CHAPTER 9
Military history in an age of military change
Carl Bennedich, the Swedish General Staff, and the First World War
This chapter discusses how the experience of the First World War helped introduce a broader and more modern, scholarly approach to the writing of official military history under the aegis of the Swedish General Staff. A central figure in bringing about this change was Carl Bennedich (1880–1939), at the time a lieutenant at the General Staff’s Military History Section. There is an interesting contrast between Bennedich’s personal, arch-conservative, and fiercely nationalistic ideological position and the progressive instincts he demonstrated as a military historian. As has been pointed out by Swedish author Jan Olof Olsson, the radical-nationalist, politicizing type of officer that Bennedich represented was untypical for Sweden in the early twentieth century but quite common in Germany. One can easily imagine Bennedich as a subaltern in the Imperial Army, as one of the dangerous officers who conspired to overthrow the Weimar Republic, but also as a member of the opposition against Hitler in July 1944.1 Bennedich’s unexpected role as a ‘modernizer’ of Swedish military history raises the question of how a romantic dreamer with seemingly little understanding for the century in which he lived could be among the first to realize the impact of total war in the twentieth century. As I will demonstrate here, this had to do with Bennedich’s deep involvement in the ideological struggle over democracy and parliamentary rule in Swedish society at the time, as well as with his discontent with Sweden’s position as neutral between the belligerent great powers.
Sweden did not differ from other European countries in that military history had played a significant role in the education of officers before 1914. The Swedish Army War College had been reorganized in 1878 by Colonel Hugo Raab, using as a model the Prussian Kriegsakademie in Berlin, where Raab had studied in the 1850s. During the two-year-long course at the college, military history—together with tactics—was the largest subject, with some 200 hours’ teaching (15 per cent of the total teaching time). A thorough knowledge of warfare in the past, Raab argued, could supply the students with the war experience that they could not gain through personal service, improve their general Bildung, and compensate for the fact that officers—unlike other Swedish government officials—had no university education. The military study of history was not undertaken only to teach students some supposedly ‘eternal principles of warfare’; it also aimed at exploring the Swedish experience of war from a more historicist perspective as an object lesson for future conflicts against the nation’s ‘hereditary enemies’ and to help build a professional identity.2
At the same time, the decades before the First World War saw rapid technological change. By the early 1900s, it was generally agreed that the industrialization of warfare had made cavalry charges and massed infantry attacks more or less suicidal enterprises. This, in turn, cast doubt on the role of history in military education. However, the prevailingly Social Darwinist ideology among European officers also created a readiness to accept high losses. Any nation claiming influence in the twentieth century, it was argued, must be prepared to prove its moral strength through bloody sacrifice. The lessons of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–05, for instance—a conflict which saw the extensive use of indirect artillery fire, trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns—may seem obvious in retrospect, but were not so to contemporaries. The massive display of modern firepower during the siege of Port Arthur made less impression than the fact that the Japanese ultimately defeated the Russians because they were prepared to suffer tens of thousands of casualties. More than anything else, Japan’s victory seemed to confirm the popular belief that war was a contest of will in which the toughest would prevail.3
Although European military professionals before 1914 certainly studied the technical aspects of contemporary conflicts such as the Boer War or the Russo-Japanese War, they also spent considerable time analysing pre-industrial wars, as these seemed equally rich with regard to moral examples. The American Civil War, then the only war of attrition waged by an industrialized society in history, evoked little interest outside the US, and although the military history sections of the French and German General Staffs published monumental histories on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the campaigns of national heroes such as Napoleon or Frederick the Great interested them much more. Together with other great commanders in the past like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, or Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, Napoleon and Der Alte Fritz played the leading roles in the story of the progression of (Western) warfare, a story that was told in more or less the same way at most European military colleges. Apart from demonstrating that the central principles of war had remained unaltered since antiquity, the aim of this grand narrative was to validate the importance of moral factors on the battlefield, emphasizing to the young officer that one day his personal contribution could make a difference.4
When war finally came in 1914, disappointment and frustration awaited the European military. It was not until March 1918, after an almost four-year-long period of deadlock on the Western Front, that the German Spring Offensive demonstrated that mobile warfare was still possible in the age of machines. However, the new German infiltration tactics differed substantially from traditional tactics. The dense, regular formations that had characterized European battle since antiquity had now vanished. The delimited battlefield had dissolved into a wasteland; a combat zone without clear perimeters, dominated by artillery fire, poison gas, tanks, and aircraft, where small, autonomous groups of soldiers wandered about in isolation, struggling to survive in a ravaged landscape. It has been suggested that if an officer familiar with combat on the Western Front in 1914 had been able to time-travel four years into the future to witness combat on the same front in 1918, he would have been unable to grasp what was going on. On the other hand, had an officer with experience from the Western Front in 1918 been able to travel further into the future, he could probably have made perfect sense of the battlefields of 1940, and possibly even those in Iraq in 2003. The main elements of modern three-dimensional warfare appeared during the final months of World War I and not—as is so often claimed—in France in 1940 or in the Persian Gulf much later.5
Needless to say, the experience of war in 1914–18 affected the use of history in military education. If young officers were to continue studying classical manoeuvres and learning about the great commanders, if General Staff history departments were to continue producing multi-volume works on the great captains and their triumphs in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these activities could no longer be motivated by positivist arguments. It was not self-evident that the same principles of war that had governed the Battle of Marathon were still at work during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918, or that studies of past wars would disclose any relevant truths about the wars of tomorrow. This precipitated a major cultural crisis for the military educational system as developed in the post-Napoleonic era—a crisis that would cast its shadow over the military profession during the entire interwar period.
