Fighting for the Fatherland: The Story of the German Soldier from 1648 to the Present Day (review)

The German army continues to attract the interest of researchers and writers of all types, and to generate every sort of book from weighty scholarly tomes to trivial items for the buff. Unfortunately, Fighting for the Fatherland is not one of the better ones.

It could have been. David Stone is to be commended for his breadth of vision. He attempts to reconstruct the history of the Prussian-German army from the days of the Great Elector to the 1990 reunification of Germany—from Fehrbellin to the Federal Republic, we might say. Tackling such a longue durée offers the possibility of getting at that elusive quality of "military culture" that is such an obsession for modern military historians.

Doing so would require looking at the topic with a critical eye, however. Instead, Stone offers us a German army that is completely unproblematized. It is a force with a tradition of operational competence, of course, but also one with an "illustrious heritage" (p. 15) and "historical touchstones of loyalty, honour and duty" (pp. 365–66), whose service on Hitler's behalf was an "aberration" (p. 329). It is a heroic institution of brilliant professionals dedicated solely to defense of the Heimat and the Fatherland. This is so, apparently, even when they are smashing Poland, overrunning Denmark, or trying to conquer the Caucasus.

These points are debatable enough, but the problems run deeper. Much of the book is a by-the-numbers slog through the centuries that perpetuates a number of myths and makes its share of errors. The Königgrätz campaign is barely recognizable here, and the same might be said for Tannenberg. The passages on the great doctrinal figures like Helmuth von Moltke are practically devoid of content, let alone analysis. The Germans are said to have invented "Blitzkrieg"' in the interwar era, but the text does not even discuss the problematic origins of the term itself. In three centuries of narrative, there is no real attempt to get at what German planners were actually striving for in their campaigns. Rather, the text portrays victories from Rossbach to Case Yellow as a result of superior professionalism, a vague term that cries out for nuance. Nor is "the story of the German soldier"—which is mentioned in the title and seems to promise a kind of military Alltagsgeschichte—especially well drawn. Most of the book deals with the generals.

The reason for all this is easy to trace. There is a huge body of scholarship on the German army, but Stone has not consulted it. The touchstone for the sections on the Thirty Years' War is C. V. Wedgwood's 1961 book; for the Wehrmacht it is Herbert Rosinski's The German Army (1939). Recent works by James Corum, Richard DiNardo, and Dennis Showalter are all conspicuous by their absence. Geoffrey Wawro's The Franco-Prussian War makes it into the slim bibliography, but does not appear to have influenced the pertinent chapters. Even a work aimed at a popular audience needs to ground itself more firmly in the literature than this one does.