David T Zabecki's Books

Chief of Staff, Vol. 2

The Principal Officers Behind History's Great Commanders, World War II to Korea and Vietnam

By: David T Zabecki

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Chief of Staff, Vol. 2

The Principal Officers Behind History's Great Commanders, World War II to Korea and Vietnam

By: David T Zabecki

The two-volume Chief of Staff examines the history, development, and role of the military duty position of the chief of staff. Many books have studied history's great commanders and the art of command. None have focused exclusively on the chief of staff -—that key staff officer responsible for translating the ideas of the commander into practical plans that common soldiers can execute successfully on the battlefield. In some cases, it is almost impossible to think of certain great commanders without also thinking of their chief of staff. Napoleon's chief of staff Berthier and Eisenhower's chief of staff Bedell Smith are two examples that are profiled in this work. Zabecki and his collaborators examine the history, development, and role of the chief of staff primarily through profiles of the most important practitioners of the art. These books are published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army.

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258

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Naval Institute Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612515592

ISBN 13

9781612515595

The German 1918 Offensives

A Case Study in The Operational Level of War

By: David T. Zabecki

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The German 1918 Offensives

A Case Study in The Operational Level of War

By: David T. Zabecki

This is the first study of the Ludendorff Offensives of 1918 based extensively on key German records presumed to be lost forever after Potsdam was bombed in 1944. In 1997, David T. Zabecki discovered translated copies of these files in a collection of old instructional material at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He presents his findings here for the first time, with a thorough review of the surviving original operational plans and orders, to offer a wealth of fresh insights to the German Offensives of 1918. David T. Zabecki clearly demonstrates how the German failure to exploit the vulnerabilities in the BEF’s rail system led to the failure of the first two offensives, and how inadequacies in the German rail system determined the outcome of the last three offensives. This is a window into the mind of the German General Staff of World War I, with thorough analysis of the German planning and decision making processes during the execution of battles. This is also the first study in English or in German to analyze the specifics of the aborted Operation HAGEN plan. This is also the first study of the 1918 Offensives to focus on the ‘operational level of war’ and on the body of military activity known as ‘the operational art’, rather than on the conventional tactical or strategic levels. This book will be of great interest to all students of World War I, the German Army and of strategic studies and military theory in general.

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433

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1134252250

ISBN 13

9781134252251

Chief of Staff, Vol. 1

The Principal Officers Behind History's Great Commanders, Napoleonic Wars to World War I

By: David T Zabecki

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Chief of Staff, Vol. 1

The Principal Officers Behind History's Great Commanders, Napoleonic Wars to World War I

By: David T Zabecki

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256

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Naval Institute Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612515584

ISBN 13

9781612515588

Chief of Staff, Vol. 2

The Principal Officers Behind History's Great Commanders, World War II to Korea and Vietnam

By: David T Zabecki

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Chief of Staff, Vol. 2

The Principal Officers Behind History's Great Commanders, World War II to Korea and Vietnam

By: David T Zabecki

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258

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Naval Institute Press

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ISBN 10

1612515592

ISBN 13

9781612515595

The Generals' War

Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918

By: David T. Zabecki

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The Generals' War

Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918

By: David T. Zabecki

Known as the War to End all Wars and the Great War, World War I introduced new forms of mass destruction and modern technological warfare. When the Bolsheviks pulled Russia out of the war in late 1917, the Germans turned their offensive efforts to the Western Front in an attempt to win the war in 1918. But as fresh American troops entered Europe, the strategic scales tipped against Germany. Much of how World War I played out turned on the plans and decisions of the senior-most German and Allied commanders. The Generals' War explores the military strategies of those generals during the last year of the Great War. These six very different men included Germany's Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff; France's Marshals Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Pétain; Great Britain's Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig; and the United States' General John Pershing. Although history remembers none of them as great captains, these six officers determined for better or worse how World War I was fought on the battlefields of the Western Front between November 1917 and November 1918. The Generals' War is a landmark exploration of the generalship that shaped the very framework of modern warfare as we know it today and provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis on the senior commanders of the Great War.

