Hans von Seeckt

Wikipedia:

Johannes “Hans” Friedrich Leopold von Seeckt (22 April 1866 – 27 December 1936) was a German military officer who served as Chief of Staff to August von Mackensen and was a central figure in planning the victories Mackensen achieved for Germany in the east during the First World War.

. . .Seeckt served as a member of parliament from 1930 to 1932. From 1933 to 1935 he was repeatedly in China as a military consultant to Chiang Kai-shek in his war against the Chinese Communists and was directly responsible for devising the encirclement campaigns, that resulted in a string of victories against the Chinese Red Army and forced Mao Zedong into a 9,000 km retreat, also known as the Long March.

. . .At the outbreak of the First World War, Seeckt held the rank of lieutenant colonel and served as chief of staff for Ewald von Lochow in the German III Corps. On mobilisation, the III Corps was assigned to the 1st Army on the right wing of the forces for the Schlieffen Plan offensive in August 1914 on the Western Front. Early in 1915, after they were attacked by the French near Soissons, Seeckt devised a counterattack that took thousands of prisoners and dozens of guns. He was promoted to colonel on 27 January 1915. In March 1915, he was transferred to the Eastern front to serve as chief of staff to General August von Mackensen of the German 11th Army. He played a major role in the planning and executing of Mackensen’s highly successful campaigns.

In 1917, Seeckt was sent to the Ottoman Empire, a Central Powers ally, to replace Colonel von Schellendorff as Chief of Staff of the Ottoman Army. In choosing Seeckt, Germany was sending a first rate staff officer, but this made little impression on the Turks. The alliance between the Ottoman Empire and Germany was weak. The crumbling Ottoman Empire was enticed to join in the conflict with the promise that a victory would yield them the return of recently lost territories, while Germany hoped the involvement of the Turks would tie down forces of the Entente far from Western Europe. Since the start of the conflict German efforts to influence Ottoman strategy met with limited success. Neither Bronsart nor Seeckt were able to get much consideration for a grand strategy in the Ottoman Empire. Though Enver Pasha would take counsel from the German officers, he would disregard their opinion if it differed from his own. Seeckt wrote that “I… meditate, telegraph, speak, write and calculate in the Turkish service and in Germany’s interest”.

A common view in the German high command was that internal division in a nation undermines a nation’s ability to successfully conduct a military campaign. Seeckt held this view, even to the point of supporting the leadership of the Ottoman Empire as it conducted the genocide of Armenians along its eastern border in 1915. The brutal slaughter met with an outcry from German civilians, churchmen and statesmen. When Seeckt arrived in Turkey two years later he argued such actions were a necessary measure to save Turkey from “internal decay”. In a July 1918 message Seeckt replied to inquiries from Berlin by stating “It is an impossible state of affairs to be allied with the Turks and to stand up for the Armenians. In my view, any consideration, Christian, sentimental or political, must be eclipsed by its clear necessity for the war effort.” Seeckt also supported the Committee of Union and Progress, a group of army officers who had taken power in Turkey and were attempting to modernize the Ottoman state and society to better support the Ottoman army’s effort to win the war.

. . .In the spring of 1919 he was sent to represent the German General Staff at the peace conference in Paris. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Allies to limit their demands for the disarmament of Germany. Seeckt sought to keep a force of 200,000 men, which was denied.

. . .The Treaty of Versailles limited the Army to 100,000 men, only 4,000 of whom could be officers. As the commander in chief of the new Reichswehr, Seeckt wanted to ensure that the best officers were retained. The Reichswehr was designed as a cadre force that could be expanded if need be. Officers and NCOs were trained to be able to command at least at the next higher unit level. At the beginning of World War Two suitable NCOs were commissioned, as the NCOs trained by Seeckt were seen as easily suitable to command much larger units. Almost all of the leaders of the Wehrmacht in World War II were men that Seeckt had retained in 1919–20.

. . .Seeckt made the training standards of the Reichswehr the toughest in the world. He trained them in anti-air and anti-tank fighting by creating wooden weapons and staging mock battles under the guise of training the soldiers for reintroduction into civilian life. Seeckt’s discipline of this small army was quite different from that of past German armies. For instance, rather than the harsh punishments of the Imperial Army, minor offenders were forced to spend off-hour duties lying under a bed and singing old Lutheran hymns. To make the training appear less military, photographs were published of recruits being taught topics like horse anatomy and beekeeping.

