The Grand Illusion: The Prussianization of the Chilean Army (review)

The Grand Illusion: The Prussianization of the Chilean Army. By WILLIAM F. SATER and HOLGER R. HERWIG. Studies in War, Society, and the Military. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Photographs. Tables. Notes. Index. 247 pp. Cloth, $50.00.

This book makes one think the adage "military history is to history what military music is to music" still has substance after all. Over the years too much military history in monographic form has failed to encourage sophisticated linkages with political and social history. Impressive in style and substance, The Grand Illusion stops short of pursuing significant opportunities to place an important subject within the historical and cultural perspectives that would enlighten us further about the essence of modern Chilean civil-military relations.

Throughout the book, opportunities to link prussianization's failure to civilian as well as military causes are noted, but go unseized. For example, the civil war of 1891, curiously referred to as a "revolution," certainly the result of something more historic than a "squabble" (p. 45); the parliamentary republic of 1891-1925 (pp. 178-80) and its violent episodes; and the "mobilization of 1920" (pp. 101-2)--all well documented in secondary literature--are simplistically and cursorily treated. This weakens and confines to the realm of narrow, institutional history the book's thesis (see p. 27) that prussianization in Chile was a success in form but not content.

Opportunities to present prussianization as more than an anecdotal episode of meridional goose stepping in spiked helmets beg pursuit. Germany's foreign policy and mercantile priorities receive due attention, but Chilean motives, those connected with her own second-generation missionary efforts in Colombia, Ecuador, and El Salvador do not. A contrast with Japan's flirtation with prussianization is made early on, but none with Turkey's. Peru's motives in contracting a French mission in the 1890s, dismissed as based on "questionable wisdom" (p. 4) are misunderstood. Despite excellent treatment of strictly military developments, the book's value as a source of new knowledge or perspective on prussianization in Latin America, exportation of European military systems through missions, or civil-military relations associated with either is severely circumscribed.

Attentive vetting in the editing and publishing processes might have precluded this circumscription. It might also have avoided other problems, such as the confusion over usage of the terms "military academy" and "military school" (pp. 39-41, 61 et seq.), and gratuitous proleptic comparisons (pp. 5, 201) of German efforts in Chile to those of Joseph Heller's fictional "Milo Minderbinder" (in Catch 22), which trivialize, at the outset and at the conclusion, discussions of German and Chilean motives for prussianization, and detract from the central argument.

Sater and Herwig ably confirm what has been common knowledge for the better part of a century, and elaborate on it, little more. The historical significance of prussianization lies (nearly a century after its zenith) in the generation of an army officer corps ethos and attendant myths and lore, not in immediate or long-range technical and war-making achievements. To judge the failure of prussianization (chapter 4, pp. 95-131) by the standards of war-making capability or "military science" is to be, well, Eurocentric. Similarly, to assert that individuals like Hans von Kiesling or Otto Zippelius deserve more credit for what they did in Chile following World War I (pp. 207-08) than prussianization's prewar missions, and to do it without ample documentation, is to miss the point completely. With all his faults and prussianization's failures, Emil Körner's is the myth of professionalization that prevails. Illusions can be more important in Latin American civil-military relations than reality.

The work really cannot do justice to its title, obviously drawn from Jean Renoir's 1937 classic La grande illusión: In Chile nichts neues may be the more appropriate fictional and filmic allusion.

Frederick M. Nunn, University of Arizona

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