Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine, 1918-1945

by John Mosier

Book Overview

A riveting account of the origins and development of the German army that breaks through the distortions of conventional military history Acclaimed for his revisionist history of the German Army in World War I, John Mosier continues his pioneering work in "Cross of Iron," offering an intimate portrait of the twentieth-century German army from its inception, through World War I and the interwar years, to World War II and its climax in 1945. World War...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805075771
• ISBN13: 9780805075779
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.9" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Original

A singularly outstanding and original work. This book far exceeds Mr Mosier's previous efforts at military history.

Read the Citations

This is an excellent, thoroughly researched book. I don't understand how previous reviewers can deny that, given the use of primary sources and first-hand accounts, this is the case. Read the citations if you doubt Mosier's scholarship. True, many are in Russian or German, and therefore are suceptible to translator biases if not read in the native languages, but what would you expect Mosier to do? Just because his theories are not the same as those currently in vogue, does that mean he's wrong? Doubting the truth of official Soviet sources under Stalin is "fanciful"? A great read, and a great book to argue about for serious and open-minded student of WWII.

Debunking the Myths of the Second World War

"Cross of Iron" is John Mosier's best book to date! Having debunked the myths of World War I in "The Myth of the Great War" and the German Army in World War II in "The Blitzkrieg Myth", controversial historian John Mosier once again turns his thoughts to the Wehrmacht in "Cross of Iron. The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine 1918-1945". "Cross of Iron" is as well written and powerful as Mosier's previous books, but much better researched and with fewer unsupported allegations or assumptions. Anyone who has spent time working with primary sources relating to the Second World War knows there is still a great deal to learn about the German armed forces of World War II. Indeed, much of what we think we know are myths - embedded by either the defeated Germans or the victorious Allies to further political or military agendas or to simply hide the truth about the war from the general public. This has been Mosier's underlying thesis in each of his books and the author takes great delights in addressing these myths and debunking them one by one. In "Cross of Iron" the author asserts that the superiority of the Wehrmacht - the German armed forces of World War II - lay in its institutional memory, or doctrine. "The Germans had mastered many of the problems of modern warfare, and they preserved the essentials of what they had learned as they integrated the technologies that emerged in the next decades," notes Mosier. "Their advantage in combat thus was not a function of equipment or even training: it was conceptual, and the two key concepts were speed and integration." There is little here that is new to anyone who has read indepth on the Wehrmacht. What is new is that Mosier addresses each of these issues in detail and discusses their impact on the progress of the war in a manner which is both informative and insightful. His gift is to take existing sources and weave them together into a tapestry of the Second World War much different than what we have been used to seeing. Like a growing number of contemporary historians, Mosier recognizes that all of the existing memoirs and monographs penned by Hitler's Field Marshals and Generals were written with an agenda in mind: to absolve themselves and the Wehrmacht of any blame or complicity in the start of the war or the horrendous war crimes that followed and to blame Hitler for all of the ills suffered by the people of Europe during the war. But modern German historians themselves have proven that this simply isn't so. The military leaders of the Third Reich (like the German population) supported Hitler and the Nazis as long as they were winning and willingly took part in the mass genocide and ethnic cleansing of millions of Jews and Slavs. "The army lost more than the war," writes Mosier, "it lost its honor." Mosier then asserts that it was this complicity in war crimes on an unprecedented scale in modern war that caused the leaders of the Wehrmacht to fight so hard, for they knew that they w

Debunking myths about German military culture

Mosier's book is an analysis of German military power from World War I, through the interwar years, to the end of World War Two. The study combines psychology, cultural studies, and military history to arrive at fresh and novel conclusions regarding the Wermacht, and Mosier will stir up debate on the issues he explores. Mosier attributes Germany's military successes at the outset of World War Two to a proficient, highly trained officer corps that could integrate the new combined arms warfare into its tactics - as well as successes due to the sheer ruthlessness of Hitler's strategies against conflict-averse opponents. More specifically, the superiority of the Wehrmacht was due to its institutional memory. In World War I it had mastered many of the problems of modern warfare. The advantage came not only through superior training, and certainly not of superiority of equipment - it was a conceptual advantage, that of speed and integration of tactical forces. The Wermacht also had severe limitations. Mosier is most interesting in his descriptions of how the Nazi ideology severely limited the German ability to wage war - for instance its struggles to create the modern equipment of warfare (for which the Germans were woefully deficient in many respects) -- the infighting of the Nazi leadership led to fiefdoms preventing real insights to develop strategic bombing forces or ground armor that could match the Allied weaponry. German design tended to be over-engineered, mechanically unreliable, and underpowered. Mosier sees Hitler as a much cannier strategic actor than other historians, essentially agreeing with the logic of such gambles as the Ardennes offensive. Hitler's success, Mosier argues, came from the lack of firmness of his opponents early in the war; as the war progressed though his opponents became more and more willing to absorb casualties in order to defeat the Wermacht. The book is a fascinating cultural and psychological study of Germany's army, shrewdly argued, and likely to be quite influential.

Five stars for enlightening me

In "Cross of Iron", John Mosier essentially continues where he left in "Blitzkrieg Myth", except that we get a continuous story about the German Armed Forces from 1918 to 1945 in addition to a deeper explanation of why much of what is written about it and its methods in WWII is partly distorted from reality. WWII is a big subject, with the Wehrmacht as one of the very most central components. As concluded in his last book, the training and institutional memory were key factors in the Wehrmacht's successes on the European battlefields. In this book he elaborates extensively on this subject, drawing to attention several issues like: * The selection process of the Weimar Republics officers, and how this 100 000 man army consisted mostly of officers and NCO's. * The training of Germany's officers, and its military education * Jewish officers in the Wehrmacht * Psychology in the general staff and among senior officers. Mosier's elaborations and conclusions here are interesting and it seems like he has hit another issue right on spot. More to do with Germany's arms industry, he further discusses its ridiculous wartime production, although increased sharply under Albert Speer's governance, was still lagging far behind its enemies'. A chapter about the personalities and planes of the Luftwaffe gives a deeper understanding of why Germany chose the air strategy that it did, and partly why it was simply unable to design good enough airplanes during the war. Some of these explanations also applies to other products of war, such as tanks. "Paper Tigers: Hitler's Tanks" is a chapter with quite a self explaining title. Yet again, our (created) illusions about Germany's armored and mechanized capabilites are thoroughly broken down. Mosier also gives his views on Hitler, the Nurnberg process and an important chapter about criminal acts done by the Wehrmacht, some of which are fairly well known already. Personally, I conclude that if most of what John Mosier claims is correct, there is a lot of bollocks out there in the form of so called 'serious' historical works. More than anything this book serves as a reminder and teacher that we should all be a lot more critical of what we read. If Mosier should turn out to be a fake, then it would just serve as a double reminder, but I seriously doubt it. After having read a lot about the Wehrmacht, its battlefield performance and general history of WWII in ten years time, just too many questions and inconsistencies have popped up. Many of them are finally answered after reading John Mosier's two last books. I intend to get my hands on "The Myth of the Great War", ending the trilogy with his first book, since I suspect them all to be strongly linked. I have a sense of relief after reading these two books. Relief because I feel that someone has finally told a more truthful truth about a very interesting subject. I could not avoid plunging into all of Mosier's notes, which are gathered before the index this time. This r