I will confess that I didn't know too much about this subject which is why I wanted to read the book to expand my knowledge and after reading the book I certainly feel as though I have done that!  I thought it was well thought out, concise and clear - I didn't feel overwhelmed by the amount of detail and I thought overall it was an excellent read - I have since purchased a copy for my husband's collection of books on Germany during WWI and WWII

This work provides an insightful and well researched insight into the personal motivations of the men who enlisted into the German army during the Great War in addition to a thorough investigation into the implications of the tactical approaches which were adopted and the conditions of trench warfare. 
I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in military history who are interested in gaining a different perspective into the psychology of warfare.

Dennis Showalter is one of the most respected of military historians writing today, so his new history of the German Army of the 1914-18 conflict, ‘Instrument of War’, has been eagerly anticipated. 

It should not disappoint either the academic community or the general readers at whom it is also aimed, although the general readers Showalter has in mind are evidently the sort who already have a working knowledge of the Wars of German Unification. 

In general, Showalter expresses himself with admirable clarity although he uses, not for the first time in his writings, the somewhat obscure Americanism “at seventh and last”, which evidently means “at the end of the day” or “in the final analysis”.

In general, his argument is tightly structured and prose purposive, although at one point, within the space of three pages, he manages to repeat the colourful fact that, in imitation of German cavalrymen, spiked helmets once used to appear on American West parade grounds.

Showalter persuasively postulates that as a fighting institution the German army “displayed less a genius for war than a gift for improvisation” given that it was overextended from the war’s inception. This qualifies but does not completely overturn the German army’s fearsome reputation for efficiency, however, insofar as this ability to take the initiative and respond imaginatively to adverse circumstances was something nurtured by training and compares very favourably with the comparable regimes of that of all of its major rivals at that time. Moreover, Showalter shows, by reference to storm troop tactics, that the injunction “to educate the soldier to think and act for himself” was something inculcated down to non-commissioned officer level.

Showalter nevertheless shows that ultimately the German army was not “stabbed in the back” but defeated on the battlefield. It was the tragedy of Weimar Germany and ultimately of all Europe that this fact was not made manifest at the time by means of some high-profile public humiliation of Germany’s generals.

The book contains some interesting photographs but no maps and a bibliography which only lightly genuflects in the direction of the prolific and reflective reading indicated by the main text and its footnotes.

This book is not flawless (what book is?) but its weaknesses are very minor when compared with its strengths, which should render it the definitive one-volume history of the German army in the Great War for a very long time to come.

The problem with the German Army in World War One, argues Dennis Showalter, is that it was an instrument of war and not for war. 

It started with the insouciance of Prussian War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn. On July 5, 1914, he told Moltke the Younger (known as “Gloomy Julius” to the higher ranking members of the German General Staff) – after, of course assuring the Kaiser that the German Army would support the Austro-Hungary Empire’s ultimatum to Serbia, that nothing would come of this war talk. The man who planned the railroad timetables clocking how the German Army would go to war, Wilhelm Gröner, took a July holiday.

It ended with Ludendorff’s spring 1918 offensives which had little more by way of specific objectives than punch a hole in Allied lands and see what happened.

Germany pursued war with a too casual appraisal of strategic ends. It concerned itself with the operational scale of war, not the strategic. Battles were to be won. And the next battle would be won and …

But this was the German Army, regarded as the best in the world. It was Germany’s pre-eminently competent institute. After all, it had wrapped up the 1866 war against Austria and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 quickly and with few casualties. There was no “mythology of sacrifice and victimization” as came out of the Crimean War or the American Civil War.

Sure, there was an 1895 staff report stating an offensive against France would result in a limited advance and eventual tactical stalemate.

But duty called. There had to be a “next war”. Russia was getting stronger. France was an enemy. It was not pure paranoia that they thought themselves surrounded by enemies. German honor was at stake.

In the second through sixth chapters of the book, Showalter shows how that war played out, how the German Army evolved and failed, changed the Second Reich and planted seeds for later German policies in World War Two. Each of those chapters covers roughly a year of the war.

Two important areas covered. 

