Robert M. Citino. The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945. Modern War Studies Series. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. Illustrations, maps. 632 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-2494-2.
Reviewed by Robert Kirchubel (Purdue University)
Published on H-War (May, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
Robert M. Citino, presently at the National WWII Museum, has again teamed up with the University Press of Kansas for his latest installment on modern German military history. The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand investigates Germany’s final battles against the Soviet Union and the Western Allies to its east, south, and west. As we have come to expect from Citino, the book is thoroughly researched, clearly narrated, and tightly argued. While Wehrmacht’s Last Stand synthesizes a great number of secondary materials—a review of its bibliography reveals only a couple pre-1945 German military journals that could be considered primary sources—it is full of new insights and thought-provoking interpretations of key events in late World War II.[1] Citino takes military historians to school by demonstrating how operational history should be written, at a time when elements of the academy consider that subdiscipline passé and of doubtful utility.
The Wehrmacht had a good run during the first two years of the war, then a couple years of transition (notably against the USSR), but in Wehrmacht’s Last Stand it is reeling backward on every front. By early 1945, German soldiers were defending German soil, not someone else’s. For the sixteen months under study here, the Wehrmacht bent but did not break until the sauve qui peut during the last weeks of the war. Citino therefore asks, “What kept the German Army going in such an increasingly hopeless situation?” (p. 3). The answer should not be surprising: loyalty to Adolf Hitler.[2] As in his earlier works, Citino’s frame of reference is what he calls Germany’s “way of war” (p. 229). This is not the same as strategy or doctrine but instead represents an “ingrained and traditional military culture, imposing repetitive patterns of thought and behavior” spanning centuries (p. 299). Consistent with his emphasis on the traditional point of view, Citino frequently invokes the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Carl von Clausewitz, and other German military luminaries of yore to demonstrate the Wehrmacht’s continuity with its Prussian ancestors.
Central to Citino’s German way of war framework is his assertion that the “war of movement” was its preferred technique. Actually, he goes beyond saying that movement was merely preferred, and claims that it was the only form of fighting at which they could excel. The contrasting “positional war” was anathema to the Prussian/German way. This one-sided approach might have worked in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, when a few weeks of marching culminating in a couple day-long battles could decide a campaign or, in some cases, a war. Starting with the American Civil War, however, this was no longer possible when considering wars between modern industrialized states and alliances. Unfortunately, Citino’s emphasis on movement cherry-picks the brief episodes of exertion, adrenaline, and glory (or terror) that punctuated weeks or months of often boring, static positional or defensive warfare, which routinely dominated the remaining 90+ percent of an army’s existence—the case regardless of whether we are talking about Frederick II, Gebhardt von Blücher, Wilhelm II, or Hitler.
Wehrmacht’s Last Stand is organized into an introduction and ten chronological chapters arranged geographically: the war against the Red Army (chapters 1, 4, 6, 9-10), in Italy (chapter 2), and across northwestern Europe (chapters 3, 5, 7-9). Citino’s overall conclusions are tucked into the last half dozen pages of chapter 10. The bibliography is a who’s who of works on the German military, and historiographical footnotes on various armies, battles, personalities, etc., will be very useful for scholars wanting to focus on these subjects. Looking at the three main combat theaters from least to most important, we can quickly dispense with the chapter on Italy for three reasons: the front was tertiary in the worst sense of that word (for both sides), the mountainous boot was no place for flashy movement, and in general Citino is dismissive of the campaign there. Chapter 2 concentrates mainly on two large Allied undertakings: the landings at Anzio and Operation Diadem, plus the German responses. It dispenses with the final nine months of World War II in Italy in a paragraph.
The Germans had certainly encountered materiel superiority before D-Day, on the so-called eastern front, but this did not prepare them for fighting the Western Allies, backed as they were by American industrial and managerial might. In chapter 3 Citino does a superb job explaining pre-invasion issues, the Allied landings, and ineffective German reactions on D-Day. Chapter 5 details the battles around the expanding beachhead and the Allies’ breakout and pursuit, to include Omar Bradley’s demonstration of operational acumen, Operation Cobra, where he turned the tables on the outclassed Germans. Walter Model, who we suspect Citino would not want for a bridge partner, arrives in chapter 7 to staunch the flow. By this stage of the war, however, Wehrmacht’s Last Stand tells us, the Wehrmacht was “eating itself” (p. 327). By chapter 8 German operational panzer capability was a pathetic shadow of its 1939-41 self. Just like offensives in 1914, 1918, 1941, and 1942, Hitler’s Battle of the Bulge “petered out short of achieving anything decisive” (p. 381). Half of chapter 9 covers the battle for western Germany. Additionally, for a German army that during this period could not show itself in daylight and mainly fought at night, Citino tells us, it was “time to face facts” (p. 402). I would assert that the German officer caste had a spotty record of clearheaded facing facts since at least 1914.
