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Peter H. Wilson, "Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500" (Harvard UP, 2023)
01:00:11
An interview with Peter H. Wilson
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- [01:26]
Peter H. Wilson
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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AJ Woodhams
So if I am, let's say, let's say I'm a soldier In Frederick the Great's army in 1740, how have things changed for me from the year 1500 up to 1740 in terms of equipment, training, just how have things changed?
- [01:45]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, you get clothes, you get clothes issued to you. So you'll get sort of a set of underwear and a shirt and shoes and stuff that come. You'll get that once a year and you'll get a uniform coat probably every two years, which is better than most of the German armors, which was about every three years.
- [02:09]
AJ Woodhams
It should be noted too that originally you would have to bring your own equipment to fight.
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Peter H. Wilson
Yeah, that's right.
- [02:15]
AJ Woodhams
Closer to 1500. But now things are different.
- [02:18]
Peter H. Wilson
Yeah, you would have that and your pay would be docked accordingly.
- [02:31]
AJ Woodhams
Hi everyone, this is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books podcast where I interview today's best authors writing about war related topics. Today I am super excited to have Peter H. Wilson on the show for his new book Iron and A Military History of The German speaking peoples since 1500. Peter Wilson is a professor of the history of war at the University of Oxford and the author of several books, including Heart of A History of the Holy Roman Empire and the Thirty Years War, Europe's Tragedy. He is also a contributor to the BBC, L.A. times and financial Times, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Peter, how are you doing today?
- [03:17]
Peter H. Wilson
Oh, good, thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me on.
- [03:20]
AJ Woodhams
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really glad that you're here today. This is a really fascinating topic and one that I'm really glad that you've written about. I feel like my knowledge, and you write about this in your introduction, my knowledge, and I feel like the knowledge of a lot of people when it comes to German military history is, of course, the first and Second World War, and that's really all I knew. And your book includes those periods, but it focuses mostly on what came before and what came after, and I really appreciated that. So I guess firstly here, why did you decide to write this book?
- [03:59]
Peter H. Wilson
Right. Well, I've always found German history really interesting, and I think it probably comes from opening up a historical atlas. And, you know, all the other countries in Europe are all shaded in nice uniform colors. And you look at the middle of Europe and it's such a mess and you think, well, you know, how on earth, why was it like that? How did they get on? How did they organize themselves? And that's the kind of basic question I guess I've been trying to answer for most of my career. And I had the idea of writing this book for a long time. And yeah, it felt really good to finish it, I have to say.
- [04:40]
AJ Woodhams
Yeah, well, I mean, it's a big book. I mean, if you're watching right now, you can see kind of the thickness of the book. But to be honest, even though it's a big book, I mean, 500 years of military history, you know, you can't. I mean, even just like some of these conflicts, people write books that are just as long. And so it seemed like such an ambitious project. Did that intimidate you to write 500 years worth of history in a single book?
- [05:11]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, having. Having you mentioned earlier on, I wrote the history of the Holy Roman Empire, so that was a thousand years. So this seems. This seems slightly more manageable. But yeah, I wanted to do something that gave the whole broad sweep of this on its own terms. So we don't hear the story as a kind of teleological, inevitable march to the two world wars, and then we don't stop the story there, we actually carry on. That was the whole point. It was to sort of. Yes, that's extremely important, the two wars of the first half of the 20th century. But, you know, we need to put them into their broader context. And. Yeah, that was one of the purposes of doing it the way.
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AJ Woodhams
Well, talk about some of the myths of German militarism. People often say about Germany and Prussia specifically that it was uniquely militaristic. Why was that not the case?
- [06:14]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, I think you're quite right. It has that image. And you say those words, Prussian militarism. And we have a certain sort of set of images come to mind. I mean, maybe we have Frederick the Great. We certainly have the sort of pickelhauber helmets and the sort of image that, in fact, that the publishers chose for the front of the book, which is a painting, a patriotic painting of a battle in the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866. And then obviously, we have all the hardware and so on and steel helmet and the stuff from the two world wars. And that sort of. That image is very dominant and it's very visual, and it conveys a sense that the Germans have been somehow uniquely warlike and also somehow that they've been successful. And it's quite interesting that a lot of the books that cover this, you know, conveniently stop the story sometimes, perhaps in 1943, not even in 1945. So, you know, there's a more complicated story there and there's. It's understandable why we have that particular image because it is actually, when you scratch the surface, you realize just how complicated it is. And it's much easier to have a simple story, particularly if we're trying to fit, say, Germany into, you know, the history of another country and so on. So we have something that seems to make things intelligible and make sense. But what I've said is that to some extent there is a reality there that's important. The Germans themselves, some came to believe this and outsiders came to believe that, and that also then shaped their actions certainly in the later 19th and early 20th century. But there's a bigger and more interesting story out there as well.