First, the book counterpoints the impression of Allied futility and slaughter on the battlefield after the trenches were dug. Massive Allied casualties in stalled offensives on the Western Front seemed, to the German Army, a slowing raising sea lapping at the shore and forever taking ground. To them, the Somme looked like a near run thing and not futility. The opening artillery barrage of the offensive seemed, to German soldiers, like the end of the world. German lines almost ruptured. By September 1916, two months into the battle, the Germans were at the limits of endurance. “A necrology of the irreplaceable” dead began to fill German accounts. In November 1916, Allied officers noted the Germans now were not the Germans at the beginning of the battle.

They begin to question the competence of their nation and army.

The war dragged on for two more years, of course, because the Germans became masters of defense and innovated in other ways. In particular, they developed the portable MG 08/15 machine gun for portable use, a complicated defense system, stormtrooper tactics, and better airplanes. They did not, even though they got their hands on an Allied tank very quickly after its deployment, develop effective tanks. Why bother? It was an offensive weapon and, by 1917, Germany was planning defense.

In fact, argues Showalter, the German Army got in the habit of defense and was ultimately too used to when it launched the Michael Offensive on March 21, 1918. It was not, argues Showalter, disrupted by starving German troops looting overrun Allied supplies. It was doomed by troops often years out of practice in offensive operations, a supply system that pushed supplies to the moving front on a pre-planned schedule and not on real-time demand, continued offensive operations killing experienced assault troops and requiring more men to hold area behind the line, and so many men down from the “Flanders flu” that Ludendorff complained it was his subordinates’ excuse for failure. The offensive even failed due to a lack of fresh horses because this was the one time on the Western Front horse cavalry might have been able to operate in the open and make a difference. 

Tactically Michael was a stunning success. The line advanced 14 miles in a day – more than any other day in the war. Planning had started on it exactly one year before the war ended, November 11, 1917. The tactics were partially based on the stunning – perhaps the most perfectly realized German offense of the war – German victory at Riga September 1917. General Bruchmuller’s planning showed the way to new combined arms tactics.

But, arguably, the Germans should have stopped when they were ahead, consolidated their advances, went back on defense. Douglas Haig even entertained notions briefly of peace negotiations. But Showalter says Ludendorff’s offensives were not impressive in success but in “the limited nature of that success”. Allied counterattacks began on July 18th, and one German general marked the date as the turning point of the war.

The book’s second strength is showing the life and psychology of the German soldier. A member of a citizen army and serving in units from the same area, they bonded like families. The captain of the company was father and the first sergeant mother, and a joke went that a recruit’s expected reply out of what he wanted from the army was to be an orphan. It was less ideology or country that motivated them that living up to German idea of masculinity and gaining the respect of one’s peers.

Serving successfully as a soldier, enduring what had to be endured, accomplishing a mission, was a rite of passage for a German man.

They were not robots. Quite the opposite. Individual initiative was expected out of soldiers even at the beginning of the war and particularly after 1915 under the new German defensive doctrine of “resist, bend, and snap back”. German workers in factories carried out complicated tasks together with minimal supervision. They carried that teamwork and initiative and intelligence into battle. Showalter says that the war on the Western Front in 1917 has been called a factory of death, but the German Army developed a “artisanal approach to modern war”. 

Institutions of knowledge-sharing, practical experience gained in battle, were created. The German Army expected a lot of its men. Even during wartime, its number of commissioned officers was not increased.

Officers didn’t hand out the harsh punishments of armies from more democratic countries. Less than a 100 German soldiers were executed in the war. A certain amount of high spirit was expected in the troops. In fact, a soldier who had spent a few days in the guard house or on punishment detail almost couldn’t call himself a real soldier.

Officers regarded it as their duty to look after their men even if the officers were aristocrats. They also thought never giving an order you knew would be disobeyed a good rule. The combination may have led to looting by German soldiers in the hot, humid, thirsty days of August 1914 when supply trains could not keep up with the rapid movement.

Showalter doesn’t ignore the bodies of the German soldier. He mentions how, in those hot days, the Germans marched to the Marne with their pants down – from dysentery. German soldiers suffering from diarrhea at Verdun had the same problem and had to venture out to the hellish zone of war to relieve themselves during breaks in the hellish shelling. German soldiers, when finally forced to retreat in September 1916, expressed their frustration by leaving a giant pile of human shit. The young German soldier, we are told, often away from home for the first time and with his peers, exhibited a peculiar Teutonic fixation on bodily functions. He was in a peculiar zone outside of the hierarchies of civilian life where he could prove himself.

