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Understanding 9/11Ludendorff's own story, August 1914-November 1918; the Great War from the siege of Liège to the signing of the armistice as viewed from the grand headquarters of the German Army
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Book digitized by Google from the library of Harvard University and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.
2 volumes 23 cm
Translation of Meine Kriegserinnerungen, 1914-1918
2 volumes 23 cm
Translation of Meine Kriegserinnerungen, 1914-1918
Notes
London edition (Hutchinson & co.) has title: My war memories, 1914-1918.
Reviews
Reviewer:
gallowglass
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June 30, 2021
Subject: Deflecting the blame
Half a book is not something easy to assess, and in any case, if I’d had the choice, I would have gone for the second part of Ludendorff’s war-memoirs, not the first. How much more fun to have heard him wriggling off the hook, as he tried to explain away Germany’s defeat, largely caused by his own vacillations and sometimes hysterical mood-swings.
Instead we get the more flattering half of the story, beginning with his astonishing double-knockout in the first month. Capturing the key Belgian city of Liège, of which he had particular local knowledge. Then defeating a whole Russian army so decisively that its commander went off into the woods and shot himself.
In the second case, he had just been joined by Hindenburg, brought out of retirement to supervise him, and together they would make a legendary team. Ludendorff, the brilliant staff officer who had shown how to fight on two fronts at once, but too emotional and indecisive to make a good leader. And Hindenburg the big, steady rock-like figure that the public still worshipped long after he’d lost the war.
As the author admits, he rushed-off these memoirs as soon as the whistle went, so they were ready to appear early in 1919. And in this centenary year of 2019, we need to remember how vividly the original readership, perhaps still recovering from frostbite or trench fever, would respond to names like Częstochowa or Przemysl, or references to the 36th Reserve Division of the 9th Army, that just mean nothing to the rest of us. So the book will hardly justify reading in its entirety, as most of it just takes the form of a sequential battle-diary of the vast, unfamiliar Eastern Front.
Most, but not all. The one advantage of the first half is that you also get the preface thrown in - which was, of course, the last part to be written. And here we pick up a fascinating little glimpse of what was in the pipeline. For among this long drone of excuses for Germany’s dwindling fortunes while he was in the chair, we are hearing the first stirrings of the stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende), a phrase originally uttered in autumn 1919 as a joke by a British officer lunching with none other than… Erich Ludendorff!
Subject: Deflecting the blame
Half a book is not something easy to assess, and in any case, if I’d had the choice, I would have gone for the second part of Ludendorff’s war-memoirs, not the first. How much more fun to have heard him wriggling off the hook, as he tried to explain away Germany’s defeat, largely caused by his own vacillations and sometimes hysterical mood-swings.
Instead we get the more flattering half of the story, beginning with his astonishing double-knockout in the first month. Capturing the key Belgian city of Liège, of which he had particular local knowledge. Then defeating a whole Russian army so decisively that its commander went off into the woods and shot himself.
In the second case, he had just been joined by Hindenburg, brought out of retirement to supervise him, and together they would make a legendary team. Ludendorff, the brilliant staff officer who had shown how to fight on two fronts at once, but too emotional and indecisive to make a good leader. And Hindenburg the big, steady rock-like figure that the public still worshipped long after he’d lost the war.
As the author admits, he rushed-off these memoirs as soon as the whistle went, so they were ready to appear early in 1919. And in this centenary year of 2019, we need to remember how vividly the original readership, perhaps still recovering from frostbite or trench fever, would respond to names like Częstochowa or Przemysl, or references to the 36th Reserve Division of the 9th Army, that just mean nothing to the rest of us. So the book will hardly justify reading in its entirety, as most of it just takes the form of a sequential battle-diary of the vast, unfamiliar Eastern Front.
Most, but not all. The one advantage of the first half is that you also get the preface thrown in - which was, of course, the last part to be written. And here we pick up a fascinating little glimpse of what was in the pipeline. For among this long drone of excuses for Germany’s dwindling fortunes while he was in the chair, we are hearing the first stirrings of the stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende), a phrase originally uttered in autumn 1919 as a joke by a British officer lunching with none other than… Erich Ludendorff!
