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Jackboot: A History of the German Soldier 1713-1945
Traces the influences which have shaped the character of the German army from the time of Frederick the Great to the end of World War II. The author sets out to re-establish the reputation for which the German soldier was once renowned, and which was distorted by Nazi atrocities.
238 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1965
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About the author
John Laffin
118 books6 followersJohn Laffin was a prolific author with nearly 130 books to his name. Many of his books concerned military history.
Laffin's parents both served in WWI, his father in the 20th Battalion and his mother as a nurse. In 1940, aged 24, having worked with Smith's Weekly and The Wagga Advertiser, he enlisted in the 2nd AIF. He trained as an infantryman and later completed an officer course before serving in New Guinea. While convalescing in Sydney in 1943 he met his wife Hazelle.
After the war Laffin worked for a number of newspapers and magazines, wrote short novels and began his own feature service and editing unit. With his family he left for England in 1956 where he resided for nearly 40 years. He wrote articles for Australian newspapers and taught English, history and geography in secondary colleges.
Laffin traveled extensively in Europe, especially the Western Front areas of WWI and in the Middle East. He returned to Australia in 1995 but Hazelle developed heart problems and died in early 1997. He is survived by his two daughters, Bronwen and Pirenne, and a son, Craig.
Laffin's parents both served in WWI, his father in the 20th Battalion and his mother as a nurse. In 1940, aged 24, having worked with Smith's Weekly and The Wagga Advertiser, he enlisted in the 2nd AIF. He trained as an infantryman and later completed an officer course before serving in New Guinea. While convalescing in Sydney in 1943 he met his wife Hazelle.
After the war Laffin worked for a number of newspapers and magazines, wrote short novels and began his own feature service and editing unit. With his family he left for England in 1956 where he resided for nearly 40 years. He wrote articles for Australian newspapers and taught English, history and geography in secondary colleges.
Laffin traveled extensively in Europe, especially the Western Front areas of WWI and in the Middle East. He returned to Australia in 1995 but Hazelle developed heart problems and died in early 1997. He is survived by his two daughters, Bronwen and Pirenne, and a son, Craig.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 22, 2020
The subtitle of the book is somewhat misleading, this is not, quite, the story of the German soldier. At least not of the individual. Very few instances of soldierly action are described, it is more the history of the Prussian and German states’ relationship to war as a profession and a duty, a guiding principle; their highest calling.
In his Introduction Laffin says the German is a born soldier, aggression and fortitude in his blood, needing to be trained, yes, but the material is there already, not base clay but refined. He contrasts modern national aptitudes for soldiering; none equals the Australian for dash, élan and initiative, but for dogged persistence and obedience to orders no-one can touch the English and Welsh, for fighting fury the Scots, for thoroughness Americans, fanatical courage the Japanese, the capacity to suffer and still keep fighting, the Russians. He claims none of these are complete soldiers, though, they fight only because it is necessary to do so. But Germans are complete soldiers, for them war is holy. “The complete soldier fully realises that his only logical end is death, that this is a soldier’s only privilege. The German knows this.” In modern times, he says, only Napoleon’s soldiers can be compared with them - and then only when Napoleon commanded them. He states that Prussians and Germans never considered themselves beaten in any conflict up to 1918 (later in the book he says not even then.) They had to admit defeat in 1945, bludgeoned by impossible odds, but even in extremis in December 1944 they launched the Battle of the Bulge, which, Laffin claims, “will for ever remain a magnificent feat of arms.” Despite younger Germans saying, “It will never happen again,” Laffin believes a German “can never evade his destiny: he does not really want to evade it. He is a soldier. A soldier fights.”
For how this came about you have to go back to landlocked Prussia, poor and barren, no cities worth the name, little industry and less culture, and to Frederick William (and his obsession with very tall soldiers) who expanded his army by impressing and enrolling men - many of them foreign - but it was his son Frederick the Great who devoted the resources of the state to it and realised that Prussia, surrounded by larger more populous countries, had to depend on organisation and speed and manœuvre in battle.
By Napoleonic times his lessons had largely been forgotten or outmoded. In 1808 crushing defeat at Jena and Auerstadt led to change, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau instituted a war academy and seven years later their influence bore fruit with Napoleon’s defeat at Liepzig. Their adherent Clausewitz formed his principles of war whose beliefs extend down the years since. An inculcation of military virtues via the school system (extended to the whole of Germay after unification in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870) laid the foundations for the nature of the German soldier and Kaiser Wilhelm introduced badges and awards for proficiency - a system brought to its greatest peak by the Nazis. Through all these years deference to a military uniform (indeed to uniforms of any stamp) was inbuilt in the German state.
In the context of France invading Germanic territory fourteen times between 1675 and 1813 Laffin quotes General Fuller as saying, ‘Few nations have had so bad a neighbour as Germany has had in France.’ (To which I can only reply, you should try being a Scot, mate.)
A piece of information that surprised me was that in the Nineteenth Century homosexuality was apparently rife in the Prussian army and not hidden, was indeed paraded, by those of that persuasion.
