's unique, other than the emperor, no one else is directly key of anywhere else in Europe. And that royal status, which is so often denigrated in Prussian history, is actually important to the other European powers, recognizing the Hoenzolland dynasty as something different. And they gradually sort of, they become their kind of, no, I wouldn't say so much challenger, because they're not actually seeking to leave the empire, but the growth of Prussia disproportionate to any of the other principles

within the empire unbalances the system at the point when Revolutionally France launches the wars beginning in 1793, what we know is the revolution in the program of the combination of external pressure and internal division is the thing causes the empire to collapse. Yeah. Let's talk a bit about the 17th century in the 30 years. If this system had advantages, the 30 years war must display some of the disadvantages, just to put it mildly. Maybe actually, you know, we've never talked about the 30 years war on the show before. Tell us a little bit about what it was, you know, just give us a bit of an overview. And then how does it transform the system that we are discussing in military practice in the empire?

It's best to understand the war really as a civil war, as an imperial civil war. It's a war about the religious and political order within the empire, to which other powers intervene, either because they're supporting the Habsburgs, so like Spain, so they're supporting the Austrian Habsburgs who they want to resolve this, so that they can then help them in other wars. So we need to think of, you know, sometimes the 30th years more is seen as a general European conflict,

and those that fought it were very clear that there were multiple wars going on in Europe at the same time, and they're trying to keep these things separate. So there's external support for the Habsburgs to try to resolve the war. And likewise, those people who want to keep the Habs busy and prevent them safe from helping the Spanish are intervening either indirectly with subsidies or directly with truth. So this is why there are these foreign interventions. And that's one of the things that makes the war so prolonged. I mean, the Habs repeatedly win. Bohemian revolts, while the Bohemians have been smashed by November,

1620. There are intervention prolongs the war. They were all defeated by 1624. The Danes interdeen. They're defeated by 1629. There's a whole year almost of peace relatively. And then the Swedes and could be aged and abetted by the French. And then we really have a different character with the war that lasts another 18 years or so. So it's a conflict that could so easily have ended earlier, but for the combination of the internal and then the external factors reignites the conflict so that it drags on. Its conclusion is spoken of, the piece of Westphalia, right, is sort of enshrined, certainly in the American political diplomatic conversation as a definitive moment that establishes

certain concepts of sovereignty, sort of notions of what we're. war ought not to be about that we might take certain religious questions off the table, right? It's sort of, it's caught up in some ways with the foundations of the way we think about government today and the ways in which we think about war today, right? In the modern strategic conversation here in the United States, we often, it sort of starts with this at this place. Well, we, we Westerners, we think in terms of peace being natural and then we go to war for certain objectives and then we negotiate peace and we have to be careful because when we talk about, for example, the Chinese Communist Party, they think in much more fluid terms.

And these are obviously very broad generalizations. And the Western conception, the Western generalization seems to be to go right back to Westphalia. It's sort of the source of it. You suggest it's a bit more complicated. So tell us a bit about what the piece of Westphalia is understood to be and what it actually was. Well, the piece of Estalia is understood exactly as you said. So the foundation of the modern sovereign state, seen as a national or even a nation state. And the idea that these states then interact as equals, rather than having a hierarchical order,

and that they will subscribe then to a same common system of international law. And that really is an invention of the 1860s, which is then retrospectively, so by international lawyers writing in the 1860s, seeking to find the origins of what the world indeed was becoming by that point, and they see it in the peace of Vesvailia. And it's not me that, just me that's saying this. I mean, there's a fantastic book by Derek Croxton, for example, The Last Christian Peace, which underscores the fact that the actual settlement of Vesphalia

is a settlement of the causes of the war, which is why the war was called the 30s war. They look back to what caused this, and much of it is a dispute over the possession of ecclesiastical land, for example, right of immigration, for religious dissenters and things like this, and those are specifically settled. So religion isn't taken out of politics,

but what it is, they make a settlement that makes it much harder to polarise along religious lines. So because it is an intricate compromise to peace, so there are very few outright loathness. So most people have gained at least something, and this intricate, settlement sort of suits the intricate constitution of the empire.

So it was then much more difficult to sort of say, my religious rights are being depressed come and help me because somebody would, you know, you tried to join all the dots of all the different princes and they'll say, well, actually, you know, I don't want to antagonize them because they are currently my friend in this other dispute that I've got with my own local neighbour.

