In 1899, Kaiser Wilhelm II succeeded in excluding the War Ministry and Congress in drawing up future military plans, and the final military plan was the sole responsibility of the General Staff; due to the high concentration of power and the high degree of secrecy, the top naval officers had only a sporadic understanding of the war plan, and even Prime Minister Bethmann Hollweg did not know the core war plan until 1912. Although preparations for this plan began in 1905.
Kaiser Wilhelm II
Named after its designer, the Schlieffen Plan was one of the most important government documents written by all nations in the first decade of the 20th century, because what it brought on the battlefield, the hope it stirred up and shattered, is still influential today. It may be argued that it has proven to be the most important official document of the last hundred years, but the impact of the paper plan on the development of events should not be exaggerated. Planning does not determine the outcome. Events triggered by a particular action plan are often extended beyond the plan, are inherently unpredictable, and far exceed the expectations of the initiator. The same is true of the "Shi Lifen Project". It was in no way the result of the First World War; at the time of the war it was the result of many people's implementation and non-implementation of decisions in June and July 1914, not of a group of officers of the German General Staff who had designed them in advance. It's not that its failure—because it failed—that determines what happens next; it's a plan to win in a short-term war. If the warring parties decide to stop after the initially defeated military conflict, a long-running war that follows may be avoided. In any case, the "Schlieffen Plan" chose the place of war and designed the action of the German army on that stage, and once this plan was adopted under the pressure of the crisis, the focus of the war depended on it, and the inherent flaws of the plan already determined the possibility of the expansion of the war, and the possibility of prolonging the war as a result. The plan is inherently dangerously uncertain: the uncertainty of its plans to win a quick victory, and the greater uncertainty that results if it fails to achieve its desired goals.
German Chief of the General Staff Schlieffen
The Schlieffen Plan was an outstanding backup plan, and in 1891 Schlieffen was appointed chief of the German general staff and immediately began to theoretically consider how best to protect his country in a general political atmosphere. The starting point of the plan inherited from his predecessors, the great Moltke Sr. and Waldersee, was to deal with the danger of Germany caught between France and Russia. France's defeat and loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870 led to inexhaustible hostility, while Russia was a longtime ally of France. In the worst case, this foreshadowed a series of expensive modern fortresses, which led them to assert that the German army would be on the defensive on the Western Front, using the Rhine as an obstacle to resist the French attack, and deploying its main forces on the Eastern Front; however, even on the Eastern Front, its goal was limited to the establishment of a defensive line in the territory of the Russian Front; and for victory in (Russian) Poland "the pursuit of entry into Russia", Moltke wrote in 1879: "It is of no benefit to us." Moltke kept in mind the great catastrophe of Napoleon's march into Moscow.
Marshal of Prussia The Old Moltke
It has to be said that the same is true of Schlieffen; but as a student of the Moltke staff education system, he understood its discipline but did not understand its inspiration. Moltke insisted on the precision of military analysis, but also always worked tirelessly to adapt his strategic thinking to suit the spirit of national diplomacy. He and Bismarck were open to each other, regardless of their differences in policy. Schlieffen was not interested in foreign affairs, and he believed that power came first. Due to the young German emperor's lack of judgment and the abandonment of Bismarck's 1890 "reinsurance" treaty with Russia, Schlieffen took over as chief of the general staff, giving full play to his preconceptions. The "reinsurance" treaty stipulated that Russia would remain neutral against Germany unless it attacked France; germany would remain neutral against Russia unless it attacked Germany's ally, Austria-Hungary. Schlieffen began to indulge in chessboard deduction. There are not many things he can confirm: France, weaker than Germany but protected by fortresses; Russia, weaker than Germany but protected by a vast space; a weak Austrian ally, hostile to Russia, and therefore can be used to distract the enemy, even as a weight in balance; very weak Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary's allies, which can not be considered; Britain, which can be ignored, because Schlieffen is indifferent to sea power, and he even despises the German navy, although it is the beloved of the German emperor, And during his reign, it became more and more frequent.