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301

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Indiana University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0253037298

ISBN 13

9780253037299

Retreat from Moscow

A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941–1942

By: David Stahel

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Retreat from Moscow

A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941–1942

By: David Stahel

An authoritative revisionist account of the German Winter Campaign of 1941–1942, with maps: “Hair-raising . . . a page-turner.” —Kirkus Reviews Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as its first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow, a bold, gripping account of one of the seminal moments of World War II, David Stahel argues that instead it was its first strategic success in the East. The Soviet counteroffensive was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. Despite being pushed back from Moscow, the Wehrmacht lost far fewer men, frustrated its enemy’s strategy, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative. Hitler’s strategic plan called for holding important Russian industrial cities, and the German army succeeded. The Soviets as of January 1942 aimed for nothing less than the destruction of Army Group Center, yet not a single German unit was ever destroyed. Lacking the professionalism, training, and experience of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army’s offensive attempting to break German lines in countless head-on assaults led to far more tactical defeats than victories. Using accounts from journals, memoirs, and wartime correspondence, Stahel takes us directly into the Wolf’s Lair to reveal a German command at war with itself as generals on the ground fought to maintain order and save their troops in the face of Hitler’s capricious, increasingly irrational directives. Excerpts from soldiers’ diaries and letters home paint a rich portrait of life and death on the front, where the men of the Ostheer battled frostbite nearly as deadly as Soviet artillery. With this latest installment of his pathbreaking series on the Eastern Front, David Stahel completes a military history of the highest order. “An engaging, fine-grained account of an epic struggle . . . Mr. Stahel describes these days brilliantly, switching among various levels of command while reminding us of the experiences of the soldiers on the ground and the civilians caught up in the Nazi ‘war of annihilation.’” —The Wall Street Journal

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301

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Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374714258

ISBN 13

9780374714253

Understanding Modern Warfare

By: David Jordan,James D. Kiras,David J. Lonsdale,Ian Speller,Christopher Tuck,C. Dale Walton

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Understanding Modern Warfare

By: David Jordan,James D. Kiras,David J. Lonsdale,Ian Speller,Christopher Tuck,C. Dale Walton

Understanding Modern Warfare has established itself as the leading introduction to the issues, ideas, concepts and context necessary to understand the theory and conduct of warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is an invaluable text for military professionals and students of military history. Key features include: incisive coverage of the debates surrounding contemporary and future warfare; accessible, yet sophisticated, discussion across the land, sea, and air environments; and coverage of contemporary topics such as drones, cyber warfare, and hybrid warfare. The book makes extensive use of text boxes to explain key concepts and to reference extended examples, and it includes annotated guides to further reading and key questions to promote the reader's further thinking. This second edition has been fully revised and updated to take into account new debates and recent events in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, and it has also been restructured to further improve its usefulness as a teaching tool.

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499

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Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1316489906

ISBN 13

9781316489901

Riders of the Apocalypse

German Cavalry and Modern Warfare, 1870-1945

By: David R Dorondo

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Riders of the Apocalypse

German Cavalry and Modern Warfare, 1870-1945

By: David R Dorondo

Despite the enduring popular image of the blitzkrieg of World War II, the German Army always depended on horses. It could not have waged war without them. While the Army’s reliance on draft horses to pull artillery, supply wagons, and field kitchens is now generally acknowledged, D. R. Dorondo’s Riders of the Apocalypse examines the history of the German cavalry, a combat arm that not only survived World War I but also rode to war again in 1939. Though concentrating on the period between 1939 and 1945, the book places that history firmly within the larger context of the mounted arm’s development from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the Third Reich’s surrender. Driven by both internal and external constraints to retain mounted forces after 1918, the German Army effectively did nothing to reduce, much less eliminate, the preponderance of non-mechanized formations during its breakneck expansion under the Nazis after 1933. Instead, politicized command decisions, technical insufficiency, industrial bottlenecks, and, finally, wartime attrition meant that Army leaders were compelled to rely on a steadily growing number of combat horsemen throughout World War II. These horsemen were best represented by the 1st Cavalry Brigade (later Division) which saw combat in Poland, the Netherlands, France, Russia, and Hungary. Their service, however, came to be cruelly dishonored by the horsemen of the 8th Waffen-SS Cavalry Division, a unit whose troopers spent more time killing civilians than fighting enemy soldiers. Throughout the story of these formations, and drawing extensively on both primary and secondary sources, Dorondo shows how the cavalry’s tradition carried on in a German and European world undergoing rapid military industrialization after the mid-nineteenth century. And though Riders of the Apocalypse focuses on the German element of this tradition, it also notes other countries’ continuing (and, in the case of Russia, much more extensive) use of combat horsemen after 1900. However, precisely because the Nazi regime devoted so much effort to portray Germany’s armed forces as fully modern and mechanized, the combat effectiveness of so many German horsemen on the battlefields of Europe until 1945 remains a story that deserves to be more widely known. Dorondo’s work does much to tell that story.

