John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship. Donald B. Connelly. The University of North Carolina Press. 471 pages; maps; photographs; index; $49.95.

Reviewed by Brig. Gen. John S. Brown, U.S. Army retired

I first learned of Lt. Gen. John M. Schofield’s definition of discipline at a tender age. As a new cadet at the U.S. Military Academy, it was right up there with “how’s the cow” and the amount of water in Lusk Reservoir to be memorized as “plebe poop”—and as an alternative to terrible consequences. Until I read this fine biography by Donald B. Connelly, however, I had little understanding of how much we as a profession truly owe to this distant colleague. Schofield proved a capable warfighter, but made even greater contributions as an advocate of reform and as a politically astute senior soldier. Connelly ably develops these themes in 14 chapters that progress chronologically, extensively supported by 80 pages of endnotes, a 24-page bibliography, nine maps and a comprehensive index.

Schofield graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1853 and saw a brief period of active service against the Seminoles in Florida before being reassigned to teach on the West Point faculty in 1855. When the Civil War broke out, he was on leave of absence teaching physics and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Despite the thinness of his prior field experience, he advanced quickly and performed well. During the Atlanta Campaign of 1864 he ably maneuvered his corps as the left wing of Gen. William T. Sherman’s broadly deployed grand army. His delay of Confederate Gen. John B. Hood’s counteroffensive and his gutting of Hood’s army at the bloody Battle of Franklin positioned the Union for decisive success at the Battle of Nashville a few weeks later. At war’s end Schofield was in North Carolina, where he played a key role in surrounding and capturing Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s army.

Connelly carries us through the Civil War in the first half of his book. He does justice to the campaigning but, more important, also positions us to understand Schofield’s role as a reformer—and the relevance of his earlier experiences to that role. The late 19th century witnessed the maturation of modern concepts of profession, and soldiers participated in this growth. Professional associations, journals, tiered military schooling, standardized training practices and modern expectations with respect to the background and experience of officers all date from this era. Schofield proved a key player in Army reform for 40 years—as President Johnson’s Secretary of War, as Sherman’s immediate subordinate and confidant, as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, as commanding general of the Army and as a distinguished retiree who provided political support and counsel to Elihu Root and others.

Schofield’s greatest contribution to reform may have been his ability to work through and prosper in intensely political environments. As a lieutenant, Schofield proved instrumental in saving Missouri for the Union, in the process extralegally mustering federal troops and overthrowing the elected governor. He successfully contended with the politics as well as the military aspects of guerrilla warfare, martial law, slavery and emancipation, the use of African-American troops and the governance of conquered territories. As the military commander in Reconstruction-era Virginia, he stood in the midst of civil-military crisis. Surreptitiously identified to lead American volunteers into Mexico to evict the French, he instead assisted in a satisfactory diplomatic resolution. The rocky road to military reform was, of course, an intensely political process. Establishing the position that became the Army Chief of Staff, reining in the bureaus, professionalizing leadership, coping with domestic strife, transforming from a frontier constabulary to capabilities appropriate for a world power and establishing sensible relationships with the emerging National Guard all required adroit political maneuvering.

Connelly’s discussion of political and civil-military relations is superb, and perhaps the most useful aspect of this thoughtful book. Schofield’s engaging, affable, self-deprecating character served the Army well in a world of prickly egos. A number of his predecessors as commanding general quarreled so fiercely with their Secretaries of War that the two men could not live in the same town. Schofield consciously and conscientiously subordinated himself to his Secretaries of War and encouraged them to focus on politics while he ran the Army on their behalf. His 40-year effort to effect this principle established the concept of a Chief of Staff, while the political support he enjoyed enabled the eventual transformation of our calling into a profession.

John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship is must reading for students of the Civil War, the 19th-century Army, civil-military relations and the Army as a profession. I strongly recommend it.

BRIG. GEN. JOHN S. BROWN, USA Ret., was chief of military history at the U.S. Army Center of Military History from December 1998 to October 2005. He commanded the 2nd Battalion, 66th Armor, in Iraq and Kuwait during the Gulf War and returned to Kuwait as commander of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, in 1995. He has a doctorate in history from Indiana University.


NAZI IDEOLOGY VERSUS THE GERMAN HIGH COMMAND
Inside Hitler’s High Command. Geoffrey P. Megargee. Foreword by Williamson Murray. University of Kansas Press. 327 pages; photographs; index; $17.95.

