In a military and political career that spanned fifty-two years, Max Bauer played an influential role in the development of the armies of three countries. His strategic vision played a role in at least half-a-dozen wars, yet he has been largely forgotten by the public and by the historians. That’s true even in China and Iran where his work was most influential.

Max Bauer began his military career in the German army in 1890. He was appointed to the German General Staff in 1905, and became known for his role in the development of German heavy artillery and the tactics of employing it. During World War I, he became known for his organizational skills, and for his tendency to get involved in political intrigue. Ludendorff praised him for his role in producing a booklet on defensive tactics that became a standard textbook in the German army of World War I. He also played a major role in mobilizing German industry for munitions production.

After the war Bauer became involved in the Kapp Putsh of 1920. When that coup against the German government failed, Bauer was forced into exile. For the next few years, Bauer played a shadowy role. He was in the Soviet Union part of that time, probably playing a role in the clandestine military cooperation between the German army and the Soviet Union. He resurfaced in Germany in 1925 after an amnesty for the coup plotters.

In late 1927, Bauer was recruited by the Nationalist Chinese to help reorganize the Chinese army. Chiang Kai-shek apparently tried to recruit Ludendorff, but Ludendorff recommended Bauer. After spending some time in China and probably drawing up plans for the continuation of Chiang’s northern expedition, Bauer drew up recommendations for the development of Chinese military power. His basic recommendations were for the development of communications, heavy industry, a chemical industry, and a strong air force.

Bauer then returned to Germany to work with a Chinese mission to gain the help of German industry in developing those instruments of military power. Junkers was contacted for potential licenses to start a Chinese air industry. Other German firms were contacted for help in extending China’s rail network.

Attempts to get large-scale industrial assistance from German firms ran afoul of European politics. The Versailles Treaty prohibited Germans from training foreign armies, so Bauer’s activities had to remain officially that of economic adviser to Chiang. He entered wholeheartedly into that role because as he said, “You cannot organize and use a General Staff until you have industries to support an army.” According to John P. Fox, writing in the journal Contemporary History, Bauer proposed, “plans for the reconstruction of roads and railways, air, postal, and telegraphic communication, canals, agriculture, the heavy, chemical, and armament industries; the development of mines and flood control, health and urban development, and measures to promote financial stability.”

Bauer envisioned China as a huge market for German industry, but only after political stability was assured. He proposed that China demobilize roughly two million troops from it’s swollen armies, and build a small, tough central army that could control warlords and bandits, using a high-quality rail network for mobility.

Some of Bauer’s plans could be put into operation quickly. For example, Chiang soon had a very good military intelligence network collecting information on warlord and foreign armies in China. A “model division” and officer-training schools were quickly put in place. Other ideas like industrialization obviously would take years. At one point Bauer claimed that it would take China 30 years to build a modern army.

China’s warlords were obviously threatened by improvements to the Kuomintang central army, and in early 1929 a coalition of four warlords known as the Kwangsi militarists challenged the central government. Bauer helped plan expeditions that quickly crushed two of the warlord armies and brought the other warlords to the negotiating table.

In spite of the victories, China’s warlords collectively were more powerful than the central army, and the resulting peace left them with their remaining armies and with considerable local autonomy. Bauer advocated reaching a political settlement with the warlords because continued fighting could scare away foreign investment.

That advocacy of political settlements did not extend to the various Communist enclaves in the cities and in the countryside. Bauer saw the Communists as a much more formidable potential foe than the warlords, and helped plan the series of “Bandit suppression” campaigns that forced a small communist remnant to flee to northern China in a march of over a thousand miles.

Bauer continued to advise Chiang and the Kuomintang until 1933. After the Nazi seizure of power in that year, he returned to Germany to participate in what he apparently thought was going to be a traditional German conservative government. Bauer became involved in the German military’s efforts to marginalize Hitler and barely escaped assassination by the Nazis during the Night of the Long Knives. He then fled to Holland.

