Drawing on more than a half-century of research and teaching, Dennis Showalter presents a fresh perspective on the German Army during World War I. Showalter surveys an army at the heart of a national identity, driven by - yet also defeated by - warfare in the modern age, which struggled to capitalize on its victories and ultimately forgot the lessons of its defeat. Exploring the internal dynamics of the German Army and detailing how the soldiers coped with the many new forms of warfare, Showalter shows how the army's institutions responded to, and how Germany itself was changed by war. Detailing the major campaigns on the Western and Eastern fronts and the forgotten war fought in the Middle East and Africa, this comprehensive new volume reveals operational strategy, the complexities of campaigns of movement versus static trench warfare, and the effects of changes in warfare.

Author Biography

Dennis Showalter has been a professor of history at Colorado College since 1969 and specializes in German military history. He was President of the American Society of Military History from 1997 to 2001 and is Joint Editor of War in History specializing in comparative military history. In addition, Showalter is an advising fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas and has previously taught at the United States Air Force Academy, the United States Military Academy and the Marine Corps University. He has written or edited two dozen books and over a 150 articles. Recent monographs include The Wars of German Unification(London: Arnold, 2004), Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berkeley, 2005.), and Hitler's Panzers (New York: Berkeley, 2009). Tannenberg won the American Historical Association's Paul M. Birdsall Prize for best new book of 1992 and he was also the recipient of a Festschrift, Arms and the Man: Military History Essays in Honor of Dennis Showalter, ed. Michael Neiberg (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011).