U.S. View of Revisionist Writings

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The following review from 13 years ago was published in Parameters, the quarterly journal of the U.S. Army War College, Spring 1995.

A Surge of Revisionism: Scholarship on The Great War

PAUL F. BRAIM

Although the 50th anniversary of great events in World War II is upon us, bringing a plethora of writings on that conflict, a scholarly reexamination of World War I proceeds apace. A quick look at reviews and lists of new books reveals as many on the First World War as on the Second. Advertisements for tours of European battlefields of the Great War appear to be at least as numerous as those for visits to battlefields of "The Great Crusade" in the same areas in World War II. It also seems that the battlefields of World War I, at least in Europe, are better memorialized than those of its successor. Two associations, The Great War Society and The Western Front Association, both collegia of persons interested in the First World War, are increasing in membership and hold frequent conferences of scholars and antiquarians.

The high interest in World War I may well be the result of the passage of time having obliterated the uglier memories of that war, while memories of the horrors of World War II, such as of the Holocaust, yet remain strong. Scholars, however, generally recognize World War I as having defined "War in the Machine Age." It could be said that the 20th century began at Sarajevo in 1914; some believe our century will end in war growing out of the same locale.

The word "Revisionism" often connotes the writings of those iconoclasts of the period between World Wars I and II who discovered great conspiracies to wage war for personal power or profit. The Revisionists celebrated herein are not reformers; rather, they are scholars who have subjected earlier verities about World War I to broader and more rigorous research--and who have found many previous conclusions to be less valid than commonly held. They display considerable understanding, even empathy, with the leaders on both sides--beleaguered as those leaders were by immense challenges.

Revisionist historiography over the last decade rather well refutes the old charge that Allied and German military leaders were blundering fools or butchers, who considered no strategy other than attrition in their attempts to prevail in the Great War. However, recent campaign analyses and biographies do show the senior commanders to have been bound by a conservatism born of chronological age and military heritage, which limited their appreciation of the potential of the weapons of the Machine Age. These leaders, on both sides of the fighting, were men whose experience was in an animal-powered era. They slowly came to appreciate the combat effectiveness of the tank and the airplane, but they continued until war's end to seek to employ, in a decisive role, their favorite weapons platform: the horse.

A recent defining study of the forward edge of fighting in the Great War has come through the scholarship of Hubert C. Johnson, whose Breakthrough! Tactics, Technology, and the Search for Victory on the Western Front in World War I describes and analyzes a broad array of diverse innovations in tactics in World War I. Johnson avers that Allied and German commanders, their staffs, and their military schools, gradually developed tactics and procedures to return maneuver to warfare on the Western Front. Bringing to light a number of obscure staff studies and offensive plans, he shows that both sides attempted, over the long period of siege warfare, to improve coordination of artillery, tanks, and aircraft with infantry attacks. The Germans did not emphasize the employment of tanks but did develop effective antitank operations. The Germans also developed "stormtroop tactics" for engaging and bypassing defensive positions, although, as Johnson shows, Allied forces employed similar, if less effective, procedures for penetrating strong defenses. Limitations in communications, and embedded parochiality, prevented these early combined-arms operations from achieving a complete rupture of the extensive defenses on the Western Front.

From his notes, it is obvious that Dr. Johnson has followed his own admonition that there remains no substitute for researching the major (national) archives. He buttresses his extensive research with conclusions based also upon an uncommon degree of common sense. Johnson acknowledges indebtedness to Bruce Gudmundsson's earlier work, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918. Gudmundsson concludes that stormtroop tactics enabled the Germans to break through Allied defenses, but slow reinforcement of their gains, by foot and animal, prevented decisive exploitation of the gaps they created. By 1918, the Germans could not reinforce their depleted armies, in quantity or quality of human replacements, to meet the increasing power the Allies gained through American participation in the war. Gudmundsson also challenges the opinion held by many veterans of World Wars I and II (including this reviewer) that the Germans were, essentially, better soldiers than their enemies. He asserts that the key to German battlefield superiority in war lay in decentralization of command, which allowed even their junior leaders to make independent combat decisions.

A predecessor to Gudmundsson's work, Timothy Lupfer's The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine during the First World War, also examines and confirms innovative German organizational and tactical changes which led to battlefield effectiveness. In a similar vein, Tim Travers, in his book Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front, and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900-1918, describes the conservative bent of British generaldom and the struggles of radical British thinkers to develop tactics to maximize new weaponry. In a related text, Doctrine and Dogma: German and British Infantry Tactics in the First World War, Martin Samuels compares German and British tactics, giving the British more credit for innovativeness than does Travers.

Most of the Revisionist scholars are less sympathetic and more critical of American leadership than were previous authors of largely paeanic texts. The First World War began the United States' overseas commitments on behalf of imperiled humanity. Our national distemper over the political results that followed the Armistice did not include condemnation of our military leaders. It was an age of heroes, as the current era certainly is not. Most American military histories and biographies were rather hagiolatrous until recently. Now that nearly all of the doughboys of the Great War have passed in final review, it is time for dispassionate, critical histories of US participation in that war--and these are appearing on publishers' lists, reexamining and reevaluating that struggle.

