2 How Many Times Can the German Army Play the Same Trick?
By the summer of 1870, Otto von Bismarck had managed to play the chess game of European politics so brilliantly that he had all but created a single nation out of hundreds of German-speaking principalities, duchies, free cities, and kingdoms that stretched across the European plane from France to Russia’s western province of Poland. To effect Germany’s final unification into the Deutsches Reich, he contrived to involve all these separate states in a conflict with France by tricking Napoléon III into declaring war on Prussia. The Franco-Prussian War allowed Bismarck to call upon an alliance of all the German states to defend their loose confederation. Under Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, the German army surrounded the French and defeated them at the Battle of Sedan on the 1st of September 1870, when it captured Napoléon III. The war dragged on for another five months of desultory fighting until Paris was besieged, after which Bismarck arranged for the king of Prussia to be crowned as “Kaiser”—emperor of a single united German nation—at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris.
But the Battle of Sedan is the event that military historians remember most. After its spectacular defeat in that town, the French army established the Grande Quartier-Général—a general staff like the German one. In the forty-four years that followed, French military historians subjected the Franco-Prussian campaign and its decisive moment at Sedan to careful study, for the now unified German Empire had become an even bigger threat to France than the dozens of German principalities had been before the war.
Sedan sits in the department of the Ardennes, near the Belgian border, to the west of the small nation of Luxembourg, in the forest and mountain range that gives the department its name. It’s the star in the map shown in figure 2.1.
Location of Sedan on the map of France. Courtesy of Creative Commons Wikipedia. http://
By the late summer of 1914, “the lamps were going out all over Europe,” in the words of British Foreign Minister Edward Grey. But not in the Grande Quartier-Général of the French army nor, for that matter, in the Großer Generalstab of the German army. Each was war-gaming the opening moves of the war they were both hoping for. The Germans had been refining what was known as the “Schlieffen Plan,” named after Alfred von Schlieffen, the chief of the General Staff who drafted it as early as 1905. The plan was famously summed up in the admonition “When we march into France, let the last man on the right brush the English Channel with his sleeve.” This time, France was to be defeated, not by a frontal attack from the west toward Sedan as in 1870, but by a vast encirclement. The German army would sweep down across Belgium along the north coast of France and then take the French army from the rear as it rushed east toward the Rhine.
But, perhaps fearing that the French knew about this decade-old plan, in the summer of 1914, the German Generalstab decided to modify it. Instead of heading west to the Channel, the German army would go through the Ardennes, almost exactly where it had met and defeated the French army at Sedan in 1870.
Despite careful historical study of the Battle of Sedan, including the terrain and the German strategy in 1870, this battle went no better for the French in 1914 than the first one. Forced to retreat almost all the way back to Paris, the French army was saved 50 kilometers from the city by reinforcements, some crucially delivered in taxi cabs (whose drivers ran their meters).
On the French battle map of that offensive (figure 2.2), you can find Sedan in the upper middle, around which the advancing German armies are sweeping counterclockwise.
French map of Battle of the Frontiers (Bataille des Frontières), August 1914. By Lvcvlvs—Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29123350.
In the years following World War One, a new generation of French military historians working for the Grande Quartier-Général, studied these operations assiduously, though all the analysis was kept secret.
Despite two previous rounds with Germany in the seventy years before, the French were surprised in May 1940 when the Germans did the same thing for the third time in as many wars. Hitler sent the Wehrmacht’s Army Group A straight through the Ardennes right into Sedan, which was captured without resistance. The Army Group then poured south, defeating the entire French army in less than six weeks. Notice the large dark gray arrow in the map shown in figure 2.3, pointing right at Sedan.
The fall of France, May–June, 1940.
Four years and six months later, the armies of Britain and the United States stood pretty much where the French armies had been in May of 1940 (the thick black line in the figure 2.3 map). At which point, Hitler launched his largest and last full-scale offensive of World War Two. He did so in the very same place where the Germans had attacked and won in 1870, 1914, and 1940: the Ardennes. The Allies called it the “Battle of the Bulge” for obvious reasons. Notice how the Germans pushed a huge bulge into the British and American lines between the middle of December 1944 and the beginning of January 1945 (figure 2.4).
Furthest extent of German advance during the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944.
If you’re looking for Sedan (whose location isn’t labeled on the map in figure 2.4), it’s just to the left and below Neufchȃteau on the lower left of this map.
Four times in seventy years, the Germans attacked in exactly the same place. How could their adversaries get matters so completely wrong so many times in the same way at the same place? Common sense and prudence would strongly suggest precautions against the Germans doing the same thing over and over again. Well, that’s what common sense might tell us. But the professional military historical analysis of what went wrong each time before, in fact, seems to have suggested each time that it wouldn’t, couldn’t happen again.
