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The Vex
ing
Question of
Prussia
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley
,
NBER
, and WCEG
http://bradford-delong.com
brad.delong@gmail.com
@delong
First Full Draft: December 9, 2019
Last Major Revision: December 9, 2019
Last Edited: December 9, 2019
11360 words
pages: <
https://www.icloud.com/pages/0sJdHr8FwY3J2-1k5BlH6SYVw
>
html: <
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/the-vexing-question-of-
prussia.html
>
Introduction
Reading
Adam Tooze
’
s
powerpoints for his
War in Germany, 1618-1648
<
https://adamtooze.com/2018/01/18/war-germany-1618-2018/
>
course,
and thinking about the Vex
ing
Question of Prussia in World History...
For a bit over the fi rst half of the
1870-2016
Long 20th Century
,
global
history was profoundly shaped by the peculiarity o
f
Prussia
. The standard
account of this peculiarity—this
sonderweg
, sundered way, separate
Prussian path—has traditionally seen it has having four aspects. Prussia—
and the
“
small German
”
national state of which it was the nucleus—
managed to simultaneously, over 1865-1945:
1.
wage individual military campaigns with extraordinary success: in
campaigns it should have won it conquered quickly and
overwhe
l
mingly; in campaigns it should have narrowly lost it won
decisively; in campaigns it should have lost it turned them into long
destructive abattoirs.
2.
wage wars no sane statesman would have entered and—unless its fi rst
quick victories were immediately sealed by a political agreement—
lose them catastrophically
,
via total neglect of grand-strategical and
strategical considerations, a failure to take anything other than the
shortest
-term
view of logistics
, and a stubborn eagerness to turn the
country into an abattoir out of a refusal to recognize that war is a
continuation of politics
.
3.
via the role, authority and interests of the military-service nobility
societal caste, divert the currents of political development from the
expected Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, French, Belgian, Dutch, Swiss,
Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish path of growing political and social
democracy into a separate channel,
the
sonderweg
, of authoritarian
rule at home in the short-run material interest of a business-landlord-
service nobility class and caste, and of desired conquest and
demographic expansion in the European "near abroad".
4.
engage in continent-spanning systematic patterns and campaigns of
terror, destruction, murder, and genocide that went far beyond
anything other European powers engaged in within Europe, and even
went far beyond the brutalities of colonial conquest and rule that
European powers engaged in outside the continent.
Did Prussia—and the
“
small German
”
national state of which it became
the core—in fact follow a separate and unusual path
,
with respect to
economic, political, cultural, social development
,
relative to other western
European national states in the arc from France to Sweden? Do these four
2
aspects as components rightly summarize the
sonderweg
? What is their
origin, and what is the relation between them?
This is the vexed question of Prussia
…
A Persistent “Prussian Way of War”?
Sometime “Aggressive Excellence”
The fi rst thing to note is that Prussian operational excellence
—
winning
campaigns it ought to have lost, and winning decisively and
overwhelmingly campaigns it ought to have nar
r
owly won
—
did not exist
for a century
before 1866 and the Prussian victory at Königgrätz in the
Austro
-
Prussian war. In 1864 the Prussian army did not cover itself with
glory in the short Austro-Prussian war against Denmark. In 1815 the
Prussian army had the distinction of losing the last two battles anybody
ever lost to Napoleon: the battles of Ligny and Wavre. Also in 1815
,
staff
confusion in arranging the order of mar
c
h and the consequent delayed
arrival of Prussian forces at Waterloo turned the Duke of Wellington
’
s
victory from a walk in the park into a damned near run thing and a bloody
mess. In the rest of the Napoleonic and French Revolutionary wars, the
performance of the Prussian army was: competent but undistinguished in
1813-4, the most disastrous in history in 1806, less than competent from
1792-5.