And so it encouraged actually the residents, of disputes through legal arbitration rather than recourse to violence. But the big thing that Vestphalia does is it actually delegitimize, by and large, recourse to violence, and certainly delegitimize that for a certain level of political actors. So it does sort of shift the right to maintain truth becomes more concentrated, the right to take action becomes more concentrated in the elite of the empire that then for the next 150 years are the ones who collectively are in charge of that area. Yeah.

You document that the 17th century sees a transition from mercenary forces to standing armies of a different character. Talk a bit about that and talk about the changing nature of the conduct of war during that period. Right. Well, for the 16th century, war is essentially seasonal. So we have long wars, but most of the time the armies are only together in the kind of campaigning season. It's this war in the eight of grass.

You know, you have to say whether you've got to have grass, that's your fuel, that's your animal feed, that enables you to move. So outside the campaign season, forces were often reduced to garrisons to hold captured area. And then you'd run out of money by that point. You re-recruit, you remobilized, you fight in the next. the next year. So in the 17th century, we're shifting much more to forces maintained all the year-round. Operations are lasting longer, but there is demobilization at the end of the war. So at the end of the 30th year's war, we don't have standing armates. Only the Austrian have to have standing armies.

So the Bavarians had a field force of about 18,000 men throughout the war, one of the major players, they reduced to a couple of garrison companies. So, and this is the peace dividend. Everyone wants that and may think, well, we'll just have a few professional officers, militia companies, and that's our defense sorted. With the resumption of a series of prolonged wars then in the late 60s onwards, then we shift to a cadre system. So we have a larger professional cadre officer heavy that's maintained in peacetime

that can be expanded. So your company size might be 50 men and then you with a normal complement of officers in NCOs, then you expand that by recruiting new recruits or you impress militiamen or something to expand in wartime. And it's a kind of ratchet. Every successive conflict across from the 16th and 17th Street to the 1710s, armies tended to, they would shrink again in peace, but they would be bigger than they were when that war broke out. So we have that incremental growth. Yeah. So as we move here from the 17th into the 18th century, I mean, there's obviously a lot going on,

but one of the things is the emergence of Prussia as a significant factor. And I have an instinct that you're going to, again, say that a generalization like the one I'm about to make is over simplified or too oversimplified. But I can't even remember where I read this years and years ago, but it's to find my thinking about Prussia sense. that there's something about the geography of Prussia, a sort of location on the northern plain that compels or compelled a particular seriousness towards the maintenance and use of military force

because the absence of natural boundaries and so forth made it very vulnerable. And there was some comparison one could draw to the Spartans, you know, not having walls. Again, I can't remember where I read this, but it was a clever comparison and it stuck with me. And I never particularly had reason to question it. What, if any, is the truth to this?

And what are the sources of, well, of Prussianism as we've come to understand it? Well, Prussia is certainly, Branboe, Prussia is certainly exceptional in some respect. So, you know, from the 60s or so, it is on this upward trajectory. And that has indeed much to do with its leadership, the Holland Zoland dynasty. We do invest heavily in their armed forces or in their army, they don't, they scarcely have a native. And so overtake Bavarian Saxony, which would be. the other, really with a more important in the 17th century. So, especially in the Serser, after the 18th century, Frederick William the Sears,

so the father of Frederick the Great, there is a, he consciously adopts a different style. So less courtly display, wearing military uniform, changing over to a system of limited conscription that enables a larger army on the cheap. It's not the men are sort of furloughed for the bulk of the year so they can, work in the economy and then can be remobilized in the summer exercise period and of course mobilized for war. So that has created a system which is, should we say, an exaggeration of what else you find across the impact. They're not totally but certainly by its scale and so forth and exaggeration. If we look at Frederick the Great, who then uses this force that's being built up

and doubles its size and uses it aggressively, and that also is exceptional. I mean, the Bavarians do fight the Habsburg, by and large, no one is foolish enough to challenge the Habsburg. Prussia does, and very nearly comes the crop of several times. Frederick could easily have been killed on several occasions, history would have been quite different. You know, if you think of Charles of 12th and Sweden,