The Group of Allies and the Allies before World War I
Taking into account the relativity of power, and considering only their influence, Schlieffen drew up a plan to attack France with overwhelming force in the accident of war, using seven-eighths of the German military forces, with total victory or nothing. Failure would put his emperor in danger. Schlieffen, however, never considered failure. In August 1892, he had decided to do his best on the Western Front, rather than the Eastern Front conceived by Moltke and Wadsey. In 1894, he proposed plans to destroy the French fortress on the Franco-German border. In 1897 he accepted the fact that German heavy artillery could not destroy the border fortresses and began to convince himself that "the offensive could not be withdrawn by undermining the neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg", in other words, he wanted to render the French fortress useless by flanking the encirclement. His plan, written between 1899 and 1904, was tested in wargames and staff travel expeditions, and envisaged two-thirds of the army advancing through Luxembourg and the southern tip of Belgium. Finally, in the so-called "Great Memorandum," completed in December 1905— on the eve of his retirement from the highest military post he had served for fourteen years— he dismissed moderation. Belgium's neutrality, jointly guaranteed by Britain, France and Prussia, would be inviolable, but would be massively undermined. Almost all of the German troops were stationed on the front from the Swiss border, almost extending into the North Sea, and they would first cross Belgium in a massive march, flank through northern Brussels, then across the Plains of Flanders, and reach the French border on the twenty-second day after mobilization. On the thirty-first day, the German army will advance along the Somme and Meuse rivers, where the right flank turns south, encircles Paris from the west, and begins to drive the French army to the left flank from Alsace-Lorraine. It was a massive semicircular pincer offensive, with a circumference of 400 miles and a flank distance of 200 miles, against the French army offensive. In the face of unstoppable pressure, the French army will be nailed to the battlefield of the decisive battle, fighting in static and being annihilated. By the forty-second day, the war on the Western Front would be won, and the victorious German army would return to Germany by rail, reach the Eastern Front, and there would be a devastating blow to the Russian army.
The Schlieffen Project
Schlieffen continued to tinker with his plans, even after his retirement, until his death in 1912. He had no other pastimes and no hobbies. When he was chief of the general staff, he often worked until midnight and then relaxed by reciting military history for his daughter. Military history was second only to his hobby of writing military plans. Before becoming Chief of the General Staff, he was an expert in military history at the General Staff, but studied history entirely from a technical point of view. It was the deployment of troops on the map, not the minds of soldiers, nor the rationality of the government that threw them into war that piqued his interest. He indulged in the Battle of Cannes, in which Hannibal surrounded the Roman legions in this battle in 216 BC. Hannibal's overwhelming victory was an important inspiration for his 1905 "Great Memorandum." He recognized the essence of general talent at the Battle of Canney: not to be tainted by politics, logistics, technology, or the psychology of combat. The practice of being a young officer in the Lancers of The Guard does not seem to have left a mark; he held staff positions during the wars of 1866 and 1870. In 1884 he became a professional military historian; after 1891, he became completely addicted to mapping. He was cold, harsh, conceited about his intellect, more detached when the term of office had reached an unprecedented length, and by the end of his career he had at least reduced the war to a purely abstract thing, with so many troops deployed here and so much there. An excerpt from the "Big Memorandum" reads with a lot of flavor:
If possible, the German Army would win the battle through the envelopment of the right wing. Therefore, the stronger the wing is built, the better. To this end, the army's eight corps and five cavalry divisions would be divided into five routes from south of Liège across the Meuse river and towards Brussels-Namur; the ninth army would join them after crossing the Meuse river north of Liège. The latter would have to cross the Meuse River within the control of the Huy fortress, which would have to be rendered ineffective.