- [08:09]
AJ Woodhams
So just kind of talking about some of the symbolism of, you know, when we think of. Of German militarism. So the title of your book, Iron and Blood. I feel like I see the word iron a lot associated with the German military. You've got the Iron Cross, Iron and blood. Why is iron. Why is that associated so much with German militarism?
- [08:30]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, partly because they made those associations themselves. So as you say, the medal that comes from the so called war of Liberation, so 1813 against Napoleonic France, the Iron Cross. So that was very much a part of about trying to create a Prussian martial identity. And it was actually originally open for civilians who did good things as well, but became a military medal and interestingly doesn't have a continuous history. They drop it, they restart it and so forth. But I mean, iron, yes, it's a hard metal, isn't it? I mean it's a sort of serious one. It's not like gold or something, which is shiny and soft. So it has all those associations with hardness and toughness.
- [09:22]
AJ Woodhams
Well, let's go all the way back to the year 1500, which is where your book starts. And it should be noted too that your book is not just, I guess we're going to use the word Germany a lot in this podcast, but it's not just what is today modern day Germany. It's all the German speaking peoples. So modern day Germany, but also Austria and Switzerland. So take us back all the way to 1500 with this region. What do the militaries of this region look like in 1500? What kind of weapons do they use? What types of battles are being fought? What was taking place in society?
- [10:03]
Peter H. Wilson
Right. Well, the whole point of starting there is that that's where those stories interconnect. So Austria, Switzerland and Germany as well. So they interconnect in the Holy Roman Empire, which is you still a very powerful. It's the largest and most prestigious state. There isn't another emperor in Europe at the time. It is supposed to be the guardian of Christian Europe. So a lot of the conflicts are being fought in the east against the Turks who have overrun Hungary. And they are a real world power. I mean the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents at the time as technologically and militarily advanced. So a lot of the conflict is fought in the east and it's about coordinating money and resources from across this vast area to assemble forces, at least to hold the line. The Turks are usually the ones on the offensive and there's a lot of siege warfare and raiding as characterizes the conflicts in the East. Those in the west are mainly between the Habsburgs. So the Austrian family that basically monopolize the imperial title and are contesting the control of various territory and prestige as well, especially with France. And those are campaigns which are very seasonal. I mean both fighting in the east and in the west and in Italy. This is war in the age of grass. I mean Grass is your petrol. You know, you can't go anywhere until you've got grass that fuels your pack animals and it fuels the horses as well. And it's generally grown when the weather's better. So there's a tendency to sort of raise forces. They then fight for six to eight months or so when the weather's better, and then those forces are largely disbanded and sent home. You leave some garrisons if you've been lucky enough to capture territory, and then there's a big effort to get started again. And this sort of episodic character war continues really into the. Into the 17th century, because war consumes enormous quantity of resources and we're in an age where most people at the subsistence level, so extracting a surplus from them is really tough. So getting the resources together is a great effort. So war is a hugely costly and destructive business in this time.
- [12:31]
AJ Woodhams
Yeah, and it should be noted too, that soldiers at this time, like you just mentioned, they're not professional soldiers. They're being disbanded and they're going back to live their lives. And it's not until later, well, I guess talk a little bit about how that worked, how were soldiers recruited and how did these armies form?
- [12:54]
Peter H. Wilson
So, yeah, so they are. Our understanding of professionalism, I guess, sort of shifts. And that, again, is part of the book. So a lot of them are fighting on a regular basis and they often are sustaining themselves through marauding in the kind of downturn time as well. So that war creates these additional problems where they would extort communities and so on for further resources across the winter. But there is. The type of warfare at this point requires fairly large disciplined units to maximize the effectiveness of weapons. So these are principally handguns of relatively limited range and pole weapons. So the classic one is the pike, which protects the shot while they reload and can also be used as a shock weapon. And anyone who's handled any of these, even replicas, will know just how heavy they are and how unwieldy they are. So to say these people are not professionals, I think would be wrong. They have to have some kind of training and unit cohesion always improved. If you had a large number of higher proportion of veterans, people who'd fought before and knew what to do. So they are recruited largely by offering them a bounty, a recruitment bounty. So a large lump sum that looks attractive and then the promise of pay. And they might get paid, they might not get paid, and that was a perennial problem. And generally speaking, pay was much better at the beginning of the century when the population was lower the growth in population across the 16th century created a sort of underemployment in many spheres. And it was much easier to recruit and obviously governments wanted to spend less. So pay began to shrink and that became a major problem. In fact, war did not pay for a lot of the men who fought it.
- [15:07]
AJ Woodhams
Well, let's talk about the weapons real quick. So you had mentioned guns. How many? I guess at this point in time, 1500. How many soldiers used guns? What were the typical weapons?
