5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The view from the top -- or very near it, November 18, 2008
This review is from: The Halder War Diary 1939-1942 (Hardcover)
If goes without saying - or rather, it should - that a book like THE HALDER WAR diary wasn't written, and isn't exactly published, with the NY Times bestseller-list in mind. It isn't a memior of the sort Guderian, Manstein and Kesselring wrote years after the Second World War ended, but rather a chronologically organized mass of free-form notes, jotted down by the Chief of the German General Staff during the opening and middle years of World War Two. In other words, it's raw information which wasn't intended for public viewing or subjected to postwar polishing or revisionism, but simply Halder's observations and feelings as they occurred at the time. This makes it both more reliable and less interesting than the works of his fellow generals, who were often as interested in protecting their reputations and justifying their actions as they were in telling the truth.
Colonel-General Franz Halder was the Chief of the German General Staff from 1938 until 1942. This made him the second most important man in the German Army behind its commander in Chief, Field Marshal von Brautschitch, and put him at Adolf Hitler's elbow for half the war. He was a fussy, precise, high-strung man with a professiorial manner and a very orthodox way of looking at military affairs which was bound to put him at odds with anyone who didn't hold with traditionalist views of warfare, and in retrospect he seems an odd choice for the job. Hitler, after all, was an unconventional miliary thinker who had a taste for gambling at long odds, and not only hated the General Staff, but especially swivel-chair soldiers like Halder who had seldom if ever come near a battlefield. So it's not exactly a shock that their relationship, which started out on strong footing, quickly deteriorated into mutual contempt and hostility - something which is documented with surprising frankness in Halder's diary.
As Chief of the General Staff, Halder was ever-present at Hitler's twice-daily situation conferences during the war, and seems to have made a habit of scribbling down everything he could remember in his office immediately afterwards. He was a scrupulous diarist, but not a conventional one. There is no system to the manner in which he took his notes. Some of the entries are little more than a series of unrelated bullet-points about politico-military matters; others combine long outpourings of observation, reaction and emotion in the manner of a conventional diary. This is generally viewed as being reflective of Halder's nature, but in fact it is probably more indicative of Hitler's command style than anything else. [In his own postwar (death-row) memior, the former chief of the Armed Forces High Command, Wilhelm Kietel, repeatedly complained about the way Hitler was unable to stay "on point" during his military conferences, and constantly brought up unrelated matters.] Despite this, and perhaps because of it, Halder's diary gives a largely accurate picture of how the German military was run at the height of its success: a mixture of discipline and disorder, tactical brilliance and strategic myopia. On the one hand, Halder shows Hitler's command structure as despotic and inefficient, with the chain of command routinely ignored and the Supreme Leader unable to restrain himself from meddling in extraneous detail; on the other, he more than occasionally tips his own hand as a rigid strategic conformist, bitterly hostile to Guderian and Rommel, and unwilling to grant Hitler credit for his many tactical inspirations. However biased they may be, his observations on his fellow generals, on the Nazi Party, on the SS and Hitler's mind and behavior make for its most intresting reading.
Obviously, a book like this is primarily of interest to students of the military art and historians, so it can be forgiven its lack of aesthetic charm. It is, after all, simply a personal war diary, written by a man of great intellect but very little imagination, who wanted and needed a vent for his frustrations at the manner in which his commander-in-chief was behaving. But I would strongly recommend it, if only to gain a better understanding of how things were done "on the other side of the hill."
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Valuable first hand source about the initial phases of WW II in Europe, July 18, 2006
This review is from: The Halder War Diary 1939-1942 (Hardcover)
This book is not for the layman nor for the reader who wants some eloquent prose. General Halder was a strict German staff officer who reached the top of his profession, promoted to Chief of the General Staff in 1938. Of course, the editors of General Halder's papers mistitled the work, for the general did not maintain a diary, but rather a collection of notes, a convenience to remind him of points brought up during briefings and conversations. When the war started in September 1939, Halder kept these notes where he poured all his thoughts in a short and some times telegraphic way. The reader must have some broader knowledge of WW II in order to comprehend some of the notes and there are some chronological gaps, obviously of days when Halder did not have the time to take personal notes. His carreer came to an abrupt end in September 1942, during the peak of the Stalingrad campaign, when he was fired by Hitler for speaking his mind about the tragic mistakes made in the Eastern Front. The book stops at that point also, but it is really of high value for the serious student of the first three years of the war in Europe.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Chief of the General Staff, December 28, 2009
This review is from: The Halder War Diary 1939-1942 (Hardcover)
The Halder war diaries are the day to day activities of the German High Command as it pertained to General Franz Halder. They cover the period from just
before the start of the invasion of Poland to Halder's dismissal as Chief of the General Staff in September of 1942. The "diaries" (notes) describe in short entries the actions
of the German Heer (Army) from September of 39 to September of 1942. The entries also have much information dealing with matters of diplomacy and economics (as they related to the German Army).
Some of the interesting aspects of the diaries is the frustration of Halder with Hitler's constant meddling in operational affairs. It would seem from the diaries that Halder was
very much in favor of fast and deep attacks (i.e. blitzkrieg), but according to the diaries it was Hitler who was always concerned with the flanks of the attacks and halted the
German drives because of his fear of the flanks. On several occasions (both in the West and in the East) Halder complained of Hitler's concern over the flanks of their deep attacks. Only during the Soviet counter-attack in December 41 to Feb. 42 did Hitler tell his Generals (as recorded by Halder) to
not worry about the flanks. Large amounts of interesting information in these diaries, but they are not for the "lay person". A good understanding of the German military in the
second world war is really needed before undertaking the reading of these diaries.
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