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Schlieffen Plan (1905) ..
The
Schlieffen Plan was a name given after
WW1 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 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. After losing WW1, 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 meddling with it out of timidity.
In
February 1891,
Alfred von Schlieffen was appointed to the post of Chief of the
Großer Generalstab (Great General Staff), the professional head of the
Kaiserheer (
Deutsches Heer [German Army]). The post had lost influence to rival institutions in the German state because of the machinations of
Alfred von Waldersee (8 April 1832 – 5 March 1904), who had held the post from 1888 to 1891 and had tried to use his position as a political stepping stone. Schlieffen was seen as a safe choice, being junior, anonymous outside the General Staff and with few interests outside the army. Other governing institutions gained power at the expense of the General Staff and Schlieffen had no following in the army or state. The fragmented and antagonistic character of German state institutions made the development of a grand strategy most difficult, because no institutional body co-ordinated foreign, domestic and war policies. The General Staff planned in a political vacuum and Schlieffen's weak position was exacerbated by his narrow military view.
In the army, organisation and theory had no obvious link with war planning and institutional responsibilities overlapped. The General Staff devised deployment plans and its chief became
de facto Commander-in-Chief in war but in peace, command was vested in the commanders of the twenty army corps districts. The corps district commanders were independent of the General Staff Chief and trained soldiers according to their own devices. The federal system of government in the German empire included ministries of war in the constituent states, which controlled the forming and equipping of units, command and promotions. The
system was inherently competitive and became more so after the Waldersee period, with the likelihood of another Volkskrieg, a war of the nation in arms, rather than the few European wars fought by small professional armies after 1815. Schlieffen concentrated on matters he could influence and pressed for increases in the size of the army and the adoption of new weapons. A
big army would create more choices about how to fight a war and better weapons would make the army more formidable.
Mobile heavy artillery could offset numerical inferiority against a Franco–Russian coalition and smash quickly fortified places. Schlieffen tried to make the army
more operationally capable so that it was better than its potential enemies and could achieve a decisive victory.
Schlieffen continued the practice of staff rides (
Stabs-Reise) tours of territory where military operations might take place and
war games, to teach techniques to command a mass conscript army. The new national armies were so huge that battles would be spread over a much greater space than in the past and Schlieffen expected that army corps would fight
Teilschlachten (battle segments) equivalent to the tactical engagements of smaller dynastic armies.
Teilschlachten could occur anywhere, as corps and armies closed with the opposing army and became a
Gesamtschlacht (complete battle), in which the significance of the battle segments would be determined by the plan of the commander in chief, who would give operational orders to the corps,
The success of battle today depends more on conceptual coherence than on territorial proximity. Thus, one battle might be fought in order to secure victory on another battlefield.
— Schlieffen, 1909
in the former manner to battalions and regiments.
War against France (1905), the
memorandum later known as the "Schlieffen Plan", was a strategy for a war of extraordinarily big battles, in which corps commanders would be independent in how they fought, provided that it was according to the intent of the commander in chief. The commander led the complete battle, like commanders in the Napoleonic Wars. The war plans of the commander in chief were intended to organise haphazard
encounter battles to make "the sum of these battles was more than the sum of the parts".
Deployment plans, 1892–1893 to 1905–1906: In his
war contingency plans from 1892 to 1906, Schlieffen faced the difficulty that the French could not be forced to fight a decisive battle quickly enough for German forces to be transferred to the east against the Russians to fight a war on two fronts, one-front-at-a-time. Driving out the French from their frontier fortifications would be a slow and costly process that Schlieffen preferred to avoid by a
flanking movement through Luxembourg and Belgium. In
1893, this was
judged impractical because of a
lack of manpower and mobile heavy artillery. In
1899, Schlieffen added the manoeuvre to German war plans, as a
possibility, if the French pursued a defensive strategy. The German army was more powerful and by 1905, after the Russian defeat in Manchuria, Schlieffen judged the army to be formidable enough to make the
northern flanking manoeuvre the basis of a war plan against France alone.
In
1905, Schlieffen wrote that the
Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905), had shown that the
power of Russian army had been overestimated and that it
would not recover quickly from the defeat. Schlieffen could contemplate leaving only a small force in the east and in 1905, wrote
War against France which was taken up by his successor,
Moltke (the Younger) and became the concept of the main German war plan from
1906–1914. Most of the German army would assemble in the west and the main force would be on the right (northern) wing. An offensive in the north through Belgium and the Netherlands would lead to an invasion of France and a decisive victory. Even with the windfall of the Russian defeat in the
Far East in 1905 and belief in the superiority of German military thinking,
Schlieffen had reservations about the strategy. Research published by Gerhard Ritter (1956, English edition in 1958) showed that the memorandum went through six drafts. Schlieffen considered other possibilities in 1905, using war games to model a Russian invasion of eastern Germany against a smaller German army.
In a staff ride during the summer, Schlieffen tested a
hypothetical invasion of France by most of the German army and
three possible French responses; the French were defeated in each but then Schlieffen proposed a French counter-envelopment of the German right wing by a new army. At the end of the year, Schlieffen played a war game of a two-front war, in which the German army was evenly divided and defended against invasions by the French and Russians, where victory first occurred in the east. Schlieffen was open-minded about a defensive strategy and the political advantages of the
Entente being the aggressor, not just the "military technician" portrayed by Ritter. The variety of the 1905 war games show that Schlieffen took account of circumstances; if the French attacked Metz and Strasbourg, the decisive battle would be fought in Lorraine. Ritter wrote that invasion was a means to an end not an end in itself, as did Terence Zuber in 1999 and the early 2000s. In the strategic circumstances of 1905, with the Russian army and the Tsarist state in turmoil after the defeat in Manchuria, the French would not risk open warfare; the Germans would have to force them out of the border fortress zone. The studies in 1905 demonstrated that this was best achieved by a
big flanking manoeuvre through the Netherlands and Belgium.
Schlieffen's thinking was adopted as
Aufmarsch I (Deployment [Plan] I) in 1905 (later called
Aufmarsch I West) of a Franco-German war, in which Russia was assumed to be neutral and Italy and Austria-Hungary were German allies. "[Schlieffen] did not think that the French would necessarily adopt a defensive strategy" in such a war, even though their troops would be outnumbered but this was their best option and the assumption became the theme of his analysis. In
Aufmarsch I, Germany would have to attack to win such a war, which entailed all of the German army being deployed on the German–Belgian border to invade France through the southern
Netherlands province of
Limburg, Belgium and Luxembourg. The deployment plan assumed that Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops would defend
Alsace-Lorraine (
Elsaß-Lothringen).
Alfred Graf von Schlieffen,
Denkschrift "
Krieg gegen Frankreich" [Schlieffen-Plan], Dezember 1905.
...
Post-war writing by senior German officers like
Hermann von Kuhl,
Gerhard Tappen,
Wilhelm Groener and the Reichsarchiv historians led by the former
Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant-Colonel)
Wolfgang Förster, managed to establish a commonly accepted
narrative that Moltke the Younger failed to follow the blueprint devised by Schlieffen and condemned the belligerents to four years of
attrition warfare. It was not German strategic miscalculation that denied Germany the quick, decisive conflict it should have been. 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 and contextualisation. 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-type 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 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 WW1, a view which was supported by Hew Strachan.