It’s important to note that the French, British, and American general staffs actually took seriously what their historians told them, and they planned accordingly. The staffs treated history as a source of knowledge useful for predicting the future. And, each time, they paid dearly for doing so.
After the fiasco of the Franco-Prussian War, France completely reorganized its military, and with careful study of the history of the war, changed its military doctrine, too. Long before 1914, the French decided that they were not going to make the mistake of defending cities under siege, as they had done in 1870. Instead, they would attack with élan right through the Ardennes on either side of Sedan. But their advancing armies were decimated by machine gun fire and artillery. Afterward, it didn’t take much study of World War One for the French to realize that it is defense, not all-out offense, “à l’outrance,” that wins wars. So, the third time around, they built the Maginot Line, as history bid them, to prepare for the next World War, spending billions of francs in the process. And so, too, as students of history, in 1940, the French couldn’t believe that the Germans would do it again. They just knew that the Germans, unable to get their tanks, half-tracks, and other armored units through the deep forest of the Ardennes, would have no choice but to come down through Belgium, as the old pre–World War One Schlieffen Plan required them to do, and to fight it out in front of the fortified Maginot Line. They were wrong, and it cost them the war. In 1944, the Allies thought they knew exactly what the Germans were going to do because they had broken Enigma, the German secret radio codes, years before. Since there were no orders radioed to German units to prepare for an offensive through the Ardennes, the Allies concluded there couldn’t be one coming. They were wrong— a mistake that almost cost them the war in the west. The Germans, suspecting that their radio traffic was being intercepted, had ordered their officers to use only telephones—and they attacked in the same spot they’d used three times before.
The moral of this story is that, if you want to prepare for the next war, don’t study military history. But the military establishment of every modern Western nation devotes vast resources to have historians do exactly that. More than their colleagues in other areas of study, military historians take seriously the oft-repeated dictum of the American philosopher George Santayana. In Reason in Common Sense, he famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (Santayana, 1905, p. 284). Others have seconded this sentiment. The world’s most widely read historian, Winston Churchill, is widely reported to have claimed that “the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
Military histories may be the most convincing evidence of the failure of history to get the future right. For centuries now, governments have paid some of their best and best-informed military officers to write the military histories of their wars. The result has been a cornucopia of studies of the minutest details in the exercise of the military art. The U.S. Army’s history of World War One comprises nineteen large volumes and its history of World War Two, thirty-eight.
No one can pin down the origin of the saying “generals are always preparing for the last war,” so widely known and so often repeated. But, surely, the military historians have long been acquainted with the observation it makes. You would think that they’d pay some heed to it, especially since they are expected to provide insight from history to guide the strategy, tactics, and logistics of future wars. You’d be wrong. And the problem is not that military historians are stupid or uninformed. The problem is that history is not up to the task of providing useful guidance about the future.
The story of the military historians’ repeated failures to extract the right lesson from their study of the past, to see their way forward by looking back, is the clearest illustration of a more general fact about historical scholarship. There are obvious reasons why the military planners should not have looked to military history to predict the future. These reasons also apply to most other historical research. Here are a few of them.
First, the exact factors a historical explanation cites for one event almost never recur again in exactly the same way. So one explanation doesn’t have much bearing on the future. Even if the same factors are in operation in the future, their weights and proportions are rarely the same, and new factors are almost always involved. This is far from news to most historians, and it is among the reasons many have dissented from Santayana’s dictum and looked with skepticism on Churchill’s pronouncement.
But the users of history have increasingly underestimated the role of entirely new factors in shifting the trajectory of events away from its past directions. The effect of entirely new and unarguably unpredictable factors on history has grown rapidly in the last two centuries. Ironically, it’s safe to predict the role of these factors will soon completely undermine confidence in any predictive role for history. This prediction is not itself based on history, though the history of the four separate German thrusts through the Ardennes illustrates it plainly enough. Technological change from 1870 through 1944 was clearly unpredictable and had a decisive impact when added to other factors that remained the same over the period. The machine gun, the Maginot Line, the tank, Ultra decryption all made a difference in what happened in each of the thrusts—and all made any extrapolation from previous history pretty pointless. It’s interesting to note that the military planners were later criticized by historians for not having learned this obvious fact from history. If technological change is driven by scientific discovery and invention—the quintessentially unpredictable results of human creativity—then it seems obvious that the events technology affects will be just as unpredictable. And, as the role played by technology in human affairs grows ever greater, the study of history will have fewer and fewer lessons for the future.