- [15:22]
Peter H. Wilson
Right, well, so infantry. So firearms are primarily an infantry weapon because they're heavy. And in the beginning of the period, there are sort of two types. What is called the musket is actually the heavier one and requires generally a rest. And then there's a shorter version which has different names and the range and its ability to penetrate armor was less too. So there's a.
- [15:49]
AJ Woodhams
It's like 10ft, right?
- [15:50]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, I mean, it varied. Armor gets thicker as well across to respond to this. So there's a classic, you know, attack and defense issues going on. The proportion of firearms, it varied, but generally speaking, it creeps up to roughly half or so of the infantry, certainly by the sort of middle, late 16th century. But one of the things we've got to think about, we tend to think, well, guns, yeah, of course, they must be more sophisticated and more modern than just having a sword or a halberd or a pike. But it's really the modernity comes from the combination of all of these weapons. You know, we have the benefit of hindsight and we know that there are going to be these sort of refinements that come on. And most of the things rifling, all of these things, they've all been invented breech loading. But the industrial capacity to make these as viable weapons doesn't exist. It comes really in the 19th century. So, you know, it's not obvious that firearms are necessarily better. And in the 17th century, it's actually the infantry suffer from having too few pikemen because they're seen as the steady soldiers around which the others can gather and are essential for the formation. So that's. Yeah, I mean, obviously there are pistols too, for cavalry. Horse soldiers also have firearms, but there again, they're fairly ineffective, mainly for close quarter fighting.
- [17:29]
AJ Woodhams
Well, talk kind of a little bit in this early period about some of the major powers who initially. What are the most powerful players in this region? Closer to 1500.
- [17:44]
Peter H. Wilson
So within the empire itself, it's always Austria. Austria controls around a third of the empire. And Austria going forward into the 19th century always has a Much larger army than the Prussians do. It's only really in the, in the sort of middle of the 19th century that that military balance shifts. And the Austrians are, generally speaking, for most of the time into the mid 18th century at least, they are seen as the, the leading military power and the one that you copy. So a lot of the ideas come from, from the Habsburgs. And the Habsburgs act as a kind of conduit as well because they're fighting both the French mainly, and also they fight the Turks. They're experiencing two very different kinds of warfare. And so they are important for the kind of cross fertilization. So the introduction of light cavalry tactics, light infantry tactics, a lot of that comes from fighting in Hungary, which is then transmitted through from men who've served there with the Habsburgs or deserters from Habsburg forces and so forth. And then within the rest of the Empire we have the, the Swiss, who are a sort of autonomous confederation who gradually evolve out of the empire and are very important as a source of ordinary soldiers who are recruited into other European armies. The French, the Spanish and so forth have large numbers of Swiss. And then we have the various German princes of which there's probably about, I mean, we look at, you know, you get these lists, they say, you know, 250 or something. Really there's only about 50 odd. And out of those, the ones that matter is about 15 or so that have some kind of military potential collectively. The rest have a potential, but only collective. But the Habsburgs are distinctive because they're the ones that can really act properly on an international level on their own. The others really are only able to do that as allies or auxiliaries of somebody else.
- [19:46]
AJ Woodhams
Yeah. And on Austria, I found that so fascinating because we think of German militarism and of course modern Germany is what we think of, but Austria is really, for the last half century, they've had the largest military presence in the German speaking world, which I guess, like we were talking about at the beginning of the show, it's all been shaped by World War I and World War II. But I didn't know much about Austria. Talk a little bit then about kind of what defined Austrian militarism, which is something that I don't hear too much about. Like what is the, how does, how does Austria, how do they differentiate themselves from the Swiss or the, the German states?
- [20:34]
Peter H. Wilson
Right. Well, I think there's, there's a lot of shared culture within, within this area. And I, and I think it's better actually to think of this as different types of military culture or martial culture, rather than, than use the term militarism. Militarism tends to have this sort of pejorative sense of an excess and a way in which sort of the interests of the military are distorting the broader interests of society. And certainly I'm not saying that didn't happen, of course, that's good point, that happened many times. But I think if we only look at it from that perspective as a kind of critique, then we're not really always understanding what's going on. So what we get is a gradual development of once we have permanent armies. So this is something the Austrians, again, because they have the largest force, because they have this permanent threat from the Turks, they are the ones that create the first proper permanent unit. So they've got 20,000, 30,000 troops that they can call on around 1600. The others they only have a few hundred or so at the most. And then they rely on militia and men that they can recruit to form units when a war starts. So once you have permanent units, you then begin to get traditions, building up, practices and so on. And there are certain things that European armies have shared in common and then there are others which are more distinctive. So by the time we get to the 19th century, we got distinct traditions in military music, distinct traditions in the way that officers and men interact and so on. The Habsburg army was always a kind of multilingual, multicultural one. We tend to think of them as not being terribly efficient. But to be an officer in the Habsburg army, you normally had to speak at least one other language. So Hungarian or Italian or Croatian or Czech or all the other languages of the empire in order to talk to soldiers. There was a separate kind of army, German, that developed as a kind of basic German that anyone from the empire could understand. So it has those kind of characteristics that come from this, from its own general character as this sort of multinational, multi ethnic empire.
