"Racy two-volume military memoirs of the brilliant mind that conceived the operational plan for Tannenberg, Germany's triumph on the eastern front in 1914. Hoffmann was the strong man in the east for the rest of the war.Max Hoffmann was Chief of Staff to Von Prittwitz, the aristocratic General charged with defending Germany's East Prussian heartland at the outbreak of the Great War. Prittwitz was as inept as his name suggests, and when the Russians steamrollered west far faster than...

"Racy two-volume military memoirs of the brilliant mind that conceived the operational plan for Tannenberg, Germany's triumph on the eastern front in 1914. Hoffmann was the strong man in the east for the rest of the war.Max Hoffmann was Chief of Staff to Von Prittwitz, the aristocratic General charged with defending Germany's East Prussian heartland at the outbreak of the Great War. Prittwitz was as inept as his name suggests, and when the Russians steamrollered west far faster than...

General Max Hofmann was well known as a consummate planner, even by the high standards of the German Army of the First World War. Working as the operation hub on the Eastern Front he and his superiors, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, used superior strategy to offset the huge advantage of number that the enemy Russian army possessed. The greatest victory that they achieved was the dramatic battle of Tannenberg, still studied today as a masterpiece. In this memoir translated from the German, Hoff...