Book Review - Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II
Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II
Written by: Jörg Muth
University of North Texas Press, Denton, 2013,
ISBN: 978-1574415339, 376 pp,
Reviewed by: Captain Dale O’Shannessy
The quality and performance of military forces throughout history is often founded foremost on a compelling narrative. Narratives about naturally-gifted soldiers and officers, who possess superhuman courage, what historian Michael Howard calls ‘nursery history’, are meant to inspire soldiers or build national pride. While these stories obviously serve a purpose and often contain grains of truth, it is far more difficult to depart from the narrative and examine the facts and context, warts and all, of past battles and forces in order to reveal real reasons for success or failure. In Command Culture, author Jörg Muth has taken the latter path and sought to untangle and illuminate the reasons for the substantial difference in performance between the German and American officer corps in World War II, by exploring how these nations selected, educated and promoted their officers in the interwar period.
The central and unassailable fact of Command Culture is that the German officer corps was superior to the US one. German officers demonstrated daring, competence and creativity. American forces were often shocked to realise that a stubborn German company, which they had defeated at great cost, was commanded by a mere Leutnant and that the Officer Commanding had been killed at the outset while leading from the front. In contrast, American officers who demonstrated ferocity in battle often did so ‘despite every discouragement from their seniors’. Muth traces this difference in command culture from the battlefield right back to the schoolhouse.
The book first examines the lives of American and German officer candidates at their respective academies and schools. The realities for these two groups are shown to run counter to common intuition, with stereotypical ‘German strictness’ more a feature of American officer training. Cadets at West Point lived miserably in a system of stiff ceremony, honor codes and bastardisation, where the failure of a single subject could mean the repetition of an entire year. At the end of four years, the cadets graduated as Second Lieutenants into the Army having had minimal contact with soldiers and modern equipment, and an education focused purely on engineering. The German Kadettenschulen on the other hand is shown to be far more accommodating and nurturing. German cadets were taught a broader range of subjects in a collegiate environment, where character and leadership were central tenets. Junior cadets could outrank senior cadets as promotion in their cadet hierarchy was based on merit, and hard-won promotions were easily lost. Academic failure would not prevent graduation as long as the cadet displayed officer qualities (they weren’t educating scholars after all) and at graduation most cadets were not commissioned. Commissions were won only once cadets had proven themselves in a real unit. From the outset, it is apparent that the German and American approaches are radically different.
Next the book examines the mid-career education courses for each nation’s officers. In America, this entailed the Command and General Staff Course (CGCS) at Fort Leavenworth and in Germany attendance at a Kriegsakademie. An immediate difference between these two courses is that entrance to the Kriegsakademie had to be earned through a rigorous examination process, while the CGCS selection process was based more on ‘personal influence and cunning paperwork’. In Germany, attendance at the Kriegsakademie was an achievement that came with improved prospects for promotion, while the CGCS was seen mainly as a ‘ticket-punching’ exercise. Adding to this distaste of the CGCS was the course itself, which focused on rote-learned information and assessments which valued ‘technique’ rather than ‘tactics’. And again, the German system demonstrates greater nuance, such as tactical solutions being openly published and instructors being chosen for their teaching ability, largely absent in America.
A great American exception is discussed however, in the form of the Infantry School at Fort Benning. After the war, officers who attended this school credited it with providing skills they found to be essential in battle. The success of the Infantry School is attributed largely to George C. Marshall (who would go on to fill the position of US Chief of the General Staff during the war), who, as its assistant commander in the 1930s, revamped and ‘Germanised’ the course. This too is evidence that American successes were often produced by visionary officers who were not successful because of the US system of education, but in spite of it.
The final chapter of the book attempts to synthesise the information presented and to point out other critical differences and commonalities between the two officer corps. This final examination of how education either emphasised or counterbalanced the cultural traits of the respective officer corps goes so far as to consider the historical cultural mark left on the modern US officer corps, and considers actions from the Second Gulf War. The great achievement here is how the book demonstrates how, due to cultural factors, the Germans, living in an authoritarian state and restricted through much of the interwar period by the Treaty of Versailles, were able to create a liberal and effective system of education, where the USA as a liberal democratic nation, encumbered only by self-imposed restrictions, produced only a mediocre system of education.
The book and the language used is best described as precise and academic, mainly because it was written as the author’s doctoral thesis. A related characteristic of this type of writing is the attempt to avoid bias by critically evaluating sources, and to contemplate both sides of an argument openly. This kind of careful and considered analysis largely prevents simple, solid conclusions from being drawn however the results are still illuminating and the book maintains the reader’s interest well. Another happy consequence of the style is a wealth of referenced works to consider for further study.
Overall, Command Culture is a worthwhile and stimulating read, for more reasons than can be explained in this review. It gives plausible explanations, based on the study of preparations in the interwar years, for the widely- believed narratives surrounding the performance of USA and German forces in World War II. For the military reader, it prompts self-reflection on the efficacy of their professional education, and more importantly, challenges them to consider the state of their military’s command culture.