- [23:00]
AJ Woodhams
Let's then mention Switzerland, famously neutral, but that wasn't always the case. What are kind of the defining characteristics when it comes to Switzerland?
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Peter H. Wilson
Yeah, well, this is the thing, this idea of the Swiss neutrality and they must be very peaceful and so on. I mean, they fight numerous wars against each other and outsiders. And it's an aggressive power basically in the late 15th, early 16th century. And so they expand over the Alps southwards into Italy. So that's when the Italian speaking part of Switzerland is essentially conquered and remains in an inferior status until the Napoleonic era when they're given equal rights. There's various other bits that they conquered from the nobles, they basically kick out. And so these areas in Switzerland lack rights too. So it's a very hierarchical society and it's very fractious as well. It's the spread of the reformation. So early 16th century introduces conflicts between the Protestants and the Catholics and these repeat into the early 18th century episodically. But gradually there's a sort of. Essentially there's a kind of balance where no one really gains the upper hand and they end up with this sort of uneasy sort of balance where they know that if they do this too much, if they disturb the balance, then they become vulnerable to outsiders. And so a lot of the neutrality is about trying to balance the internal pressures with also balancing the relations of this confederation as a whole and its integral element parts with other powers. Because the cantons are supplying soldiers to foreign powers, which is a major source of income for the cantonal elites. And the French especially are paying so called pensions which were actually they go into the pockets of the bigwigs in the big towns, but they're also doled out as kind of to buy patronage and it kept taxes low. So it was a sort of win win situation for about three centuries until this business gradually becomes unsustainable.
- [25:26]
AJ Woodhams
Yeah. Well, let's move ahead on our timeline then a little bit for the German speaking region, let's say like the next 200 years, which frankly there's a lot of violence, a lot of things happen from 1500 to 1700. But how does warfare change in the German speaking region?
- [25:48]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, I guess it retains one of the characteristics throughout and that's one of the key arguments of the book. We tend to think of Prussia and certainly Prussia by the sort of middle of the 18th century does fit the classic idea that it is able to initiate wars and fight. It generally has allies, but it can initiate a conflict generally speaking, if we look separate from Prussia. And that's one of the things that does where the historical record really does fit much more of our popular perception, the rest of it is more reactive and it can only really operate in conjunction either as a collective, so while the empire still exists, or as a coalition partner, as a member of one of the coalitions. So for example, the wars of the late 17th and the 18th century are primarily contests between French attempts to gain some kind of hegemonic position within Europe and others who are trying to contain French power. So the empire is nearly always in those anti French coalitions and is supplying either directly as a member or its component principalities are often supplying troops, so to the British, to the Dutch and so on, who are generally speaking the enemies. And these wars against the Turks are continuing. The last of those really isn't the very end of the 18th century. So that kind of pattern is repeating. And what the big change is that there have been some disturbances. These external wars have triggered internal conflicts as well. And 30 years war sees a lot of that in the first part of the 17th century. But the real shift is 1740 when the new King of Prussia, the man we generally know as Frederick the Great, launches this sort of unprovoked attack on the Austrians, who seem particularly weak at that point. And you know, it's meant to be a lightning strike and grab the territory. And it sort of comes off, but it embeds this Austro Prussian rivalry which is then a major theme really into the mid 19th century.
- [28:13]
AJ Woodhams
Well, let's talk then about Prussia, which gets talked about a lot is the reputation for having a very tough military. Is that deserved talk about the Depression attitude?
- [28:28]
Peter H. Wilson
Yeah, to some extent it is, yes. I think the thing is in terms of having a fairly high proportion of the population within the army. Yes, that's definitely the case. That is mitigated by the fact that in the 18th century and even in the 19th century, a lot of the soldiers are given leave for most of the year. So the army is very large in the exercise period in the summer when the units are at full strength. And then from 8 to 10 months the rest of the year the soldiers are released back into the civilian economy. And that's the thing that enables, because they're not paid in that period. So this enables a state with very limited resources to have this large force. And that really is the crux of the problem. It has a first strike capacity and it has to win. If it's fighting on its own, it has to win quickly because it can't sustain a major war. And that basic characteristic is then implanted on Imperial Germany, the Germany that is created when Austria is ejected from this long running sort of overarching framework that has dominated Central Europe until the 1860s when Prussia kicks the Austrians out and has a smaller Germany grouped within what is known as the Second Empire or the German Imperial Germany. It basically has, it has that mindset and those same characteristics that if it fights a war, it's got to win quickly because it doesn't really think it's got the capacity to fight a long conflict.