Wehrmacht’s Last Stand gives pride of place to the war against the Soviets, where the Third Reich absolutely had to win or die trying. As shown in chapters 3 and 5, the Red Army was now capable of conducting nearly year-round offensive operations, with completely obliterating Army Group Center in June 1944 as its crowning achievement. Citino uses this event, rather than action in Normandy (as some other historians have done), to discuss the July 20 bomb plot. As he ably explains, this last in a long line of Rube Goldberg assassination attempts (butchering millions of innocents was OK, just do not ask a German officer to go Jack Ruby on his führer) deeply affected the German officer corps. Citino also demolishes the vacuous “sacred oath” fig leaf by demonstrating that selective Prussian/German obedience to orders and adherence to oaths goes back at least to Frederick and Hans David von Yorck. By chapter 6, Model, now commanding two army groups, again came to the rescue. As is the rule during this stage of the war, unfortunately for the Germans, “a local success by the Wehrmacht usually meant a big hole [in its lines] somewhere else in the front” (p. 277). Citino hammers the final nails into the Wehrmacht’s coffin in chapters 9 and 10. Somehow the German army maintained itself in the field and occasionally even mustered enough strength for a local counterattack. However, this sort of tactical “saga is impressive only within the context of yet another miserable German operational collapse” (p. 432). Citino concludes with the assessment that only loyalty to Hitler, in particular by generals like Model and Ferdinand Schörner, kept the Wehrmacht together and fighting until the rubble of Berlin. When forced to choose between Hitler, the men under their command or even the German nation, most senior German leaders threw in their lot with the first. This represents a drastically different choice than their predecessors made in 1918.
Citino’s body of work, the Wehrmacht’s Last Stand plus its siblings, both older and yet unborn, is essential reading for those taking study of the German military operations to the next level. His writing is refreshing: he tosses in twenty-first-century US military jargon like “full spectrum dominance,” and one can imagine him smile as he writes phrases such as the Tiger’s “fuel tanks were sucking air” (pp. 172, 46, it is no wonder he is a popular lecturer). He includes discussions of all three levels of war, and his numerous mini-bios of key generals sprinkled throughout add a human element. Citino is as comfortable both praising and criticizing Model as he is Bernard Montgomery. He likewise refuses to gloss over German atrocities, adding that we cannot legitimately call these “excesses” since murderous brutality “emerged from policy and doctrine” and from which few men wearing field-gray demurred (p. 318).
Wehrmacht’s Last Stand is not without its problems, however. Maps are its Achilles’ heel, so readers better have the book in one hand and google earth in the other. Besides usually showing only operational details while the text drills down to the tactical level, maps also include an inconsistent mix of anachronistic German symbols alongside standard (NATO) ones. Order of battle charts suffer from similar limitations, scratching the surface and only listing armies on one, drilling down to divisions in the next. Annoying is Citino’s excessive use of Denglish; some specialized military terms may need the German and English words side by side, but “waves” (p. 89) and “sleeping?” (p. 113), probably not. Let the reader have google translate up and running, too.
In Wehrmacht’s Last Stand Citino brings to mind three deeper, more substantive observations as well. First, maybe it is time to let go of the “war of movement” thesis.[3] After the heady days of Sedan in the summer of 1870, Helmuth von Moltke’s army took up positions around Paris and Metz until 1871. One can almost count major World War I German campaigns of movement on their fingers; even in the wide-open spaces of “the east,” positional or defensive warfare was the rule. In World War II, except for the first two years, the positional form dominated the Wehrmacht. Sure, during Barbarossa, mechanized forces conducted a good deal of movement, but most infantry (and therefore the mass of the Eastern Army) marched for days or weeks before fighting positional war either besieging Leningrad, containing encirclements, or resisting Soviet counterattacks (again, see footnote 3). In 1942, the southern half of the Eastern Army moved out while the northern half defended static positions. By the 1943 summer campaign that ratio had slipped from 50:50 to more like 20:80. Citino offers his own call and response: “What couldn’t Prussia do?[4] Fight and win a war of position” (p. 352). Implying, as Citino does, that the German officer corps was a one-trick pony is the ultimate in damning with faint praise. This is especially true when we recall that for most of World War I and at least half of World War II, it did not even fight a war of movement very well. In reality, the Wehrmacht could not win wars of movement (Barbarossa), or win global wars, or wars of attrition, or coalition wars, or long wars, or wars of....
