Customer Reviews

On the German Art of War: Truppenführung (Art of War)

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I thought I was getting a book on staff organization and functions, operational leadership, and tactics from Germany, circa 1933. Aside from the technological limitations (telegraphs and trains, rather than secure email and heavy lift cargo planes for example) imposed by the period, this is very difficult to distinguish from current U.S. Army doctrine for combat operations.

Throughout Truppenfuhrung, the need for solid staff work, good intelligence, initiative, and audacity in all leaders are stressed. A clear conceptual framework for conventional operations is laid down addressing offense, defense, movements, logistics, and the rest of the disciplines that make a modern army successful. Mostly, it is laid out like the current U.S. doctrine, and the operational doctrine that has been in use since the 1950s. This isn't surprising, as most major military innovations of the past 150+ years have either come from the Germans or have been adopted and brought to a much higher degree of sophistication by the Germans. The U.S. turned around and took the German work and incorporated it into U.S. doctrine.

It is interesting to see the roots of U.S. doctrine laid bare. Most Army training is concerned with a standard, and achieving a rote understanding of doctrine, without a historical context. This is the context.

Before a reader starts fulminating that this is the work of the most evil government of the Twentieth Century, consider that the author, the Chief of German General Staff Ludwig Beck resigned because of Hitler, and participated in Operation Valkyrie, the attempt to assassinate Hitler, and was executed for his participation in the conspiracy.

Great informative historical document, though rather specialized.

E.M. Van Court

A fantastic overview of German tactics and doctrine, at the philosophic level, on the eve of World War II. I particularly enjoyed the sort of foreshadowing you see in this work of the coming of air and armor tactics that are still experimental at the time of the work's completion.