August von Gneisenau

German military leader

• Born: October 27, 1760
• Birthplace: Schildau, Saxony (now in Germany)
• Died: August 23, 1831
• Place of death: Posen, Prussia (now Poznan, Poland)

As a Prussian field marshal and member of King Frederick William III’s Military Reorganization Commission, Gneisenau fashioned the Prussian strategy that finally defeated Napoleon I in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 and played a key role in reforming the Prussian army into the most professional military force in nineteenth century Europe. Gneisenau’s organizational and operational reforms survive today as accepted elements in most of the world’s armies.

Early Life

The scion of a noble but poor German military family, August von Gneisenau (g-NI-zeh-now) was born during the Seven Years’ War. His father, an artillery lieutenant in the Austrian army, abandoned him to friends who reared him in near poverty. A moneyed maternal grandfather subsequently assumed responsibility for the young orphan and entrusted his education to Jesuits. With the death of his benefactor, young Gneisenau inherited enough money to attend Erfurt University from 1777 to 1779. With his inheritance depleted, Gneisenau prematurely left the university, joined a local Austrian regiment as a cavalry subaltern, and fought against Prussia during the 1778 War of Bavarian Succession.

Gneisenau subsequently joined the army of Bayreuth-Ansbach, a tiny principality that hired out its soldiers to the highest bidder. It was within this context that Gneisenau, now a lieutenant of chasseurs, traveled to North America in 1782 to fight as a British mercenary against the American colonists. He arrived too late to fight, but he came upon and embraced new concepts that would later define his role as a leading Prussian military reformer: the belief in a politically active citizenry and the use of open order tactics by civilian militias in warfare.

Gneisenau returned to Europe after one year and personally petitioned Frederick the Great to allow him to join the Prussian army. In 1786, he received a commission as a first lieutenant in the infantry. Although he did participate in the Polish campaign of 1793-1794, Gneisenau served for the next twenty years in different Silesian garrisons, where he immersed himself in military studies and further developed the unique blend of combat and staff skills for which he is rightfully famous.

Gneisenau was an undistinguished forty-six-year-old captain when war broke out between France and Prussia in 1806. On October 14, 1806, he commanded a company of infantry at the Battle of Jena and experienced at first hand Napoleon’s annihilation of the once-invincible Frederican army. The defeat was a profound blow to Gneisenau, but even more devastating was the complete indifference shown by the Prussian middle class to the loss of the army. In fact, their perception of the army as a royal instrument promoting reactionary interests was in direct contrast to the nascent “people in arms” concept Gneisenau had seen in the colonies.

Gneisenau adopted the citizen-soldier concept in his 1807 defense of Kolberg, a Pomeranian coastal town situated on the Baltic Sea and besieged by the French. Gneisenau’s defense of Kolberg was the only successful Prussian military operation at the time and was directly attributable to his deliberate attempt to transform the local civilians from detached bystanders into active defenders who fought with the same spirit as his regular troops. Gneisenau’s success earned for him the highly prized Pour le Mérite award, a promotion to lieutenant colonel, and the notoriety that laid the foundation for his major accomplishments.

Life’s Work

Subsequent to the Prussian debacle at Jena-Auerstadt, King Frederick William III established the Military Reorganization Commission on July 25, 1807. Its charter was to review the army’s performance and propose necessary reforms. Major General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, after rejecting a position as the director of an English artillery school, became chairman of the commission. Gneisenau, who saw himself as Scharnhorst’s “Saint Peter,” also became a member, as did two other protégés, Majors Karl Grolman and Herman von Boyen. Carl von Clausewitz, although never a full member of the commission, worked indirectly with it as Scharnhorst’s aide. With royal sanction, these five military reformers would resurrect a new Prussian army from the ashes of the one previously destroyed by Napoleon. Gneisenau’s influence was second only to Scharnhorst’s; with the latter’s premature death in 1813, he became the most prominent military reformer.

Gneisenau and his peers quickly ascribed the Prussian defeat to an outdated military and a reactionary society. The Frederican army that faced Napoleon relied on rigid tactics, brutal and unenlightened discipline, and overcentralized control. Common people, in turn, felt no sense of responsibility toward the state and greeted Prussian military failures with apathy. Gneisenau and the other reformers decided to reverse the situation, but they realized that to be competitive the Prussian army would have to revise its tactics, organization, and working relationship with civilians completely. A mere reorganization of the old-style army would not suffice.

