The Rise of the Wehrmacht: The German Armed Forces and World War II (review)

These two volumes are intended as a general history of the Wehrmacht from 1933 to Stalingrad. The volumes begin with a brief examination of the Wehrmacht's organization and its evolution through the 1920s. The books then briefly outline Germany's major campaigns from Poland to Stalingrad.

First of all, there is nothing original in these books, either in their sources, methodology, or analysis. Both books are based solely on English-language secondary sources, and on a small number of these. The source material is mostly popular history and memoirs from the 1950s and 1960s. The author ignores almost all the English-language writing on the Wehrmacht of the last twenty years. Both volumes are characteristic of an approach to history that ignores primary documents.

The Rise of the Wehrmacht volumes are replete with major factual errors. For example, Mitcham shows his ignorance of prewar Wehrmacht doctrine process when he describes Hugo Sperrle and Wolfram von Richthofen as the driving forces of the Luftwaffe's doctrine in the 1930s (Vol. 1, p. 98). In fact, neither officer had any input into the Luftwaffe's primary operational doctrine. Mitcham also gets facts about major operations wrong. In Volume 2 (pages 394-395) he describes General von Richthofen's VIIIth Air Corps as bombing Belgrade on 6 April, 1941. In fact, on that date von Richthofen's units were flying in close support of von List's army in northern Greece, and Belgrade would have been at extreme range for almost all of von Richthofen's aircraft. See Ulf Balke (Der Luftkrieg in Europa, 1997, pp. 233-239) for an accurate account of how General Loehr's IVth Air Fleet bombed Belgrade with bombers based near Vienna.

With minimal research the author writes with a broad brush and makes sweeping assertions about the Wehrmacht's doctrine that are impressively wrong. Mitcham argues that the Luftwaffe's greatest failure was that it was "flying artillery for the army and little else" (Vol. 1, p. 99). This is, of course, pure nonsense. The Luftwaffe did not ignore strategic bombing. In fact, the Luftwaffe's operational doctrine (Luftwaffe Regulation 16) was heavily weighted towards strategic bombing and in 1940 the Luftwaffe was better prepared to carry out a strategic bombing campaign than the strategically-minded Royal Air Force. The Luftwaffe's ability to conduct joint operations with the army was one of the primary reasons why the Germans enjoyed a string of blitzkrieg victories from 1939 to 1942. Of course the Luftwaffe had fatal flaws which included an incredibly inefficient aircraft production system and a weak training program (See Horst Boog, Die deutsche Luftwaffenführung). But effective joint operations is not an operational flaw.

A reader today does not have to read German to have access to a good history of the Wehrmacht. There are many excellent books available in English that are based on thorough research in the original documents. For anyone interested in the Wehrmacht the most important resource is the superb ten-volume German official history of the Second World War (Germany and the Second World War, Oxford University Press), which is available in English. Everything covered in Mitcham's books is covered in the German official history—with the difference being that the official history volumes are better written, backed by first rate scholarship, and illustrated by better maps. Although most of the volumes have been available in translation for years, Mitcham cites not a single one.

Of the many histories of the Wehrmacht that I have read and reviewed over many years this ranks as perhaps the worst. Even the propaganda-laden stuff put out by the Soviet Union in the 1970s was better than this. At least those books could be mined by a historian for useful details, statistics, and maps as long as...