An official German military aid program to China was in full swing by that time, and the Nazis successfully pressured the Chinese not to allow Bauer back in the country. At that point, shah Reza Pahlavi of Persia (soon to become Iran) invited Bauer to head an economic mobilization mission in that country. The shah had been impressed by Bauer’s work in China, and wanted a similar buildup of the infrastructure to support military power.

Bauer’s position in Iran became increasingly anomalous as official German influence increased with a wide range of trade ties between the two countries. At the same time, the Nazis sought to use Bauer’s influence with the shah to increase their penetration of Iran. Hitler was often surprisingly indulgent of former political rivals when they were no longer in a position to threaten him, especially if they were in a position to help his cause.

Bauer remained in Iran until mid-1937, when he left that country after a series of disputes with the Shah over continued corruption in the Pahlavi regime. During his three years in Iran he did not directly train the Iranian army. A French mission did that until it was withdrawn in 1939. He did, however, organize an impressive logistics and manufacturing system for the Iranian army. The Shah lavished a large percentage of his foreign exchange on the Iranian army, buying modern tanks and artillery from Czechoslovakia, and two hundred obsolescent military aircraft from Britain. Bauer’s contribution to the Iranian build-up was primarily in the area of manufacturing and logistics. By 1937, the Iranians were well on their way to independence in terms of small arms, including machine gun production and were starting production of mortars and artillery ammunition.

As official German advisors left China at the start of the brief undeclared Sino-Japanese war of 1937-38, the Nationalist Chinese sought the help of Bauer and other ‘independent’ German advisors. Bauer and other ‘independent’ advisers played some role in the successful Chinese defense of Shanghai, and the series of little publicized but bloody battles in Northern China that, together with growing tension between the Japanese and the Soviet Union along the Manchurian border, helped convince the Japanese military to adopt a less belligerent policy toward China.

Bauer’s influence waned in 1939 and 1940, as official German missions resumed and the increasingly self-confident Chinese government reduced its dependence on foreign advisors. During the period of relative peace that China enjoyed between mid-1938 and early 1940 Bauer rapidly lost power in Chinese government circles, and he left China for the last time in January 1940.

Bauer and many of his team of advisers slipped into Iran in February 1940 at the request of Shah Pahlavi, who was desperately trying to build up his military in the face of an apparent threat from the Soviet Union. In Iran, Bauer again faced an anomalous situation. The shah of Iran faced an ominous Soviet buildup on his northern border. In the aftermath of the German/Soviet partition of Poland, Hitler recognized Iran as falling within the Soviet sphere of influence. Britain and France were willing to defend Iran in the event of a Soviet invasion, but the shah was skeptical of both their capabilities and their long-term motives.

The presence of Bauer and his team of primarily German advisers worried the Western Allies, and in early 1940 they put considerable pressure on the shah to expel Bauer or turn him over to them, along with several hundred other Germans in Iran. The presence of German officers in Iran seemed to threaten British control of the large oil fields and the huge oil refinery at Abadan, which supplied much of the Royal Navy’s oil.

The British made contingency plans for an occupation of southern Iran in the spring of 1940, but the fall of France made those plans impractical for the time being. The Soviet build-up near Iran continued through 1940 and early 1941. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 actually precipitated a Soviet/British invasion of Iran in mid-August of 1941, as the British and Soviets attempted to make sure Iranian oil stayed out of German hands and to open up a supply route across Iran for British arms headed for the Soviet Union.

Bauer may or may not have played a role in coordinating the Iranian defense against that invasion. He certainly played a role in setting up a reasonably modern logistics framework for the Iranian army. Bauer and his team of advisers left the country under US protection as part of the US sponsored deal that ended the Allied invasion of Iran in October of 1941. Bauer was interned when the US entered the war on the side of the Allies later that year. He sat out the rest of World War II in US custody, became a United States citizen after the war, and died there in 1955.