The German War Book stated the employment of “uncivilised and barbarous peoples in European wars” was an unlawful instrument of war, since “these troops had no conception of European-Christian culture, of respect for property and for the honour of women.” A footnote adds that this was a source of great bitterness during the Great War, quoting a Private’s letter to his parents (sensitivity warning; use of the ‘n’ word,) “The French have sunk so low as to use niggers against us. They are heathens and quite revolting and cruel. We fight fiercely against them because we know we can expect no mercy from these savages. You can smell them in the night.” (I’d have thought a smell - if any - would more likely have been produced by day than by night, but there you go. I suspect that any such perception was psychological anyway.)
Twice, re 1918 and 1945, Laffin asserts that the Germans were not beaten but overwhelmed - which, he says, is something different. For 1918 he cites a million troops left in the east to keep the conquered territories subdued and how they might have affected things in the west. (In this regard, the undefeated Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in Africa does stand out in his four year undefeated campaign of improvisation, holding down 300,000 British and Allied troops with a maximum strength of 20,000 of his own [including bearers,] while managing to inflict 60,000 casualties. After the armistice he for a short time contemplated holding out - much as some Japanese soldiers were to in the wake of 1945 - but in the end decided to honour its terms.) Laffin suggests a suitable counter to this perception might have been that rather than negotiating armistice with the civilian Erzberger, the Allies ought to have forced Hindenburg to the table amd made him surrender his sword; the symbolism of which would have been unmistakable. In 1945 the German soldiers considered themselves brutally crushed, not militarily defeated. Laffin says, “Others,” (I count myself among that number,) “might not be able to see the difference, but this is not important. The Germans know there is a difference.”
The book was published in 1965, only twenty years after the Second World War finished, at which time there were still many Germans who had experienced the upbringing that inculcated such a mindset. Laffin quotes a former soldier telling him that, “‘We are not finished with our jackboots yet,’” and, “‘Germany must triumph. Peace is ignoble.’” It is to be hoped that with the further 55 years since then of peace (however ignoble - yet welcome to those who hope it will never happen again) and of a sustained non-military education system in Germany that that attitude has faded away for good.
In his Introduction Laffin says the German is a born soldier, aggression and fortitude in his blood, needing to be trained, yes, but the material is there already, not base clay but refined. He contrasts modern national aptitudes for soldiering; none equals the Australian for dash, élan and initiative, but for dogged persistence and obedience to orders no-one can touch the English and Welsh, for fighting fury the Scots, for thoroughness Americans, fanatical courage the Japanese, the capacity to suffer and still keep fighting, the Russians. He claims none of these are complete soldiers, though, they fight only because it is necessary to do so. But Germans are complete soldiers, for them war is holy. “The complete soldier fully realises that his only logical end is death, that this is a soldier’s only privilege. The German knows this.” In modern times, he says, only Napoleon’s soldiers can be compared with them - and then only when Napoleon commanded them. He states that Prussians and Germans never considered themselves beaten in any conflict up to 1918 (later in the book he says not even then.) They had to admit defeat in 1945, bludgeoned by impossible odds, but even in extremis in December 1944 they launched the Battle of the Bulge, which, Laffin claims, “will for ever remain a magnificent feat of arms.” Despite younger Germans saying, “It will never happen again,” Laffin believes a German “can never evade his destiny: he does not really want to evade it. He is a soldier. A soldier fights.”
For how this came about you have to go back to landlocked Prussia, poor and barren, no cities worth the name, little industry and less culture, and to Frederick William (and his obsession with very tall soldiers) who expanded his army by impressing and enrolling men - many of them foreign - but it was his son Frederick the Great who devoted the resources of the state to it and realised that Prussia, surrounded by larger more populous countries, had to depend on organisation and speed and manœuvre in battle.
By Napoleonic times his lessons had largely been forgotten or outmoded. In 1808 crushing defeat at Jena and Auerstadt led to change, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau instituted a war academy and seven years later their influence bore fruit with Napoleon’s defeat at Liepzig. Their adherent Clausewitz formed his principles of war whose beliefs extend down the years since. An inculcation of military virtues via the school system (extended to the whole of Germay after unification in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870) laid the foundations for the nature of the German soldier and Kaiser Wilhelm introduced badges and awards for proficiency - a system brought to its greatest peak by the Nazis. Through all these years deference to a military uniform (indeed to uniforms of any stamp) was inbuilt in the German state.
In the context of France invading Germanic territory fourteen times between 1675 and 1813 Laffin quotes General Fuller as saying, ‘Few nations have had so bad a neighbour as Germany has had in France.’ (To which I can only reply, you should try being a Scot, mate.)
A piece of information that surprised me was that in the Nineteenth Century homosexuality was apparently rife in the Prussian army and not hidden, was indeed paraded, by those of that persuasion.