A second, equally important complicating factor in efforts to apply history to the future is the knowledge the historical “players” have of that history itself. One reason the German attack through the Ardennes was such a surprise, especially the third and fourth times they tried it, was that everyone knew they’d done it before, and no one suspected they’d do it again, and again, and again. But the Germans’ decision to do it again was based, at least in part, on the conviction that their adversaries, knowing the Germans had done it before, again and again, would simply not expect them to do it yet again. History—the study of what happened and why—has an effect on history, on what actually happens, through people’s awareness of it. That kind of “reflexiveness” is another source of the difficulty in extrapolating the human future from the past.
If, in general, the course of human history is heavily influenced by the emergence of new factors that no one could predict, like scientific and technological change, and if it is also “reflexive,” effected by historical agents knowing what happened in the past—then it’s pretty safe to conclude that history has no hope of predicting any detail that might be used to cope with the future. Some people view this conclusion as reflecting a serious objection or at least a limitation on history’s claims to provide knowledge, or at any rate useful knowledge. It certainly undermines grandiloquent claims like Santayana’s and Churchill’s. And it provides the basis for the animus of at least some empirically oriented social scientists against history.
But, as the basis for a critique of history as an explanatory discipline, the demand for predictive power is widely viewed as being both unreasonable and a misunderstanding of what history is all about. This goes for both academic historical scholarship and the true-story narrative history devoured by general readers. Most historians and consumers of history will insist that history is not in the event-prediction business and can’t be judged by any such a standard—indeed, that the goal, function, aim, and objective of history and historical scholarship is not to teach us anything specific about the future. Some sciences are in the prediction business and do increasingly well at it. But history isn’t science and doesn’t pretend to be. Don’t mistake history for accurate crystal ball gazing, they insist.
Although, unlike weather forecasting, history doesn’t—and indeed is not supposed to—predict particular future events, it does nevertheless prepare us for our future, or so some argue. It’s more like climate science, measuring out epochs and periods, explaining events by “contextualizing” them as instances, examples of much larger units, periods, what a famous French historian called the “longue durée.” As such, history is the only thing that can help us cope with the future. How else, so many historians argue, can we understand our present except as the result of our past? And although the future is open, it’s not radically open, and only history can identify, if only tentatively and imprecisely, its shape. Sometimes history helps us avoid traps, mistakes, outcomes that we had to deal with in the past and wish to avoid. Sometimes it suggests ways to improve the chances of attaining outcomes we seek, or mitigate the worst consequences of ones that are unavoidable. Sometimes it can reveal trends, help us put the present into perspective, measure the dimensions and the causes and effects of events in our own times by comparisons. History can do all of this, even if it can’t actually tell us what’s going to happen next. Surely, that would make a knowledge of history worth having.
Well, such knowledge certainly would be worth having if there were a way of telling its right explanations from its wrong ones, and those of its right explanations which were broadly relevant to the present and the future from those which were not. Having a good idea about the direction or drift of things would be of inestimable value to our understanding if only we could be confident that we indeed had such an idea. But it’s evident there’s no agreement among historians, either on how in general to tell right from wrong explanations, or even which particular explanation is right or wrong, still less which ones can help us prepare for the future, whatever that means.
Each of the four military catastrophes in the Ardennes that military historians didn’t predict was the subject of a best-selling work of history by a respected historian: The Guns of August (Tuchman, 1962), The Fall of Paris (Horne, 1965), To Lose a Battle (Horne, 1969), and The Bitter Woods (Eisenhower, 1969). None of these best-selling explanations, not Barbara Tuchman’s, not Alastair Horne’s, not John Eisenhower’s stood for very long without inviting a revisionist historian’s response. Why is that? Because it remains an open question whether any of these best sellers got it right, correctly explained why the Germans went through the Ardennes in 1870, or 1914, or 1940, or 1944.
There is overwhelming evidence that the most basic questions about the most significant events in history must remain permanently open. Long after the events of World War Two, indeed long after all the archives were opened, diaries read, and memoires published, historians still disagree. Between 2014 and 2016, at least eight books were published debating the events of the 1944 Battle of the Bulge alone.
In 2014, at least a half a dozen door-stopper books on World War One were published, each with a different narrative explanation of why the Great War had broken out a hundred years before. Now, you might say that the appearance of yet another batch of books on such a well-trod subject is testimony not to previous histories’ having got matters wrong, but, rather, to our eagerness to consume narratives. The cause for their publication is sheer commercial opportunism, not new revelations about why World War One really broke out. Indeed. But, surely, the tide of history books on the same subjects, year after year, decade after decade, and now century after century, all disagreeing about their causes, is also testimony to the fact that we still lack the historical knowledge we seek? We still don’t know why World War One started. Worse, we will never know if any of these new books have provided the correct answer to this question.