In the later days of the war, tensions crept in. Old, experienced soldiers didn’t appreciate young officers. The 1916 census of Jews in the German Army, never officially released, created resentment by Jews – disproportionately represented in the Army – and non-Jews alike who regarded them as fellow participants in battle. 

There was also the always present resentment, in war, of front line troops for those in the rear. And, since the German Army was, for the duration of the war, on occupied ground, a large number of troops were thus engaged. Almost a million troops were on the Eastern Front after Russia left the war.

Being on occupied ground also psychologically ground the troops down and made them paranoid. They also decorated the tombs of their fallen comrades – when they had them – more than the French or English troops did.

Showalter doesn’t talk much about the Eastern Front, though he wrote the acclaimed Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914, but he talks about the impression Eastern Europeans, especially Jews, made on the Germans. It wasn’t a favorable one. They regarded the conquered members of the East as dirty – they were by German standards – and ignorant. One Jewish soldier even remarked that if these Jews of Russia were his co-religionists, he thanked God he was German.

The German Army instituted delousing plans for the conquered East. Ludendorff, Hindenburg, and the Kaiser dreamed of colonizing its new lands. All these and the use of forced labor by civilians and POWs to build, in 1916 and 1917, the Siegfried Line, Showalter acknowledges, planted seeds for the Third Reich’s behavior.

There is much more including the effects of what was, basically, a Ludendorff and Hindenburg dictatorship which included mandatory work for all able-bodied German men. Militarism and the erosion of democracy may have been the result, notes Showalter, but no other leaders were available to lead the war and its required industrial production.

Not a book for the World War One newbie. Reading a good general history of the Great War is needed to put things in context though Showalter approaches things chronologically. Surprisingly, for an Osprey Publishing book, there are no maps. A few events post-armistice are very briefly covered. 

There is an index and 23 pages of photos.

Definitely recommended for those with an interest in the Great War and a valuable redress to the Allied-centric histories in English.

Book received from NetGalley.

I really loved this book.  While I have read some books on World War I and have studied it a little in college classes I really don't know much about the soldiers and their training of the era.  I learned quite a bit from this book and will definitely be buying a copy for my own shelves

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from NetGalley.

Institutional histories can be very dry and only of interest to specialists.  Dennis Showalter, however, is at his best and most entertaining within the historical genre.  Instrument of War: The German Army 1914-18 is intended for general readers, published by Osprey, and definitely gives newcomers a clear and complete—without being complicated—view of the Wilhelmine Army at war.  Showalter is one of America’s leading military historians and one of the foremost authorities on the German Army in any language.  Instrument of War is his bread and butter, written with a smooth hand which comes off like a good lecture: full of humor and insight.

Showalter begins by looking at the dramatic transformation of the Prussian Army and State after 1860.  In short: 1848 left Prussia with a military which was primarily composed of the Landwehr—the militia—which represented liberal values.  The professional force was essentially a small Praetorian Guard, a bastion of conservatism under direct control of the King.  In 1860, Albrecht von Roon became Minister of War and forced funding increases through the Landtag (an actual reform bill failed) which allowed the size of the professional army to be increased and the power of the militia reduced.  Combined with the planning abilities of Moltke the Elder, this rapidly transformed the Prussian Army from an international punchline into a force which was able to defeat the major powers in Europe: Austria and France.  The Army, enlarged, conscripted, and with massive reserve contingents, subsequently became a microcosm of German society.  A reader might question why social history is leeching into military history, but consider that a citizen army is composed of citizens and reflects the society it is drawn from.  


The social component is also important in putting Wilhelm II into context.  Fussy and eager to interfere in military matters, despite being generally ignorant in them, Showalter argues that Wilhelm was generally able to be sidestepped in matters which had an effect by the internal culture of the German military, which reflected the federal nature of the German state.  The social component also is interested in filling a hole in scholarship which seeks to link German genocide in its colonies with genocide during WWII.  Showalter points out that the colonial service was largely disconnected from continental military concerns, makes convincing argument for it, and therefore the actions of the German Army against civilians needs to be explained only within the context of the German Army’s experiences and perceptions and not as a point of continuity in genocidal actions.

