Transcript
Speaker: So if I am, let's say the Samus soldier in Frederick the Great's army in 1740,
Speaker: how have things changed for me from the year 1500 up to 1740 in terms of equipment, training, just how have things changed? 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,
Speaker: German armors which was about every three years. It should be noted too that originally you would have to bring your own equipment to fight. Yeah, that's right. Closer to 1500, but now things are different. Yeah, you would have that and your pay would be docked accordingly.
Speaker: Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodham's 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 Blood, 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 Europe
Speaker: a history of the Holy Roman Empire, and the 30 Years War Europe's tragedy. He is also a contributor to the BBC, LA Times, and Financial Times, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Peter, how are you doing today? Oh, good, thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me on. 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.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: So I guess firstly here, why did you decide to write this book? Right. Well, I I've always found German history really interesting. And I think it probably comes from opening up a historical atlas. And, you know, they are all the other countries in Europe are all shaded in and 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 was why was it like that? How did they get on? How did they organize themselves?
Speaker: 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. 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.
Speaker: But to be honest, even though it's a big book, 500 years of military history, 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?
Speaker: Well, having you mentioned earlier on, I wrote the history of the Holy Roman Empire, so that was a thousand years. So 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
Speaker: 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 we need to put them into their broader context. And yeah, that was one of the purposes of doing it the way that I did.
Speaker: 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?
Speaker: Well, I think you're quite right. It has that image and you say those words, Prussian militarism, and we have a certain set of images come to mind. I mean, maybe we have Frederick the Great. We certainly have the sort of pickle halber helmets and the sort of image that in fact that the publishers chose for the front of the book, which is
Speaker: 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 helmets and the stuff from the two world wars. And that image is very dominant and it's very visual and it conveys a sense that the Germans have been somehow uniquely warlike
Speaker: 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 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.
Speaker: And it's much easier to have a simple story, particularly if we're trying to fit, say, Germany into the history of another country. And so we have something that seems to make things intelligible and make sense. But what I've said is that
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: So just kind of talking about some of the symbolism of, you know, when we think 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 know, you've got the iron cross, iron and blood. Why is iron, why is that associated so much with German militarism?
Speaker: 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, that then
Speaker: that was very much a part of about trying to create oppression, 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
Speaker: something which is shiny and soft, so it has all those associations with hardness and toughness. 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 this is not, 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.
Speaker: It's all the German -speaking people, 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?
Speaker: 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 still very powerful. It's the largest and most prestigious state. There isn't another emperor in Europe at the time.
Speaker: 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 in the Ottoman Empire straddled.
Speaker: 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 as
Speaker: and raiding as characterizes the conflicts in the east. Those in the west are mainly between the Habsburgs, so the Austrian family that basically monopolized the imperial title and are contesting the control of various territory and prestige as well, especially with France. And those are
Speaker: campaigns which are very seasonal, both fighting in the East and in the West and in Italy. This is war in the age of grass. Grass is your petrol. You can't go anywhere until you've got grass that fuels your pack animals and it fuels the horses as well and it generally grows when the weather is better. There's a tendency to raise forces
Speaker: They then fight for six to eight months or so when the weather is 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 17th century because war consumes enormous quantity of resources and we're in an age where
Speaker: 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. 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.
Speaker: 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?
Speaker: 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 downtime.
Speaker: as well, so that war creates these additional problems where they would extort communities and so on for further resources across the winter. But the type of warfare at this point requires fairly large disciplined units to maximise the effectiveness of weapons, so these are principally
Speaker: 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 the
Speaker: To say these people are not professionals, I think would be wrong. They have to have some kind of training and the 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.
Speaker: 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
Speaker: 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
Speaker: 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. Well, let's talk about the weapons real quick. So you had mentioned guns. I guess at this point in time, 1500, how many soldiers used guns? What were the typical weapons?
Speaker: Right, 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 is in its ability to penetrate armor was less too. So there's a shift. It's like 10 feet, right?
Speaker: Well, I mean, it varied, armour gets thicker as well across, to respond to this. So there's a classic attack and defence issues going on.
Speaker: 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 about guns. Yeah, of course, they must be more
Speaker: 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. 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.
