On a list of historical figures who have left disaster in their wake, few can top Erich Ludendorff. And yet, he was not an incompetent man. On the contrary, he was one of World War I’s most able generals, among the few who recognized that Western Front battlefield tactics would require a fundamental rethinking, especially with regard to combat leadership.
Unfortunately, even here his contribution proved disastrous, as his tactical revolution enabled Germany to hold out far longer than it might have, thereby exacerbating the November 1918 collapse. In the realms of operations, strategy and politics, Ludendorff’s baleful influence wreaked havoc on Germany over the course of the war, while the seeds he planted would eventually support the rise of Adolf Hitler and an even more disastrous German defeat.
Ludendorff was born on April 9, 1865, in the town of Kruszewnia, near Posen, Prussia. Like most of the border towns split between Polish and German ethnicity, Kruszewnia was a hotbed of Prusso-German nationalism. His parents were middle-class but strongly nationalist. And as young Erich gobbled up military histories filled with romantic legends and nationalist nonsense about Prussia’s struggles against Napoléon or its heroic defeat of the “evil French” in the Franco-Prussian War, his nationalistic fervor soon eclipsed that of his parents. As a teen, Ludendorff made the obvious career choice of the German army. He excelled at cadet school and after graduation entered the army as an infantry officer.