- [30:08]
AJ Woodhams
So if I am, let's say, let's say I'm a soldier in Frederick the great's army in 1740. How have things changed for me from the year 1500 up to 1740 in terms of equipment, training, just how have things changed?
- [30:22]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, you get clothes, you get clothes issued to you, so you'll get sort of a set of underwear and a shirt and shoes and stuff. You'll get that once a year and you'll get a uniform coat probably every two years, which is better than most of the German armours, which was about every three years.
- [30:46]
AJ Woodhams
It should be noted too that originally you would have to bring your own equipment to fight. That's right, closer to 1500. But now things are different.
- [30:55]
Peter H. Wilson
Yeah, you would have that and your pay would be docked accordingly. And you would have limited rations, so you'd get a bread ration which you would often pool with sort of six to eight comrades. And you would commonly pull your, your meager pay as well. And then you buy your fresh vegetables and meat and stuff in peacetime, in wartime you get a meat ration as well. And if you were a so called foreigner, which could mean somebody from outside that unit's conscription district, so another Prussian subject, or it could be usually somebody from another German principality, you would be permanently with the colours, but you'd be doing duty probably three days a week and in the other four days you would be probably working in the civilian economy as a day labourer to eke out your wages. The other thing that would make you different from most other German soldiers is that you'd be more likely to be married because the Prussian army, to stem desertion, because it had a high number of people coming in from outside the kingdom, they allowed them to marry because they thought, well, if they've got their wives there, they're less likely to run away. So your wife would probably also be working as a sort of street seller or stealing vegetables or something like that to sort of keep you going.
- [32:28]
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- [33:12]
AJ Woodhams
Very interesting. Now for a Prussian soldier, I mean, obviously later on, soldiers who were fighting during Nazi Germany or World War I under the Kaiser, there's very much like a nationalistic kind of feel and attitude. Were soldiers at this time, did they see it as just a job or were they like, I'm fighting for Prussia and for the Emperor? What was kind of the. What was the attitude of soldiers? Did they just think they were fighting a job?
- [33:44]
Peter H. Wilson
I think it's. This is a really good question and it's one that is very hard to answer because obviously we have even statements from soldiers and we need to be careful that we don't take them all at face value. But I think Germany is characterized, I think always by a multi layered sense of identity. So the strongest identity is often your hometown and then it moves out to your region. So in the period we're talking about, most of the time that was some kind of principality or small state and you move out to maybe a larger region and then finally to Germany, whatever that was, the empire before 1806. And then increasingly an idea of Germany. And that was that that rootedness in locality was the thing that really annoyed all the sort of nationalist ideologues of the late 18th and 19th century who tried to create something in common. And that German nationalism's always been characterized since then by this tension. You know, somehow we're supposed to subsume everything and have a common identity. Opposed to the idea. No, I'm a Bavarian and in fact I come from Munich, you know, so there's always been those sort of tensions. But I think what it has led to in the past is that people could fight for multiple reasons. So yes, they could have this motive of a higher sense of duty to a country. And I think that they did have that. But they often have a more localized loyalty and of course they have loyalty to their comrades. You're dependent, you're fighting in very close proximity. So you know, if you're not fighting well or you run away, you know your comrades are going to suffer. So there's a sort of cohesion coming from that. And yes, there are very mundane reasons as well. For many, it was to some extent a job.
- [35:54]
AJ Woodhams
Well, let's talk a little bit about, I don't know if just soldiers or hire or being a mercenary and maybe soldiers outside, German soldiers going Outside of the German speaking region in America, famously, the British had Hessian mercenaries that fought on the British side. How many soldiers were going outside of the German speaking region to fight as mercenaries at this time?
- [36:24]
Peter H. Wilson
There would be a lot. I mean, I think that the estimate, the general estimate for Switzerland, which has a population of throughout most of this period of less than a million. And obviously at any given point, and from 1500 to 1800, there's around a million Swiss who serve. So obviously if you break that down by year, but maybe 80,000, so, you know, 80,000 adult men to a population that's maybe only 800 or 900,000, that's a significant proportion. And Germany was probably about the same. Well, the proportion would be less because the population is so much bigger, but the overall number would be, I think, at least twice that. And so you have the sort of the French army, the Swiss army in this period, sorry, the Spanish army in this period, the Dutch army, perhaps a quarter or so of their soldiers would come from abroad and Swiss and Germans would be the majority. And these people, and to come back to your other question, I mean, they do have, generally a lot of them had, certainly the officers had a sense of professionalism and a sense of duty. And so we can call them mercenaries. But we've got to remember, you know, in 1789, the French guards stormed the Bastille. The Swiss are the ones who are massacred defending the tuileries palace in 1792. So there is a strong sense of loyalty and duty that they had.
- [37:56]
AJ Woodhams
So if there is anything unique to be said about German military culture in terms of soldiers for hire, it would just be that the population is so much bigger, which is why so many of these soldiers are coming from the German speaking region.