Speaker: But the industrial capacity to make these as viable weapons doesn't exist. It comes really in the 19th century. It's not obvious that firearms are necessarily better. 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.
Speaker: obviously there are pistols too for cavalry, horse soldiers also have firearms, but there again they're fairly ineffective, mainly for close quarter fighting.
Speaker: 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? 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.
Speaker: It's only really in the 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 leading military power and the one that you copy.
Speaker: A lot of the ideas come 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
Speaker: 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 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.
Speaker: 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 collected.
Speaker: the Habsburgs are the 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. Yeah, and on Austria, I found that so fascinating because we think of German militarism and of course, you know,
Speaker: you know, 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, you know, 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 just, you know, I didn't know much about Austria. Talk a little bit then about
Speaker: kind of what defined Austrian militarism, which is something that I don't hear too much about. How does Austria, how do they differentiate themselves from the Swiss or the German states?
Speaker: Right, well I think there's a lot of shared culture within this area and I think it's better actually to think of this as different types of military culture or martial culture rather than use the term militarism. Militarism tends to have this sort of pejorative sense of an excess and a way in which sort of
Speaker: the interests of the military are distorting the broader interests of society. I'm not saying that didn't happen, of course 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
Speaker: 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're the ones that create the first proper permanent units. So they've got 20 ,000, 30 ,000 troops that they can call on around 1600.
Speaker: 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
Speaker: 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, you know, we got distinct traditions in military music, distinct traditions in the way that officers and men interact and so on.
Speaker: 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 the soldiers, there was a separate kind of army German that developed as a kind of
Speaker: you know, basic German that anyone from the empire could understand. So it has those kinds of characteristics that come from this, from its own general character as this sort of multinational, multi -ethnic empire. Let's then mention Switzerland, famously neutral, but that wasn't always the case.
Speaker: What are the defining characteristics when it comes to Switzerland? This idea of the Swiss neutrality and they must be very peaceful and so on, they fight numerous wars against each other and outsiders.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: until the Napoleonic era when they're given equal rights. There's various other bits that they've conquered from the nobles that they basically kick out. And so these areas in Switzerland lack rights too.
Speaker: 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
Speaker: 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
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: 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?
Speaker: Well, I guess it retains one of the characteristics throughout, and that's one of the key arguments of the book. I mean, 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.
Speaker: Generally speaking, if we look separate from Prussia, and that's one of the things 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,
Speaker: 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
Speaker: anti -French coalitions and is supplying either directly as a member or its component and principalities are often supplying troops so to the British to the Dutch and so on who are generally speaking the the the enemies and these wars against the Turks are continuing the last of those really isn't at the very end of the 18th century so that kind of pattern is repeating and what the the big change is that
Speaker: There have been some disturbances. These external wars have triggered internal conflicts as well. And the 30s 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 unprovoked attack on the Austrians who seem particularly weak at that point. And it's meant to be a lightning strike.
Speaker: grab the territory and it sort of comes off, but it embeds this Austro -Prussian rivalry, which is a major theme really into the mid -19th century. Well, let's talk then about Prussia, which gets talked about a lot. Is the reputation for
Speaker: for having a very tough military, is that deserved? Talk about the depression attitude. 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.
Speaker: And 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 eight to 10 months, the rest of the year, the soldiers are released back into the civilian economy. And that's the thing that enables
Speaker: 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
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: It basically 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. Let's say I'm a soldier in Frederick the Great's army in 1740,
Speaker: how have things changed for me from the year 1500 up to 1740 in terms of equipment, training, just how have things changed? 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,
Speaker: German armors which was about every three years. It should be noted to that originally you would have to bring your own equipment to fight closer to fifteen hundred but now.
Speaker: things are different. Yeah, you would have that, and your pay would be docked accordingly. And you would have limited rations, so you would get a bread ration, which you would often pull with sort of six to eight comrades, and you would commonly pull your meager pay as well, and then you buy your fresh vegetables and meat and stuff in peacetime. In wartime, you'd get a meat ration as well.
Speaker: 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,
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: The other thing that would make you different from most other German soldiers is that you would 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.
Speaker: 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. Very interesting.
