Oskar von Hutier

Oskar von Hutier (1857 to 1934) was a German general of the First World War who served in the German Army from 1875 to 1919. Born in Erfurt in the Prussian Province of Saxony into a family with a long tradition of military service, he rose through the General Staff and spent the first year of the war as a divisional commander in France before moving east in 1915. In September 1917 he commanded the Eighth Army when it ended the two-year siege of Riga with a heavy bombardment and a surprise crossing of the Dvina River, and he followed this with Operation Albion, an amphibious assault on Russian-held Baltic islands. Transferred west in 1918, he led the Eighteenth Army in Operation Michael and advanced some forty miles along the Somme in fifteen days. His name is often attached to the stormtrooper infiltration tactics of that offensive, but those methods had been developed by other officers before he arrived, so the credit is better described as mistaken than settled.