Now, when numerous new aspects of warfare (gas war, air war, mechanized war, propaganda war, economic blockade, industrial mobilization) had to be integrated into the teaching, the dominant position that military history had held in war college curricula since the nineteenth century could no longer be maintained. In 1926, time for military history was reduced substantially at the Swedish Army War College, and in the years after 1934 additional reductions followed. A group of younger General Staff officers around Major Helge Jung—who would be appointed Supreme Commander of the Swedish armed forces in 1944—were instrumental in effecting these changes. Privately, Jung shared the nationalist-conservative ideology of the officer-corps in general. Moreover, he had a serious interest in history. He had studied the subject as a young man at the University of Lund in 1905 and later served as head of the General Staff’s Military History Section. He realized, however, that the traditional identity of the Swedish officer as answerable only to King and Nation had no place in the twentieth century. Officers must accept democratization and learn how to communicate with elected politicians, in the same way as other officials in modern society, otherwise their professional influence over defence policy would be reduced to insignificance. The role of compensating for the lack of university education among officers, which had previously been played by military history, was in the 1930s taken over by a new subject at the Army War College called ‘Sweden’s strategic situation’. This subject focused on current affairs, and included diplomatic relations, military geography, and the armed forces of the countries in the Baltic Sea region. These studies would better prepare the officer-corps to communicate with the future-oriented and utilitarian decision-makers of the modern age than would studying Sweden’s wars against Russia and Denmark centuries ago.6
It is quite certain that Carl Bennedich disapproved of these changes. Nor does he seem to have been particularly interested in the changes in military technology demonstrated by the First World War. Nonetheless, it was his activities at the General Staff Military History Section that had helped pave the way for this new order.
Bennedich, whose father owned a construction company in the city of Falkenberg in south-west Sweden, had received his commission in 1901 and been assigned to the Northern Skåne Infantry at the garrison of Kristianstad. He had been passionately interested in Swedish history since his youth, as was evident when he applied to the Army War College in Stockholm in 1908. Among the many hundreds of applicants to the college in its thirty-six year existence before World War I, he was the only one ever to receive a ‘10’ for his entrance essay (the given subject that year was ‘What were the main drawbacks of the great-power position maintained by Sweden in the seventeenth century?’).7 At the Army War College, Bennedich distinguished himself by his fervent admiration for Sweden’s eighteenth-century soldier king, Charles XII. One of his fellow students later claimed that Bennedich frequently made comparisons
between Sweden’s situation in the early eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. How much more fortunate the latter would have been if only HE [Charles XII] had been alive.8
After graduation in 1910, Bennedich was admitted to the General Staff officer-corps and assigned to the Military History Section in 1914. From 1916 to 1920, he served as a senior lecturer in military history at the Army War College. During this period, he also coordinated the work on the General Staff’s four-volume history of the campaigns of Charles XII, Karl XII på slagfältet (‘Charles XII on the battlefield’), personally writing a substantial portion of the text. Between 1922 and 1929, he served as commanding officer of the Military History Section. In 1932 he was promoted to colonel and died seven years later, when serving as commanding officer of the Life Grenadier Regiment in Linköping.9
One of the men who worked under Bennedich during the 1920s was the director of the Military Archives, Birger Steckzén. Steckzén, who was a self-conscious man and soon came into conflict with Bennedich, gives a highly unsympathetic portrait of him in his memoirs, which were written in the 1950s. According to Steckzén, Bennedich regarded the military profession as superior to all others and believed that an officer—especially a member of the General Staff—was competent to solve most of the mysteries in life. Steckzén even compared Bennedich to Adolf Hitler:
Outsiders often found him a fascinating person because of his dynamic nature and his flight of ideas. For those who had to deal with him on a daily basis he was a trying and tiresome man. He could sit and talk late into the night—that is, he talked the whole time.
