Schlieffen Plan
The Schlieffen Plan (German: Schlieffen-Plan, pronounced [ʃliːfən plaːn]) is a name given after the First World War to German war plans, due to the influence of Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen and his thinking on an invasion of France and Belgium, which began on 4 August 1914. Schlieffen was Chief of the General Staff of the German Army from 1891 to 1906. In 1905 and 1906, Schlieffen devised an army deployment plan for a decisive (war-winning) offensive against the French Third Republic. German forces were to invade France through the Netherlands and Belgium rather than across the common border.
For the French deployment plan of 1914, see Plan XVII.Schlieffen Plan
After losing the First World War, German official historians of the Reichsarchiv and other writers described the plan as a blueprint for victory. Generaloberst (Colonel-General) Helmuth von Moltke the Younger succeeded Schlieffen as Chief of the German General Staff in 1906 and was dismissed after the First Battle of the Marne (5–12 September 1914). German historians claimed that Moltke had ruined the plan by tampering with it, out of timidity. They managed to establish a commonly accepted narrative that Moltke the Younger failed to follow the blueprint devised by Schlieffen, condemning the belligerents to four years of attrition warfare.
In 1956, Gerhard Ritter published Der Schlieffenplan: Kritik eines Mythos (The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth), which began a period of revision, when the details of the supposed Schlieffen Plan were subjected to scrutiny. Treating the plan as a blueprint was rejected because this was contrary to the tradition of Prussian war planning established by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, in which military operations were considered to be inherently unpredictable. Mobilisation and deployment plans were essential but campaign plans were pointless; rather than attempting to dictate to subordinate commanders, the commander gave the intent of the operation and subordinates achieved it through Auftragstaktik (mission tactics).
In writings from the 1970s, Martin van Creveld, John Keegan, Hew Strachan and others, studied the practical aspects of an invasion of France through Belgium and Luxembourg. They judged that the physical constraints of German, Belgian and French railways and the Belgian and northern French road networks made it impossible to move enough troops far enough and fast enough for them to fight a decisive battle if the French retreated from the frontier. Most of the pre-1914 planning of the German General Staff was secret and the documents were destroyed when deployment plans were superseded each April. The bombing of Potsdam in April 1945 destroyed much of the Prussian army archive and only incomplete records and other documents survived. Some records turned up after the fall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), making an outline of German war planning possible for the first time, proving wrong much post-1918 writing.
In the 2000s, a document, RH61/v.96, was discovered in the trove inherited from the GDR, which had been used in a 1930s study of pre-war German General Staff war planning. Inferences that Schlieffen's war planning was solely offensive were found to have been made by extrapolating his writings and speeches on tactics into grand strategy. From a 1999 article in War in History and in Inventing the Schlieffen Plan (2002) to The Real German War Plan, 1906–1914 (2011), Terence Zuber engaged in a debate with Terence Holmes, Annika Mombauer, Robert Foley, Gerhard Gross, Holger Herwig and others. Zuber proposed that the Schlieffen Plan was a myth concocted in the 1920s by partial writers, intent on exculpating themselves and proving that German war planning did not cause the First World War. Later scholarship did not uphold the Zuber thesis except as a catalyst for research which revealed that Schlieffen had been far less dogmatic than had been assumed.
Aftermath[edit]
Analysis[edit]
In 2001, Hew Strachan wrote that it is a cliché that the armies marched in 1914 expecting a short war, because many professional soldiers anticipated a long war. Optimism is a requirement of command and expressing a belief that wars can be quick and lead to a triumphant victory, can be an essential aspect of a career as a peacetime soldier. Moltke (the Younger) was realistic about the nature of a great European war but this conformed to professional wisdom. Moltke (the Elder) was proved right in his 1890 prognostication to the Reichstag, that European alliances made a repeat of the successes of 1866 and 1871 impossible and anticipated a war of seven or thirty years' duration. Universal military service enabled a state to exploit its human and productive resources to the full but also limited the causes for which a war could be fought; Social Darwinist rhetoric made the likelihood of surrender remote. Having mobilised and motivated the nation, states would fight until they had exhausted their means to continue.[74]
There had been a revolution in firepower since 1871, with the introduction of breech-loading weapons, quick-firing artillery and the evasion of the effects of increased firepower, by the use of barbed wire and field fortifications. The prospect of a swift advance by frontal assault was remote; battles would be indecisive and decisive victory unlikely. Major-General Ernst Köpke, the Generalquartiermeister of the German army in 1895, wrote that an invasion of France past Nancy would turn into siege warfare with no quick and decisive victory. Emphasis on operational envelopment came from the knowledge of a likely tactical stalemate. The problem for the German army was that a long war implied defeat, because France, Russia and Britain, the probable coalition of enemies, were far more powerful. The role claimed by the German army, as the anti-socialist foundation on which the social order was based, also made the army apprehensive about the internal strains that would be generated by a long war.[75]