You have to go back to 1762 and the wars of Friedrich II Hohenzollern
(the Great) to see any evidence of operational excellence, or, indeed, more
than bare competence. Looking backward we can see Friedrich II as the
culmination of a line of military-political development through Friedrich
Willem and Friedrich I back to Friedrich Willem (
“
the Great Elector
”
).
Thus
there appears to be a century-long near-hiatus in anything that could
be called a distinctive Prussian military-political-sociological pattern
in
the society and polity as a whole,
outside of the military, the bureaucracy,
and their service nobility
,
which continued their
Friedrichian
traditions
,
to
some extent
at least
Building “Aggressive Excellence”
Trapped on the Northern European Plain
In 1618 Georg Willem Hohenzollern became Electoral Margrave of
Brandenburg under the Holy Roman Emperor (from his father John
Sigismund) and Duke of East Prussia under the King of Poland (from his
mother Anna). He married
Elisabeth Charlotte
Wittelsbach, brother of
Palatine Electoral Count and King of Bohemia Friedrich Wittelsbach
.
Georg Willem and Anna’s only son
Friedrich Willem Hohenzollern
was
born in 1620. He grew up watching his father’s and his uncle’s
principalities become devastated and depopulated ruins. His elders failed
to avoid the fate of puppets in the Thirty Years War. Austrian, Spanish,
French, Swedish, and other armies marched where they would; stealing,
raping, and killing as they wished.
With neither defensible national borders nor cultural and linguistic
differences vis-a-vis its neighbors to serve as anchors, Friedrich Willem’s
Brandenburg-Prussia was an obvious candidate to disappear into
annexation by some larger and more powerful neighbor building an early-
modern nation-state. Yet under his 1640-1688 reign, he and his counselors
built up the economy, with canals and other commercially-oriented
internal improvements, with
subsidies
for industrial development
,
and
with very strong encouragement of immigration, especially skilled
Huguenot craftsmen expelled from France by the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. From a low point of about 600,000 in 1648, population of his
old realm doubled and land won in wars brought the total population up to
1.5 million by his death. He and his counselors built up central authority,
convincing the
Juncker
nobility to dissolve their representative assembly
4
in return for permanent exemption from taxation, the entrenchment of
serfdom, and the granting of jurisdiction on their estates.
The Professional Army
Most important, perhaps, for the future of Prussia and later Germany, he
raised a professional army that amounted to 40,000 men. That was one in
every nine adult men. Maintaining such an army was a very heavy burden
on the early modern state—even with substantial subventions paid to
Prussia by its Britain and other sometime allies in return for Prussian
contributions to their campaigns. Yet even so Prussian forces remained
much smaller than those of it neighbors and near-neighbors Sweden, of
Russia, of Austria, of France, Hanover (after the accession of its Electoral
Duke to the throne of Great Britain), and even of Poland.
The Prussian army thus needed to fi ght in a different way.
The Aggressive Army: Fehrbellin &
Sequellae
As Robert Citino tells the story, the paradigm became to always emulate
the campaign of Fehrbellin. There a surprise two-week march starting
May 26, 1775 at rapid speed brought the Prussian army into surprise close
contact with the invading Swedes. Bribery persuaded local offi cials to
hold a drunken banquet for the occupying Swedish high command the
night of the attack. The Prussian vanguard gained entrance to the fortress
of Rathenau by pretending to be a Swedish patrol fleeing the Prussians at
their heels. The regrouping Swedish army moving backward to reorganize
through marshy country without good maps found itself trapped against
the Rhin River at Fehrbellin while its engineers frantically tried to rebuild
a bridge. The Swedes with 11000 soldiers and 28 cannon had nearly twice
the numbers, nearly three times the artillery, and had more experience. But
they were thinking not about what they could do to the Prussians but what
the Prussians were about to do to them. Disorganized and badly arrayed,
they lost 1000—twice Prussian losses—on the day of Fehrbellin, June 18,
1775. And after a two-week pursuit the entire Swedish invading army had
been driven out of the country, with only 3000 out of 14000 still with the
colors.
