Background
Colmar von der Goltz was born in Bielkenfeld, East Prussia, on August 12, 1843, the son of an estate owner.
Colmar von der Goltz was born in Bielkenfeld, East Prussia, on August 12, 1843, the son of an estate owner.
Goltz entered the army in 1861 and took part in the cam¬paigns of 1866 and 1870/1871; next came almost a decade in the military-historical section of the General Staff.
Goltz quit the army as major in 1883 in order to reorganize the Turkish military's training centers and eventually the Turkish army. He served first as pasha and later as marshal. Goltz returned to Germany in 1896 as lieutenant general, and two years later was appointed head of fortresses, engineers, and sappers. In 1902 he took command of the I Army Corps in East Prussia, and later became inspector general of the VI and then the II Army Inspectorate. In 1905 many generals favored Goltz as possible successor to Count Alfred von Schlieffen. Instead, the East Prussian in 1909 returned to the Porte; two years later he was promoted Prussian field marshal. In his numerous writings Goltz praised Léon Gambetta's people's army of 1871 and favored two-year enlistments over the prevalent three-year service (neither position earned Goltz the amity of Generals von Schlieffen or Helmuth von Moltke). Above all, Goltz saw future wars involving millionmen armies being conducted as national wars, requiring combined landsea strategies.
Perhaps because of the mediocre performance of Turkish forces in the First Balkan War in 1912, Goltz in August 1914 was given only the administrative post of governor general of occupied Belgium. As early as November 28, 1914, however, he was ordered to Constantinople to serve as the sultan's "adjutant general," a highly nebulous post. Goltz arrived at the Porte on December 12 and was received with icy formality by General Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission to Turkey. The impasse was resolved in mid-May 1915, when Liman assumed command of a new Turkish Fifth Army at the Dardanelles and grudgingly surrendered command of the First Army at the Bosphorus to Goltz.
Goltz enjoyed great respect among Turkish army officers, but the minister of war, Enver Pasha, viewed the Prussian as being "too old, too soft, a poor judge of men" and generally ignored him. Goltz, for his part, turned his attention to matters of grand strategy and counseled army command at home to consider a German thrust against the British either at Egypt, or, preferably, at India. While this notion was quickly dismissed as quixotic in Germany, Goltz, in October 1915, nevertheless was given command of the Turkish Sixth Army in Iraq and provided a chance to realize at least part of his scheme. General Sir Charles Townshend's army had advanced up the Tigris River in Mesopotamia in a hasty and ill-planned attempt to seize Baghdad, but on December 8, 1915, Goltz's Turkish forces invested Townshend's 12,000 soldiers at Kut el Amara; the British garrison surrendered on April 29,1916, ten days after "Goltz-Pasha" had died at Baghdad, either of spotted fever or of having been poisoned by the Young Turks.
(Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz - Anatolische Ausflüge - Re...)
From the 1870s until World War I, Baron von der Goltz was more widely read by British and American military leaders than Clausewitz. In addition to many contributions to military periodicals, he wrote Kriegführung (1895), later titled Krieg und Heerführung, 1901 (The Conduct of War [lit. War and Army-Leadership]); Der Thessalische Krieg (The War in Greece, 1898); Ein Ausflug nach Macedonien (1894) (A Journey through Macedonia); Anatolische Ausflüge (1896) (Anatolian Travels); a map and description of the environs of Constantinople; Von Jena bis Pr. Eylau (1907) (From Jena to Eylau).