As the German military enters WWI, the story is not one of brilliance but of adaptation.  On the Western Front, the Germans inflicted three casualties on their enemies for every two they took.  And much of that was under conditions of inferiority in technology and numbers.  Showalter carefully details the adaptations the German military—strategic and tactical—engaged in to prolong its ability to fight the war.  Very complex ideas are presented as plainly as possible, using everyday language: a skill which Showalter possess in excess.

The work does end abruptly.  Showalter is only concerned about the war, and not the postwar.  A conclusion could have been more fleshed out and survey how the institutional culture of the army affected the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler.  There was sufficient foreshadowing within the text to warrant the inclusion.

For general audiences, the book does keep citation to a minimum.  It was occasionally frustrating to read something I wanted to know more on and finding no reference for it, or an expectation of an explanatory note being unfulfilled.   There are some other issues with the work.  Maps would be useful.  Despite the work not focusing on operational details, there are still points where geographic locations are mentioned and it would be good to have maps to fix them in space and time.  


Additionally, there are a couple weird quirks.  What sticks in my mind is that Showalter mentions, at least twice, that the .50 BMG round was based on a German anti-tank rifle round.  This is false.  The round was based on the .30-06 round, and enlarged.  After the war, the German round was used as inspiration for improving performance… but that’s not a genealogical link.  I’m being petty in this, because negatives are that hard to find.

Instrument of War should be highly recommended for all audiences, not just general readers.  It would act as an outstanding survey for a beginner.  As a supplementary text for an undergraduate history course, the work is short enough but comprehensive enough.  And specialists will enjoy reading Showalter’s prose.

Instrument of War: The German Army 1914–18 by Dennis Showalter is a history of World War I based on the German participation. Showalter is a retired Professor of History, past President of the Society for Military History and Joint Editor of War in History specializing in comparative military history. He has written or edited two dozen books and a hundred fifty articles.

World War I was the war that could have been prevented, it, however, set the stage for the 20th century. It was the stubbornness of Austria-Hungary and their demands that brought on the violence. From all accounts, the Kaiser thought Serbia had met Austria-Hungary's demands and planned on vacation. Franz Josef took the assassination of his despised nephew as the will of God and saw it as a way of accomplishing what he couldn’t. Unfortunately, his ministers saw things differently and moved to war. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Germany joined its ally. Russia came to the aid of its Slav allies. Germany moved against France, who was bound to aid Russia by treaty. Germany’s move through Belgium brought England to war. Much has been blamed on the entangling alliances as the cause for the war but one must remember too that the NATO alliance (and the Warsaw Pact for that matter) helped keep the peace in the Cold War. WWI was more the fault of faulty leaders than alliances meant to balance power. 

World War I was history caught between pages. The advances in technology changed the world. The expansion of railroads meant that mobilization and transportation of troops and equipment could move at previously unattainable speeds. The machine gun was capable of killing on a scale never seen before. The internal combustion engine started to play a role in the military but was still too undependable to be counted on. Horses still played a major role in transportation at this time. That meant pulling animals from the farms which still used and needed them. It also meant feeding the animals. 84,000 horses used by the German’s required almost two million tons of feed a day; this came out of food that would be used by soldiers and civilians. Armies did not adapt to new technologies on the offensive. Killing charging masses of enemy troops is where the machine gun excelled. Advancing armies refused to learn their lesson. 

The German army, like most powers, relied on reserve units. It differed in that their reserve units were trained and expected to hold their own in combat. Most nations reserves went to the rear and were used as fillers. The Russian army was in the worst position of the major powers. It’s rail system needed developing and the rally points for mobilization were spread across the vast country. Germany, on the other hand, exercised a near flawless mobilization and continued to be a successful force until it was not only beaten but out-soldiered at Vimy. No one expected a long war and no one was prepared to fight a drawn out war. The German army was statistically successful in creating three casualties for every two it suffered, but allied army size stood against the Germans in a war of attrition. A well-written history of Germany in World War I.