Speed. Surprise. Attack—preferably flank attacks from unexpected
directions made possible by speed and thus attaining surprise, but attack in
any ca
s
e. To fail to attack
at every reasonable—and some unreasonable—
opportunities
would be to doom the army to a war of attrition, and then
defeat.
And offi cers needed to be able to grasp when the moment to attack
came, and then to move fast when the moment opened. This meant that
authority had to move downward: rather then waiting for the high
command to tell them what to do, lower-level commanders had to
understand the grand plan, keep themselves aware of the situation, and
strike while the iron was hot—relying on their adjacent peers and on the
high command itself to observe and adjust in reaction to opportunities.
How could this hold together? It could hold together only if offi cers at all
levels thought suffi ciently alike that they could reliably predict what their
subordinates, their peers, and their superiors were about to do given the
situation. And that meant a common training that placed a high value on:
speed, surprise, and attack.
Flank marches, night marches, clever misdirections, move fast, use
surprise, the “indirect approach”, great captains seeing and grasping an
opportunity and demonstrating their excellence by winning stunning
victories at low cost as they get and remain inside their opponents’ OODA
—observation-orientation-decision-action—loops.
1
That makes for
extremely readable battlecentric military history: lots of plot, lots of
surprise, lots of reversals, lots of
hubris
and
nemesis
, lots of human
excellence deployed for us to admire, lots of less-clever and less-agile
6
1
John R. Boyd
(1995):
The Essence of Winning and Losing
<
https://www.danford.net/
boyd/essence.htm
>
losers to scorn. And, indeed, from 1600 to 1871 Prussia grew by war after
war.
It is hard to imagine any other pattern for warfare that could have allowed
Brandenburg-Prussia to survive and grow as a state from 1740 to 1870.
Neighboring states with different patterns did not: Prussia swallowed them
up. From 1645 to 1945—with the embarrassing hiatus—the Prussian way
of war led the Prussian and then the “small German” nation-state’s armies,
at the operational level, to punch well above for the weight. For, as Adam
Tooze puts it, quoting boxer Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan—until
they get punched in the face…” There was a 150-year tradition there
before 1765.
The Growth of Prussia
The state started with the Margravate of Brandenburg as a vassal of the
Holy Roman Emperor and the Duchy of (East) Prussia as a vassal of the
King of Poland. It had gained the (small) Dutchies of Cleves and Mark
and the (very small) County of Ravensberg in 1614 as the settlement of
the War of the Jülich Succession. In 1653 it gained Eastern Pomerania. In
1657 it gained sovereignty over East Prussia, which became independent
of the Kingdom of Poland… In 1680 it gained the Prince-bishopric of
Magdeburg. In 1701 it gained acknowledgement of the ruler’s status as
King-in-Prussia. In 1715 it gained the east-of-Oder part of Swedish
Pomerania. In 1742 it gained Silesia—which was to become one of
Germany’s two industrial centers.
Then under Friedrich II Hohenzollern “The Great” Prussia fought not
short-and-lively but extended-and-costly wars. But it won
—it held on to
its territory, most importantly Silesia.
Then the fi rst era of aggressive operational excellence comes to an end.
Prussia is not so much victorious on the battlefi eld as just very very lucky.
T
he whole edifi ce could have come crashing down after a suffi ciently
large disaster
. I
t almost did after the defeat at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806. It is
true that in many ways Prussia was the lucky gambler with a system,
attributing to its system what is mostly the result of luck: Friedrich II
Hohenzollern (“the Great”) was even more so “the Lucky”: in most
parallel-universe want-of-a-nail counterfactuals we can imagine, he winds
up either dead on a battlefi eld or a penniless exile, and is judged as much a
historical failure as Charles I de Valois (“le Téméraire) of Burgundy.
Yet Prussia, via its alliances and diplomacy, grew—ultimately, that is.