If it’s not just commercial opportunism, there must be a reason for the spate of books still disagreeing about what brought about World War One. The disagreement is still lively because, no matter what historians say, we and they seek guidance from history for the future. One historian’s explanation is a cautionary tale that he or she hopes will shape policies to avoid a similar cataclysm. Another’s shows that we have nothing to worry about, or at least we don’t have the same thing to worry about because circumstances have changed so much. Still a third explains the outbreak as a tissue of one-off happenstances, freak accidents that have no implications for avoiding future outbreaks of war.
Unless there’s a way to tell which account is right, the disagreements will never end. Now, in the sciences, we know perfectly well how to decide between competing explanatory theories, models, or simulations. The criterion is clear. It’s predictive success. In choosing between alternative theories, scientists sometimes have to compare predictive track records or to examine the trends of increasing or decreasing predictive accuracy as their measuring instruments improve. But, as we’ve already seen, such an approach is not only not available in history; it’s not even appropriate. Unlike the sciences, history is not in the business of predicting the weather or earthquakes, much less political elections, economic depressions, or violent revolutions.
But unless historians accept some kind of demand that their explanations have even a modest predictive payoff, they won’t be able to claim a role for history in helping us avoid pitfalls, tracing out the broad outlines of human affairs, or enabling us to cope with the future by narrowing down its possibilities to some manageable, intelligible proportions. Without some track record of predictive success, even this role is too much to demand of history as a body of explanations we can rely on for much of anything at all.
The question remains open, what kind of real understanding do historical explanations provide if they’re not to be judged by their value in shaping our preparation for the future or our coping with its challenges?
Historians, the defenders of narrative history will insist, have far more important work to do than offer predictions or even guidance about the future. The value of historical explanations can’t be judged on that standard because the kind of understanding they provide is quite different. And, once we recognize the real aims of history, they go on to argue, we’ll see how it matters for the future (and the fleeting present for that matter) without making unreasonable demands on its powers to foresee anything in particular.
Historians seek the meaning of the past for the present and future because that is the best way, or the only way, we can understand our circumstances. And all the best of the explanations they provide help shape and ground that meaning for us.
Historians certainly do sift through the events of the past to identify the forces and factors they think had the greatest importance in shaping the present: since the present is a moving target, history must get rewritten each generation since the past factors that were significant for making the world of our fathers and mothers may not be the same as the ones making our world or our children’s world.
History enables us to look back from the perspective of the present to find the real meanings of past events. This is a role for history that has nothing to do with predicting the future or coping with it in any way. History reevaluates, reassesses, revises the past in the light of the present, finding features sometimes unnoticed in the past but important to us today, to give the past its “real” or at least its “contemporary” significance.
The American Civil War, variously called the “War of the Rebellion,” the War between the States,” and the “War of Northern Aggression,” is a wonderful example of the role and importance of history, even as it is revised, from generation to generation, in putting whole epochs, eras, periods, in a new light, one that reveals features important to us. It’s not just the names for “the late unpleasantness” that have changed. Over the hundred and fifty years since the war’s end, each generation of Americans has sought a new import in the events of 1861–1865. The meanings adopted in different times and different parts of the country have differed quite sharply, and the differences have been quite powerful in their effect on culture, society, and government. Historians and others have argued over the matter for 150 years or more. The war came to mean several different things over time in large swathes of the United States. For a hundred years or so, the Southerners’ interpretation prevailed: the war was not really about slavery at all, but about states’ rights. Whence the name “War between the States.” Slavery as a fact about the South, “the peculiar institution,” became invisible as a casus belli, and the Northern victory was fatally weakened as a motive to oppose Jim Crow segregation. For a century, Southern and Northern historians perpetuated the interpretation of the Civil War as the culmination of an argument about “nullification” and “interposition,” not an argument about the extension of chattel slavery. It thus could not take on the meaning, significance, and moral force that would make it a motivating narrative for opponents of racism and exploitation.
The rewriting of the history of the American Civil War in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century completely changed its meaning. Looking back, a changed contemporary America found a new meaning of the Civil War in the abolition of slavery and the sacrifices of African American soldiers. This new meaning of the war didn’t result from the discovery of new demographic data, new sources in diaries, letters, and memoires, new quantitative studies of slavery as a system, but, rather, from the new importance assigned to these, which motivated the new historical explanations for the Civil War and for newly important incidents in the war. It made possible and brought about a whole new domain of social history to complement, displace, deepen, and change the military and political history of the war. It made visible the role of many in the war who had been invisible, black Union soldiers, slave and free women, Southern opponents of slavery, Northern apologists for it. The change in the war’s meaning for us challenged and often overturned the weightings of importance assigned to the causes of the war on which almost everyone had long agreed.
