Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War

Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 325. $54.95.

Historian Annika Mombauer has produced an excellent book that gives us a different picture of Helmuth von Moltke "the Younger," Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914. Mombauer argues, quite persuasively, that, contrary to the received view of a reluctant and barely competent strategist, the younger Moltke played a decisive role in the Kaiserreich's war planning in the final years before the First World War. Far from an ineffectual leader, Moltke did more than tinker with the vaunted Schlieffen Plan. He developed his own war plan, fit-in his own mind at...