The German War Book stated the employment of “uncivilised and barbarous peoples in European wars” was an unlawful instrument of war, since “these troops had no conception of European-Christian culture, of respect for property and for the honour of women.” A footnote adds that this was a source of great bitterness during the Great War, quoting a Private’s letter to his parents (sensitivity warning; use of the ‘n’ word,) “The French have sunk so low as to use niggers against us. They are heathens and quite revolting and cruel. We fight fiercely against them because we know we can expect no mercy from these savages. You can smell them in the night.” (I’d have thought a smell - if any - would more likely have been produced by day than by night, but there you go. I suspect that any such perception was psychological anyway.)
Twice, re 1918 and 1945, Laffin asserts that the Germans were not beaten but overwhelmed - which, he says, is something different. For 1918 he cites a million troops left in the east to keep the conquered territories subdued and how they might have affected things in the west. (In this regard, the undefeated Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in Africa does stand out in his four year undefeated campaign of improvisation, holding down 300,000 British and Allied troops with a maximum strength of 20,000 of his own [including bearers,] while managing to inflict 60,000 casualties. After the armistice he for a short time contemplated holding out - much as some Japanese soldiers were to in the wake of 1945 - but in the end decided to honour its terms.) Laffin suggests a suitable counter to this perception might have been that rather than negotiating armistice with the civilian Erzberger, the Allies ought to have forced Hindenburg to the table amd made him surrender his sword; the symbolism of which would have been unmistakable. In 1945 the German soldiers considered themselves brutally crushed, not militarily defeated. Laffin says, “Others,” (I count myself among that number,) “might not be able to see the difference, but this is not important. The Germans know there is a difference.”
The book was published in 1965, only twenty years after the Second World War finished, at which time there were still many Germans who had experienced the upbringing that inculcated such a mindset. Laffin quotes a former soldier telling him that, “‘We are not finished with our jackboots yet,’” and, “‘Germany must triumph. Peace is ignoble.’” It is to be hoped that with the further 55 years since then of peace (however ignoble - yet welcome to those who hope it will never happen again) and of a sustained non-military education system in Germany that that attitude has faded away for good.
March 10, 2013
As relevant today as it was when first published in 1965. This book takes a look at the German soldier and the German army through out history. The author has a great writing stroy that makes this book a joy to read. The book paints of vivid picture of both soliders and officers from the Prussian armies through to the end of World War II. In my opinion this is an important book as it takes us through a journey with many stops along the way. It looks at the very nature of war and what war means and does to those who fight it. He does this with out glorifying it but in a subjective and informative manner. Also he gives us a true sense of of the much maligned German Soldier and debunks the image left by Hitler's thugs.
April 13, 2011
Excellent book on the building of the German war machine from the time of Frederick the Great to Hitler. Although this could have been a rather dry and pedantic subject, the author has made it come alive with his narrative and his research is flawless. It provides insight into the minds of the German military, from the officer class to the common soldier and frankly, is frightening. Highly recommended for the history/military buff.
February 21, 2018
First published in 1965, Jackboot traces the story of German militarism from the 17th century up to the date of print. The tone is decidedly German-biased, but you can generally spot where this is a problem - I found that wherever overly bombastic language was in use, this indicated some gargantuan exaggerations of fact and could be mentally toned down accordingly. Ince you allow for this, you actually do learn some useful information. However, you then tend to treat much of the historical detail - much of which is unsupported - as suspect. I am surprised that, in spite of its dubious historical credentials, this book has been reprinted as recently as 2000, but opinions will vary.
January 19, 2024
A short and fast read on the evolution of the German soldier from 1713 to just beyond the end of WWII. Overall well researched and very detailed. Written originally in 1965, some of his predictions didn't age well. The author clearly expected another rebuilding of the German army to again rival all of Europe in his lifetime.
May 11, 2015
If you like oversimplification, historical confusion,silly opinions, and glaring personal ideas passed off as fact.... this may be the book for you. This book is clearly for children in the 60s. But I feel it probably misled them too...
On the other hand- it covers a topic people like, so its gonna get read. And it does feature a lot of cool pics. But I counsel against counting this as a definitive work. Its a cute little book, unencumbered by historical reality.
For Wargamers and German Army fan boys, there are plenty of anecdotes and scenarios that will be of interest. The more discerning historical readers will be more aware of the lack of maps and other real historical data.
On the other hand- it covers a topic people like, so its gonna get read. And it does feature a lot of cool pics. But I counsel against counting this as a definitive work. Its a cute little book, unencumbered by historical reality.
For Wargamers and German Army fan boys, there are plenty of anecdotes and scenarios that will be of interest. The more discerning historical readers will be more aware of the lack of maps and other real historical data.
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November 16, 2008Anyone interested in European history from the Romantic to the Modern era could benefit from reading this book. The focus is as much on the societies that produced the German armies of each generation as the tactics utilized by them.
March 28, 2009
Another look inside the creation of the most effective military machine ever created......albeit for all the wrong reasons.
Like any sane person I hate the Nazis, but , to avoid recreating the past, we must learn from it.
Like any sane person I hate the Nazis, but , to avoid recreating the past, we must learn from it.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews