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Notes
1 See Robert O’Connell, Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman (New York: Random House 2014); Al Kaltman, Cigars, Whiskey and Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant (Paramus, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1998). Helpful reading lists can be found in Edward O. Frantz (ed.), A Companion to the Reconstruction Presidents, 1865–1877 (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell 2014), 156–64, 185–7, 211–12. For Robert E. Lee, see H.W. Crocker III, Robert E. Lee on Leadership: Executive Lessons in Character, Courage and Vision (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing 1999) and Bill Holton, Leadership Lessons of Robert E. Lee: Tips and Strategies for Leaders and Managers (New York: Crown 1999).
2 See, for instance, Theodore Ropp’s trend setting book, War in the Modern World (1959; New Revised Edition, New York: Collier Books 1962), 154–7, which sets the pattern for a whole series of ‘war and society’ surveys over the last half century. One of the best later ones is Brian Bond, War and Society in Europe, 1870–1970 (Leicester UP 1983). For a favourable discussion of general staff methods, see Trevor N. Dupuy, A Genius For War: German Army and General Staff, 1807–1945 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Citation1977).
3 Muth seems to approve of the fact that the Union Army won the Civil War without a general staff system (p. 25) but many errors might have been avoided if it had existed, not least the shortage of maps which he complains of again in 1940–41 (p.131).
4 See especially, J.F.C. Fuller, Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure (London: Faber 1933), 21, 25: ‘heroism is the soul of leadership’. For criticisms of the process whereby the commander is turned into an ‘office-soldier’, see ibid., 46, 52–3, 58–60, 79–81; for an historical analysis of the beginnings of the Prussian ‘clockwork system of command’, see J.F.C. Fuller, The Decisive Battles of the Western World Vol. 3 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1956), 107, 133, 134; Liddell Hart admired W.T. Sherman because he was not in thrall to his staff. See his Sherman (London: Ernest Benn 1930), 168, 237.
5 Anne C. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the US Military, 1942–1993 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP 1996).
6 This term is used in the late nineteenth-century rather than late twentieth-century sense. See Rupert Wilkinson, American Tough: The Tough-Guy Tradition and American Character (Westport, CT: Praeger 1984).
7 See Steve Weiss, Second Chance (London: Military History Publishing 2011).
8 Ambrose Bierce, ‘Killed at Resaca’, in Brian M. Thomson (ed.), Shadows of Blue and Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (New York: Tom Doherty Associates 2002), 98.
9 Heavy losses among senior officers required the Afrika Korps to find five new commanders per division annually. See B.H. Liddell Hart (ed.), The Rommel Papers (London: Collins 1953), 270.
10 B.H. Liddell Hart, A Greater than Napoleon: Scipio Africanus (London: Greenhill 1926; reprint 1992, with a new Introduction by J. Enoch Powell), 11.
11 Richard Holmes, Marlborough: England’s Fragile Genius (London: HarperCollins 2008), 386.
12 None of the American contributors on Grant mentions his books in Frantz, (ed.), Reconstruction Presidents. His most notable books are A.L. Conger, The Military Education of Grant as General (Birmingham, ALA: Menasha Ridge Press 1921) and The Rise of U.S. Grant (New York: Century 1931).
13 See the criticisms of the post-1918 British staff courses quoted in Brian Holden Reid, War Studies at the Staff College, 1890–1930 (Camberley, UK: Strategic and Combat Studies Occasional Paper No. 1, 1992), 13.
14 John Keegan, ‘United States of America’, in idem (ed.), World Armies, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan 1983), 616; Ronald Spector, ‘Military Effectiveness of US Armed Forces 1919–1939’, in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray (eds), Military Effectiveness, II, The Interwar Period (Boston: Allen & Unwin 1988), 78–80; Mark A. Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, The Grand Alliance, and US Strategy in World War II (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina 2000), 9–10, 12–15; on the lack of policy guidance, see ibid., pp. 2–5, 15–16, 21.
15 William S. McFeely, Grant (New York: Norton 1981), 375–9. The initial aim of Superintendant Sylvanus Thayer, who nurtured the West Point ethos, was to create a ‘brotherhood’ in which all classes were equal; ‘hazing’ before 1861 largely consisted of practical jokes at summer camp; systematic humiliation of ‘freshmen’, ‘plebes’, dates from the 1870s. See Stephen E. Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP 1966), 75, 158, 222–3.
16 For details, see Nigel Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General, 1887–1942 (London: Hamish Hamilton 1981), 48–9 and Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (London: Macmillan 1975), 41–2.
17 In some respects, the lack of good promotion prospects was a greater deterrent than brutal or dreary courses. This was certainly the case in the British Army. See Brian Bond and Williamson Murray, ‘The British Armed Forces, 1918–1939’, in Military Effectiveness, II, 104.
18 The extirpation of individualism at West Point, Muth avers, showed an ‘alarming misunderstanding about the very nature of leadership’ at that institution (p.186).
19 Belittled here by references to his ‘above average aptitude for strategic planning’ (pp.172–3). For a different view, see Mungo Melvin, Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General (London: Weidenfeld 2010) which is by no means uncritical.
20 Kenneth Macksey, Kesselring: The Making of the Luftwaffe (Barnsley, UK: Frontline Books 2012), 17, 18; for von Manstein’s cultural interests, see Melvin, Manstein, 16, 22, 48–9, 141, 290–1.
21 Macksey, Kesselring, 26–9, 44–5, 241; Melvin, Manstein, 65, 66–8, 108–9, 404–6; Heinz Guderian, Achtung-Panzer! (London: Cassell Military Paperbacks 1937; reprinted 1992), 162: ‘As far as our arm was concerned, this decisive step was accomplished almost overnight, when executive power was transferred to Adolf Hitler on 30 January 1933.’
22 Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge: CUP 1994), 35, 38. The number of suicides in the German Army 1878–1908 averaged between 220 and 240 annually, 14 times the civilian rate and three times the French Army, ibid., 40. On the role of ideological leadership, see Gerhard Gross, ‘Development of Operational Thinking in the German Army in the World War Era’, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 13/4 (Summer 2011), 6–7.
23 James K. Sadovich, ‘German Military Incompetence Through Italian Eyes’, War in History 1/1 (March 1994), 39–62.
24 See the treatment in Trevor N. Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (St Paul, MN: Paragon House 1987), though I by no means agree with all his conclusions.
25 Gross, ‘Operational Thinking’, 7.
26 Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (London: Michael Joseph 1952), 71, witnessed this ‘nervousness’ in his XIX Panzer Corps at the beginning of the campaign.
27 That is, drafted officers could not possibly imbibe the officially approved ‘school solution’ or be so impressed with it once in the field (p.177).
28 As Muth observes, ‘Without superior strategy direction, numerous battles can be won, but no wars’. Examples of US errors, especially hostility towards Britain before 1941, are explored by John Gooch, ‘“Hidden in the Rock”: American Military Perceptions of Great Britain, 1919–1940’, in Lawrence Freedman, Paul Hayes and Robert O’Neill (eds), War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992), 155–73; Dominick Graham and Shelford Bidwell, Coalitions, Politicians and Generals: Some Aspects of Command in Two World Wars (London: Brassey’s 1993) is a shrewd and positive assessment of US strategy more compelling because its authors are both British. Also see Gross, ‘Operational Thinking’, 7–8, and 10 on the Wehrmacht’s logistical weaknesses.
29 Especially his Fighting Power: German and US Military Performance, 1939–1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood 1982); Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence (London: Routledge 1997) remains a persuasive analysis though sometimes a convoluted one. Also see, Gross, ‘Operational Thinking’, 2; the phrase ‘gold standard’ is taken from Max Boot, ‘The New American Way of War’, Foreign Affairs 82/4 (July–Aug. 2003), 44.