Notice, however, that the sea change in the meaning of Civil War history over the lifetimes of most Americans was more a source than a result of the revisionist history that has flourished since the centenary of the Civil War in 1965. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (McPherson, 1988) reigned over this tide as a unifying document. Social, economic, cultural, and gender, along with technological, military, and political, historians all contributed to filling out the details of what happened in the United States from before to well after the period 1861–1865 in ways that would vindicate the meaning of the war as part of an emancipation for all Americans. (British readers may find the same shifting sands in the history of the meaning of the English Civil War, and French readers in reinterpretations of the German Occupation of the 1940s.)
A large part of the project of giving meaning to past events, periods, and epochs is to be found in its moral motivation. Although nothing makes this plainer than the popularity of the labels the “Good War” for World War Two and the “Greatest Generation” for those Americans who endured the Depression of the 1930s and went on to fight the Good War, both these labels are contested. Was it really a good war, or at least a morally better war than the others the United States has fought? Was the generation who experienced it really morally more worthy than the generations who came before or after?
Much narrative history is written and read in order to vindicate or contest such moral judgments. This, many historians and many readers of history will maintain, is why history is so important, why its explanations matter. What doesn’t matter is whether the explanations of history have any kind of payoff for helping us cope with the future. Their importance lies in how they enable us to evaluate the past, plumb its meaning, significance, import, its weight for meting out reward, punishment, praise, responsibility, blame, or exculpation, even if these determinations are entirely personal to the writers or readers who make or subscribe to them.
Notice, this role for history still makes getting its explanations right of the highest importance. For without confidence that among competing historical explanations some are right and others wrong and that we can tell which is which, history amounts to little more than propaganda or ideology deployed in conflicts over values, interests, and power.
Recall the controversial claim of chapter 1, that history as an account of the past in human affairs has been more a force for harm than good (to which we’ll return in the last of the main chapters). Perhaps the most powerful response to that charge is to argue that history is or would be a force for good or at least for better when and only when its narratives get their stories right. The right explanations shared widely enough can make history largely, perhaps even entirely, a force for good.
This positive view of history’s impact when it gets matters right may be overoptimistic. But surely getting the narrative right is a necessary condition for historical understanding. McPherson certainly holds this view. He ends his magisterial history of the American Civil War by stressing the importance of getting the narrative right for the broadest historical understanding: “Northern victory and southern defeat in the war cannot be understood apart from the contingency that hung over every campaign, every battle, every election, every decision during the war. This phenomenon of contingency can best be presented in a narrative format—a format this book has tried to provide” (McPherson, 1988, p. 77).
Historians have a responsibility to get their explanatory facts right, and not just because history claims to provide knowledge of the past, but owing to the impact of its explanations on the rest of humanity’s concerns. The demand that historians get these facts right, that their narratives uncover and identify the real causes of what they purport to explain, immediately poses the problem of how to tell when they have done so. We’ve excluded predictive success, even of the most generic and open-ended kind, as the criterion of whether and when historical explanations are right or even moving closer to the truth. What will provide the litmus test we need?
Historians will have little patience with this challenge. After all, we know in the ordinary course of life and from our daily interaction when the explanations we offer to one another are right or wrong, credible or incredible, worth relying on or mere rationalizations or excuses. We know perfectly well what kind of evidence will strengthen our confidence in their rightness and what sorts of facts will weaken them. The same goes for historians. Of course, they have a much harder job than ours is in ordinary life. And the more distant the past, the harder it is for them to find the sort of evidence that will determine which narrative is the right one for what actually happened. But that’s no reason for general skepticism. Sometimes the evidence that archival scholars presents to rule out or rule in a historical explanation is even better than the evidence that law courts require. Historical narratives can get their explanations right, many have argued, and we can tell when they do.
It is this widely held, indeed almost universal, view that this book will challenge. It will show that historical narratives are wrong—all of them. Even when most people can’t tell they’re wrong, neuroscience reveals why history’s narratives are always wrong. If we seek real knowledge of the past, we are going to have to rely on something quite different from what most people rely on to actually find such knowledge. This will be the case whether we look to history for some practical payoff in coping with the future or seek to understand what happened in the past for its own sake.
We’ll start, in chapter 3, by considering the best narrative explanation of an important event whose occurrence has long perplexed many.