Schlieffen was faced by a contradiction between strategy and national policy and advocated a short war based on Vernichtungsstrategie, because of the probability of a long one. Given the recent experience of military operations in the Russo-Japanese War, Schlieffen resorted to an assumption that international trade and domestic credit could not bear a long war and this tautology justified Vernichtungsstrategie. Grand strategy, a comprehensive approach to warfare that took in economics and politics as well as military considerations, was beyond the capacity of the Great General Staff (as it was among the general staffs of rival powers). Moltke (the Younger) found that he could not dispense with Schlieffen's offensive concept, because of the objective constraints that had led to it. Moltke was less certain and continued to plan for a short war, while urging the civilian administration to prepare for a long one, which only managed to convince people that he was indecisive.[76]
By 1913, Moltke (the Younger) had a staff of 650 men, to command an army five times greater than that of 1870, which would move on double the railway mileage [56,000 mi (90,000 km)], relying on delegation of command, to cope with the increase in numbers and space and the decrease in the time available to get results. Auftragstaktik led to the stereotyping of decisions at the expense of flexibility to respond to the unexpected, something increasingly likely after first contact with the opponent. Moltke doubted that the French would conform to Schlieffen's more optimistic assumptions. In May 1914 he said, "I will do what I can. We are not superior to the French." and on the night of 30/31 July 1914, remarked that if Britain joined the anti-German coalition, no-one could foresee the duration or result of the war.[77]
In 2006 the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr) published a collection of essays derived from a conference in 2004 held at Potsdam to discuss Terry Zuber's conclusion that there was no Schlieffen Plan. Had Zuber accurately interpreted his sources and were they adequate for his conclusions? The participants produced a comparative analysis of the war plans of the 1914 belligerents and Switzerland. In the Introduction to the volume, Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans and Gerhard Gross wrote that Zuber's conclusion that the plan was a myth was a surprise, because many German generals had recorded at the time that the campaign in August and September had been based on Schlieffen. Falkenhayn had made a diary note on 10 September 1914 that,
The Bavarian representative at the Great General Staff, General Karl Ritter von Wenninger wrote to Munich that
Wenninger went on to write that only the final encirclement by the northern and southern wings of the German force had not been achieved. After the Battle of the Marne, Wenninger wrote on 16 February that
Zuber maintained his thesis that the plan was a post-war fabrication by former General Staff officers to shift the blame for a lost war. Annika Mombauer wrote that Zuber had overlooked the intimate connexion between the military and political worlds and that trying to explain the war as the result of Schlieffen and Moltke's desire for war risked falling for the post-war apologetics of the General Staff that Schlieffen had created a plan that would inevitably bring victory. Robert Foley described the substantial changes in Germany's strategic circumstances between 1905 and 1914 which compelled German planners to prepare for a quick one-front war which could only be fought against France, the evidence for which lay in Schlieffen's staff rides, of which Zuber had taken too little account.[80]
Gerhard Gross wrote that the sources used by Zuber were inadequate for his conclusions. Zuber had not looked at published excerpts from the pre-war Aufmarschanweisungen (deployment commands) and the papers of General of Artillery, Friedrich von Boetticher, which included copies of original Schlieffen papers and correspondence with Schlieffen's friends and colleagues. The documents showed that Zuber had misunderstood Schlieffen's operational thinking, which was based on obtaining a decisive victory against the French through envelopment on French territory but in a much less dogmatic way than had been thought. Gross agreed with Zuber that the Denkschrift of 1905 was not an operational plan for a war against France or a detailed plan for a two-front war.[80] Dieter Storz wrote that plans and reality rarely match and that the extant Bavarian records bear out the basis of Schlieffen's thinking, that the French armies were to be outflanked by the right wing. Günter Kronenbitter analysed the deployment plans of Austria-Hungary and that despite the alliance and relationship between the German and Austrian general staffs there was no unified operational plan.[81]
The Zuber thesis was the catalyst for a debate that suggested new questions and answers and turned up new sources. Zuber may not have convinced scholars but was a considerable catalyst for research. Zuber withheld permission for his chapter to be included in the English translation. The book includes the German deployment plans, long thought lost, which show Schlieffen's operational assumptions and that the emphasis on envelopment was continued by Moltke, despite his changes of other aspects of the deployment plans.[82]
In 2009, David Stahel wrote that the Clausewitzian culminating point (a theoretical watershed at which the strength of a defender surpasses that of an attacker) of the German offensive occurred before the Battle of the Marne, because the German right (western) flank armies east of Paris, were operating 62 mi (100 km) from the nearest rail-head, requiring week-long round-trips by underfed and exhausted supply horses, which led to the right wing armies becoming disastrously short of ammunition. Stahel wrote that contemporary and subsequent German assessments of Moltke's implementation of Aufmarsch II West in 1914, did not criticise the planning and supply of the campaign, even though these were instrumental to its failure and that this failure of analysis had a disastrous sequel, when the German armies were pushed well beyond their limits in Operation Barbarossa, during 1941.[83]
In 2015, Holger Herwig wrote that Army deployment plans were not shared with the Imperial German Navy, Foreign Office, the Chancellor, the Austro-Hungarians or the Army commands in Prussia, Bavaria and the other German states. No one outside the Great General Staff could point out problems with the deployment plan or make arrangements. "The generals who did know about it counted on it giving a quick victory within weeks—if that did not happen there was no 'Plan B'".[84]