The Evolution of German Military Strategy and Tactics: 1914-1945

When the statesmen of Europe declared war in 1914, they all shared several assumptions. They all believed that they had a better than even chance of winning. Germany was no different. In making this assumption they relied on their military advisors. Those advisors regarded war not as an unpleasant necessity but as a test of manhood and of national fitness for survival. The German military advisors all shared the belief that war was inevitable. The statement made by General Helmuth von Moltke at the ‘Council of War ’ in December 1912 illustrates this point. He said, “I hold war to be inevitable, and the sooner the better.” The second assumption shared by European statesmen was that war would be short. It required exceptional perceptiveness to visualize anything else. Ivan Bloch, in his work La Guerre Future, published in 1898, had forecast with amazing accuracy that the power of modern weapons would produce deadlock on the battlefield and that the resulting attrition would destroy the fabric of the belligerent societies. Bloch’s thesis was widely known and much discussed in military periodicals. But since he was saying in effect that the military was now faced with a problem it could not solve, it was unlikely that many soldiers woul