Speaker: 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 the attitude of soldiers? Do they just think they were fighting a job?
Speaker: I think 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.
Speaker: 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 the empire before 1806 and then increasingly an idea of Germany and that was that
Speaker: 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 the German nationalism has always been characterized since then by this tension. 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. So there's always been those sort of tensions.
Speaker: 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 more localized loyalty. And of course, they have loyalty to their comrades.
Speaker: You're dependent, you're fighting in very close proximity. So if you're not fighting well or you run away, 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.
Speaker: Well, let's talk a little bit about, I don't know if you're just soldiers are higher or being a mercenary and maybe soldiers outside German soldiers going outside of the German speaking region.
Speaker: 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? There would be a lot. I think that the estimate, the general estimate for Switzerland, which has a population throughout most of this period of less than a million, and obviously at any given point,
Speaker: 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 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.
Speaker: And so you have 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 then, to come back to your other question, I mean, they do have a generally, a lot of them had,
Speaker: certainly the officers. I had a sense of professionalism and a sense of duty, and so we can call them mercenaries. But we've got to remember, in 1789, the French guards stormed the Bastille. The Swiss are the ones who are massacred, defending the Tuileries Palace in 1792. So there was a strong sense of loyalty and duty that they had.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: The hire of troops out was a means, partly, obviously, to get money, but 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.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: So you want to maintain your 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 favour anyone in particular too much. So you want to sort of pally up with the French or the Dutch or the British, you can put in a good word for you or support you. And it worked.
Speaker: They do this by hiring troops, they also do it by marrying in. Hesse and Darmstadt, one of the small principalities, grows much bigger through the collapse of the empire, partly because they had married into the Romanovs. Württemberg is another one, so forging these international connections was also about dynastic survival.
Speaker: 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 100 years. How do things change in the next 100 years leading up to German unification in terms of the German military?
Speaker: Well, after 1815, everyone wants peace. So there's a downsizing. So they fought the wars against revolutionary France and the podionic France. 1815, there's a downsizing. Conscription remains in place because
Speaker: 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 is eligible, is inducted.
Speaker: 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 to serve so they're 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.
Speaker: And that's what the constitutional discussions are in the 1850s and 1860s, that the monarch wants, and Bismarck, who was brought in to try to handle this, want more money to expand the army. And they are successful, and they have their short service model. It triumphs over the Austrians, who had a long service model.
Speaker: 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 lot of 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 adopting,
Speaker: Prove 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 and
Speaker: people that 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 to victory. Yeah, well, in what, 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? Well,
Speaker: They, I mean, when 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, alloys. And there is also a mobilization. Prussia, for example, mobilizes in 1859 when the Austrians are fighting the French and
Speaker: So there's tension and the Austrians are very concerned about maintaining their traditional pole position within Central Europe and are resentful of the Prussians. And the Prussians have had literally centuries of always being
Speaker: the number two. 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
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: 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 their Habsburg lands are cut out and the rest of Germany, as it were, is now regrouped into this second empire.
Speaker: 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?
Speaker: 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 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
Speaker: neutral and it's a different understanding of neutrality so neutrality now is really keeping out of somebody else's conflict in the past and the pre -nineteenth century idea of neutrality was.
Speaker: more ambivalent and that's partly because this idea that both sides should be treated equally was alien to the kind of Christian world view. 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.
Speaker: So neutrality was not necessarily a good thing, but there's a changed understanding in neutrality. In the Swiss, increasingly, they recognize that they are small. They are a small state. 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.
Speaker: And so do they disband their army? What does the Swiss army look like? Well, they have essentially they have a militia. So before the 19th century, there are permanent Swiss regiments, but these are all hired to 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,
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: But the standard of training in the 19th century was very poor. So in the last war that the Swiss fight, which is over, is at the last gasp of the Catholic Protestant rivalry in 1847.
Speaker: The soldiers fire off lots of ammunition, but there's hardly any casualties. There are lots of heroic paintings showing these glorious actions in which luckily only about a couple of hundred people were killed.
Speaker: 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 had existed before.
Speaker: Now 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 like opening the door to letting some of these bigger players in?