- [38:12]
Peter H. Wilson
It is that. It's also the hire of troops out was a means partly, obviously, to get money. But some very few of the German princes make large sums of money out of this Hessen castle, which is of course involved in sending troops to America. Do make money, genuinely make a lot of money out of it. And the Rothschilds, the bankers, a lot of their wealth comes in fact from handling a lot of this money at the end of the 18th century. So, yeah, there was some money to be made, but a lot of it was really about forging political connections, making, you know, you're a prince of a relatively small area within Europe which is becoming dominated by large kingdoms as sovereign states. So you want to maintain status, you need to kind of link up with a powerful sponsor. The emperor's got to manage all of these princes. So he's not going to try to favor anyone in particular too much. So you want to sort of pally up with the French or the Dutch or the British, who can put in a good word for you or support you. And it worked. I mean, they do this by hiring troops. They also do it by marrying. In Hessen Darmstadt, one of the small principalities grows much bigger through the collapse of the Empire, partly because they had married into the Romanovs. Wurttemberg is another one. So forging these international connections was also about dynastic survival.
- [39:43]
AJ Woodhams
Well, let's talk about the period. So we're in 1740, maybe let's move up to right before German unification. So a little over a hundred years. How do things change in the next hundred years leading up to German unification in terms of the German military?
- [40:03]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, after 1815, everyone wants peace, so there's a downsizing. So they fought the wars against Revolutionary France and Napoleonic France. 1815, there's a downsizing. Conscription remains in place because that has largely been introduced or at least modified during the Napoleonic era, and they hang on to that. But very few of the eligible men are inducted, so maybe only a fifth of those who are eligible. So we have armies which have a poor social standing. We see this today in the situation that in Russia, for example, such a small proportion of the manpower eligible is inducted. And people might be proud of the army, but they don't want to serve in it because it's the people who are usually least advantaged. You serve. So the military have a pretty poor reputation. The significant difference is the Prussians adopt a short service model. So their idea is to train as many as possible. And the real thing that holds them back is just lack of money. And that's what the constitutional discussions are in the 1850s and 1860s that the monarch wants. And Bismarck, who's brought in to try to handle this, want more money to expand the army. And they are successful. And their short service model, it triumphs over the Austrians, who had a long service model. And. And the idea was you had long service, you have theoretically a big army. But in reality, because the Austrians are short of money too, a lot of the soldiers have been given leave for a long time, so they're poorly trained and you have no reserves. And the French system was slightly better, but when they fight France in 1870, again, the Prussian short service model, which the rest of Germany is now adopted, proved much more effective. And they're much better at mobilizing their reserves, and the reserves are of higher quality. And that really explains those dramatic victories. First 1866 against the Austrians and then 1870, 71 against the French because everyone was betting the Austrians and then the French would win. People didn't bet on a Prussian victory and that's what shakes things up. And people then really start taking notice and think the Prussians have unlocked the secret of victory.
- [42:38]
AJ Woodhams
Yeah, well, I guess. In what ways does the Prussian Austrian rivalry, in what ways does that either influence or what advances come about? Because you've got these two powers that are both trying to one up each other.
- [42:55]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, they, I mean when we, we think of it as a rivalry and that's certainly true. But then we've got to remember that they are for most of the time during the revolutionary Napoleonic era, allies. And there is also a mobilization. Prussia, for example, mobilizes in 1859 when the Austrians are fighting the French. So there's tension and the Austrians are very concerned about maintaining their traditional Pole position within Central Europe and they're resentful of the Prussians. And the Prussians have had literally centuries of always being the number two. And for example, they were offered the chance to become emperor of Northern Germany by the French in the early 19th century and they rejected. They don't see themselves as necessarily ejecting the Austrians and taking over. That's not always the plan. There's some advantages of standing in the shadow. And so The War of 1866 is not clear cut. It's not that they're all gung ho wanting to go and there's considerable discussion as to how far they should exploit the victory, but the politics of the time meant that further accommodation with Austria was impossible. And so there is basically there's a partition. The Austrian, the German speaking Austrians along with the rest of the Habsburg lands are cut out and the rest of Germany as it were, is now regrouped into this second empire.
- [44:46]
AJ Woodhams
And can we talk about Switzerland a little bit too during this time? Because they do fight very close to this time, their last battle, so they do eventually become neutral. But what's going on with Switzerland in this time period?