you know, the monarchs did get killed in back, also that could have happened. What we, so that is all part of, of the story that's there. What we've also got to remember, Frederick invests heavily and courtly display. You only need to go to Potsdam and see the enormous palace he builds after the seven years war to prove he's not bankrupt. You also invests heavily in fortifications. So we tend to think, you know, Prussia, decisive mobile war, you know, that works partly if you've got big fortresses that tie down your opponent. So there are major fortresses. Once Cats of Silesia, the big prize we've made again, you know, invests really heavily in fortifying

it. And those fortresses, that's the thing that doesn't save Prussia in 1806, that the garrisons does surrender. So talk a bit about, it's come up a few times here, but this competition sort of within the system that we've described between Houghton, Zollins and Habsburgs, Prussia and Austria and how that plays out over the course of the 18th century. It's a bit like, this is probably overblown, but just as we're talking, I'm trying to conceptualize your argument for myself.

It reminds me a bit of the international system today, right, where you have these organizations that are invested with legitimacy and you have countries that are competing for the various goals within the system, but at the same time, there are these currents of hard power, right, that the members of the system are perfectly willing under the right circumstances to resort to and break the rules as it were to achieve their goals. It sounds a bit like this is what's going on in miniature in this part of Europe in the 18th century. Is that fair? Yeah, to some extent,

I think the difficult that we have, we tend to sort of look at this and we kind of imagine it as a kind of board game as if it's risk or something like that. So every player has essentially the same goals and that's domination of the whole area. And that isn't the case. The Prussian and Solomers, they wanted to be recognized as European monarchs. So they only get a royal title in 1700 and they're the first German rulers really to get one. The Habsburgs have got royal titles for various other things, kings of Hungary and stuff. But they want that for international recognition and they want to be taken seriously. So Frederick, for example, example in the 1740s, it's busy negotiating to make with other European powers that he will be

recognised equally and equal status of majesty. So there is, we're still in a Europe that thinks hierarchically. There is only one imperial title, or at least there's only one that Macon, that's the Holy Roman imperial title, you know, until Napoleon crowns himself emperor, there isn't another serious one. The Russians, you know, they, you know, from the sinking of the time, they don't matter. The sultan, he doesn't, you know, he's different. So, you know, he's different. So, you We have a hierarchically organized system. So the Holland and Zolins really, they want respect and they want autonomy. They don't want to have to follow the rulings of the Imperial Supreme Court and things like that.

But they don't, at the same time, they don't want to leave the empire. And they're very particular about defending the minutest, most obscure right that they might have. So they are not about sort of taking over this system or dominating it. They want it to work because there are times when they're isolated politically, so they don't have another major power as an ally, and they see the empire of the kind of reserve system to protect them. You know, that they belong to this collective. They'll get the benefits if they can, then contribute as little as possible. And the Austrians, of course, are trying to make this whole thing work for themselves, too. So they're not altruistic either, and they manipulate the system too.

The real danger, and that's what happens, is what are these two big powers cooperate? And when they cooperate, you know, Poland is part of the... Because they, you know, because they cooperated and it's unable to defend itself. And the smaller German principalities are thinking, my goodness, that could happen to us. And that's the same thing, really, that continues into the 19th century once. You know, with the German Federation, it's basically a reestablished empire. in a different form. So let's talk a bit about the destruction of the empire.

How does Napoleon exploit these dynamics and achieve victory in the broadest sense? And if, in fact, as you're suggesting, the weakness of the system has been overblown after its defeat, you know, what's the case for its strength, given that, you know, is 1806, right? It disappears. Yeah. Well, one, we have the French strengths. So the revolutionary ideology justifies a much deeper reach of the states and its control of French murdered and treasure than say the previous Bourbon regime. So the French can be much more careless with their manpower.

And so the aggressive tactics of the French, it's very costly, both in battle casualties and also a very high desertion rate as well. Don't feed your soldiers properly, that's what happened. but they can afford such losses. So they can fight very aggressively. And their opponents are very slow to sort of respond to that. They're still trying to fight in the manner of the 18th century, not that 18th century wars weren't bloody, but there is a different level of thinking.

So there's that. That's one thing. The other thing is the actual weakness of Prussia. So the Prussians are much more interested in finishing off the carve-up of Poland. And they're confronted in the early 1790 with a major insurrection, which threatens their Polish provinces. And they feel so insecure about the Polish provinces that they haven't extended constriction. So they're actually weak, they're short, they're basically bankrupt. And so they can't fight a two-front war, so they made peace with the French, 1795, and they suck the whole of northern Germany with them.

