ABSTRACT
The tactical innovations for which Gustavus was responsible were so successful, their impact on the art of war so immediate and long-lasting, that it is easy to forget that he was not only a master of tactics, but also a strategist of impressive stature. Clausewitz considered him a learned, cautious, systematic commander; but it seems unlikely that he would have persisted in this judgment if he had had the researches of recent Swedish military historians at his disposal. For though the conquest of Germany was indeed a systematic business — a deliberate organization of successive base areas, a step-by-step advance in which each forward move was solidly underpinned — there was also in it a striking element of boldness, a vastness of scale, an ability to think in large categories, and a conscious striving after a victory of annihilation, which was certainly unique in the first decades of the seventeenth century.
