![]() ![]() Whereas most studies cover only the blood-soaked eighty years from the wars of unification in the 1860s to the end of the Second World War in 1945, Wilson takes his readers through a full half-millennium of German warfare, from 1500 to the present. Peter H Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University, has written a magnificent new book showing that Germans’ relationship to warfare is far too complex, varied and, indeed, interesting to be distilled so simplistically. ![]() Their armed forces’ fighting style was characterised by a ruthless obsession with ‘military necessity’, a myopic focus on battlefield tactics and extraordinary violence. As Germans usually faced enemies superior in terms of men and materiel, their consistent strategy was to strike hard and win quickly. Encircled by powerful neighbours, its people inevitably favoured authoritarian rulers able to mobilise for pre-emptive attacks. ![]() Germany, their argument goes, was naturally predisposed to bellicosity thanks to its place at the heart of Europe. To explain modern Germany’s aggression, Anglophone military historians have often claimed the existence of a uniquely German way of war. Violence had stamped the German state since unification in the late 19th century and Heuss’s own republic had emerged in 1949 from the ashes of two devastating world wars instigated by German governments. T he Germans have, as West Germany’s erudite first president, Theodor Heuss, once ruefully observed, acquired notoriety as ‘ the bellicose nation’. ![]()
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