SHARED OPINION
The secret of Germany's failure as a military power
FRANK JOHNSON
Last week, discussing the subject of skil- fully commercial book titles, I mentioned that I had recently discovered Why the Ger- mans Lose at War by Kenneth Macksey (Greenhill Books, 1996). I said I would report here when I had read it. The matter seemed to arouse interest. 'Well, why do they?' friends asked. I met no one uninter- ested in the answer.
On the face of it, this is odd. The Ger- mans, in under 30 years, lost the two great- est wars in history. Logically, the rest of us should conclude that the Germans cannot be much good at war. Yet plenty of us think they are. Mr Macksey's book is subtitled 'The Myth of German Military Superiority', so there is a myth of the military superiority of the people who lost those two vast wars.
The other day, I went into a military bookshop in London and asked for the recent biography of Liddell Hart. The youth behind the counter replied, 'Little who?' In answer to his further question, 'Who was he, what did he do?', I found myself rather pompously replying that Liddell Hart was, I suppose, with a man called Fuller, one of the two best-known military writers of the century in the English-speaking world, and perhaps in the world as a whole. The youth had never heard of either of them, but piled high around him were illustrated books by, and about, German generals and air bases, and illustrated guides to German insignia, weapons, tanks and uniforms.
Yet they lost both. Lost the second as com- prehensively as it is possible to lose anything. But the German High Command of these two world wars, especially of the second, have had a posthumous victory. They have convinced the world that they know best how to wage war. The more I think about that posthumous victory, the more it seems to me that their true genius was not Hitler, or any general, but the man who realised the real weapon of the 20th century: public relations, or the media. Goebbels made Europe terri- fied of Germany. All that goose-stepping; massed ranks at Nuremberg rallies; columns of tanks in Poland and France supported by dive-bombers. With all that, Goebbels was the first and most lethal spin doctor.
I must make clear that this idea that those early German triumphs were as much to do with PR as with prowess on the battlefield is my own unscholarly suspicion, and not Mr Macksey's theory. He, as a scholar, must be more measured than me, a journalist. But, before I try to summarise his scholarship, I must mention one of the other reasons why I think so many people want to believe in German military superiority, at least in Ger- man aggressiveness. Eurosceptics propagate the myth in order to depict Germany as still wanting to dominate Europe, but this time dominating by means of the European Union from whose restraints Germany will one day break free to try to dominate Europe on her own. Lady Thatcher some- times gives the impression that this is what she believes, or wants us to believe. But some Europhiles unwittingly encourage this idea by depicting the European Union as the only way of tying Germany down and preventing it from dominating Europe.
Turning to Mr Macksey's thesis, the Ger- mans' tendency to start wars goes back at least to the 12th century. The German fron- tiers were flat on all sides. Scandinavians pressed on them from the north, French from the west, Slays from the east, Turks from the south. Their best defence was sud- den attack. We in our island, by then invul- nerable to invasion, cannot blame them. But Mr Macksey sees in the German military character a fatal flaw: they did not know when to stop. As early as 1410, having with- stood various eastern pagans, they 'arrogant- ly overstepped the mark, this time by threat- ening the Christianised Poles and Lithuani- ans'. So, 'the underlying reason for this crushing German defeat [of over-confident Germans by a Slav army at Tannenberg] was overstretch ... the Teutonic knights' morale collapsed and they were ultimately forced to evacuate Poland'.
Frederick the Great would have lost the Seven Years' War, in which all the great European powers except Britain were against him, had not Russia, under a new tsar, made peace. Bonaparte defeated them at Jena in 1806. But then came the fabled reorganisa- tion of the Prussian army and quick wins over weak Denmark and Austria, and not much stronger Second Empire France. But the flaw was that it was not only the army that had been reorganised to win wars. The state was, too. The result was a state run by the army, not the other way about. Thus the Germans overdid things even more. 'Behind the pol- ished execution of Moltke's plans by com- manders and aristocratic staff officers lurked an arrogant snobbishness in relationships with mere engineers, communications, rail- way staff, and supply services,' says Mr Mack- sey. Such snobbery is usually attributed to British institutions, so it is heartening for a Briton thus to read.
Years later, the second world war field marshal, Kesselring, was to complain of 'inadequate training' in intelligence, supply services, applied science and 'anything to do with oil which soiled the fingers and hampered the tactician and strategist in the free flight of his ideas'. Kesselring, a Bavar- ian, also complained that 'the old-fashioned nobility was given preferential treatment' over officers from regions such as Bavaria which 'lacked the typical military nobility and large estates'. So it turns out that they were just as toffish as Britons are supposed to be. I suspect much more so.
Mr Macksey presses on to the two world wars. In the first, after the initial failure of their plan to defeat France and then con- centrate on Russia, the Germans had no better idea how to win on the Western Front than did the British or the French. In the second world war, after initial successes, Germany overestimated British strength after Dunkirk, so did not invade, and under- estimated British strength at the Battle of Britain. Mr Macksey says they thought the RAF, 'whose combat prowess was not held in high esteem by the more experienced Germans', would be beaten in four days.
We all know that they went on to fight on two fronts, and thus lost. But Mr Macksey produces another of their errors. As the world now knows, we broke their codes. Thus we knew in advance what they were going to do. They believed their codes to be unbreak- able. Their scientists and code experts were of course the best, and could not be broken by British mathematicians. 'Thus the Ger- mans fatally committed the military sin of despising the enemy.' They had 'arrogant confidence in the infallibility of their superior genius compared with other peoples'.'
My purpose here is not vulgar anti-Ger- manism. Most living Germans would prob- ably agree with Mr Macksey. There are plenty of good reasons for Britons not to want to be in a federal Europe, but fear of Germany should not be one of them. The eclipse of German militarism is one of the reasons why we live in a golden age of peace and prosperity. Happy the age in which Mr Macksey could entitle his book Why the Germans Lose at War, and all that most Germans would want to retaliate with might be Why the English Lose at Football.
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