Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France 1870-1871 Cambridge, 2003,

Mr. Wawro had already produced an in many respects interesting book on the Six Week’s War of 1866, enriched by quantities of impressive documentation (yet inexplicably lacking serious Italian material). This newest work is a natural progression of its predecessor, and again displays a not inconsiderable wealth of detail. Wawro makes excellent use of French and, especially, Bavarian archival sources that have often been neglected in previous histories, and weaves a very compelling narrative of the battle of Wissembourg. It appears Wawro has consciously sought to emulate Sir Michael Howard’s 1961 history of the war, going so war as even titling it in nearly identical terms and featuring a similar image on the dust jacket of his book. And, in some respect, Wawro has gone his model one better, infusing his narrative with much drama by the use of many dramatic first hand accounts.

But it seems Howard’s epigone has carried admiration too far, for his history ultimately adds nothing new of import while at the same time repeating the errors and lacunae of its model. And though, as we said this book has much good in it, this makes the adulteration of much of the remaining content all the more insidious. We may broadly categorize the weaknesses of the work as follows: errors of detail/spotty scholarship, tendentious content, errors in logic, conceptualization (in our parlance this refers to the practice of deductive history: starting from a more or less à priori conclusion and thereafter gathering and marshalling supporting evidence and, as a corollary, ignoring and omitting evidence that might be at variance with the pre-arranged ‘verdict’), and, omissions.

Some of these omissions are general in scope, others are specific. Of the latter kind, we may observe that both Howard and Wawro miss the critical military factor underlying the war’s outbreak—Prussia’s imminent deployment of the Aptierung Beck, a vastly improved rifle which would nearly have evened the odds against German infantry. Another, and to our judgment more serious gap, is Wawro’s failure to really address what properly should be a major theme of any history of the Franco-Prussian War, viz. the role that emerging technologies played in its unfolding and outcome, and if and how this holds any importance for our time. Probably the most crucial of these technological changes—a ‘paradigm shift’ to borrow the phrase coined by the physicist and historian Thomas Kuhn—is the emergence of modern rifles and artillery. Simply put, the fielding of effective rifles and artillery in 1870 meant that it became practical to hit targets with precision as far as the human eye can see. The battlefield now became much, much deadlier. Tactics had to catch up with technology—and both the German and French armies would wrestle with the problem of adaptation. In many ways, the implications of this technological evolution in firepower would not be drawn until the end of the First World War—and the consequences of this ‘lag’ between material realities and strategy and tactics subsequently played a critical role in shaping world history. The failure to address such an important theme makes both Wawro and Howard’s tendency to get lost in miscellany, and their failure to sufficiently underline and, indeed, dwell on this crucial aspect of the Franco-Prussian War all the more vexing.

Beyond this, Wawro indulges in a good deal of conceptualization, blithely cherry-picking his way to an idealized portrayal of Prussian Auftragstaktik which, outside of the printed page and the parade ground, surely bears no resemblance to what actually took place during the climactic battles of 1870.

We may also note that Wawro’s attempts at rhetorical flair, though not uniformly infelicitous, mar rather than add to his work’s quality. The footnoting also seems to follow a rather opaque pattern, referencing the most anodyne facts while at the same time failing to provide footnotes for other categorical statements and judgments on more controversial issues. To be deplored also, are regrettable and avoidable errors of logic and fact as well as instances of carelessness; of which we may cite several examples: in one section Wawro cites an Austrian (which he labels as ‘Prussian’, even though according to his footnote it appears in the Östereischiche Militär Zeitung) article of 1868 as a reference for the combat shortcomings of the Mitrailleuse—the ancestor of the modern machine gun which was being secretly developed by the French. One fails to understand how such an article, written two years before the weapon was ever used in action (or, indeed, its existence truly established, since it was a ‘secret’ weapon) can be employed to substantiate its practical deficiencies. In describing the skirmish at Sarrebourg, Wawro describes the Prince Impérial ‘gathering spent cartridges’—quite impossible, since the Chassepot fired a consumable cartridge; perhaps he meant ‘bullet’?