Still, even such a hostile witness as Steckzén could write of Bennedich that ‘by virtue of his mind he was very talented’, admitting that some of his ideas were simply ‘sparkling’.10
Bennedich had been active in founding Karolinska förbundet (the Caroline Society) in 1910—dedicated to studying Swedish history in 1654–1718, when Charles XII, his father, and grandfather had ruled Sweden—and he was in constant correspondence with some of the leading Swedish historians of his time, including professors Harald Hjärne in Uppsala and Arthur Stille in Lund. In 1911, together with a colleague, he surveyed the battlefield of Poltava in the Ukraine (where his hero Charles XII had suffered his decisive defeat against Tsar Peter of Russia in 1709) on behalf of the General Staff. In his inspection report from the battlefield terrain, Bennedich, who was inspired by a recent, apologetic study of Charles XII’s campaign in Russia by his friend Arthur Stille, largely exonerated the king of any blame for Sweden’s defeat. Instead, Bennedich identified the commander of the infantry, General Lewenhaupt, as the main culprit.11
This reinterpretation of the battle was presented in print in Karolinska förbundet’s yearbook in 1913, and would later reappear in Bennedich’s article on the Battle of Poltava in the popular home encyclopaedia Nordisk familjebok. Through the encyclopaedia and Bennedich’s later work on the General Staff official histories of the campaigns of Charles XII—which the author Frans G. Bengtsson would use for his account of the battle in a famous biography of the king in the 1930s—Bennedich’s explanation of the defeat would find its way into hundreds of thousands of Swedish homes. It remained largely unchallenged until the late 1950s.12
Bennedich’s greatest claim to fame, however, came not from his work as an historian but from his role during the ‘Courtyard Crisis’ in February 1914, when he and the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin secretly drafted the constitutionally controversial speech which King Gustav V gave to 30,000 farmers, who had gathered to protest against the defence policy of Karl Staaff’s Liberal government. The explicit support for the protesters that the King expressed in his speech forced Staaff’s government to resign a few days later.13
In November that year, Bennedich began his tour of service at the General Staff Military History Section in Stockholm. Since 1890, the section had been spending most of its resources on producing a history of Sweden’s wars against Russia and Denmark in 1808–09. This conflict was a traumatic memory, for it had ended in catastrophic defeat, the cession of Sweden’s Finnish provinces, and the termination of six centuries of common Swedish–Finnish statehood. As this was the latest war Sweden had fought against its ‘hereditary enemy’ Russia, it was also expected to contain useful military lessons for the future. After twenty-four years, the sixth volume—which treated operations on the Norwegian border until July 1808—was still under preparation, and work on the seventh—which dealt with operations against Norway and Denmark until March 1809—had proceeded quite far (although it would not appear in print until 1919). At least two more volumes were planned before the project would be completed.14
The reception of this official history had been generally benign in academic circles, although not entirely uncritical. In his review of the fourth volume in Historisk tidskrift in 1905, Professor Ludvig Stavenow expressed his great appreciation of its thorough research, the high quality of maps, and the profuse and interesting data presented in the appendices, while at the same time pointing out that the lack of scholarly training among the authors had resulted in a rather fragmented main text, overloaded with detail at the expense of context and inner structure.15 From the viewpoint of a professional historian, there is little to add to this appraisal even a century later.
The lack of inner cohesion in the General Staff work was not surprising. The Military History Section had set out in the 1880s by collecting enormous quantities of documents—or copies of documents—from archives in Sweden and abroad. When the project was finally concluded in the early 1920s, there were more than 130 shelf metres of excerpts and working material. However, there had been little notion of previous research or particular research problems, and in reality each volume became a compilation of disparate studies undertaken by several authors over the course of many years. Clearly, there was no general idea behind the work, nor any ambition to emphasize certain aspects of the past before others.16 To some extent, this intellectual void may not only reflect the peculiar conditions under which the work came into being, but also the growing uncertainty among military professionals in the years before World War I as to what lessons from history would be relevant in the modern age.
As preparations for the eighth volume began, the Chief of the General Staff General Knut Bildt ordered a special study, in view of the possibility of Sweden being dragged into the ongoing war. In contrast to the earlier volumes in the series, this volume was to deal with the defensive measures that had been put in place in the territory of present Sweden in 1808–09, and thus risked revealing information that might still be sensitive. What precautions should be taken with such a text that would eventually be published?