A capstone to the Revisionist scholarship on the American experience in the Great War is the recent publication of The AEF & Coalition Warmaking, 1917-1918 by David F. Trask. In this slim volume about the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front in World War I, Trask rationalizes cogently the American experience. A former Chief Historian of the US Army Center of Military History, Dr. Trask has spent much of his professional life researching World War I. In this book he presents his grand synthesis of Revisionist scholarship. His thesis: The AEF was ill prepared for this test of battle, and its leadership was inadequate to the demands of modern war.

The entry of the United States into World War I offset the German advantage, but only to the extent that the resources of the United States could be quickly applied to the Allied cause. The Allies wanted food, munitions, US naval forces, and US manpower to reinforce their depleted armies. Allied military leaders disparaged the small US Army, considering it to be a "constabulary," its leaders inexperienced and untrained in modern war. The Allied judgments about the American Army were essentially correct. However, US President Woodrow Wilson's goal was a grand league for international cooperation to prevent future war. Wilson came to realize that he could hope to achieve his scheme only if an American army fought as a national force and gained a significant victory. This was the tasking given to General John J. Pershing, the Commander-in-Chief of the AEF when committed to battle in France.

Trask limits his inquiry to what he calls "grand tactics," the application of strategy in the theater of war, and views the AEF participation at that level through the statements of the highest US, Allied, and German political and military leaders. Quoting Allied and enemy commanders concerning the poor performance of the Americans, Trask faults General Pershing for most of the failures of the AEF. He indicts Pershing primarily for insisting on creating a separate US theater--defying the expressed opinions of many senior observers that the AEF, under the pressures of imminent combat, was totally unprepared for organizing a modern theater of war. Pershing's training dictum, to prepare the AEF primarily to fight "open warfare" is also cited by Trask as inappropriate to the impacted nature of the battlefield. Further, Pershing's resistance to temporary amalgamation of elements of the AEF within Allied armies at the height of the German offensive of 1918 (even after President Wilson had agreed to this infusion), is charged as risking Allied loss of the war. Trask's incisive critique of the AEF, and of Pershing, is hard but fair.

Critical reexamination of Pershing's leadership of the AEF was begun in the 1980s by his biographer, Donald Smythe, in his second volume, Pershing: General of the Armies. Smythe came to believe that the huge managerial task of commanding a US theater of operations in France was too great a challenge for Pershing's limited experience. He concluded, as does Trask, that the AEF was so disorganized in the middle of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign that Pershing might have been relieved had the war not ended suddenly.

Recognition also should be given to James Rainey, one of the earliest of the military Revisionists, whose 1981 master's thesis (unpublished) examined Pershing's open warfare training guidance, concluding that it was misapplied and inappropriate to the war being fought. Rainey's critique of AEF training was later summarized in a September 1983 Parameters article, "Ambivalent Warfare: The Tactical Doctrine of the AEF in World War I."

Rainey's early writing, and direct guidance by Smythe and Trask, were valuable to this reviewer's research in the 1980s on AEF operations and tactics. The book developed from that research, The Test of Battle: The American Expeditionary Forces in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, is consistent with the judgments of the experts cited above: the AEF was poorly trained and inadequately led during much of the fighting.

At higher AEF staff levels, plans were much too simplistic to manage and support a modern army in the offensive, over rough terrain, against a fortified enemy. At the tactical level, commanders failed to control and maximize their supporting fires, and they committed their reserves directly into areas where their troops were stalled by enemy resistance. Lack of experience was obvious at all levels of leadership. Close study of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, however, has led this reviewer to the conclusion that the AEF ultimately learned to fight effectively--by fighting! In the final phase of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, American combat forces performed as well as any army in France.

A final note: To commemorate the 75th birthday of the AEF, the US Army's Center of Military History recently republished the American Battle Monuments Commission guidebook to US participation in the Great War, American Armies and Battlefields in Europe: A History, Guide, and Reference Book. Although this text is light on campaign analyses, and very favorable to the American Expeditionary Forces, it is a treasure of detail on organization, operations, and geography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Battle Monuments Commission, American Armies and Battlefields in Europe: A History, Guide, and Reference Book (rpt. US Army Center of Military History, Washington: GPO, 1992).

Paul F. Braim, The Test of Battle: The American Expeditionary Forces in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1987).

Bruce I. Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918 (New York: Praeger, 1989).

Hubert C. Johnson, Breakthrough! Tactics, Technology, and the Search for Victory on the Western Front in World War I (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1994).

Timothy T. Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine during the First World War, Leavenworth Papers No. 4 (Ft. Leavenworth, Kans.: US Army Command and General Staff College, 1981).

James W. Rainey, "Ambivalent Warfare: the Tactical Doctrine of the AEF in World War I," Parameters, 13 (September 1983), 34-46.

Martin Samuels, Doctrine and Dogma: German and British Infantry Tactics in the First World War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992).

Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986).

David F. Trask, The AEF & Coalition Warmaking, 1917-1918 (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1993).

Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front, and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900-1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

The Reviewer: Colonel Paul F. Braim, USA Ret., is Professor of History at Embry Riddle University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware and has written and lectured on military history and military affairs.