Gneisenau also realized that the reformers needed to inspire a new loyalty to the state; they had to transform Prussian subjects into self-motivated citizens, inspired by patriotism and a belief in national honor. However, Gneisenau believed that a people’s army was impossible if Prussia did not change from a feudal society, dominated by landed Junkers, into a liberal, constitutional monarchy. In Gneisenau’s estimation, neither a serf in hereditary bondage nor a member of the middle class restricted from local government or the officer corps would develop a devotion to the state in the absence of basic social and political rights. The regeneration of the Prussian military would occur only through the reformation of the state.

Gneisenau and the other commission members quickly introduced a number of enduring military reforms. In contrast to the murderous discipline of the past, an edict issued on August 3, 1805, introduced a humane system of rewards and punishments that deliberately limited corporal punishment. Humane treatment, the reformers hoped, would inspire soldiers to become self-motivated and thus develop a more enduring commitment to both the army and the state. Grolman, with the active support of Gneisenau, sponsored an August 6, 1808, decree that transformed the officer corps into a meritocracy, where members of the middle class could enter and succeed based on their demonstrated performance rather than on their family background.

A third innovation was the introduction of professional military education. By 1810, the Prussian army had reorganized all of its schools and introduced the prototype for the Kriegsakademie, the first modern war college. Those who attended the college received a liberal education that included, for the first time, a systematic study of war. Thanks to Gneisenau and his fellow reformers, war was no longer for a brave dilettante but for cool professionals who subjected it to lifelong study.

Gneisenau also supported Baron Heinrich von Stein, the king’s chief minister and a fellow reformer on the Military Reorganization Commission, who laid the foundation for a War Ministry responsible for directing, coordinating, and controlling the Prussian army. The nascent general staff, organized within the General War Department of the War Ministry, would begin to flourish as the intellectual center of the German military under Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.

Gneisenau’s most cherished reforms, however, were the most imperfectly realized. He and the Military Reorganization Commission called for universal conscription as early as 1808, but Frederick William, who feared the destruction of the monarchy in a civil war between economic classes, balked at the idea of a nation in arms. It was only in 1814, when the defeat of Napoleon seemed possible, that Frederick William accepted national conscription. The principle survived, but Gneisenau did not see a lasting union of regular soldiers and militia into a military force crusading for freedom in Europe. The militia (Landwehr) enjoyed a brief, independent life but ultimately was subsumed under regular army control beginning in 1819.

Gneisenau worked hard for the above reforms and functioned as chief of the fortifications and engineering corps until Napoleon forced a powerless Frederick William to dismiss Stein and other reformers. In disgust, Gneisenau resigned and quietly undertook missions to Great Britain, Russia, and Sweden in order to muster support against France. His passionate humanism now focused on liberating Europe from Napoleon. When Prussia discarded its role as an unwilling satellite to France, Gneisenau returned to active service as Scharnhorst’s Ia, or first general staff officer. When Scharnhorst died in June, 1813, Gneisenau became chief of the general staff and served Marshal Gebhard von Blücher. In this capacity, Gneisenau planned the Prussian strategy for the major campaigns of 1813-1814, including the Battle of Leipzig .

During this phase of his career, Gneisenau introduced battlefield innovations that had a lasting influence. He was the first to make the chief of staff of a major command equal in responsibility with the commander. He believed that this arrangement would strengthen the general staff system and establish spiritual unity between staff officers and combatants. He also developed the practice of issuing clear and comprehensive objectives while leaving room for the combat commander to exercise individual initiative and freedom of action. Gneisenau directly influenced Clausewitz’s subsequent theory of war by insisting that the goal of an army was not to engage in maneuver warfare but to destroy enemy forces directly. Finally, he was an early practitioner of the battle of encirclement, later used with great success by Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke and Alfred von Schlieffen. For these innovations and other successes, Frederick William ennobled Gneisenau in 1814.

Upon Napoleon’s return from Elba in March, 1815, Gneisenau once again became Blücher’s chief of staff. Each was good for the other: Gneisenau’s powerful intellect and organizing skills tempered Blücher’s mercurial personality and bulldog tenacity. It was Gneisenau, with prodding from Grolman, who at the Battle of Ligny decided not to retreat toward Prussia but north to Wavre, Belgium. Thus, when the Battle of Waterloo hung in the balance, the Prussians tipped it in the duke of Wellington’s favor by attacking the French flank. The murderous pursuit of the French troops that followed was yet another example of Gneisenau’s vigorous style of war.