. . .The army that Germany went to war with in 1939 was largely Seeckt’s creation. The tactics and operational concepts of the Wehrmacht were the work of Seeckt in the 1920s. In addition, the majority of the senior officers and many of the middle-ranking officers were men that Seeckt had chosen to retain in the Reichswehr. Seeckt created 57 different committees to study the last war to provide lessons learned for the next war. Seeckt stated: “It is absolutely necessary to put the experience of the war in a broad light and collect this experience while the impressions won on the battlefield are still fresh and a major portion of the experienced officers are still in leading positions”. The result was the 1921 book Leadership and Battle with Combined Arms that outlined the combined arms tactics and operational ideas that went on to serve as the Wehrmacht’s doctrine in the Second World War. Seeckt envisioned Germany winning the next war by a series of highly mobile operations featuring combined arms operations of artillery, infantry, armor, and air power working together to concentrate superior firepower to crush the enemy at crucial points. Seeing a significant role for air power in the next war, Seeckt kept a large number of officers in the Reichswehr who had experience in air combat. These officers formed the future officers corps of the Luftwaffe in the 1930s.

. . .After failing to gain a seat as a candidate for the Centre Party, Seeckt was elected to the Reichstag as a member of the DVP, serving from 1930 through 1932. In October 1931, Seeckt was a featured speaker at a rally at Bad Harzburg which led to the founding of the Harzburg Front.[82] In the presidential election of 1932 he wrote to his sister, urging her to vote for Hitler. From 1933–1935 he served as an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek and helped to establish a new basis for Sino-German cooperation until 1941. In October 1933, Seeckt arrived in China to head the German military mission. At the time of his arrival, Sino-German relations were in a bad state owing to the racial arrogance of the Germans, and Chiang was considering firing the Germans and bringing in a French military mission. In order to save the military mission, Seeckt ordered the German officers to behave with more tact towards the Chinese and to start showing some respect for Chinese sensibilities. In this way, Seeckt saved Germany’s position in China.

Seeckt advised Chiang that China would need 60 divisions to form an army, which he proposed to arm with modern weapons and train in the combined arms operations which he had previously used in training the German Army in the 1920s. Seeckt stressed he would need the best Chinese officers to train in modern warfare. His goal was to make the National Revolutionary Army like the army in Germany after the war, a force which could make up for what it lacked in quantity with its high quality of professional soldiers. In addition, Seeckt stressed he wanted an end to regionalism in the Chinese military. The army was to be led by officers who were loyal to Chiang alone, with no regional loyalties. In addition, Seeckt urged Chiang to fortify the lower Yangtze valley, and to adopt policies to industrialize China to gain independence from Western manufacturing. To this end, Seeckt suggested a trade agreement between China and Germany, where Germany would receive minerals needed for weapon manufacture, especially tungsten, and China would be provided with weapons and the industrial machinery needed to make China self-sufficient in producing such weapons. In March 1934, Chiang not only appointed Seeckt as his Chief Military Advisor, but also appointed him as the Deputy Chairman of the Military Affairs Council. In that capacity Seeckt chaired the twice weekly meetings at Nanjing between Chiang and his most senior generals. At a meeting at Mount Lu in 1934, Seeckt’s plan for 60 divisions was adopted. To create that army, a 10-year plan was adopted. The officers trained by Seeckt were important later in the Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion of China.

In early 1934, Seeckt advised Chiang that to defeat the Chinese Communists he needed to employ a scorched earth policy, which required building a series of lines and forts around areas controlled by the Communists in the Jiangxi Soviet in order to force the Communist guerrillas to fight in the open, where the superior firepower of the Nationalists would give them an advantage. Following Seeckt’s advice, in the spring and summer of 1934 the Kuomintang built three thousand “turtle shell” forts linked by a series of roads while at the same time pursuing a scorched earth policy around the forts as part of the Fifth Bandit Extermination Campaign in Jiangxi. It was Seeckt’s tactics that led to a series of defeats suffered by the Chinese Communists that in October 1934 led to the infamous Long March.

An excerpt from, “Learning from the Germans Part II: The Future” By Marinus, Marine Corps Association, January 13, 2021:

The simplest argument in favor of the continued study of the German tradition of maneuver warfare stems from on the same wealth of sources and resources that enables the study of alternative models. In the years between 1979 and 2019, more than two thousand English-language books about various aspects of the German military experience were published. The same period saw the printing of hundreds of board wargames and the creation of dozens of computer games that attempted to replicate, in various ways, the tactical and operational characteristics of German forces. The existence of this body of work makes possible the detailed reconstruction of a wide variety of campaigns, battles, and engagements. At the same time, it facilitates the placement of such events in the broader context of strategy, politics, and culture.

The availability of so much material about the German military tradition greatly reduces dependence upon the memoirs of general officers that loomed so large in the early days of the maneuver warfare movement within the Marine Corps. Most of these suffered from the sort of defects so often seen in the genre of autobiography. That is, they were self-serving accounts that minimized mistakes made by the authors, omitted information that would have been embarrassing, and placed the blame for fiascos on third parties. The worst offender in this regard was Panzer Leader, in which Heinz Guderian took far too much credit for the creation of German armored forces in the 1930s and, in doing so, painted the man most responsible for that development, Ludwig Beck, as a hidebound reactionary. Thanks, however, to the work of English-speaking historians, present-day Marines are in a position to not only recognize this gross mischaracterization but learn about the troubled relationship between the two officers. (General Beck, who had resigned in protest from the German Army in 1938, had been one of the leaders of the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the aftermath of this event, which took place on 20 July 1944, Gen Guderian took aggressive measures to ensure the loyalty of German military officers to the National Socialist regime.)