How effective were Bauer’s army-building exercises? That’s hard to say for several reasons. China and Iran downplay his contributions for nationalistic reasons. Both countries claim that his contribution was marginal. It is certainly true that both countries would have built up their armies and military industries to some extent with or without Bauer’s activities. Independence from foreign arms suppliers was an obvious goal for both countries. At the same time, Bauer’s expertise and his contacts undoubtedly made some difference in both cases.

Another problem with accessing Bauer’s contribution is that both China and Iran received military training from other sources. The Chinese army received large-scale training and large quantities of arms from the official German government mission between 1935 and 1937, while the Iranian army was trained by a French mission through most of the 1930’s, and was able to buy large numbers of reasonably modern tanks Czechoslovakia along with fairly large numbers of obsolescent aircraft from Britain.

Both countries did produce substantial numbers of weapons on their own. The Chinese national armories produced a little over six hundred thousand rifles between 1929 and 1936. The all-out national effort in the period leading up to and during the China incident produced some four hundred thousand additional rifles. The Chinese also produced approximately 90,000 machine guns and 15,000 light mortars in 1937 and 1938. Chinese was not able to build substantial quantities of tanks, front-line aircraft, or artillery pieces during the brief war with Japan, though a few Italian-designed Fiat CR-32 fighters were assembled at a Chinese factory, along with a Caproni-designed bomber.

Chinese factories did produce several thousand trucks prior to and during the brief war with Japan, along with a few improvised armored cars, but plans to license-build the German Panzer I were scrapped in favor of purchases of the British 6-ton export tank, which was widely used by Chinese forces during the “China Incident” and became the basis of several Chinese designed derivatives in the 1939-43 period.

Iranian military production was much more modest than Chinese production. It was limited to small-arms, including several thousand machine guns, ammunition, light mortars, and some spare parts for the Czech-built Iranian tanks.

The two armies Bauer helped build performed in a remarkably similar manner. Both heavily outnumbered the opposing armies. Individual divisions of both the Chinese and Iranian armies fought bravely and well against technologically superior armies, while other divisions of both armies fell apart on contact with the enemy. Both armies took far higher casualties than their opponents during their brief wars. The Chinese, for example, lost about 170,000 men killed in the “China Incident”, as opposed to approximately 60,000 Japanese dead, and that ratio is deceptively low in that a high percentage of Japanese casualties were suffered during the abortive Japanese landing attempt near Shanghai.

Similarly, Iranian army casualties during the British/Soviet invasion attempt were more than three times as high as that of either of their opponents. An Iranian army of around 130,000 men lost over 25,000 men killed or captured in the brief set of battles.

In spite of those casualty ratios, both armies succeeded in giving their respective governments sufficient political maneuvering room for survival. The stubborn Chinese defense of Shanghai convinced the Japanese they could not simultaneous pursue the conquest of China and deter the growing military threat from the Soviet Union on their Manchurian border. The series of undeclared border wars between the Soviets and Japanese between 1938 and early 1940 certainly vindicated that Japanese decision, though the long-term threat from China to the Japanese position in Manchuria proved to be more deadly than that of the Soviet Union.

The British and the Soviet Union, in spite of unexpected early Iranian successes, could certainly have conquered the Iranians. They did not do so for three reasons. First, the combat power needed to do so was urgently needed elsewhere. Second, the cost of the war against Iran in terms of public opinion in the still-neutral United States was simply too high. Neither Britain nor the Soviet Union could afford to risk losing Lend Lease over Iran, so the invasion had to succeed quickly or it simply was not politically doable. Third, the US brokered end to that war gave the Allies most of what they had to have in Iran: expulsion of German advisers and ability to ship non-combat supplies, including trucks, uniforms, and radios through Iran at a modest cost in terms of United States military and economic aid to Iran.

In short, both China and Iran ended up with armies and logistics structures that in spite of their flaws and the flaws of the regimes that depended upon them, were good enough. Max Bauer may have been the factor that made them that way.