- [45:01]
Peter H. Wilson
Yes, the Swiss have been sort of made and remade in the Napoleonic era. So they've been occupied. They're occupied in fact by the Austrians at one point. And so the, you know, the survival of Switzerland is sometimes in doubt. Bits of it have been nibbled away by the French and so forth. So it's reconstituted. But the key thing in 1815 is reconstituted deliberately as neutral. And it's a different understanding of neutrality. So neutrality now is really keeping out of somebody else's conflict. In the past, in the sort of, the pre 19th century idea of neutrality was more ambivalent. And that's partly because this idea that both sides should be treated equally was alien to the kind of Christian worldview. Only one side has God on its side, and if you're helping the other side or if you're standing out of that conflict, you're allowing the devil to do his work. So neutrality was not necessarily a good thing. But there's a changed understanding of neutrality. And the Swiss, increasingly, they recognize that they are small, they are a small state, and they're resource poor, generally speaking. And so this modern idea of neutrality becomes increasingly attractive and becomes very much part of the Swiss identity after that point.
- [46:28]
AJ Woodhams
And so do they disband their army? What does the Swiss army look like?
- [46:34]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, they have, essentially they have a militia. So before the 19th century, there are permanent Swiss regiments, but these are all hired and only exist in other people's armies. So when the French decide they don't want any Swiss anymore in 1830, they send the soldiers home and those units don't exist anymore. So in Switzerland there is just a mobilization structure and a militia. So people do actually relatively limited training and then they can be mobilized to defend national frontiers, which is what they do in the two world wars. But the standard of training in the 19th century was very poor. So the last war that the Swiss fight, which is over, is at the last gasp of the kind of Catholic Protestant rivalry in 1847. The soldiers fire off lots of ammunition, but there's hardly any casualties. And there are lots of heroic paintings showing these glorious actions in which luckily, only about a couple of hundred people were killed. But that's enough. They realize that this is a bad way to settle their differences. And there is a new federal constitution which begins to iron out some of the problems that existed before now.
- [48:01]
AJ Woodhams
Being surrounded by, of course, Austria, Prussia, France, a lot of huge military powers. Is there a lot of fear that neutrality is just going to be opening the door to letting some of these bigger players in?
- [48:17]
Peter H. Wilson
Oh, absolutely. And the dangers of that are exposed in the First World War. And the Swiss had been heavily dependent, for example, on the import of heavy weapons. They'd only just decided that airplanes were a good idea. And beforehand they thought, well, the mountains will mean that we can't have airplanes, we can't have an air force. And then, so then 1914, they decide to have an air force, and of course no one will sell them an airplane. So the experience of the First World War is a bit of a wake up call and they are much better prepared by the time it gets to the Second World War. And there is, I think that the, there is definitely a deterrent value of this risk. And the Swiss do fight. I mean, they, they actually, there are a couple of dogfights and they shoot down some of the Luftwaffe planes until they realize we've got to stop doing that because we could really be invaded. But looking ahead, you know, after, after the Second World War, I mean, there are attempts by the Swiss to acquire nuclear weapons, for example, example, to have a nuclear deterrent to maintain neutrality. And yeah, it's still up in debate. There was a strong movement in the 1980s to abolish the army, which is still a militia. The professional force is very, very small and it has really shrunk even further in the last decades.
- [49:47]
AJ Woodhams
What do you think that neutrality in terms of the national identity of the Swiss, what do you think neutrality has done in terms of that identity? I mean, you've obviously got Austria right next door and Germany, which unifies these kind of just big outwardly. I don't know if we can use the word militaristic in this sense, but what does this do to the Swiss identity to now become neutral?
- [50:15]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, I think it creates something which has been successful in many respects. I mean, it has transcended the so called potato pancake ditch. You know, there's sort of the boundary between the German speakers and the French speakers and there are, of course, there are Italian and Romani speakers in Switzerland. So it has overcome some of those linguistic divisions and religious divisions and it's created something that the Swiss can, can properly identify and it's helped create a very kind of cohesive society. But it is also somewhat of a myth because the idea that you are fully sovereign and that you can survive in a modern globalized economy is wrong. I mean, if you go to Geneva, for example, I mean, a lot of people are traveling in by train from France where it's easier and cheaper to live because Geneva is so expensive. But they keep the local economy going. So. So they are of course integrated in ways that they're somewhat uncomfortable with, I think.
- [51:23]
AJ Woodhams
Well, moving along to World War I and World War II. So I noticed in your book that Both World War I and World War II only get about 50 pages. Talk about why you made that choice.
- [51:38]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, they got more than I'd intended, actually. That was. Well, partly there is operational history in the book, because I think that you can't write about war without understanding how it's conducted and the battles and campaigns and so on do make a difference. So that's in there, but it's not intended to be, only that. It's meant to explain why that is the way that it is and then what the impact of, of particular outcomes are. So it was to do that, but obviously the history of the two world wars required. So there's a lot more coverage of those than there is, say for the Napoleonic conflict. But yeah, I think there are other people who've written excellent operational or campaign histories and there was no point in repeating that. And if you were to do that, even at sort of 8, 900 pages across 500 years, you've got like one or two pages per year, so you can't really say very much. Sure.