So Hanover, Heston Castle, Saxony, these were major armed principalities that in the past have contributed the substantial part to imperial defence. So the Austrians are left fighting only with the South Germans against the French, and they become increasingly so they're heavy-handed because they're desperate and they're getting defeated. So they're treating these South German territories, they're disregarding rights and so on. So the South German medium princes are thinking, what are we going to do here? And then they think, well, maybe we jumped it and sign up with a fringe. So there's a, the South crumbles away as Barden and Wittenberg and Bavaria and the others, throw the lot in with the French. And then by 1805, the final, you know, catastrophic defeat, you know,

Napoleon's got the best army you'll ever have, really, defeats the Austrians and Russians at Ossevich. and then he can dictate peace. So the Austrians are thinking, you know, he's going to grab literally the imperial title and use it to legitimate reorganization of Germany. So we will advocate and dissolve the empire to stop him from doing it. It's a fascinating analysis,

and it sort of puts me in mind of the problem that we all face when we think about the past, that there's this tendency to look at the result of something and think, well, it must have been determined by some internal principle that made it inevitable, right? The empire failed because the empire was always going to fail faced with a threat like that.

A threat like that was always going to defeat an empire designed in the way that it was. And your point, which in a way, and I mean this is a compliment, kind of goes back to Thucydides, right? There's just a lot of contingency at work here. If the breaks go the other way, it's possible, maybe not likely,

but it's possible to imagine the result going the other way. But it doesn't. They don't, and it doesn't. And then this sense of weakness. sets in, right, that the empire had been kind of a hopeless system behind the times, not availing itself of the resources that other European countries are availing themselves of. How does that belief play out? What are the consequences of that analysis in the 19th century and how does it affect the German military history and German military organization in the 19th century?

Yes, that's right. I mean, there is a growing belief amongst at least certain parts of the German public, that the empire has been a failure. And that takes a while to build up. Part of this is confessional. So the imperial legacy is increasingly associated with the Habsburgs who are Catholic. So 19th century politics and certainly 19th century nationalism swings becomes much more partisan. And that is part of the problem, the greater versus the small Germany's solution to this, the question of unification, which is sort of hot-housed, really, in ideological terms. Most Germans are not bothered about that so much.

They just want more mundane problems about employment or the price of grain and stuff to be resolved. So there's that sort of issue. Looking back, they actually, what the Confederation grows is it adopts a military system that isn't dissimilar to the empire. Again, it's a contingent system with common commands and a collective decision to be taken by the federal diet in place, the old imperial diet. And that system is partly put in place, and it does actually mobilize.

Most of the German small states fight on the Austrian side against Prussia in 1866. It's not just Austria against Prussia. There are also the Bavarians and stuff. the Hanoverians actually defeat the small Prussian army. But it is partly hollowed out by the fact that it's clear by, certainly by the early 1860s, that Prussia is so predominant that many of these smaller states thinking, it's actually quite expensive to maintain our confederal contingent. Let's just pay the Prussians, let the Prussians go.

And so they surrender some of their military sovereignty. and that becomes a rush after 1866. And a lot of them are annexed as well. The small ones that pick the wrong side, Nassau and Hanover and stuff, annexed by the pressure, which pressure becomes much bigger as a result. So there's, again, I just,

I keep bringing my conventional preconceptions to the table and allow you to chip away at them. Bismarck launches a series of three lightning wars, that aid in the unification of the country, the establishment of empire, this sets in place a pattern that ultimately less talented men cannot maintain leading to not one but two civilizational disasters in 1914 and 1939. That's certainly what I've thought. What should we add to this picture or subtract from this from this picture?

Well, that's looking at it like that. Well, obviously, say, you know, both world awards are Germany's fault, which is a nice. It's an easy view to take if you're not the German. So I would hesitate about trying to sort of pin all the blame solely on the Germans. But certainly, if we look at what the Germans are doing, what the German High Command is doing, I mean, they are preparing for what they think will be a short and victorious war because of the experience they've had in 1870, 71. So you think 1870, what's usually called a Frank oppression or Frank German war,

within a few months, the Germans have won a decisive victory. Captured Napoleon III, the bulk of the French regular army, you know, that's job done. The French should surrender and make peace, and they don't. And there's a protracted struggle that runs into the early part of the following year when they are fighting to some extent and guerreroes. and it creates a kind of anxiety. We will be robbed of our victory. So if we try to understand the kind of military thinking

in the last 30, 40 years before the First World War, it's an imperative to achieve a swift and decisive victory to prevent this unraveling and also to prevent far superior resources being brought to bear. That's this sort of sense of encirclement. Yes, it's partly geographic, but it's also more mental, you know, that our opponents will be more numerous. So that's one of the reasons why they support the Austrians because they're reluctant to lose their main ally in 1914. And the out, following the deceit, there's a kind of refusal really to learn from that.