Second, Citino laments the “politicization of the German officer corps” during “the last years of the war” (p. 468). This is disingenuous, as Citino himself proves throughout the Wehrmacht’s Last Stand. Yorck, Konstantin von Alvensleben, Albert von Waldersee, Paul von Hindenburg, Erich Ludendorff, Hans von Seeckt, Kurt von Schleicher, Werner von Blomberg, Ludwig Beck, Walther von Reichenau, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Hans Oster, Franz Halder, and countless others provided the standards that Model and Schörner followed. The apolitical German army officer train left the serious history station back in the 1970s. And, incidentally, most of those listed immediately above stumbled from one bad choice/decision to the next, again and again. It is what they did.
Finally, and more broadly, conventional wisdom says that after 1871, the Germans did not do well fighting wars (strategy), but they sure excelled at combat—campaigns (operational level) and battles (tactics). So, they were a two-trick pony after all. Therefore, perhaps more of us should get behind historians like H. P. Willmott who recognize that maybe the Wehrmacht was not all that good—at any level of war. Citino surely knows this too, putting it this way: “Systemic factors [for German failures] ran far deeper” (p. 140). After the shock of blitzkrieg wore off around the autumn of 1941, the Wehrmacht’s performances slipped in the operational or tactical realms, as well. That is hard to swallow for us “ex-Wehrmachtaholics” (to use John Kuehn’s term introduced at the 2012 Society for Military History annual conference). These days the German army is running out of pedestals to fall off of. It is like the German officers had a Times Square-type message crawling along the band around their peaked caps; it screams “We’re not that smart!” But Wehrmachtaholics are too blinded by prejudice, perceived reality, bias, internal narrative, or whatever to see it. After all, twice in twenty-five years German officers followed structural problems and unstable heads of state over a cliff to national and institutional ruin. Their thinly disguised contempt for any “other” wrecked chances for smooth working coalitions or non-hostile occupied peoples. Their myopic focus on operations staff work only led to amateurish negligence of intelligence and sanguine logistics. Their obsession with combat leadership meant they could not produce a home front manager worthy of the name.
In Wehrmacht’s Last Stand’s concluding remarks, Citino points out that World War II ended with the Wehrmacht’s “reputation intact” (p. 466). Thanks to Cold War politics, self-serving memoirs, and Wehrmachtaholic enablers, in too many quarters this remains the case. One would be hard pressed to find a historian of stature better suited than Citino to bring the German army down from this last perch.
Notes
[1]. Citino uses many postwar monographs written by high-ranking Germans, often under the supervision of Franz Halder, who had his own reputation to burnish, faults to ignore/minimize, and axes to grind. I do not consider these or postwar memoirs, both written in the prudently retroactive fashion, proper primary sources.
[2]. Citino deals mainly with German officers. To understand the many other important factors why 1945 looked completely different from 1918, one must look elsewhere. Why did so many Germans keep their faith in Hitler? See Ian Kershaw (not Alex, as it appears in Wehrmacht’s Last Stand’s bibliography), Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris (London: Norton, 2000); and Ian Kershaw Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis (London: Norton, 2001). Why did the German home front not collapse at the end of World War II? See Nicholas Stargart, The German War: A Nation under Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). How did the Nazis indoctrinate the mass of young officers and enlisted men to keep fighting against impossible odds? See Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
[3]. We can leave the distinction between movement and maneuver, and correct uses of each, to another forum.
[4]. I do not want to speculate why he limited his argument to the federal state of Prussia, when in World War II it is clearly correct to discuss the entire German military.
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Citation:
Robert Kirchubel. Review of Citino, Robert M., The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51318
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