Speaker: Oh, absolutely. And the dangers of that are exposed in the First World War. And the Swiss have 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 in 1914, they decided to have an air force. And of course, no one will sell them an airplane.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: there's definitely a deterrent value of the Swiss. And the Swiss do fight. I mean, 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 the Second World War, I mean, there are attempts by the Swiss to acquire nuclear weapons, for example, to have a nuclear deterrent and to maintain neutrality. And yeah,
Speaker: It's still up in debate. There was a strong movement in the 1980s to abolish the army, which is still a militia. It's not a professional force. It's very, very small and it has really shrunk even further in the last decade.
Speaker: 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 you know, what does this do to the Swiss identity to now become neutral? Well, it's,
Speaker: 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, the sort of the boundary between the German speakers and the French speakers, and of course there are Italian and Romany speakers in Switzerland. So it has overcome some of those linguistic divisions and religious divisions, and it's created something that the Swiss can
Speaker: 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 globalised economy is wrong. I mean if you go to Geneva for example, I mean a lot of people are travelling in by train from France where it's easier to
Speaker: and cheaper to live, because Geneva is so expensive, but they keep the local economy going. So they are, of course, integrated in ways that they're somewhat uncomfortable with, I think. 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.
Speaker: Well, they got more than I'd intended, actually. Partly, there is operational history in the book because I think that you can't write about war without understanding how it's
Speaker: how it's conducted so and it's 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 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 and there is safe for the Napoleonic conflict
Speaker: But yeah, I think there are other people who've written excellent operational campaign histories. And there was no point in repeating that. And if you were to do that, even at sort of eight, nine hundred pages across 500 years, you could like one or two pages per year. So you can't really say very much. Sure. Well, I guess in the broader context of German military history,
Speaker: In what ways do you think modern scholars and historians should approach World War I and World War II?
Speaker: Well, I think it helps to see them as separate but connected. Obviously, there's a generation that could have served in both, and the connections between them are profound. But I think we do an injustice to historical actors if we see one thing inevitably leading to something else. And no one has any agency, and decisions don't matter. So I think we've got to recognize that there are differences.
Speaker: And then I think it really helps to try to put these into context. I mean, there are reasons why the Austrian performance was so poor. You know, if we only look at the army's formal structures or their weaponry and so on, we don't really understand why they performed so poorly. And the way in which the Austrian army, for example, is gutted in the opening battles.
Speaker: And they should have performed better. I mean, if you look at the tactical manuals, they... And you're talking about World War I, correct? 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 and align.
Speaker: 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, you know, the interpretation of the war afterwards, you know, the stab in the back myth and all of these things. And then when we come to the
Speaker: the Second World War. I mean, I feel very strongly that, you know, 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 a
Speaker: The only way you can fight a blitzkrieg is to treat people abominably. 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?
Speaker: 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 the UK, it hasn't been a conscription wartime feature and then a little bit into the post -war era. But this sort of cycle of
Speaker: People serving in East Germany, you served 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, 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
Speaker: 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 Eastern Germany until 1994.
Speaker: in West Germany, the 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. What are you hoping that readers take away from your book?
Speaker: Well, I hope they enjoy it. I mean, you know, history is enjoyable. I mean, it's an awful, in a way war is an awful subject, but we can't understand the human condition without looking at it. And I hope that, you know, that it's enjoyable read as well as informative. Wonderful. Well, kind of lastly here, first off, Peter, it's been a terrific interview and there's, there's some, we didn't hardly even talk about after
Speaker: the German unification leading up to World War I. Yeah, or navies, navies, navies. Or navies. We didn't talk about navies. The Austrians had a big navy at one point.
Speaker: How big? Well, they were, let's think they were, I think in 19, um, 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. 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, what are you working on next?
Speaker: 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 can be human resources, they can be finance, it could be ideas, expertise, it could be access to neutral territory or resources, information. It's about that. Oh, very cool. Well, hopefully when
Speaker: You published 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? The European fiscal military system has a Twitter feed, so that's related to this book. Wonderful. Well, Peter H. Wilson, Iron and Blood, a military history of the German speaking people since 1500. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library.
Speaker: such a fascinating story. And Peter, thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thank you.