And so there is the same type of thinking dominates, you know, partly the senior command of the army after the First World War, you know, excuse themselves. They weren't responsible for the defeat. They'd been stabbed in the back by socialists and churkers and the weakness of the home front. So it allows the same mentality and the same kind of flawed analysis to persist. Why does the German assault into France fail to achieve its objectives in 1914 but succeed in 1940? Right. Just to, you know, we've got, I don't know, five, ten minutes left.

Right. Well, I'd say, you know, 1914, they could only have won if everything had gone to plan. So, you know, it's, and it's the failure to sort of adapt. You know, when you hit a problem, what does, you know, ultimately, when Falcon Hind takes over, you know, the race to the sea, well, we're just trying to outflankment a bit more. And, you know, and it's not going to work. I think is a different situation. I mean, by 1940, you've got an army. Yes, I mean, half the German army is either old men or poorly trained,

but they believe in themselves. They've just smashed the poles. You know, they're convinced that they're going to win. They have certain technical advantages. So the fact that they have much better use of radios, so it's better coordination of armor and air power. and they're facing a force that by and large feels it's likely to be defeated. So they have those advantages.

But things could have gone wrong. I mean, we could have seen, you know, the enormous columns of German troops passing through the Ardennes, you know, not dissimilar to what we saw with the initial Russian assault towards Kiev and, you know, with better use of air power and so on by the Allies. You could have had a sort of similar result. with stalling that advance. So again, I wouldn't say it's foregone completely. We need to look at the events in detail to find that explanation. You make an observation early in the book that I've been thinking about for days now about contemporary reception of, in particular this period

of German military history and how the Americans embarked on a modernization campaign based on, I think you call it a myth based upon a sort of myth or mythical understanding of Blitzkrieg, whereas the Chinese of late, you say, have actually taken a kind of different lesson from the results of the First and Second World Wars for the Germans, namely that you can't mistake an opening gambit for a strategy. I think I'm paraphrasing you correctly, and I like to take both of those things in terms. They're both really interesting. I've lived what you're saying in terms of the American reception of the sort of Blitzkrieg operating concepts. I mean, the Marine Corps circa 10, 15 years ago, again, there's explicit reference to mission, you know, the way we talk

about mission type orders and operating concepts and so forth. It's explicit reference to sort of German ways of war from the previous century. And a belief, certainly within the Marine Corps, that, you know, 2003 march up to Baghdad was an example of the success of such a concept. So what's mythical about it? What were Americans failing to understand in your view? What are we, what are we overblowing about Blitz Creek? I'll talk about the Chinese. Well, you know, I'd hesitate to pass judgment on American policy. But, you know, if we stick with the Germans,

I think the basic problem is that, you know, we tend to think that the German military was trying to escape political control and act on its own. It wasn't. They had a very professional view of what their job was. Their job was to win a victory, and then you hand over to the politicians, you then decide what to do. And they only got frustrated with politicians,

if they themselves encountered a problem and were not getting that victory, and then felt they were not being supported enough. So the big problem was planning for a victory, and not what you do with a victory. And so there was a disconnect, really, between a national strategy, which is based on national interests, coordinated by the government and the planning for a war. So that I would say is really where things went wrong.

It's the idea that somehow with a victory you can do what you like, and it's not the case. And I think that the problem is often how we tend to forget how a war is fought is also going to make an impact on how it might be resolved. And that's certainly the case with the surface of war. I mean, I think one of the reasons why the piece of best failure was actually a relatively good settlement, at least, for the bulk of the belligerents, is that they were pretty much all invited to the table. And they do work out a kind of compromise with relatively complete losing. And so they all have a stake in the peace.

And I think that perhaps is a lesson for the problem. Peter Wilson, author of Iron and Blood, a military history of the German-speaking people since 1500. This conversation and the book are genuinely thought-provoking. I'm very grateful for your time. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.