It so happened that the task of answering this question at the Military History Section was entrusted to the newly assigned Lieutenant Carl Bennedich. From Bennedich’s perspective, the war of 1808–09 was a tragedy not only because it had ended in humiliation and the loss of Finland. The defeat had also led to the only successful military coup in Swedish history—the mutiny of the army on the Norwegian border in March 1809—the end of royal absolutism, and the adoption of a new constitution (which would remain in operation until 1974). While Swedish Liberals in the early twentieth century regarded this bloodless revolution of 1809 as the founding moment of modern Swedish society, to Bennedich it was a disgraceful moment when self-serving, unpatriotic bureaucrats had initiated the erosion of royal power and national greatness. To him, it was therefore self-evident that an official history of Sweden’s catastrophic defeat in 1808–09 should leap at the opportunity to draw conclusions that could also be useful in the contemporary political debate on parliamentary rule and democracy, a struggle in which Bennedich himself had made his most important contribution as anonymous co-author of King Gustav V’s Courtyard address some months before.
When Bennedich presented his report in March 1915, he began by listing the literature he had consulted on the period. Among the historians he had read was the Liberal history professor Nils Edén, an expert on the 1809 Constitution, who a few years later would lead the government of Liberals and Social Democrats that would introduce universal suffrage in Sweden. As Bennedich acidly remarked in his memorandum, however, he had only studied Edén’s work in order ‘to become acquainted with the desires and needs of modern Swedish party politics when it comes to tainting the truth about the events of 1809’.17 In spite of this openly expressed ideological bias, Bennedich’s memorandum nonetheless contained a highly critical appreciation of those volumes on the wars of 1808–09 that had already appeared. Bennedich’s criticism was in fact quite similar to that which had been expressed by professional historians since the 1890s.18
Although Bennedich was a great admirer of the German military, he also shared the German historian Hans Delbrück’s critique of the history-writing of the Prussian General Staff. The writing of history, Delbrück emphasized, must always be founded in a critical analysis of the available sources. Bennedich even asserted that the Army War College, like any other academic institution, should ‘teach its students to form their own opinion on the basis of their own researches into various fields of the art of war’. When it came to source criticism, this would mean nothing less than giving future staff officers the same kind of training that civilian undergraduates received at history seminars, according to Bennedich. Although one could argue that the Swedish General Staff should not aspire to produce histories of the same quality as those of great powers such as Germany and Austria with their superior resources, he said, scholarly quality was not necessarily a function of size. The Danish General Staff, Bennedich noticed, had in recent years published no fewer than four volumes of a high scholarly standard on the Great Northern War, with no more than three officers involved in the project, none of them full-time.19
To Bennedich, it was also clear that military history could not be written out of context. He therefore demanded that the proposed structure of the last two volumes should be revised. According to the existing plan, Volume 8 should deal with the remaining operations on land and Volume 9 with the remaining operations at sea. It would be better, Bennedich said, to have both volumes describe land and naval operations, and draw a chronological line between them in March 1809. On the domestic scene at this point, the overthrow of King Gustav IV Adolf and the return to constitutional monarchy introduced a system of government related to that of modern Sweden. From March 1809, the strategic situation was also that of modern Sweden, the Russians having conquered the Åland Islands and advancing across the northern border of Sweden proper.20
In addition, Bennedich pointed out the need for a thorough geographical description of the theatre of operations, something that had been missing from the earlier volumes. Such a description should contain data on economy and agriculture, population density, the availability of horses and wagons, the quality of roads and communications, shipping, and ice conditions in the Baltic Sea region. The war must be analysed in its full geographic, economic, and social context, Bennedich believed, expressing views that would only become fashionable among academics much later, inspired by the famous French school of Annales historians in the interwar period. In a sense, he also precipitated the change in the Army War College’s curriculum in the 1930s, when the teaching of ‘Sweden’s strategic conditions’—consisting of current geographic and statistical data— replaced military history as a core subject in officer training.