Reviewed by James J. Schneider

Geoffrey Megargee is an applied research scholar at the Center for Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. His new book is a thorough examination of the German high command, with a special focus on the German General Staff system, from January 1933 to May 1945, which coincides with Adolph Hitler’s accession to power and his ultimate demise. It is the relationship between Hitler and the German high command that makes this book a unique contribution to the historiography of the period.

Megargee provides a systems perspective as he seeks to answer the following essential questions: What was the balance of power within the German high command? How was it established and maintained? What struggles affected this balance and the ability of the high command to function? What was the German core war-making doctrine? How did these ideas influence the structure and function of the command system? What was the daily routine of the high command as the controlling “brain” of the Wehrmacht? How did the German decision-making process actually work in practice? How did the logistics, personnel management and military intelligence systems fit into the decision-making process? What forces drove structural changes in the high command and how did they arise? What were their effects? How did the power of personality, especially Hitler's, affect the high command and its organizational and functional development? Finally, how did the National Socialist ideology affect the rationality of the high command and General Staff?

Aided by superior German resources, the author successfully addresses these and other questions as well. Most significant, however, is Megargee’s handling of the issue of Nazi ideology and its effect on military decision making and problem solving.

It was Voltaire who observed that, if we believe in absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. Nazi ideology so thoroughly and absolutely corrupted the reasoning of the German high command that its rational functioning ceased to exist; by the end of the war the absurd was perceived as reality. Critical thinking and reasoning, the core element in military decision making, had traditionally depended on intellectual courage, integrity, rigor, objectivity and other aspects of rational thinking. Megargee is able to demonstrate that Hitler, as supreme warlord, possessed a political and strategic outlook that was fundamentally irrational and manifest with an unwillingness to change his beliefs in light of new facts and evidence. The erosion of the rationality of the high command emerged as a direct consequence of the military implementation of Hitler’s strategy of extinction.

Hans Delbrück, the German military theorist and historian, discovered two primary strategic patterns in the history of the art of war. The first, a strategy of annihilation (Niederwerfungstrategie), relied on a decisive battle of annihilation; the second, a strategy of exhaustion (Ermattungstrategie) relied on maneuver and battles of attrition. Although Megargee does not use Delbrück’s framework or terminology, his work reinforces the idea that for the first time in modern warfare, Hitler’s “genius” hatched a third kind of strategy, a strategy of extinction (Erloschungstrategie). Especially on the Eastern Front, this strategy was executed through operations (instead of battles) of annihilation at the military front and with battles of extermination (Ausrottungschlachten) in the civil rear. The extermination of the Warsaw ghetto, for instance, and the camp exterminations were all tactical and operational components of this strategic process. The logistical challenge that confronted the Germans in implementing the extermination battles was certainly as demanding as any conventional operation. Megargee is clear about how this strategy influenced the thinking of the German high command. Beginning with Hitler’s emphasis of character above competence, the entire rational, intellectual and moral climate of the high command became transformed. For Hitler, character meant nothing more than personal loyalty; an officer’s intellectual quality and competence was relevant only to the extent that he had sufficient intelligence to follow the Führer. The elevation of personal loyalty over competence foreclosed at the outset any rational rejoinder to Hitler’s policy of racial extinction. Megargee’s account of the German high command can thus be seen as a kind of morality play staged in a theater of global war.

Ultimately, from the German perspective, the strategy of extinction undermined the very instrumentality of the war itself; within the intellectual climate of absurdity, Hitler’s schizoid high command refused at every turn to recognize the face of defeat; the irrational will to victory destroyed the very instrument that might have achieved some limited success. Here, in the book’s broadest context, appears a window of insight into more recent confrontations: the pursuit of war objectives that become increasingly more irrational subverts and erodes the rationality of the military charged with the attainment of those very aims.

JAMES J. SCHNEIDER, Ph.D., is a professor of military theory at the School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kan.


THE WAR WITHIN—ANALYSIS OF THE UNION COMMANDS
Commanding the Army of the Potomac. Stephen R. Taaffe. University Press of Kansas. 284 pages; photographs; maps; notes; index; $29.95.
Reviewed by Col. Cole C. Kingseed, U.S. Army retired

During the Civil War, 36 officers in the Army of the Potomac were assigned corps commands ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 men. Of the total, only three managed to maintain their commands for more than a year. In an intriguing analysis of senior command in the Union’s most visible and significant field army, historian Stephen R. Taaffe takes an in-depth look at these officers’ collective successes and failures and concludes that nowhere was the conflict within the war more evident than in the selection and retention of the army’s corps commanders.

