Geoffrey WawroCritiques

A very good analysis of the most imortant war until WWII. Wawro outlines how the invention of the breech loading rifle, coupled with the idea of enveloping one's opponent, set the stage for every major war until 1945. The Napoleonic idea of the massed battalions overwhelming one's enemies by cutting into them with masses of bayonet armed infantry, was dealt a fatal blow by the Prussians in this conflict. His final chapter lays out the following embrace of the Prussian strategy, by all the successful armies until the middle of the twentieth century, played out. I sadly note this book no longer seems in print, perhaps due to the English speaking world is reluctant to embrace a book whose principal focus is a battle fought "Far away, by people we know little about" to quote Neville Chamberlain. A very great pity.½

Tedious, slow account of Hapsburg misfortunes at the outbreak of WWI. Reads like a hatchet job on poor Austria Hungary, making me wonder about the author's objectivity. shouldn't have finished this one.

Of all of the wars fought in Europe between 1815 and 1914, none was more important in terms of its impact than the Franco-Prussian War. The culmination of Otto von Bismarck's strategy for unifying the German states into a single country, it saw the displacement of France as the dominant Continental power and the formation of a new nation that would dominate events in Europe for the next three-quarters of a century.

Such an epochal conflict is well deserving of study, yet for Geoffrey Wawro to write this book is in some respects an act of bravery. For decades Michael Howard's [b:The Franco-Prussian War|25863|The Franco-Prussian War The German Invasion of France, 1870-1871|Michael Eliot Howard|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348574883s/25863.jpg|26583] has been the go-to source for readers seeking an English-language history of the conflict, and little has changed since its publication in 1961 to undermine its value. Yet Wawro's book is a worthy addition to the literature on the war, thanks to the directness of his analysis and the clarity of his prose. He provides readers with a superb introduction to the conflict, starting with an analysis of its political background and the strengths and weaknesses of the two armies before detailing the major campaigns of the war. From his analysis emerges a tale of two powers, one rotted yet still possessing formidable strengths, the other dynamic but suffering from its own set of flaws. Wawro makes it clear that while the Prussians enjoyed several advantages the outcome was far from ordained, with the flaws of French leadership being a decisive factor in its defeat.

Wawro's book illuminates the depth of France's humiliation in their defeat. In doing so, he helps to underscore the long-term significance of the war, as France would emerge from it determined to undo its loss. Though this may not have made the conflict that took place four decades later inevitable, the seeds for it were clearly sown in 1870-1. To understand why is just one reason why this book is necessary reading for every student of modern European history, as well as anyone seeking an accessible overview of this pivotal clash of powers.

This is a non-fic about one of the ‘forgotten wars’ of the 19th century, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. While it is mainly a military history, there are a lot of vignettes and more general history.

The pre-history: on one side Prussia with Bismarck, growing world power, winner of 1866 war with Austria. On the other – France, which holds to its Napoleonic past (from, the structure of army to his nephew as the current emperor) and assumes that it is able to press others to do what France wants. Bismarck fires up French by a series of provocations (which France is eager to follow) to declare the war on Prussia (thus losing potential favorable international opinion).

France’s army was smaller and older, with professional solders, mostly uneducated. It has two wunderwaffen – Chassepot rifle, which shot further and more precise then Prussian needle rifle; and Mitrailleuse – early modern machine gun, which doesn’t swivel, so its volleys were more spectacular than effective sweeping fire. Prussian had their wunderwaffen as well Krupp’s steel tube guns with a great range. Their army was larger, conscripted and more educated, which is a great boon in the industrial era.

The armies also had quite almost opposite approaches to the war: Germans attacked again and again, each attempt quickly gaining support of the neighboring units, fallen officers quickly replaced but educated NCOs; French based everything on their old glory, long-range rifle and static defense, the latter pulverized by Krupp’s guns. Another problem is a constant bickering among French high command, were everyone wanted honors but not the responsibility, so they march their troops to exhaustion only to leave them under enemy fire.

To a large extent this war, more than any other led to the WWI as we know it – French elan tactics, fight for Alsace and Lorraine, raise of Germany with resulting fear of it, assumption that a future war should be short, so its ok to throw millions of solders into this meatgrinder, and so on.

A great history book for everyone interested in the period.

Read it twice!

Read it twice!

unbelievable and obscene tragedy of wwi

All World Wars have been started and lost by natives of Austria. Is there something peculiar in the water of the not so blue Danube? Budapest is also known as a city of suicides, so self-destructive activities seem to be in the water (see also the Nibelungen saga). For Geoffrey Wawro, Hungary is the key culprit whose destructive behavior in the failed Austro-Hungarian marriage made Austria go postal in the face of a mad Serbian act of aggression.