Bennedich hoped that if this material was collected it could also be of use later when the Military History Section’s attention shifted to Charles XII, who had fought most of his wars in the same North European setting as the wars of 1808–09. Although publicizing such information could prove harmful to Sweden’s present defence, he wrote, a thorough geographic survey of the Baltic Sea region would still be necessary for a correct analysis of events. Even if only a few pages of such a survey proved fit to print in the end, it would still have served its purpose.21 Further, the influence of winter conditions on operations merited further research, he thought, as did the role of the archipelago fleet. Bennedich also pointed out that the Russian army had in fact defeated the superior Swedish army in wintertime, although Russian equipment had been just as bad and Russian logistical support even weaker than that of the Swedes: ‘If we are better than in 1808, the Russians are probably better too, and at least to the same degree.’ 22
Moreover, Bennedich called for a thorough investigation of Sweden’s diplomatic relations with her ally in 1808–09, Great Britain. He claimed that the British had dealt with the Russians behind Sweden’s back throughout the conflict, as they knew that Russia was the only power on the Continent worth mobilizing in the struggle against Napoleon. Sweden’s will to resist the Russian invasion in 1808 had also been weakened by domestic financial interests that wanted to continue to trade with Russia, and therefore were prepared to sacrifice the eastern part of the realm for a quick peace. It would therefore be valuable, Bennedich argued, if the General Staff history could explain the true nature of British policy in 1808–09, as ‘in the present situation there are certain delusions even at very high levels regarding the interests of foreign powers in Scandinavia’. According to Bennedich, ‘Already in those days the ghost of ‘neutrality’ hung over us’.23
Bennedich’s remarks were a direct comment on Sweden’s foreign political situation in the winter of 1915. The country was neutral in the ongoing world war, in which Britain and Russia openly aligned against Germany. Influential groups with whom Bennedich sympathized wanted Sweden to abandon its bystander role and enter the war on Germany’s side. The principal guardian of neutrality in the Swedish government was Foreign Minister Knut A. Wallenberg, who was also the head of Sweden’s leading financial family. Many of the pro-German activists regarded Wallenberg’s concern for neutrality merely as a way to protect his private financial interests. Bennedich belonged to those who saw the Wallenberg family as a modern successor to the forces that had brought down the fatherland during the Napoleonic Wars. Apart from a survey of the military geography of the Baltic Sea region, he therefore urged that an examination of Sweden’s domestic conditions in 1808–09 should be included in Volume 8. Bennedich realized that it might seem inappropriate for the General Staff to publish a study on domestic politics, but if the work on the wars of 1808–09 was to be concluded in a satisfactory way, all factors that had undermined Sweden’s national defences must be taken into consideration. As in the case with the geographic survey, full publication would not be necessary. The published account could well terminate in early 1809, ‘when the shadow of revolution approaches’.24
In earlier histories, the king who had been overthrown by the revolution in March 1809, Gustav IV Adolf, had been given most of the blame for Sweden’s defeat. According to Bennedich, the King’s only real fault was his reluctance to take strong measures against his subordinates and to enforce the necessary obedience among them. He was not responsible for the breakdown of army logistics and the mass deaths suffered by Swedish militia conscripts during the war, Bennedich claimed—they had been caused by bureaucratic inertia and passive local officials.25 These and other important truths about 1808–09 must be brought to light, Bennedich concluded. He therefore urged the General Staff historians to abandon their nineteenth-century ambitions of academic impartiality and instead write an account of the ‘dangers and consequences of the self-delusions of a people, its bureaucracy, and its party bosses, and their negligence towards their real, most elementary duty.’ He hoped that such an emphasis would also make the revered 1809-Constitution appear in a different light. The true lesson of 1809 was that the ideals of the French Revolution had eroded national consciousness and officialdom’s sense of duty, which in turn had led to chaos in the governmental apparatus. Expressing the dominant conservative stereotypes of the belligerents in 1914–18, Bennedich described Sweden in 1809 as a country where ‘The Gallic phrase had confused stern Germanic reason’.26
There is no doubt that Bennedich’s views found fertile ground among the Swedish General Staff at the time. When Volume 8 finally appeared in 1921, most of his recommendations had been duly implemented. This volume covered operations on both land and sea until March 1809, and contained a short survey of military geography as well as some thirty pages of domestic politics (albeit somewhat more moderate in tone than Bennedich would have preferred).27 Volume 9, which covered operations in Åland and Västerbotten and the end of hostilities in September, appeared the year after, and had been produced at record speed by a single author.28
For the rest of the First World War, Bennedich served as the senior lecturer in military history at the Army War College. He was also busy writing and editing most of the General Staff’s next monumental official history, the four-volume series on Charles XII. Bennedich wished to portray his hero as one of the greatest generals of all time and to ‘sell in’ the notion of a special Swedish tactical tradition, dating from Sten Sture the Elder at the Battle of Brunkeberg in 1471 by way of Gustavus Adolphus to Charles XII and his field marshal, Rehnskiöld. This alleged ‘Swedish school’ of army tactics was focused on decisive action and victories of encirclement and annihilation, and of course was much ahead of its time.29 Since the 1950s, military historians have convincingly dismissed Bennedich’s interpretation.30 But although the Charles XII volumes are highly biased and in some respects even unreliable with regard to historical facts, they must still be regarded as far superior to most of the General Staff’s volumes on the wars of 1808–09. Not only does Bennedich’s work contain detailed references to sources, it is written with considerable dramatic talent in clear and elegant prose, and approaches its subject from a consciously theoretical perspective.
