BOOK REVIEW: The Generals’ War: Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918.

It is now popular among most historians to dismiss the idea that leadership at the top can play the crucial role in the outcome of great historical events. With such attitudes, they are only displaying their own ignorance of how the real world works. For better or worse, leadership does matter, and Ząbecki has done a skillful job in laying out how these senior generals determined the outcome of the war. On the German side, Ludendorff, in effect Hindenburg’s chief of staff but also the real author of German military decisions, drove the German conduct of the war to its disastrous end in 1918. In some respects, Ludendorff was a proficient tactician and innovator. In fact, he was one of the few generals in the war to make a coherent and effective attempt to solve the extraordinarily difficult tactical problems the fighting in the Western theater had raised. However, the most perceptive and effective German general in the war, Crown Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria, noted of Ludendorff that he “is certainly a wonderful organizer, but not a great strategist.”[1]

That, in a nutshell, was the heart of the problem with the whole German Army. Brilliant at the sharp end of tactical competence, but incapable of perceiving the strategic consequences of their actions, Ludendorff and the German high command found themselves stuck in a strategic quandary of their own making.

Looks good enough that it just went near the top of my ever-expanding Kindle to-read list. For a look just at Allied operational art during the same timeframe, Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I is another solid read.