A more nuanced case for frequent recourse to the wellspring of German military history rests upon the continuous, consistent, and increasingly central role played by many of the fundamental precepts of maneuver warfare in German military culture. That is, while there were many instances where German military professionals violated one or more of these tenets, a deep appreciation for such things as the inherently chaotic nature of war and the importance of a rapid decision cycle permeated the way that German soldiers fought, thought, and taught for more than a hundred years. Thus, while the American, British, and French practitioners of maneuver warfare often waged war in ways that put them at odds with the cultures of the forces in which they served, German maneuverists could reasonably assume that they were cooperating with superiors, subordinates, and peers who shared their beliefs and biases. Because of this, Marines attempting to imagine a force in which the practice of maneuver warfare is the norm will find more positive examples of such organizational orthodoxy in the annals of German military history than in the tales of mavericks, eccentrics, and doctrinal apostates.

A more powerful justification for the retention of the link between maneuver warfare in the Marine Corps and the German military tradition begins, paradoxically, with the two most common arguments offered by the opponents of that enterprise. The first reminds us of the large number of war crimes committed by members of the German armed forces during those conflicts. The second rests firmly upon the incontrovertible fact that Germany lost both world wars.

There is no doubt that, during both world wars, members of the German armed forces, acting in their official capacities, violated laws of war that were then in force in a large number of ways. These crimes included the invasion of neutral countries, the aerial bombardment of cities, the sinking of civilian ships, and the collective punishment of civilians. (Outrages of the last types usually took place in the course of attempts to enforce one of the central tenets of the law of war of that era, the rule that civilians may not, under any circumstances, participate in combat.) In the Second World War, moreover, German soldiers, sailors, and airmen served a regime that engaged in the persecution of political dissidents, the maltreatment of prisoners of war, and a gargantuan, frequently murderous, campaign of ethnic cleansing.

As horrible as they were, the war crimes committed by German servicemen in the course of the world wars were far from unique. The armed forces of the victors of the Second World War invaded neutral countries, bombarded cities from the air, sunk civilian ships, maltreated prisoners of war, and engaged in the collective punishment of civilian communities. In addition to these things, they conducted campaigns of mass rape, looting, and indiscriminate murder against civilians they were obliged to protect. In addition to this, they ensured the survival and, indeed, enabled the expansion of the communist regime of the Soviet Union, the crimes of which surpassed in quality, and greatly exceeded in quantity, those of National Socialist Germany.

The war crimes of the armed forces of the alliance that won the Second World War does not, in any way, excuse those of their German counterpart. They do, however, present serious students of the art of war with a conundrum. If German violations of the laws of war prevent us from studying German military history, then the war crimes committed by members of the Allied armed forces during the Second World War should prevent us from making use of the American, British, and Soviet experience of that conflict. Similarly, if connection to a reprehensible regime prevents a military tradition, institution, or personality from offering anything of value to present-day Marines, then we may study neither Soviet military theory nor the campaigns of the Red Army, let alone the memoirs of Georgi Zhukov.

What is true for the question of war crimes also applies to the issue of ultimate defeat. If we limit ourselves to the study of the winners of various wars, then we deprive ourselves of the lessons that we might learn from the study of the achievements of Hannibal, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Robert E. Lee—let alone the strategic contests that we ourselves have lost. What is worse, a one-sided study of history leads easily to the false assumption that everything done by the victors contributed to their eventual triumph and every act on the part of the losers drove another nail into their collective coffin. In other words, it replaces attempts to make sense of the complex interplay of multiple forces with the unthinking embrace of all things, whether help or hindrance, associated with the side that achieved strategic success.

Done well, the study of German military history necessarily produces a great deal of discomfort. Even if a Marine begins with a quest to learn about techniques, tactics, or campaigning, he cannot spend much time with the relevant sources without being reminded of fatal mistakes made in the realms of strategy, policy, and morality. Indeed, it is this “elephant in the room” that makes the study of the German military tradition so valuable to Marines of the 21st century. In the course of helping us learn the nuts-and-bolts of maneuver warfare, it draws our attention towards the higher arts of war.

An excerpt from, “The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform” By James Corum:

In January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he inherited the best-led, best-trained, and arguably the most-modern army in the world. The process of creating the tactical doctrine of this army and the incorporation of this doctrine into the army’s weapons, organization, and war plans are the primary concern of this work. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, German Army leaders, on their own initiative, began to analyze the lessons of that war carefully, and they set out to create a military system that would be a great improvement on the admittedly impressive one of the old Imperial Army.