Wawro chiefly blames Franz Joseph and uses a string of abusive adjectives among which "senile" is still the most friendly. His charge does not make sense, though. If Franz Joseph is some kind of demented King Lear on the throne, his lack of compos mentis restricts his guilt. It was the men around Franz Joseph who took the fatal decisions. Wawro is on much firmer (and traditional) ground in blaming the incompetence, corruption and backwardness of the k.u.k. army, part of which Wawro blames on the undeclared budgetary war of Hungary against Austrian rule by starving the beast to a level that made the army unusable as a tool for war.

The previous books of Wawro were mostly about Germany and Prussia in particular. He therefore sees Austria through the lense of a mediocre Prussia. In reality, the muddling through of Austria was and is the normal state of affairs of most empires and Prussian militarism the exception. Wawro also seems not to be too familiar with Austrian history prior to 1864, so that his judgments are often unfair and incomplete if one considers a wider span of history than the 50 years he tends to focus on. The Habsburg family had managed to hang on for more than 400 years by their strategy on relying more on marriages and diplomacy instead of war. The death of archduke Franz Ferdinand, a firm opponent of war in the Balkans (where "thieves and regicides" lived), was doubly tragic as it put two of the worst generals in history in the driver's seat: Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf and Oskar Potiorek. Wawro is justly scathing about their dismal and inexcusable performance. They wargamed their plans and lost - heavily. Instead of going back to the drawing board and making sure that they had a winning strategy, they executed their dismal plans - and lost as predicted.

One element Wawro does not really deal with is the deadly combination of green troops (mobilized in July, sent into war in August) into a campaign theater with severely deficient logistics. In the Western theater, civilian infrastructure could compensate for the deficiencies in logistics. In South-eastern and Eastern Europe, only the bare minimum of infrastructure existed, so that the green troops quickly began to suffer for any incompetence and idiocy. The latter was in abundance in Hötzendorf and Potiorek's planning - having troops march through Bosnia instead of crossing the Danube opposite Belgrade or having the troops disembark from the trains more than 100 km from their target. Underperforming Russian czarist logistics was no mean feat.

The book actually ends too soon, as the real question is why Austria-Hungary stayed in the war in 1915, having lost nearly half a million men in half a year, decimated its NCO and officer corps as well as lost almost all major battles, especially as it was fighting mostly for honor and no territorial gains. Hatred against Serbia and later Italy certainly was a powerful motivator. The main bloodletting, however, happened in the East against Russia about a territory neither the Russians nor the Austrians cared at all.

An insightful, learned chronicle of how imperial hubris and meaningless slaughter in the First World War brought the crumbling multinational dual monarchy to collapse and the Hapsburg dynasty to an ignominious end.

Distilling down a generation's research for the general reader, Wawro aims to disperse the fog that still allows Vienna to escape its share of culpability in creating the disaster that was the Great War. While if you have read the specialist military history you'll be aware that Habsburg military leaders such as Conrad and Potiorek have come in for their just share of criticism, Wawro ends this book with a meditation on how Emperor Franz Joseph has been allowed to waltz off into history essentially unstained by culpability. What might be disappointing for some readers is that this book essentially ends in with events in the Spring of 1915 and does not deal in detail with the Italian campaign; the point by which the Habsburg polity had devolved into a German puppet state.½

Dr. Wawro is definitely not impressed with the leadership and strategic skills of Austrian General Conrad von Hotzendorf!! This book presents the early period of WWI from the perspective of Austria-Hungary. It covers the diplomatic moves, the military mobilization, and the opening strategy and battles of the AH army. Without giving away the entire work in a review, basically AH in general and Conrad von Hotzendorf in particular bundled all aspects of the start of the war which led to disaster. I found this book well written (not my first reading of Wawro's books) and fascinating. Wawro has apparently done his homework in researching this book.

To say the least, Conrad v Hotzendorf should have court martialed and probably executed for his performance during the war. At one point, according to Wawro, Conrad quips to a colleague "if Archduke Franz Ferdinand were still alive, he would have had me executed." Interesting. This is a fine read for anyone interested in a close look at the performance of the Austro-Hungarian Army, its leadership and the diplomats during the start of WWI,

The Habsburg Empire was a congerie of different peoples, and often suffered for it. Sadly, much the same must be said for this book.

The topic is without doubt fascinating: How the Prussians and Italians attacked Austria-Hungary -- for political reasons in the Prussian case, for purposes of a land grab in the Italian. The Prussians had a disadvantage in manpower, but made up for it with superior technology (breech-loading needle guns) and planning (they had invented staff command, and had plans all worked up in advance; the Austrians were operating by the seat of their pants).

But somehow the tale fails to come together. In reading the narrative, one gets the impression of the Austrians stumbling around the Alps trying to figure out how to fight. Which is true in a way -- but there was an overall course of development of the campaign even if there wasn't much of a plan on the Austrian side.