An associate professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, Taaffe is no stranger to military history. His previous works include The Philadelphia Campaign: 1777-1778 and MacArthur’s Jungle War: The 1944 New Guinea Campaign. Commanding the Army of the Potomac is Taaffe’s first venture into the history of America’s bloodiest conflict. While most histories of the Army of the Potomac focus on that army’s commanding generals, Taaffe looks at the cadre of officers at the corps level, examining who was appointed corps level command, why they were selected and why so many ultimately failed the test of leadership.

As President, Abraham Lincoln reserved the final approval of the army’s corps level commanders. At the outset of the war, Lincoln based his selections on rank and seniority to form the nucleus of the Army of the Potomac’s initial cadre of corps commanders. Equally important was his perception of the individual officer’s merit, but perception of merit often carried more weight than battlefield realities. Interpersonal relationships within the officer corps, Congress and the Lincoln administration also proved determining factors in selection for senior command.

Taaffe divides the Army of the Potomac’s corps commanders into four distinct groups. The McClellanites, those followers of the army’s first commander, George B. McClellan, were the most numerous, and they collectively shared McClellan’s limited war perspective. This cadre included Gettysburg’s victor George G. Meade, Ambrose Burnside and the army’s most illustrious corps commander, Winfield Scott Hancock.

Next were the officers who owed their positions directly to political pressures on the Lincoln administration. Irwin McDowell, Edwin Sumner, Erasmus Keyes and other political appointees routinely failed to measure up to Lincoln’s expectations.

Corps commanders whom Taaffe labels “the opportunists” made up the third category. Regrettably, these officers demonstrated a lack of military competence when they achieved senior rank within the army. “Fighting” Joe Hooker, Dan Sickles and Dan Butterfield all sought command for their own self-aggrandizement, were shameless self-promoters and contributed to the Army of the Potomac’s defeat at the gates of Richmond and at Fredericksburg in 1862. At Gettysburg, Sickles and Butterfield actively undermined the efforts of Meade to establish a high-performing team in the war’s most crucial campaign.

By far the most competent commanders emerged from the ranks of the army’s brigade and division commanders. In this capacity Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant enjoyed opportunities that were unavailable to the Army of the Potomac’s commanders; since Grant commanded all the armies of the republic, he did not have to limit his selections to the eastern army. Able to draw talent from across multiple theaters of operation, Grant promoted officers primarily based on merit. Not surprisingly, it took years for such competent commanders to emerge; unfortunately many of the officers who proved themselves to be the most qualified to lead corps did not have the opportunity to do so before the war’s conclusion.

Serving as corps commanders proved a dangerous business as fully 20 percent of the Army of the Potomac’s corps commanders succumbed to death, illness or serious wounds over the course of the conflict. By the end of the war, however, merit-based promotion supplied the bulk of the Army of the Potomac’s senior commanders, but as an entity, the most qualified officers exerted little influence on the Army of the Potomac’s high command because it took years to refine an officer’s battlefield skills. Only Philip Sheridan and Edward Ord achieved sufficient seniority to reach corps level command and higher by 1865. Taaffe also explores the reasons why officers were removed from command. Only eight of the 36 corps commanders in the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James went on to larger and more important commands. The vast majority fell by the wayside and most were relegated to secondary and tertiary commands. Regardless of the reasons why they were initially appointed to command army corps, fully three-quarters of the temporary and permanent corps commanders derailed because of battlefield incompetence, arrival of more senior commanders and alienation of superiors.

Unwittingly, Taaffe draws interesting parallels that our nation’s current military and civilian leadership would be prudent to explore. Too frequently, assignment to senior commands during the Civil War resulted from negotiations among the President, Secretary of War, general in chief and Army of the Potomac commander. Becoming a senior general did not guarantee a corps command, as often personal relationships within the army played an important role in achieving corps command. Such a system contained inherent weakness as longtime “friendships occasionally blinded officers to one another’s weaknesses” and “cliquishness limited opportunities for outsiders.”

That being said, the vast majority of the Army of the Potomac’s commanders demonstrated some degree of military acumen, but only a few were exceptional. Availability and proximity to the nation’s center of power often led to promotion of less qualified officers than those who had demonstrated unsurpassed potential for senior command. Taaffe clearly demonstrates that those officers “who attempted to shun politics and concentrate on performing their duty often found themselves sucked into the intrigue around them.” Aside from Taaffe’s superb analysis of command in the Army of the Potomac, his examination of senior military commanders delivers a valuable message to our nation’s current defense establishment.

COL. COLE C. KINGSEED, USA Ret., Ph.D., a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is a writer and consultant.