Battle of Canney
Curiously, Schlieffen was obsessed with the movement of the troops, but was not at all interested in expanding its size in order to guarantee its ability to overwhelm the enemy. As Holger Herwig argues, there was a fear among German generals that expanding in size would lead to the corruption of the army by socialists from the big cities, made up of rural lads far from politics. Although in 1905 he requested the formation of 33 new infantry battalions, that number, according to his calculations, could save his plan from the danger of failure due to insufficient strength. At that stage, he didn't need more, despite the sheer size of Germany's huge and still expanding population that could easily meet demand. He designed for himself and believed that the conundrum he could solve was how to win a short-term war with available resources. His ambition was to replicate the victories of the great von Moltke against France in 1866 and 1870, which took six and seven weeks respectively. All in all, he wanted to avoid an "exhausted" war. "The strategy of attrition," he wrote, "won't work if hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth are spent to maintain millions of troops." ”
German soldiers in World War I
He did not live long enough to discover, as Hitler did, that a brilliant plan of aggression, if flawed, was like an irresistible law of reaction that inevitably led to a war of attrition. Schlieffen, however, correctly numerically limited the range of the offense he had designed in the circumstances of his time. Hitler's plan failed because, after a whirlwind victory on the Western Front, he persuaded himself that such a victory could be repeated in the vast space of the Eastern Front. Schlieffen flinched in the face of such a space. He realized that an army marching on both feet and horses would exhaust all its power in the boundless vastness of the Siberian steppe. So he spent sleepless nights next to the map of Flanders and the Paris region, where there was an army, where he marched from the flanks, a river with bridges, a hidden fortress. He made adjustments in the middle of the night, not with the goal of dealing with the german number of French troops, but the number that the Belgian and French road networks could bear. Such calculations were the basis of the Staff College's training: cadets were given something from a prepared form to a map, and the length of the column given to the traveling army in the table, for example, 29 miles for an army—could figure out how many troops could squeeze through a given area at what speed. For the limit of a day's rapid march is 32 miles, which is the distance of a day's march on a one-way road; but the tail of the 29-mile-long marching column will still be close to or at the starting point of the march at the end of the day. If there are two parallel roads, the tail can walk half the distance, if there are four sets of roads, it can walk three-quarters, and so on. Ideally, a unit in an army would not march in columns, but march in tandem, allowing all to travel 32 miles by the end of the day; in practice, as Schlieffen acknowledged in one of his amendments, parallel roads would at best be separated by only one or two miles. However, because his great wheeling movement required about 30 armies to sweep forward at a 300-mile front, each army had only 10 miles of frontal march, meaning that only a maximum of 7 parallel roads were available. This was not enough to enable the tail of the column to catch up with the line troops at the end of the day. This flaw is serious in itself; what is even more serious is that it absolutely does not allow any additional troops within a roundabout radius. They can't act together simply because there's no room left.
German troops on the march
Thus, Schlieffen's decision to calculate only the current strength was correct; the plan came from mathematical reality. As he recognized in his final amendment, any attempt to increase the number of troops on the road, or even to use only the existing numbers, would result in unhelpful traffic jams: "Unnecessarily large numbers of troops will be formed in the rear. Unfortunately for Germany, the Schlieffen Project did not derive solely from mathematical reality. Its ultimate source is a kind of wish thinking. Schlieffen dreamed of repeating the great victory of 1870, not on the Franco-German border, but inside France, because he realized that the French were unlikely to plunge recklessly into German territory a second time. Yet France is a "great fortress", and as he emphasizes time and time again, fortresses are lined up both on the frontier and inside, especially Paris, which is a city surrounded by modern fortresses. Although Belgium was also fortified, it provided a way around the Fortress on the French border, for its army was too weak to resist German forces at any time; but reaching Paris via Belgium not only extended the marching route, but also narrowed the forward front. The obsession with the road network, and of the army on the right, in search of corridors capable of massaging rapidly from Flanders to paris and Paris, to the decisive battlefield, was rooted in the fact that the days of the right-wing action automatons could not exceed six weeks; beyond that time the Russians would emerge from their vast space and drown the small number of troops left on the Eastern Front to defend the road to Berlin.
Ruins of the Fortress of Liège, Belgium
Dreams are whirlwinds of rapid action; mathematical calculations warn of a thunderstorm that is dying. Even in the "Great Memorandum" of 1905, Schlieffen took his fears into account. "Therefore," he wrote, "it is essential to accelerate the advance of the German right as much as possible." Moreover, "the commander of the force must always be vigilant and correctly assign the route of the march"; at this point he admitted that the moderate marching speed of a well-trained army was 20 miles per day. The command to speed up or change the road rarely changes this. He then referred to the well-known "weakening of offensive forces". "The active army (which has existed in peacetime) must remain intact and cannot be used to assume the duties of defending the area of communication, attacking fortresses or defending fortresses", although at the same time "the railways necessary for the transport of the army must be defended" and must occupy the large cities and populous provinces of Belgium and northwestern France. These missions are sponges that deplete the strength of combat troops. He then listed the aspects of prevention: "If the British landed and advanced, the German army would stop ... Defeat the British and then continue the campaign against the French. "The plan does not leave room for such delays. Then, in a slightly later revision, he mentioned the danger that the French, who had been despised after their defeat in 1870, would find a new will to fight: "Since they were instilled in the spirit of attack, we must assume that a part of [their army] that was not attacked would attack. "This is a harbinger of a war of attrition, foreshadowing a long war of iron and blood. Any of the following situations would bring danger: "In the face of a great detour, the enemy holds his position, just as in siege battles, every army on the front line bites the enemy, piece after piece, day and night, advancing, attacking, advancing. If the German army had avoided the "pause in the war in the Far East (i.e., the Russo-Japanese War)" and achieved such a advance, the French might have withdrawn to the "Great Fortress" later— "France must be considered a great fortress"; "If France abandons the Oise and Aisne and retreats behind the Marne, the Seine, etc. ... It will be a war with no end in sight."