In his capacity as senior lecturer in military history at the Army War College, Bennedich in May 1918 firmly opposed a proposal by the college commandant Lieutenant-Colonel Oscar Nygren to temporarily exclude the war against Russia in 1808–09 from the syllabus so that time could be made for a general overview of the Napoleonic Wars. Bennedich argued that the 1808–09 conflict was valuable to study in view of the many ‘negative lessons’ it contained. He was supported by his colleague, the senior lecturer in military geography, who expected that the teaching of Finland’s geography would become an important part of his duties in future (an independent Finnish state had appeared on Sweden’s eastern border a mere six months before). Students would come better prepared to geography classes if they had studied the campaign in Finland in 1808 beforehand.31
The college commandant accepted these objections, but ten years later the wars of 1808–09 still disappeared from the syllabus for good. Swedish officers in the late 1920s spent considerable time studying Finland’s geography, but they did so without consulting the General Staff’s histories of 1808–09.32 Although the short survey of the Baltic Sea region’s military geography had been included in Volume 8 on Bennedich’s recommendations, it proved to be of little use for strategic planning in the 1920s as it did not contain any information about railways, airports, munitions industries, hydroelectric power stations, or other modern infrastructure. The officer who in 1929 succeeded Bennedich as head of the General Staff’s Military History Section, Helge Jung, initiated the reorientation of the Swedish officer-corps and the teaching at the Army War College towards a more contemporary focus.
The outcome of the First World War, when Imperial Germany suffered defeat and parliamentary democracy triumphed in Sweden, constituted a serious blow to Bennedich and made him lose interest in current affairs. During his time as head of the General Staff Military History Section (1922–9) he would also play a surprisingly marginal role when it came to research, not least because he had a formidable rival in the civilian director of the Military Archives, Birger Steckzén (who was formally Bennedich’s subordinate). In the last of the three great Swedish General Staff histories, dedicated to the wars of Gustavus Adolphus in 1611–32, Bennedich was initially involved in some of the research, but the project was dominated by Steckzén, who had written a doctoral dissertation on Sweden’s military participation in the Thirty Years War and had a much better grasp of the relevant sources—in Swedish as well as in foreign archives. The volumes of the Gustavus Adolphus work, which began to appear in print only in 1936 when Bennedich had long since left the General Staff Military History Section and was serving as regimental commander in Linköping, were also more in tune with contemporary academic history than had been the earlier General Staff works. Although the idea that Gustavus Adolphus represented a unique ‘Swedish school’ of warfare is still discernable, this thought tends to drown in a mass of details. No doubt, the lack of surviving documents from Charles XII’s campaign in Russia had facilitated Bennedich’s one-sided argument in his work on Karl XII på slagfältet. It is perhaps revealing that Steckzén criticized Bennedich for being an historian who started with ‘a predetermined thesis and then adapted his sources accordingly’.33 To this day, this has remained a common accusation against theory-oriented historians from their more cautious colleagues.
As would later be the case with many historians from the 1968 generation, it was Carl Bennedich’s ideological awareness which gave urgency to his pen and led him to look for the overriding structures in history at the expense of detail and nuances. In Bennedich’s view, the cataclysm of 1808–09, which had led to Sweden’s final fall from great-power status and the reduction of the monarchy to a predominantly symbolic institution in society, could not be satisfactorily analysed in a purely military context. Consequently, the battlefield narrative of traditional General Staff history had to be expanded into a larger ‘history of war and society’. Paradoxically, this position made him more ‘modern’ in scholarly terms than most other military historians of his time (and even some military historians of our time).
It is also clear that Bennedich’s position was formed by the Great War. As this conflict had developed into an unpredictable war of attrition, it seemed obvious that any serious military analysis should include a knowledge of communications and infrastructure, as well as of demographic, economic, social, and ideological factors in the belligerent countries. Recent experience from the conflict in which Sweden—to Bennedich’s regret—refrained from actively participating had also highlighted the role of trade interests in foreign policy and the dangers for a small-power neutral of the undermining of its governmental authority. Consequently, all those aspects of ‘total war’ should be a part of the official history of Sweden’s struggle in 1808–09, if the General Staff’s efforts were to be of any relevance to future generations of Swedish officers.
Although the First World War revolutionized warfare and seemingly diminished the immediate value of centuries-old experience to Swedish officers in the interwar period, Bennedich’s view that total war made the writing of ‘total military history’ necessary remains highly relevant even today.
Notes
1 Jan Olof Olsson, 1914 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1964), 36.
2 Gunnar Åselius, ‘Hugo Raab och den moderna högskoleidén’, in Gunnar Artéus (ed.), Hugo Raab. Förkämpe för ett modernt försvar (Stockholm: Försvarshögskolan, 2003).