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407

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Naval Institute Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612510876

ISBN 13

9781612510873

The German 1918 Offensives

A Case Study in the Operational Level of War

By: David T. Zabecki

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The German 1918 Offensives

A Case Study in the Operational Level of War

By: David T. Zabecki

At the tactical level of war, the Germans are widely regarded as having had the most innovative and proficient army of World War I. Likewise, many historians would agree that the Germans suffered from serious, if not fatal, shortcomings at the strategic level of war. It is at the middle level of warfare, the operational level, that the Germans seem to be the most difficult to evaluate. Although the operational was only fully accepted in the 1980s by many Western militaries as a distinct level of warfare, German military thinking well before the start of World War I clearly recognized the Operativ, as a realm of warfighting activity between the tactical and the strategic. But the German concept of the operational art was flawed at best, and actually came closer to tactics on a grand scale. The flaws in their approach to operations cost the Germans dearly in both World Wars. Through a thorough review of the surviving original operational plans and orders, this study evaluates the German approach to the operational art by analyzing the Ludendorff Offensives of 1918. executed - major attacks produced stunning tactical results, but ultimately left Germany in a far worse strategic position by August 1918. Among the most serious operational errors made by the German planners were their blindness to the power of sequential operations and cumulative effects, and their insistence in mounting force-on-force attacks. The Allies, and especially the British, were exceptionally vulnerable in certain elements of their warfighting system. By attacking those vulnerabilities the Germans might well have achieved far better results than by attacking directly into the Allied strength. Specifically, the British logistics system was extremely fragile, and their rail system had two key choke points, Amiens and Hazebrouck. During Operations MICHAEL and GEORGETTE, the Germans came close to capturing both rail centers, but never seemed to grasp fully their operational significance. The British and French certainly did. After the Germans attacked south to the Marne during Operation BLUCHER, they fell victims themselves to an inadequate rail network behind their newly acquired lines. networks had a decisive influence on the campaign of March-August 1918.

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408

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Psychology Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0415356008

ISBN 13

9780415356008

1918

Winning the War, Losing the War

By: Matthias Strohn

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1918

Winning the War, Losing the War

By: Matthias Strohn

This wide-ranging collection of articles by some of the most renowned names in the subject explores the tumultuous events of the final year of the First World War. In 2018, the world commemorated the centenary of the end of the First World War. In many ways, 1918 was the most dramatic year of the conflict. After the defeat of Russia in 1917, the Germans were able to concentrate their forces on the Western Front for the first time in the war, and the German offensives launched from March 1918 onward brought the Western Allies close to defeat. Having stopped the German offensives, the Entente started its counter-attacks on all fronts with the assistance of fresh US troops, driving the Germans back and, by November 1918, the Central Powers had been defeated. This study is a multi-author work containing ten chapters by some of the best historians of the First World War from around the world writing today. It provides an overview and analysis of the different levels of war for each of the main armies involved within the changing context of the reality of warfare in 1918. It also looks in detail at the war at sea and in the air, and considers the aftermath and legacy of the First World War.

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314

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472829344

ISBN 13

9781472829344

The Generals' War

Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918

By: David T. Zabecki

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The Generals' War

Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918

By: David T. Zabecki

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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301

Publisher

Indiana University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0253037298

ISBN 13

9780253037299

Book's by David T Zabecki

Chief of Staff, Vol. 2

Chief of Staff, Vol. 2

The German 1918 Offensives

The German 1918 Offensives

Chief of Staff, Vol. 1

Chief of Staff, Vol. 1

Chief of Staff, Vol. 2

Chief of Staff, Vol. 2

The Generals' War

The Generals' War

Retreat from Moscow

Retreat from Moscow

Understanding Modern Warfare

Understanding Modern Warfare

Riders of the Apocalypse

Riders of the Apocalypse

The German 1918 Offensives

The German 1918 Offensives

1918

1918

The Generals' War

The Generals' War

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