With the final defeat of Napoleon, Gneisenau fell into disfavor. The absence of a common foe enabled the reactionary Junkers to reverse the more extreme changes he and the other reformers had introduced. Gneisenau subsequently resigned in 1816. He became governor of Berlin in 1818 and a field marshal in 1825. In 1831, during the Polish Revolution, he commanded the army of occupation on Prussia’s eastern border. While on border duty, both he and Clausewitz, now his chief of staff, died of cholera.

Significance

As a reformer and combatant, August von Gneisenau had a lasting and widespread influence. He and the other Prussian reformers on the Military Reorganization Commission forever changed the character of modern armies. Following the Prussian example, rival powers introduced universal conscription and opened the officer corps to those with talent, regardless of their social background. They increasingly relied on nationalism rather than harsh discipline to motivate troops. They also formalized their military establishments by introducing war ministries, professional military education, and the general staff system. Gneisenau was instrumental in developing and popularizing these innovations.

Gneisenau was bitterly disappointed for two reasons. Prussia, rather than becoming a liberal constitutional monarchy, remained thoroughly autocratic. As a result, the army remained an isolated enclave of military technicians rather than a democratic institution manned by enlightened citizen soldiers who had a personal investment in supporting their government. Gneisenau overestimated the state’s willingness to turn over a new leaf. Instead, the pattern for future Prussian jingoism was set.

As a combatant, Gneisenau believed that the army was the enemy’s “center of gravity” and thus had to be destroyed. A vigorous pursuit was part of the process. Both concepts found expression in Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege (1832-1834; On War , 1873), which later had an impact on German strategy and tactics (beginning in the Wars of German Unification). Given the influence of these combat techniques and his earlier organizational reforms, Gneisenau’s sustained influence on modern military establishments is undeniable.

Bibliography

Britt, Albert Sidney. “Field Marshal August Neidhart von Gneisenau.” In The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850: Proceedings, 1983, edited by Clarence Davis. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1985. A basic treatment of Gneisenau’s accomplishments that tries to prove that he was an outstanding example of ability improved by study.

Craig, Gordon. The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Craig’s seminal work traces the role of the army in modern German history. Gneisenau and the reformers receive a sympathetic look for their attempts not only to resurrect an army but also to change a society.

Dupuy, Trevor Nevitt. A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807-1945. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Dupuy performed statistical analyses of World War II battles and discovered that German combat effectiveness per man was better than for the Allies. He concludes that the Germans developed the ability to institutionalize military excellence. Analyzes how the Germans did this, beginning with Gneisenau and the reformers in 1807. The specific details on Gneisenau are valuable but limited.

Gneisenau, August Wilhelm Anton, Graf Neidhardt von. The Life and Campaigns of Field Marshal Prince Blücher of Whalstaff: From the Period of His Birth and First Appointment in the Prussian Service Down to His Second Entry into Paris in 1815. Translated by General Count Gneisenau and J. E. Marston. London: Constable, 1996. A reprint of Gneisenau’s biography of his military superior. Offers an idea of how Gneisenau viewed the Napoleonic Wars and the army in which he served.

Goerlitz, Walter. History of the German General Staff, 1657-1945. Translated by Brian Battershaw. New York: Praeger, 1953. This German historian traces the growing incompatibility between the German army and a society evolving toward a democratic-capitalistic system. Goerlitz identifies Gneisenau’s zealotry as one reason that the reformers fell so quickly into disfavor. He also treats Gneisenau’s impact as a combatant.

Müffling, Baron Carl von. The Memoirs of Baron Von Müffling: A Prussian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars. London: Greenhill Books, 1997. Müffling, the Prussian liaison to Wellington during the Waterloo campaign, provides his recollections of the wars, including his impressions of Gneisenau, Blücher, and others.

Ritter, Gerhard. The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany. Translated by Heinz Norden. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1969. As the title implies, this three-volume study analyzes the growth of German militarism from 1740 to the present. Gneisenau receives a factual review for reform efforts that unwittingly created the possibility for subsequent military adventurism.