3 Michael Howard, ‘Men against Fire’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: from Machiavelli to the Modern Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
4 Gunnar Åselius, ‘Historien som vägvisare till framtida segrar. Om krigshistoriens roll i svensk officersutbildning’, in Inte bara krig. Nio föreläsningar i Krigsarkivet. Meddelanden från Krigsarkivet XXVII (Stockholm: Krigsarkivet, 2006); Martin Raschke, Der politisierender Generalstab. Die Friedrizianischen Kriege in der amtlichen deutschen Militärgeschichtsschreibung 1890–1914, (Freiburg: Rombach, 1993); Jay Luvaas, The Military Legacy of the Civil War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959); Carol Reardon, Soldiers and Scholars: the US Army and the Uses of Military History 1865–1920 (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas., 1990); Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: from the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 393–9.
5 Cf. Jonathan B. A. Bailey, ‘The First World War and the birth of modern warfare’, in MacGregor Knox & Williamson Murray (eds.), The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); on the Swedish reception of the new way of waging war, see Lars Ericson Wolke, Krigets idéer. Svenska tankar om krigföring (Stockholm: Medström, 2007), 321–49.
6 Gunnar Åselius, ‘Krigshistoria i kris: historia, strategi och kampen om undervisningstimmar på Krigshögskolan under mellankrigstiden’, in Gunnar Artéus, Karl Molin & Magnus Petersson (eds.), Säkerhet och försvar. En vänbok till Kent Zetterberg (Karlskrona: Abrahamsson, 2006).
7 Military Archives, Stockholm, KHS arkiv, Inträdesprov, serie F I, 1908, ‘Vilka voro de främsta nackdelarna med den stormaktsställning Sverige upprätthöll i det sjuttonde århundradet?’
8 Torsten Söderquist, ‘Kursen 1908–1910’, Kungl. Krigshögskolan 1878–1928. En minnesskrift (Stockholm: Haeggström, 1928), 99, ‘mellan Sveriges läge i början av 18. och 20. århundradet. Huru mycket gynnsammare skulle icke det senare ha varit om HAN levat’.
9 Biographic data from Frank Martin, ‘Carl Bennedich’, Svenska män och kvinnor. Biografisk uppslagsbok (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1942).
10 Birger Steckzén, Personliga minnen från det svenska arkivväsendet (Meddelanden från Krigsarkviet, 26; Stockholm: Krigsarkivet, 2005), 29, ‘För utomstående var han med sin dynamiska natur och sin tankeflykt en fascinerand e person, för den som hade att dagligen göra med honom var han en prövande och tröttande man. Långt in på nätterna kunde han sitta och prata dvs han pratade hela tiden själv’; ibid. 28, ‘å huvudets vägnar var han mycket begåvad och hade uppslag och idéer som ibland voro blixtrande’.
11 Gunnar Åselius, ‘“Poltava verkar inte förstämmande på en frisk människa”. Med Carl Bennedich på slagfältet’, in Lena Jonson & Tamara Torstendahl Salytjeva (eds.), Poltava: krigsfångar och kulturutbyte (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009).
12 Bennedich’s studies of Poltava were published as ‘Om den svenska planläggningen av slaget vid Poltava och stridsledningen’, Karolinska förbundets årsbok (Stockholm: Karolinska förbundet 1913); Carl Bennedich, ‘Poltava’, Nordisk familjebok. Konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi (Stockholm: Nordisk familjeboks förlag, 1915); Generalstaben, Karl XII på slagfältet. Karolinsk slagordning sedd mot bakgrund av slagtaktikens utveckling från alla äldsta tider III (Stockholm, 1918); Frans G. Bengtsson’s account of Poltava can be found in Karl XII:s levnad. Från Altranstädt till Fredrikshall (1935; Stockholm: Norstedts, 1980), 146–185 (this work was also translated into English: The Sword does not jest: the Heroic Life of King Charles XII of Sweden, New York: S:t Martin’s Press, 1960; on Bengtsson’s dependence on the General Staff official histories, see Bengt Liljegren, ‘Om Frans G Bengtssons Karl XII’, in Lars M Andersson, Fabian Persson, Peter Ullgren & Ulf Zander (eds.), På historiens slagfält. En festskrift tillägnad Sverker Oredsson (Uppsala: Sisyfos förlag, 2002), 62, 66; the first major reinterpretation of the battle came only with Gustaf Petri’s article ‘Slaget vid Poltava’, Karolinska förbundets årsbok (Stockholm: Karolinska förbundet 1958).
13 Bennedich’s activities in Karolinska förbundet and in connection with the Courtyard Crisis (when the king intervened directly in parliamentary politics) are described by Jarl Torbacke, ‘Försvaret främst’. Tre studier till borggårdskrisens problematik (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1983), 43–113.
14 Bertil Broomé, ‘Krigshistoriska avdelningens förhistoria och verksamhet t o m 1917’, Aktuellt & Historiskt (1973), 180–205.
