Martin Clauss and Christoph Nübel (eds)

Militärisches Entscheiden Voraussetzungen, Prozesse und Repräsentationen einer sozialen Praxis von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert

(Campus Verlag, 2020), 496 pp. € 52.00.

The processes and cultures of military decision-making form a well-recognised sub-field of social and psychological inquiry, an interest sharpened by a tendency in many developed industrial societies to transpose “lessons” from the military world into other areas of organised human endeavour such as economic management or even sport. The quest for timeless principles which have universal applicability has at times obscured the reality that such decision making processes themselves have a history and may derive a great deal from specific cultural environments not easily transposed into different fields or eras. The present volume represents a potentially useful examination of such processes in various historical contexts.

Unfortunately the coverage has certain weaknesses which rather compromise its value. As so often in collective works dealing with “military” issues, warfare at sea is almost entirely neglected while military aviation does not figure at all; the only naval contribution (Sebastian Rojeck’s piece on how Tirpitz and his apologists justified the policies he advocated before and during the First World War and then explained away their failure) smells more of Berlin ministries and publishing offices than of the salt sea. Chronological coverage is patchy; the early modern period receives just two pieces and, apart from a few pages in Wolfram Pyta’s introductory essay, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars scarcely figure.

Above all, apart from a couple of pieces on classical antiquity and one on Byzantium, the collection is overwhelmingly centred on German experience and for the more modern periods (1870-1945) tends to regard the Prusso-German experience as totally normative. Admittedly the German High Command of that era was widely admired across the military globe (arguably excessively so, with consequences which cast shadows on officer training in many countries well after 1945), but a comparative essay or two might have thrown light on how far, for instance, the rigidities and silo thinking which plagued pre-1914 German planning identified by Lukas Grawe were reflected in other national contexts. It would also have been interesting to know how the inherent instability of a German officer training approach – much admired in other armies at the time and in retrospect- which put great stress on individual tactical enterprise at quite junior levels within a higher level unitary strategy was managed in other armies which sought to adopt it. As Marco Sigg demonstrates with examples from the Second World War Eastern Front, the implementation of this approach even within the German military varied widely from unit to unit and the full ideal was probably only sustainable in a limited number of elite units for a short period of time before attrition of experienced junior officers had damaging effects. And while (despite Roman Töppel’s claims) it is surely no longer news that the surviving members of the OKW systematically rewrote history after 1945 to blame everything that went wrong on Hitler’s supposedly incorrigibly amateur strategic decision making, there are obvious alternative case studies of the interplay between senior professional military officers and strong-minded political leaders in wartime that could have been examined.

The strictly medieval contributions have very real points of interest and echoes from other sections. Michel Grünbart’s piece on Byzantine military decision making draws attention to the unexpected survival of what looks like a superficially Christianised culture of taking omens and attentiveness to portents (commanders were advised to include books on weather lore and dream interpretation in their campaign libraries) which links back to earlier eras. Indeed it intriguingly echoes Simon Puschmann’s contribution which compares the writings of Vegetius with his first century predecessor Onasandros, in which the latter writing at the peak of pagan Rome had a great deal more to say about the need to take omens and portents correctly than the former operating in an increasingly Christian environment. While neither ancient writer gets much mention from Grünbart, one was left wondering whether a quest for an Onasandrian style of warfare in Byzantium might pay dividends.

Despite the very different timeframes and contexts, both Sebastian Schaarschmidt’s piece on the ways in which military decisions were portrayed during the Staufen period and Oliver Landolt’s one on decision making processes in late medieval and early modern Swiss armies indicate that rapidity of decision making might not always be regarded as a prime consideration. Staufen rulers at least appeared to take decisions based on very wide consultation with the great magnates who provided the bulk of their armies, somewhat as they were expected to make peacetime decisions in full consultation with the great men of the realm- though Schaarschmidt has little to say about what happened when this process broke down (as for instance in the collapse of relations between Frederick Barbarossa and Henry the Lion). Swiss armies of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries also had complex decision making processes with (at least in formal terms) a fair degree of “bottom up” input with issues potentially being put to the vote of a council in which each contingent had a vote (if not a necessarily a veto). Predictably the results could be messy and this approach came under more and more pressure as Swiss units came to serve as mercenary units under foreign paymasters. Simon Liening’s piece on late medieval German city leagues identifies another layer of potential delay in decision making. Despite the regular inclusion of provisions for automatic mutual military assistance in the foundation documents for such organisations, in practice it could prove very difficult for a city to persuade its partners to rally round in the hour of need unless they perceived it as clearly in their interest to do so. Complaints that individual cities were bearing an undue share of the burden were commonplace. Sadly Liening does not follow the discussion through to see what happened when the leagues actually managed to field composite forces.

The two early modern pieces cover very different areas. Jan Philipp Bothe considers the role of geographical knowledge in decision making and concludes that for military theoreticians there was never enough of this. Local guides might be unreliable or ignorant, maps were never quite detailed enough. In the end the trained eye of the commander on the spot was vital. In one of the most interesting pieces in the collection, Alexander Querengässer considers the advantages and disadvantages of having the ruler in person on the field of battle. Frederick the Great was all for it, and there were clear advantages in terms of speed of decision making and unity of command when facing a commander who had to refer decisions upwards to a distant ruler over slow and insecure communication channels. On the other hand, a ruler who led from the front rapidly lost control of events, there were real personal dangers (as both Gustav Adolf and Karl XII of Sweden found) and the supposedly inspirational presence of the ruler in times of crisis could be distinctly overrated (as Frederick himself experienced). In the end, the best place to be was probably on an adjacent hill, near but not in the fight itself.

Obviously it would be unfair to criticise the contributors (including those not covered in this review) for the overall balance of the coverage but, for all the merits of individual pieces, this is a rather overly German-centric view of a subject of general interest.

Brian G H Ditcham
Independent Scholar
[email protected]