(originally published on H-German 25 November 1995)
Lawrence Sondhaus argues that the Prussian army's influence on the Prussian-German naval officer corps between 1847-1897 was pervasive, and remained so, even after 1888 when naval leadership finally replaced what had hitherto been continuous army control. He, therefore, insists that the increasingly bourgeois naval officer corps revealed in Holger Herwig's pioneering analysis as slavishly emulating its more aristocratic army counterpart after 1890 should come as no surprise. Sondhaus concludes that decades of army supervision over the navy ensured that "the strongest manifestations of the outlook and mentality of Prussian militarism within the corps came after 1888, when the last of the 'navy generals' had departed and the navy men were running their own service." (483) In short, Sondhaus insists that the elite emulation Herwig found prevalent in the Wilhelmine navy after 1890 was deeply ingrained and not primarily a striking manifestation of bourgeois status insecurity.
Anchoring his analysis in the naval archive of the Imperial German Navy and its prehistory as the Royal Prussian Navy before 1867 and the North German Bundesmarine between 1867-1871, Sondhaus carefully tracks the recruitment, training, and education of naval officers as well as their subsequent career paths. He stresses that from the beginning the "spirit of the army" was present by royal design. An army presence, however, was not always sufficient to ensure that aristocratic recruits materialized in acceptable numbers or that the cadets recruited possessed the requisite educational attainment the monarch and the army leadership demanded.
Indeed, Sondhaus demonstrates that social and educational expectations generally were thwarted as the navy scrambled to fill officer billets with merchant mariners and foreign naval officers following its creation amidst the turbulence unleashed in the north by the events surrounding 1848. Moreover, the navy subsequently failed to attract officer candidates from the nobility, the sons of army officers, or from the professional middle class in sufficient number to achieve that "union of professional and social comrades" (467) envisioned by Prince Adalbert of Prussia in 1862. Sondhaus delineates that such a "union" would only appear much later during the Wilhelmine era when the navy's unheroic role in the Danish and Austrian wars faded somewhat and social barriers were relaxed while education standards were elevated to meet the manning levels and technology requirements of an expanding fleet.
The value of this article rests on the statistical evidence Sondhaus provides while charting the navy's course for achieving the social cohesion of its officer corps. He illustrates quite clearly that naval leadership by army officers resulted in an unswerving determination to create and maintain an officer corps socially and professionally similar to the army's model. Despite some early disasters at sea, an ongoing image problem due to martial inactivity during the unification wars, and occasional unrealistic educational or financial standards established for entry, all of which served to reduce the nobility component within the officer corps, the commitment to social cohesion remained. Indeed, Sondhaus demonstrates that competent and long-serving officers of lesser social origin frequently were "passed over" or retired in favor of those possessing higher social status. Likewise, he reveals the navy's periodic willingness to dilute education requirements to improve both the social quality as well as increase the quantity of its cadet recruits.
The social snobbery surrounding promotions and lowered entry standards notwithstanding, Sondhaus agrees that the naval expansion of the Wilhelmine era underscored the need for professionally competent naval officers to lead an increasingly technical service. He reiterates that the growing middle-class composition of the officer corps ultimately guaranteed that a higher educational level existed in the navy than in the army, but that the army's continued social exclusivity and greater social cohesiveness helped determine that the navy remained the subordinate service. The navy's response to its perceived inferior status was, of course, to imitate the professional behavior and social attitude of the army officer corps. Sondhaus proves how natural this response was to a generation of officers, including Tirpitz, himself of middle-class background, who came of age professionally under the command of Generals Albrecht von Stosch and Leo von Caprivi. Stosch and Caprivi led the navy for sixteen years (1872-1888). Sondhaus identifies their combined tenure as the period in which the army achieved the greatest ascendancy over the navy's organizational mentality. Their legacy would remain alive in the goals, ideals, and attitudes pursued and exhibited by Tirpitz and his contemporaries when they assumed command of their navy.
Sondhaus makes his point. He convincingly demonstrates that an army presence surrounded the navy from its Prussian origins. Yet, while he proves that the Wilhelmine Reichsmarine leadership was a product of army direction bent upon achieving organizational social cohesion, he does not offer much insight or information beyond recruitment statistics to indicate how cohesiveness developed once cadets entered the service. He has some excellent segments on the vagaries of naval training and education in terms of locale and curricula, but one does not learn much about what was taught or presented nor how inculcation occurred. How was obedience obtained? How was discipline learned or dispensed? What were the procedures or processes developed for inculcating individual honor and group loyalty? Were the methods or practices employed to accomplish the foregoing actually military rather than army ones? The answers to these and other questions which might be posed need to be provided before the actual extent of army influence on the navy can be assessed. We can anticipate that Sondhaus will provide these answers in forthcoming publications devoted to the German navy.