Class Schedule, Lecture Topics, and Reading Assignments:
Week 1: Introduction to the course as provided in our course syllabus. Lecture: Vietnam: Strategy & Tactics. Reading: You may begin reading “We were Soldiers…” immediately.
Week 2: We will turn next to the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon warfare. Lecture: The Industrialization of War I, Intro to the Civil War. Reading, Ropp, Chapter 6. “The Wars of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1854-1871).
Week 3 & 4 We will dedicate the next two weeks to a more in-depth study of the Civil War. Since this is a course in military history, our primary focus in lecture will be on the operational history of the war, including, of course, a comparison of the two preeminent commanders: Robert E. Lee & Ulysses S. Grant. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, we must also consider the role of President Abraham Lincoln in shaping the political and military strategies that ultimately won the war for the North. On our midterm writing assignment, you will have an opportunity to assess the historical record and military accomplishments of both Grant and Lee, as well as the contribution of Lincoln’s political and diplomatic leadership. The consensus of military historians over the last century maintains that Lee was the best tactician of the conflict (with General William Tecumseh Sherman a close second), but the consensus also maintains that Ulysses S. Grant was the greatest strategist of the conflict. It is even possible to suggest that the strategies employed by Grant and Lincoln against the Confederacy became the American way of war. They were repeated on a far greater scale by Presidents Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt to defeat Germany in World Wars I and II! The Ropp text will provide a clear and insightful assessment of the politics, military strategies, and tactical realities of the war. In the case of the Civil War, it is impossible to reach a full understanding of these factors without considering the historical significance of slavery—what the historian Eric Foner described as “the original sin” of America. I address the importance of slavery in passing, but, as a European historian, I must defer to my American history colleagues for a more nuanced and complete discussion of the role of race-relations in American society. Reading: Continue Ropp, Chapter 6.
Due to time constraints, we will leave the nineteenth-century wars behind and jump ahead to the World Wars of the twentieth century. It will be necessary to turn our attention to European developments, about all, the rise of Germany as a great military power.
Week 5: Intro to the Great War, 1914-18. The Trench Stalemate and the problem of adjusting tactics to the new firepower. Lecture: The Industrialization of War 2, Douglas Haig and the Battle of the Somme, 1916. The Battle of Verdun. Reading: Ropp, Chapter 8, The First World War.
Week 6: New Theories and New Weapons: The tank, the airplane, and the submarine. The theory of Blitzkrieg. Reading: Ropp, Chapter 9, “The Long Armistice, 1919-1939. In this excellent chapter, Theodore Ropp discusses the rapid development of the tank, the airplane, and the submarine and traces the ways in which the future belligerent nations of the Second World War attempted to shape new strategies and tactics to take advantage of the new advances in military technology. Here is a brief summary of those developments. In Germany, military planners were eager to take advantage of a new theory of combined arms that came to be known as Blitzkrieg. In brief, the German idea was to combine tactical airpower with large numbers of tanks attacking the sort of fixed defenses that had proved to be so difficult in the 1914-18 war. As a result, Germany began World War II with a powerful tactical air force and, quite possibly, the most modern army in the world. In the United States and Great Britain, a new generation of airpower theorists were focused upon designing and building long-range strategic bombers that might be capable of winning a world war from the air and thus avoiding the costly trench warfare that characterized the First World War. In both Japan and the United States, planners imagined how to win a possible naval war in the Pacific, fought with a new generation of warships. The Japanese pioneered the development of the aircraft carrier. It was this very modern, revolutionary combination of aircraft carrier battle groups that carried out the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The United States, of course, soon surpassed the Japanese in that and also conducted the most efficient submarine offensive against Japanese shipping. Above all, Great Britain and the United States dedicated an enormous amount of study and expertise to designing and manufacturing enormous, technically advanced air forces, that eventually overwhelmed the German Luftwaffe and devastated both Germany and Japan.
Weeks 7-15: The Second World War.
Here are a few brief comments on the framework of the Second World War in Europe. The Second World W ar can be divided into two stages:
Sept 1939 to December 1941 – BLITZKRIEG. This period was characterized by almost two years of rapid, stunning German victories: over Poland, Great Britain, and France. The German army and air force (Luftwaffe) launched quick strikes with a coordinated tactical system of aircraft, tanks and infantry. The new Germans method of attack enabled them to win decisive battles and knock entire countries out the war with breathtaking speed. The German army clearly enjoyed a technical and tactical advantage over their opponents for much of the war. Blitzkrieg was suited to Hitler’s intuitive style. Hitler’s diplomacy augmented pure military power by reaching an arrangement with the Soviet Union enabling the Germans to concentrate against one opponent at a time. The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact completely changed the international political context of the war. In brief, Hitler’s diplomacy was as great a factor in the early German victories as the success of the Luftwaffe and the German Panzer divisions. It may be useful to think of the war between September 1939 and the defeat of France in June 1940 as Adolf Hitler’s successful attempt to refight the First World War and change the outcome.
Hitler wanted to avoid total war; he really did not want a world war at all – he preferred a series of short, sharp conflicts that would not bankrupt the German economy. The Nazis tried to keep up the supply of consumer goods for German civilians and fight the war using captured resources: i.e. Roman oil fields, Czech armament factories. Hitler was remarkably successful in fighting a massive war of aggression on a shoestring. Since Germany lacked the industrial capacity to build all the aircraft, submarines, tanks and weapons necessary to defeat a great coalition of opponents, Hitler tried to build submarines in 1940 to beat Great Britain and then re-tool German industry in 1941-42 to build tanks to use against the Soviet Union. This pay as you go style of warfare worked as long as Hitler’s diplomacy kept his opponents off balance; it failed when Germany, due to his blunders brought about the Allied coalition of Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. This global alliance had economic and military resources beyond the dreams of the Nazi state.
12/7/1941 to 5/8/1945 – The period of TOTAL WAR. The Nazi strategy fell apart when Adolf Hitler risked an invasion of the Soviet Union and failed to achieve the quick victory. In December of 1941, The German army suffered its first real military disaster in the Battle of Moscow. Hitler compounded that error by declaring war on the United States on December 11, 1941. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor transformed a European conflict into a global conflict and left Germany facing an alliance Great Britain and two future Superpowers: The United States and the Soviet Union. There simply was no way that Germany, for all of its military expertise, could win such a conflict. This period of Total War led to the complete destruction of Germany. By the end of the war, Germany had lost over 7,000,000 dead – a figure amounting to about 16% of the pre-war population of the country.
But from 1939 to 1941 the German army seemed invincible, and Hitler himself appeared to some to be a new Napoleon. Judging from the Polish experience, Hitler was closer to Genghis Khan. The Germans simply swallowed Poland. The areas that were not directly annexed to the Reich (or absorbed by the Soviet Union) became a colony called the “General Government” under Hans Frank. It was here that the Jews of Eastern Europe would be concentrated – it was here that the death camp network would be constructed to “process” those Jews. Poland, and much of Eastern Europe, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, sank into a new Dark Age.
Week 9: The first indications of German weakness: The failure of German air power in the battle of Britain and the disastrous miscalculations of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941. Reading: Ropp, Chapter 10. “The Second World War.
WEEK 10: Spring Break
Weeks 11-12: Pearl Harbor, Midway & Tarawa: America & Total War: Reading: Ropp, Chapter 10
Weeks 13-14: The British & American Bomber Offensive against the Reich, The Battle of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and the defeat of Germany. Reading: Ropp, Chapter 10.
Week 15 & Finals Week: Finally, although we have concentrated on the war against Germany, we must examine the events and thinking that led the United States to be the first, and only, nation in the world to use nuclear weapons.