First, this is a relatively unbiased book. Asprey doesn't ding Germany for dictatorial tendencies, contrary to what some may think; rather he dings the dictator, Quartermaster-General Ludendorff, who executed a bloodless coup against Kaiser Wilhelm II.

That is, in essence what started in 1916, and was complete by the time German relaunched unlimited submarine warfare in early 1917.

That said, Ludendorff had plenty of fellow-traveler idiots in both the German military and in Wilhelmm's cabinet. A stupid Grand Admiral, Tirpitz, who clamored for the naval expenditures that antagonized the UK, then was afraid to use his toy in war. A series of spineless chancellors and ministers, emasculated by Wilhelm and afraid of Ludendorff when he sought to push them aside.

And, in front of him? A puppet figure concerned to the nth degree about image, Field Marshal Hindenburg -- the man who did NOT win Tannenburg (neither did Ludendorff, of course), but rode that combination of myth and manipulation by Ludendorff to head the German Army.

Ludendorff deserves his military hacking down to size, too. The one positive thing, on the tactical side, was his development of stormtroopers. Otherwise, his rejection of the tank was idiocy in both tactics and larger strategy. His "Kaiser's offensive" was little better than the attrition warfare of two years earlier.

The real hero in Germany? The common soldier and common civilian, even more than in World War II, under a dictatorship in some ways as restrictive as Hitler's Germany, and with even tighter restraints on food and raw materials.