- [52:44]
AJ Woodhams
Well, I guess in the broader context of German military history, in what ways do you think modern scholars and historians should approach World War I and World War II?
- [52:58]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, I think it helps to see them as separate but connected. I mean, obviously there's a generation that could have served in both and the connections between them are profound. You know, I think we do an injustice to historical actors if we see, you know, one thing inevitably leading to something else and no one has any agency and decisions don't matter. So, yeah, I think we've got to recognize that there are, there are, that there are differences. And then I think it really helps to try to put these into, into context. I mean, there are reasons why the Austrian performance was so poor. You know, if we only look at, you know, the, the army's formal structures or their weaponry and so on, we don't really understand why this, why they perform so poorly and the way in which the Austrian army, for example, is gutted in the opening battles and they should have performed better. I mean, if you look at the tactical manuals and you're talking about World War I. World War I, yeah. I mean, the Austrians, the tactical manuals were not unsophisticated. The German manuals were better, the doctrines were better. But of course they suffered from the fact that they were calling up reservists who'd been trained under the previous manual. And so the officers think, well, it's much quicker if we just advance in a line, you know, and hope for the best. So, you know, I think that's the thing. We need to understand the sort of low level failures like that to explain outcomes as well as the grand strategic ones. And we fit things into society and so on, and we get a much better understanding we get a better understanding about the interpretation of the war afterwards, the stab in the back myth and all of these things. And then when we come to the Second World War, I mean, I feel very strongly that there has been a lot of popular scholarship has separated out the Holocaust and the realities of the Nazi control of continental Europe from the conduct of war. And the two things are clearly interrelated. I mean you can't, you know, you fight. The only way you can fight a blitzkrieg is to treat people abominably.
- [55:19]
AJ Woodhams
So Post World War II, what would you say has defined the German military, the Austrian military? And Well, I mean you talked a little bit about not really the Swiss military, but maybe some of the military leaning things that the Swiss have done. What defines these regions Post World War II?
- [55:38]
Peter H. Wilson
I think a major aspect is the kind of cohort character of conscription. I mean right into this century conscription has been a major part of people's lives in those countries. In a way, say in, in the UK it hasn't been, I mean conscriptions wartime feature and then a little bit into the post war era, but this sort of cycle, this cycle of people serving. And in, in East Germany you serve for 18 months. So it was a relatively long period of time. In Austria and West Germany the service periods oscillated and they were generally shorter. But it's fairly significant. You know, fairly large numbers of men went through that process and that embedded these armies into society and they were very visible. I mean if you traveled around in Germany in say the 1980s and so on, I mean on the autobahn you would have these long columns of troops and also the foreign armies that were stationed there. And that's the other thing, that's the change really. Certainly in Germany's case, major Russian presence in Germany in eastern Germany until 94 in West Germany, major presence from the Western Allies. So they were occupied countries to a considerable extent. So the second half of the 20th century, the experience has a lot of things which are very different from the past.
- [57:10]
AJ Woodhams
What are you hoping that readers take away from your book?
- [57:14]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, I hope they enjoy it. I mean history is enjoyable. I mean it's an awful, in a way, war is an awful subject. It. But we can't understand the human condition without looking at it. And I hope that it's enjoyable read as well as informative. Wonderful.
- [57:34]
AJ Woodhams
Well, kind of. Lastly here, first off, Peter, it's been a terrific interview and we didn't hardly even talk about after the German unification leading up to World War I, but.
- [57:48]
Peter H. Wilson
Yeah, or navies Navies or navies?
- [57:50]
AJ Woodhams
We didn't talk about navies.
- [57:54]
Peter H. Wilson
The Austrians had a big navy at one point.
- [57:57]
AJ Woodhams
How big?
- [57:58]
Peter H. Wilson
Well, they were, let's think they were. I think in 1914, they're ranked seventh largest in the world, bigger than the Russians. The Russians, of course, had lost a lot in fighting the Japanese.
- [58:12]
AJ Woodhams
Well, I guess we'll just have to let the audience, they'll have to pick up a copy of your book to find out more about the naval situation. What are you working on next?
- [58:24]
Peter H. Wilson
I'm writing a book about what you do if you can't find what you need to prepare or fight a war from your own population. So resources that come from outside. So they could be human resources, it could be finance, it could be ideas, expertise, it could be access to neutral territory or resources, information. It's about that.
- [58:46]
AJ Woodhams
Oh, very cool. Well, hopefully when you publish that, you'll come back on the show and would love to chat with you about it if people want to follow you. Are you on social media? Where can people find you?
- [59:00]
Peter H. Wilson
The European fiscal military system has a Twitter feed. So that's related to this book? Yeah.
- [59:07]
AJ Woodhams
Wonderful. Well, Peter H. Wilson, Iron and A Military History of the German speaking people since 1500. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. Such a fascinating story. And Peter, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [59:24]
Peter H. Wilson
Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thank you.