Scharnhorst The Formative Years, 1755-1801

This is the first comprehensive study of Gerhard Scharnhorst in any language. Other than the author’s The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militärische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801-1805 (1989), there exists no other work on Scharnhorst in English. Of the major German works, Das Leben des Generals von Scharnhorst (1869/71), written by Hanoverian historian Georg Heinrich Klippel, was a popular biography with no critical analysis. In keeping with the political correctness of his time, Klippel failed to include a single document from Scharnhorst’s voluminous papers that was disparaging toward the social, political, and military cultures in Hanover. Seventeen years later, Prussian historian Max Lehmann published his study of Scharnhorst (1886/87), which corrected many of the flaws in Klippel’s work, but failed to provide any critical analysis of Scharnhorst’s modernization, especially as it applied to Prussia. Like Klippel, Lehmann complied with the political correctness of his time in Prussia and Germany. Rudolf Stadelmann, Scharnhorst: Schicksal und Geistige Welt (1952), is an incomplete fragment that offers some interesting insights.

Scharnhorst: The Formative Years uses the previous German studies as a starting point to present many unpublished discoveries about his youth, his education and training, his extensive service in Hanover, and the modernization program Scharnhorst sought to implement in Hanover, and later realized in part in Prussia.

A follow-up volume, detailing Scharnhorst’s career in Prussian service, is in preparation.

"For those with a deep interest in Scharnhorst's life [...], this book offers much material that has not previously been available in English. It is a very thoroughly researched biography that will require careful study to appreciate its quality." Miniature Wargames

"Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, 1755-1801, is a great biography of this important figure in the history of warfare. White has provided an in-depth dive into Scharnhorst’s education, military career, and the relationships which made him one of the leading reforming figures in the transition from the positional warfare of the Ancien Regime to the total war of Revolutionary France. It makes this book a welcome addition to the history of warfare and the German principalities before their final unification in the 19th century, and I am looking forward to Part Two." The Napoleon Series

"...through a very detailed analysis of Scharnhorst’s syncretic private studies, provides an example of how professional officers ought to structure their personal study beyond merely reading their service chief’s professional reading list so that it is broad, intellectual, and critical." The Strategy Bridge