Author Ken Macksey takes a beating
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Sadly, Kenneth Macksey has declined to perform the major revision that the publisher trumpets on the dustcover. It is not "revised and fully updated" nor can one certify that it "draws upon fresh source material." Macksey retired from the Royal Tank Regiment in the 1950s and has since become a prolific writer on all matter of things military. He frequently provides interesting details in his books that cannot be found elsewhere but few source materials to guide the reader further. By now, he must be recognized as a `pop' writer of history, drawing upon his past works to flesh out new themes and narratives. As interesting as the story of Heinz Guderian is, the author has embellished and exaggerated his story, already well promoted by Guderian himself, and added a fawning, gushy style that convinces me that he has lapsed into a sheer hagiography of a man he admires without limit.
Macksey reveals much when he styles Guderian in the same class as British tank pioneers such as J.F.C. Fuller and Percy Hobart. Scholarship of the last 20 years has fairly demolished their reputations and their former icon status. But Macksey is at ease more with the interpretations and source material of the 1950s. Indeed, his "revision" introduces only two new sources, the story of the cracking of the German `Enigma' codes by the British, revealed by F.H. Hinsley and others in the 1970s, and the publication, in German, of a biography of Erich Fellgiebel, who Macksey considers a key signal officer of the Wehrmacht (and ample material for yet another of his books). The sole source in Macksey's 1 ½ page bibliography postdating his first edition is a volume of Hinsley (1979) and Macksey makes little use of the Enigma story in any case.
The book reveals a strange, iconoclastic and chatty writing style, utterly fawning over Guderian and his record, invoking badly skewed historical presentation and logic in almost every page, such that it remains a maddening read. Macksey relies far too much on Guderian's memoir, Panzer Leader (1953), offers a few letters between Guderian and his wife as the fruit of the "extensive Guderian family archives." The rest of his sources are near-obsolete ones, like John Wheeler-Bennett's 1953 Nemesis of Power. He has thus ignored later seminal writing on General Hans von Seekt, the development of the Blitzkrieg doctrine and forces, the command structure, fresh biographies, the conduct of the war and Wehrmacht implication in atrocities, among many relevant topics.
In order to advance the reputation of Guderian, fellow tanker Macksey portrays him as a lone visionary, scarcely understood in his pure and just quest for a dominant tank arm for the German Army. In doing so, Macksey ignores the evident accomplishments of many other thinkers and practitioners in the German forces, from the 1920-26 chief of staff Seekt onward, and ignores character traits of Guderian that show him to be stubborn, impatient and prone to seeing enemies at every obstacle. Not content with the conventional judgement that Guderian was one of Germany's leading armor advocates (nor was Guderian thus content), Macksey makes him the only theorist and visionary and the only able commander of armoured troops. We have no basis of comparison, for lack of knowledge, of the other major leaders of the Panzertruppen (such as Hoth, Kleist, Hoeppner), nor does Macksey explain how infantry officers like Rommel and Manstein could be at least as adept in handling armoured formations as Guderian. He does not indicate to the reader what the various inspectorates of motorized and fast troops did between his departure from them in 1935 and his return as Inspector of Panzer Troops in March, 1943; and they in fact directed most of the design, construction, organization and fielding of the German mechanized forces largely without Guderian's participation.
Guderian surely deserves recognition for his many feats and accomplishments, but with a critical eye of a modern biographer. Macksey cannot supply us with the information we want to know. Instead we have a flawed survey of the German Army, with Guderian pictured as the rebel at its center. I gather that he reads little German, based upon the assistance he acknowledges, and that plays some role in his neglect of sources. But he also invokes the term `academic' as a pejorative, as in "...the evidence is academic and too thin to be persuasive [p198n]." So Macksey has little use for the tools of modern research and gives us his gut instincts, based upon what he has read. This does not cut it, especially when as a tank officer he writes of a tank pioneer. Why do we know nothing about Guderian's command of one of the first three panzer divisions in 1935-38 (and who were the other two commanders)? Why do we learn little more about the man than he himself wrote in 1953? We learn that he loved his family and enjoyed pastoral scenery! What exactly were his theories in the early years and how are they distinguished from the others working in the field? Guderian was one of the few motor transport officers of the 1920s and combined with his signals experience of World War I, he surely imparted technical improvements to the evolution of the mechanized forces, but can we be so sure of the tactical elements? We simply do not know from this book, but are assured by the author that Guderian was the leader and the brains of the operation of the inspectorate of motorized troops, and (1931-35). To be present at the creation does not make one the architect.
Sadly, this review must lament what might have been instead of extolling the virtues of what has been written. Let this serve as a warning to all of us that the bookshelves offer a broad mix of quality and the reader must discern what truly merits his or her attention.
Guderian: Panzer General-Revised Edition
