Dr Matthew Hughes
Department of Politics and History
Brunel University
Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK
Tel: +44 1895 266872
Robert M. Citino, The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Losing War, 1943. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2012. Pp. xxviii, 410. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-7006-1826-2.
Robert M. Citino’s latest work on the campaigns of the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) in 1943 builds on his previous book on the Wehrmacht’s defeats in 1942, published in 2007, also by Kansas Press. The focus here is on land power and Professor Citino has less to say on naval and air operations. Alongside Citino’s earlier scholarship on the German army and operational ‘art’ before 1942 and, one assumes, future works on German war-fighting in 1944 and 1945, Citino is producing a comprehensive account of the German army at war in this period. But what is the operational level of war that underpins Citino’s studies?
Operational war (or ‘art’) exists between the tactics associated with actual killing and the higher-level management, organisation (strategy) and objectives (policy or grand strategy) of fighting a war. It is usually a discrete theatre of war – usually a corps or army level battle – commanded by senior soldiers with little direct input from civilian decision-makers who, with a policy objective in mind, and having decided the strategy, have left the fighting to the military. (Of course, in totalitarian Germany during the war there was no real civilian input into the war, a point Citino reiterates in his examination.) The operational level of war is the subject of many ‘pure’ military histories and it is the prism through which Citino evaluates the performance of German troops in 1943, a year after their seismic defeats in the USSR at Stalingrad and in North Africa at El Alamein. Considering Citino’s well-established expertise in German-language sources and on the German army generally, he successfully contextualises the operations of 1943 within Germany’s pre-war experience and understanding of the operational art – going back to wars fought by Prussia in the eighteenth century – significant for a country surrounded by potential enemies and keen to fight quick, decisive wars with encircling ‘cauldron’ battles that would avoid debilitating wars of attrition.
Citino moves lucidly between three core theatres of land combat in 1943: North Africa, notably the Tunisian campaign; the Soviet Union, culminating in the great tank battle at Kursk; and Italy, from the invasion of Sicily to the Salerno landings south of Naples. He draws out the comparative aspects of the war, tying Africa, the Soviet Union, and Italy together with a common thread of how the German army achieved initial operational success through aggression, devolved command, and effective doctrine, finessing battles against the odds to its advantage, only to be defeated by the Allies’ weight of numbers and improving operational art. The improved battlefield performance of the Soviet army after 1942 – building on its pre-war understanding of operational art as exemplified in its development of the idea of ‘deep battle’ – and of the US army as it cut its teeth in North Africa and Italy, gradually checked the Germans’ operational skill. Citino weaves into his text the latest thinking on the battles of 1943, showing, for instance, that the Germans never planned the battle of Kursk as anything other than a local operation.
The Allies gradually muted the German skill at military operations, not just with brute force of numbers – which, to be fair, was often the deciding factor – but with their own story of operational success, as Citino shows. His examination is not new but it is told with great skill and for readers interested in how battles are fought and won, this is a text par excellence. In the end, the Wehrmacht had a Sisyphean task against the economic might of the USA and USSR, and no amount of parochial operational skill could overcome the factories of Detroit and the Urals. This did not stop the Germans fighting on, winning battles locally but losing globally. Citino’s readable writing style draws in the reader, making light of complicated military operations and the volume under review is sure to be well received by military historians – and by the general reader looking for a scholarly, engaged, expert account of the fighting. By the end of the volume the reader cannot but wonder why the Germans did not surrender in 1943; victory was obviously impossible. Citino is to be congratulated for his account of the operational level of war that does more than just examine one year of the Second World War; it is a vivid account of the operational level of war and what it can and cannot contribute to eventual success or defeat.
As way of a coda – an observation as much as a criticism – Citino’s account might bewilder non-specialists, not least the manner in which the author detaches combat from ideology. Rather like Major-General J. F. C. Fuller’s 1948 book, The Second World War, 1939-1945: A Strategical and Tactical History, this is killing contextualized within war-fighting. It is as if the operational level of war is the pinnacle of study. This is acceptable in its own terms – not every history of the Second World War has to deal with, for instance, culture, the Holocaust, gender or fascism – but it makes for a distinctive analysis and style of writing, one that can be compared to, say, John Dower’s cultural history of combat in the Pacific, War Without Mercy an account that opens up new vistas, ones closed off by traditional, more rigid examinations of battle. The analysis of war on its own can be dry and it often results in a fetishization of combat, of the heroic, desperate, glorious losing battles of the German army; the lack of politics lends itself to language that is itself strangely, unwittingly politicized. This is apparent in the language in the volume under review which tends to a staccato macho, slangy, style of expression, that of the soldier with the whiff of cordite in his nostrils, in which battle is fetishized, even eroticized, such as (pp. 8, 27, 46, 64, 92): ‘laying on the heavy metal,’ ‘a hard driver who led from the front and liked to laugh at danger….sometimes danger laughed back,’ ‘highly aggressive attack dogs masquerading as an officer corps,’ that sense of swagger took a hit early on,’ ‘it was magnificent but it was hardly war.’ Citino is certainly aware of the wider context of the war – leaving to one side his earlier corpus, his analysis of such matters on, say, pp. 205-11, shows as much – but as he says (p. 44): ‘Military historians are, by and large, a fairly conservative group.’ This interesting, crafted book shows that this statement holds true: military history in its established forms has some way to travel before its methodologies are accepted (if ever) within the wider, more avant-garde academy.