French soldiers in the trenches
This is not the only assessment of despair in the "Big Memo". There are others. Schlieffen was at a decisive point eager for more troops, through the great detours of Belgium and northern France to the right: "More troops must be recruited ... An army of eight armies must be created ... We have always boasted about our population density, about the enormous manpower at our disposal; ... But these people are now trained, armed, and have provided the maximum amount of manpower they can supply... The eight corps that are most needed are the right wing, or put them behind. Schlieffen strongly demanded the formation of these eight corps from the reserves, namely the reserve army and the Home Guard (overage reserve soldiers), which would be equivalent to a full quarter of the German Army's strength. Still, he clearly shared the feelings of his comrades and feared expanding the size of the army by recruiting unreliable elements. The despair of the commentary grew stronger: "How many troops [of the eight armies] were able to be transported (to the right flank) depended on the ability of the railways ... It takes (them) to complete the siege of Paris... The manner in which they march and attack are indicated on map three. At this point, the discerning reader can see that the "Great Memorandum" collapsed: the map III does not show how the newly joined army advanced or encircled Paris—the strategic point of What Schlieffen called the "Great Fortress" of France. These armies appeared out of thin air, without any indication of how they would reach Paris and its periphery. The "capacity of the railway" had nothing to do with this; the railway in the Schlieffen Plan could only transport attacking troops to the German border with Belgium and France. This was followed by a journey along the road network and a measure of the speed of the advance by relying on the heavy pace of infantry. Schlieffen estimated that he could only advance 12 miles a day. During the crisis of August and September 1914, German, French, and British forces exceeded this speed sometimes for days in a row—the first battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, in its great retreat from Mons to Marne, advanced an average of 16.5 miles a day from August 24 to September 5, and 23 miles and 21 miles on August 27 and 28, respectively. But Schlieffen's average is not too far from the eligibility criteria. Between 18 August and 5 September 1914, von Kluck's forces marched a little more than 13 miles a day on the great winding outer flank, advancing a total of 260 miles. For the "eight new armies" needed to solve schlieffen's planned problems, to reach the decisive battlefield, they in fact need not only to travel faster and farther (which is already impossible), but also to do all this on the roads occupied by those that already exist (which is absolutely impossible).
Schematic diagram of the Schlieffen Plan
It is therefore not surprising to find between the lines of the "Great Memorandum" that the author admits that "we are too weak to carry out the plan to the end", and, in a later revision, "on such a broad front we still need a more powerful army than has been estimated so far". Schlieffen walked into a dead end of logic. The railway would put the great detoured armies in place; the Belgian and French roads allowed them to reach the outskirts of Paris in the sixth week after mobilization. But unless assisted by eight armies— 200,000 men— they could not be strong enough to win a decisive battle without room for those 200,000 men. His plan to win a lightning victory was inherently flawed. Nevertheless, this plan is archived for backup. Moltke Jr., the nephew of the Victors in 1866 and 1870, after succeeding him as Chief of the General Staff in 1906, began tinkering with the plan. Schlieffen himself was already doing this, precisely until the eve of his death on January 4, 1913. Neither has been able to solve the planned difficulties. Many accused Moltke Jr. of complicating the plan, and he strengthened the left wing of the German plan by slashing the large right wing of the Schlieffen Plan accordingly; this was not the point. Moltke's staff undoubtedly reduced the time it took for troops to get on and off trains at front-line deployment sites, at least two days in some areas and four days in others. Nor is this critical; railways can rely on plans to speed up operations, but where railways cannot reach them, they rely on roads, and the latter cannot rely on plans to speed up. The most elaborate calculations are also tied up by the inelastic average of 12 miles a day. Moltke and the General Staff responded by ignoring it. The Schlieffen Project was left idle in filing cabinets until 1914, when it was pulled out and put into practice, with disastrous consequences.
Little Moltke
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