Over 1772-95 it gained West Prussia and Posen as its spoils from the
Partition of Poland. Then Napoleon cuts it down to size after the
catastrophic tactical and operational defeat of Jena-Auerstadt, and the
subsequent pursuits. And in 1815 Prussia gained, with the collapse of
Napoleon, North Saxony, pieces of Westphalia, and the Rhineland—where
included the Ruhr Valley, which was to become Germany’s second great
industrial region. The victorious allies wanted to punish Napoleon’s
willing ally Saxony. And Austrian Chancellor Metternich wanted Prussia
to lose massively from any French aggressive expansion in the Rhineland,
to ensure that in the future Prussia would stand with Austria in the fi rst line
of those containing France.
A less successful diplomatic decision than that of giving Prussia a great
industrial region at the start of the 19th century in order to contain France
can hardly be imagined.
Yet the 1763-1815 territorial gains were not due to operational excellence.
That had been lost.
Indeed, Prussia would have been unlikely to have been
offered its 1815 territorial gains had Metternich and the Austrians seen it
as still punching as much above its weight as it had in the years up to
1764
.
8
And yet operational excellence was, somehow, revived after 1865.
The Prussian way of war did and does exercise a somewhat sinister
fascination.
Why “somewhat sinister”? Because we have to recognize Friedrich II’s
was not, in the end, a terribly good or effective way of making war.
500,000 Prussians died in war in battle, of disease, as civilians murdered
by passing soldiers, or as civilians starved in the aftermath of one of the
many scorched-earth campaigns. And his victory and the preservation of
the state was, in the end, more a matter of luck than of skillful strategy.
Prussia drew to an inside straight from 1740-1763 in the reign of Friedrich
II Hohenzollern. And the lesson the inherited military-political culture
drew from that was: always draw to inside straights.
Other Prussian Military Traditions
This reinforces other
military traditions passed down from history
that
Robert Citino sees as also key to the Prusso-German army of the 20th
Century
.
Perhaps most prominent is the idea of the “death ride”: the
Totenrit
. If the operational doctrine of attempting to emulate Fehrbellin did
not work, try it again: “what it costs, it will cost.” With enough elan and a
willingness to take high enough casualties, victory ought to be achievable.
This made defeating Prussia-Germany so damned costly.
The Prusso-German way of war was always unwilling to recognize that
war is a continuation of politics by other means, and the game may well
not by worth the candle. Hence there was an enormous unwillingness to
cut losses. Instead, the default was to role the iron dice of war for another
campaign one more time—no matter how low the chances of success or
how costly the effort—in the belief that this time, perhaps, will and
élan
would carry the day, and speed, surprise, and aggression would derange
the enemy and at least win one more campaign.
Thus the second of the features of the Prusso-German way of war is:
wage wars no sane statesman would have entered and—unless its fi rst
quick victories were immediately sealed by a political agreement—lose
them catastrophically
,
via total neglect of grand-strategical and strategical
considerations, a failure to take anything other than the shortest
-term
view of logistics
, and a stubborn eagerness to turn the country into an
abattoir out of a refusal to recognize that war is a continuation of
politics…
Rolling the Iron Dice of War Until You Lose
After 1850 the inherited pattern was to cause Prussia and Prussia-Germany
to role the iron dice of war fi ve more times: fi rst—at favorable odds—
against Denmark in 1864; second
—at
un
favorable odds—against
Austria
in 1866; third
—at unfavorable odds—against
France
in 1866;
fourth
—at
very
unfavorable odds—against
great powers
France, Russia, Britain, and
America
in
1914-8
;
and fi fth and last—at ludicrously unfavorable odds—
against France, Russia, Britain, and
hyperpower
America in
1939-45.
Make a lot of high-stakes bets at unfavorable odds, and gambler’s ruin is
the result. By 1945 following the Prusso-German way of war had lost far
more than it could ever have reasonably hoped to gain.
10