In another more serious logical lapse, Wawro states that immediately prior to the battle of Froeschwiller, Napoleon III, disquieted by reports of the French defeat at Spicheren, contemplated the withdrawal of Marshal Mac-Mahon’s Army of the Rhine. But this reasoning makes little sense, because the battles of Spicheren and Froeschwiller took place simultaneously—on the 6th of August--and the defeat at Spicheren did not become clear until after seven o’clock in the evening, after the battle of Froeschwiller had ended.

Elsewhere, (p. 101) Wawro makes another contradictory statement: "Luckily for the thirty-nine year-old Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, Prussian tactics never relied on frontal attacks." Wissembourg, Woerth, Spicheren, Borny, Mars-la-Tour, Saint-Privat—six out of seven of the major battles of 1870 featured massive frontal assaults by the Prussians. Again, as in his conceptual romance with the Auftragstaktik concept, Wawro does not make a distinction between tactics as represented in the manuals and staff-histories and tactics as they actually take pace on the battlefield.

Still another opposition occurs in the same section. Wawro makes a point of writing “how deeply Prussian tactics had penetrated the Bavarian army in the years since 1866..." (p. 100), but then soon goes on to add (p. 105): “The truth, of course, was altogether different...the Prussians had turned an intensely critical gaze on their new south German ally before the smoke of the battle had even lifted. What they found was an undisciplined Bavarian army that had performed abysmally in 1866 (as an Austrian ally) and still seemed unprepared for the tests of modern warfare.” How, we ask, can the Bavarian army be so behind the Prussian if, as the author has just told us, it is “deeply” penetrated by Prussian tactics?

Particularly objectionable is a reference Wawro makes to Ardant du Picq, pejoratively representing the French military thinker as arguing “that the ‘moral action’ of inspired troops could overcome the ‘destructive action’ of inanimate guns’ (p. 174) and subsuming his thought to the notoriously disastrous French tactics of 1914. This amounts to a gross misreading of du Picq, as just one quotation from du Picq should suffice to demonstrate: “The whole of the science of combat lies then in the happy, proper combination, of the open order, scattered to secure destructive effect, and a good disposition of troops in formation as supports and reserves, so as to finish by moral effect the action of the advanced troops.”(Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies, p. 85)

Any thorough reading of du Picq should suffice abundantly in establishing that officer’s not only sound, but prescient grasp of what modern combat was becoming in 1869-1870; emphasizing moral as well as material factors. In fact, this, in the author’s words, ‘foolish’du Picq was a great proponent of the practical, real world Prussian tactics (which, incidentally, also laid great stress on the moral element in combat) so lauded by Mr. Wawro.

Indeed, so repeated are Wawro’s cheap-shots towards the French army (a notable instance being when he mentions a monetary award given to French troops and gratuitously adds that the sum “would keep them in wine and prostitutes for weeks”,p.90), that we are forced to conclude that he is either a rabid francophobe or a virulent germanophile. Probably the former is the better supposition, judging from a recent article where Wawro attempted to draw a parallel between the Franco-Prussian War and on-going American military operations in Iraq, with the Americans playing the role of the Prussians and the French, comme par hasard, playing the role of those nasty Iraqi supporters of the villainous Saddam Hussein and, in a final flourish, glibly assigned the guilt for the outbreak of the war on the Iraqis…If parallels are to be drawn, one is rather tempted—based on the author’s status as an instructor at the Naval War College—to see in the poor planning and bungled execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom that the Leboeufs and Bazaines of the 21st Century, doubtless energized and inspired by the lectures of silver-tongued Staff School exegetes like Wawro, have moved from the Seine to the Potomac and found congenial quarters in the Pentagon.

Notwithstanding this curious mix of logical and factual missteps, or the incoherent subtext that underlies it, we can recommend this history because of its useful inclusion of first-hand accounts (although Wawro would have done well to include the primary source compilation of French accounts in Été 1870: La Guerre Racontée par les Soldats, Jean-François Le Caillon, Paris 2002) to readers already familiar with the war.