There is a lot of good information here, and quite a few maps (drawn, I think, with the ancient Macintosh program MacDraw). If you go through the index and look up a particular battle, you'll learn a lot. But the outcome of the war of 1866 was to weaken the Habsburg monarchy even more, while allowing Prussia to take a major step toward uniting Germany. And, in reading this book, I found it hard to understand why.½

This is a well written military history of the most significant war in late 19th century Europe. The war led to the unification of Germany in a ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The balance of power established in 1815 was irrevocably changed by Prussia's creation of a German Empire.
In 1870 the Prussians were enjoying the fruits of their victory over Austria in 1866. Napoleon III had been in power since 1848 and he no longer inspired enthusiasm in the hearts of the French people. Count Otto von Bismarck was at the height of his powers. A meeting between the Kaiser and the French ambassador was described in a document known as the Ems Dispatch. Bismarck's editing of the document and a poor translation made the content very offensive offensive to the French. Napoleon III over reacted and ordered mobilization. Napoleon's actions helped to isolate France and deprive her of allies in the war.
After setting forth the causes of the war the author does an informative sketch of the two armies at the beginning of the war. The French army was an all volunteer army professional army of 400,000 men. The Prussians had an army of almost one million men based upon conscription and the use of reserves on the front line. The French rifle was superior in all respects but this was balanced out by the superiority of the Prussian artillery. The Prussian artillery was breech loading while the French was muzzle loading. When the fighting started the Prussian artillery ruled the battlefield foreshadowing the tactics of World War I.
The critical difference between the two armies was their leadership. The Prussian General Staff had great planning capabilities and had developed superior tactics. The French relied on the Napoleonic system of Marshals, great generals who controlled whole armies. In 1870 their generals fought defensively and were enveloped by the Prussians.
The author's use of primary sources provides insight into two major factors that led to France's complete defeat. The rank and file of the French Army had no desire to fight. The French soldier had little confidence in their generals and was not motivated to make sacrifices for victory. The Prussians and soldiers from other German states were young and confident. They had been trained to follow orders and to think on the battlefield.
The morale of the French generals was no better than the rank and file. They were defeatist and steeped in defensive tactics. The Prussians were supremely confident after their victory over Austria in 1866.
The great battle of Sedan where the French army was defeated and Napoleon III captured effectively ended the war. The great victories of the Prussian armies fueled German militarism which contributed to World War I. These victories were as much the product of the incompetence of French leadership as the efficiency of the Prussian armies.
I was interested to learn that Phil Sheridan was an observer of the war for the United States. The author's quotes from Sheridan and the British observer provide some interesting insights into the conduct of the war.
The author picked out a very interesting quotation from a German officer's diary, " every battle is a skein of personal crises only loosely joined by a plan of operations." He is reminding the reader that there is a temptation in looking back on something as helter skelter as a military battle in 1870 to see patterns and order that was not there in the event.
I had started this book about five years ago and couldn't get through it. It seems that all of my reading about the American Civil War has changed my attitudes about military history. It is a good book but not excellent and I would limit my recommendation of the book to those interested in military history.

4216 The Franco-Prussian War The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871, by Geoffrey Wawro (read 7 Oct 2006) This is a 2003 book by a historian now with the Naval War College at Newport, RI, and I found it exceptionally well-done, though some of the detailed accounts of each battle, especially the ones before Sedan, were tedious. The account of how the war came about is super-interesting. Napoleon III wanted a war to solve his domestic problems! How idiotic! The Ems Telegram was deemed insulting to France, so France declared war. Not much went right for France in the war. The German behavior in the war was atrocious, prefiguring frightful German behavior to come in future wars. This is a most interesting and worthwhile account of a most important war.

If you're looking for one book to read about this conflict, this is certainly the one you want to read. Besides deploying all the newest thinking about the period, Wawro spends rather more time than I recall Michael Howard doing on the sheer misery of the tail-end of the conflict. This is while finishing with a consideration of the grim irony of this conflict, as to how the often derided French Third Republic became something of a phoenix while the German Second Reich seems to have been congenitally deformed; not the usual conclusion that is drawn about these events.

About the only thing I have to criticize about this book is that it wouldn't have been that big a deal to include some formal order of battle information.½

The work is a highly readable account of the Franco-Prussian War particularly interested in the conduct of the war. The defeat of France is not a foregone conclusion despite the general superiority of the Prussians in military organization, training, and manpower. The superiority of French arms (the chassepot and the mitrailleuse) cost the Prussians high casualities. But the French lose due to their poor leadership and inferiority in artillery. The ability of the Prussians to blast the French positions to pieces after frequently fruitless infantry assaults is their key to victory. Key also is the French ability to throw away almost every opportunity to exploit Prussian weaknesses and hunker down in defensive positions. Wawro also presents good early chapters on why the war occured when it did and the state of the opposing armies.½