15 L. S. [Ludvig Stavenow], ‘Sveriges krig åren 1808–1809’, Historisk tidskrift 25/1 (1905), 57–58.
16 Broomé 1973, 188–192; Krigsarkivet, Beståndsöversikt (Meddelanden från Krigsarkivet 11/2; Stockholm: Krigsarkivet, 1987), ii. 557.
17 Military Archives, Stockholm, Sveriges krig 1808–1809, vol. 398, ‘Vilka särskilda synpunkter böra göra sig gällande vid utarbetandet av Del VIII av “Sveriges krig åren 1808–1809”, dels på grund av att denna del, i motsats till övriga delar av ifrågavarande arbete, behandlar försvarsåtgärder inom eget land, dels med hänsyn till verkets avslutning inom rimlig tid?’, Carl Bennedich, 5 March 1915, preface, ‘endast för att lära känna modern svensk partipolitiks önskningar och behov ifråga om färgläggning av sanningen om 1809 års händelser’.
18 Ibid. 21–24, 27.
19 Ibid. 20–21, 26, ‘lära sina elever att på grundvalen av egna forskningar inom olika grenar av krigskonsten bilda ett eget omdöme’.
20 Ibid. 9–11.
21 Ibid. 32–9.
22 Ibid. 57; ibid. 67, 69, ‘Äro vi bättre än 1808, torde ryssarna även vara det, och åtminstone i lika proportion’.
23 Ibid. 42, ‘Redan då stod ‘neutraliteten’ som ett hotande spöke över oss’; ibid. 62, ‘särskilt med tanke på vissa under nuvarande läge ännu även på mycket ledande håll rådande fullständiga vanföreställningar om utländska makters intressen i den skandinaviska norden’; ibid. 63–4.
24 Ibid. 6–7, 39, 40, ‘då revolutionens skugga möter’.
25 Ibid. 41–7.
26 Ibid. 72, ‘vådorna i och följderna av ett folks, dess byråkratis och dess partihövdingars självbedrägeri och åsidosättande av sin verkliga, mest elementära plikt’; ibid. 73, ‘Den galliska frasen omtöcknade det sträva germanska förnuftet.’
27 Generalstaben, krigshistoriska avdelningen, Sveriges krig åren 1808 och 1809, viii (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1921), 44–47, 220–254.
28 Generalstaben, krigshistoriska avdelningen Sveriges krig åren 1808 och 1809, ix (Stockholm: Norstedts 1922); Willy Kleen, Ur skuggan av min dal (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1954).
29 Generalstaben, krigshistoriska avdelningen, Karl XII på slagfältet. Karolinsk slagordning sedd mot bakgrund av slagtaktikens utveckling från alla äldsta tider I–IV (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1918–1919).
30 Folke Wernstedt, ‘Lineartaktik och karolinsk taktik. Några reflektioner med anledning av framställningen i “Karl XII på slagfältet”’, Karolinska förbundets årsbok (Stockholm: Karolinska förbundet, 1957); Gunnar Artéus, Krigsteori och historisk förklaring, ii: Svensk och europeisk stridstaktik 1700–1712 (Gothenburg: Historiska institutionen i Göteborg, 1972).
31 Krigsarkivet (KrA) [Military Archives of Sweden], Stockholm, KHS arkiv, serie A II, vol. 2, avd I, Exp. lärarkollegiets protokoll [faculty meeting minutes], 21 May 1918.
32 Reglemente och övriga bestämmelser för Kungl. Krigshögskolan, 1926 års upplaga [War College Regulations, 1926 edition] (Stockholm, 1926), §§ 2, 3 & 10; Militärläroverksinspektionens arkiv, Krigsundervisningskommissionen [Board of Military Education] serie A, vol. 5; KrA, Äldre lärokursen 1928–1929, C. A. Ehrensvärd 31 August 1928, ‘Förslag till undervisningsprogram i läroämnet Sveriges strategiska förhållanden’.
33 Steckzén, Personliga minnen, 29, ‘Som historisk forskare gick han ut från en förutbestämd Tes och anpassade källorna därefter’; on the Gustavus Adolphus project, see Lars Ericson [Wolke], ‘Clio i österled. Krigsarkivets, krigshistoriska avdelningens och Gustav Adolf-projektets arkivforskningar till stormaktstidens militärhistoria i Ostpreussen under 1920-talet’, in Kent Zetterberg & Gunnar Åselius (eds.), Historia, krig och statskonst. En vänbok till Klaus-Richard Böhme (Stockholm: Probus, 2000); the evaluation of the general staff history of Gustavus Adolphus presented by Sven Lundquist in his article ‘Slaget vid Breitenfeld’, Historisk tidskrift, 83/1 (1963) remains relevant.