Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II Review

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(More customer reviews)The title and subtitle of Jörg Muth's Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II is a mouthful. It is deceptive, for it may give the initial impression that this is a work of narrow specialization and of limited breadth. Yet what readers will find is a book with a most ambitious scope; one that demystifies the burning question any serious student of WWII must wonder: How is it the Wehrmacht could consistently prevail, even against the most staggering odds? A question which becomes even more compelling when contrasted with the too often plodding and pedestrian performance of the Wehrmacht's American adversaries. Until this book, I did not have a ready answer. In his most painstakingly researched and well-annotated book, Mr. Muth provides the central and missing pieces of this puzzle: how, paradoxically, a society which can be accurately characterized by a militarized, evermore (from 1933 onward) authoritarian order, produced a military which can also be accurately characterized by dynamic and creative thinking, a ready grasp of the potential of new technologies, and the importance of individual initiative. And how a liberal, democratic state produced a military characterized by rigidity of thinking; one beholden to obsolescent concepts, and where the initiative of its officers was actively repressed. Read Mr. Muth's book. You will have a far more clear understanding of how and why each army performed the way it did after than before: ...The Consequences for World War II. Indeed!
Highly recommended.

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In Command Culture, Jörg Muth examines the different paths the United States Army and the German Armed Forces traveled to select, educate, and promote their officers in the crucial time before World War II. Muth demonstrates that the military education system in Germany represented an organized effort where each school and examination provided the stepping stone for the next. But in the United States, there existed no communication about teaching contents or didactical matters among the various schools and academies, and they existed in a self chosen insular environment. American officers who finally made their way through an erratic selection process and past West Point to the important Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, found themselves usually deeply disappointed, because they were faced again with a rather below average faculty who forced them after every exercise to accept the approved "school solution."Command Culture explores the paradox that in Germany officers came from a closed authoritarian society but received an extremely open minded military education, whereas their counterparts in the United States came from one of the most democratic societies but received an outdated military education that harnessed their minds and limited their initiative. On the other hand, German officer candidates learned that in war everything is possible and a war of extermination acceptable. For American officers, raised in a democracy, certain boundaries could never be crossed.This work for the first time clearly explains the lack of audacity of many high ranking American officers during World War II, as well as the reason why so many German officers became perpetrators or accomplices of war crimes and atrocities or remained bystanders without speaking up. Those American officers who became outstanding leaders in World War II did so not so much because of their military education, but despite it.

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