German West Front War Plan In 1914 example essay topic

The Schlieffen Plan is commonly - though misleading y - identified with the German western offensive at the start of the First World War in August 1914, which began as a campaign of rapid movement but ended in deadlock and trench warfare. The plan is generally seen as a desperate gamble almost certain to fail, and its recklessness is counted as part of Germany's war guilt - the plan held out the false promise of a quick victory, and so it underpinned the "short war illusion" that led Germany into a long war of attrition, ending with her defeat and collapse in 1918. This analysis confuses two quite different moments in history. The Schlieffen Plan was not designed to meet the strategic challenge Germany faced in 1914, but rather to pre-empty it by winning a more limited and manageable war at the time it was written in 1906.1. The consensus is that the Schlieffen Plan epitomized the arrogance of German militarism in believing that swift and total victory could be gained in a war on two fronts against a numerically superior coalition. It is held that the Schlieffen Plan initially deployed most of the German army in the west, with a small force left in the east to conduct a holding operation against the Russians.

After a lightning campaign leading to a decisive victory over France within six weeks, Germany could turn her full might against the Russians. The standard verdict is that France could not have been comprehensively defeated within such a short time, so the plan was quite inadequate to the strategic dilemma confronting Germany. Anyone who believes all this has simply not read the Schlieffen Plan. That document is solely concerned with a war in the west. It does not call for the deployment of any forces against Russia, and contains no reference at all to a six-week deadline for the defeat of France. The great historical misunderstanding has been to regard Schlieffen's plan as a half-baked scheme for fighting a war on two fronts, when it was in fact a carefully reasoned scheme for fighting a war limited to the west, at a time when this seemed to be a distinct possibility.

The German west-front war-plan in 1914 was devised by the younger Helmuth von Moltke, and while it bore some resemblance to Schlieffen's proposal, it was extensively adapted to the changed circumstances, in particular to the necessity of now deploying against Russia as well as France. If we are to understand the original Schlieffen Plan, we must disentangle it from the events of 1914 and examine it in its own right and context. Then we can turn to the altered version that Moltke actually used at the beginning of the First World War. In February 1891 Count Alfred von Schlieffen was appointed Chief of the Prussian General Staff, a post which he held until the end of 1905. The most important responsibility of the General Staff was to produce the annual deployment plans, which stipulated how the German army was to be drawn up ready for battle in case of war. The initial pattern of deployment was the basis of the operational plan for the conduct of the war itself.

The General Staff routinely tested these war plans in studies and exercises. During most of Schlieffen's time as Chief of Staff, the essential strategic problem for Germany was indeed the likelihood that the next war would have to be fought against two enemies on widely separated fronts, the French in the west and the Russians in the east. Schlieffen never found a convincing solution to this problem. His suggestion was to deploy much greater forces on one of the fronts in order to defeat that enemy quickly and decisively, and then to use rail mobility to reinforce the other front and win a decisive victory there too. That sounded fine in theory, but when it was tested in exercises it proved hard to achieve. An initial victory on one front could not be fully exploited because of the need to switch forces promptly to the other front.

Once that happened, the first enemy could recuperate and resume the struggle - thus giving support and encouragement to the second enemy and making his defeat more difficult. None of Schlieffen's two-front exercises resulted in the complete eradication of either of Germany's foes, and in his bleaker moments he could envisage the German army shuttling back and forth between the two theatres of war until it was completely exhausted. He reassured his staff officers that it should be an advantage to fight on "interior lines", that is, in between two enemy forces, picking them off one at a time. In reality, though, he remained uncertain about the chances of solving the two-front problem. But with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, it suddenly appeared that Russia might be unable to come to the aid of her French ally in the case of a war in Europe. Schlieffen was eager to explore the strategic potential of this new situation, and his outdoor staff exercises (Generalstabsreisen) of June and September 1904 simulated a concentration of the entire German army in the west.

In November 1904 he drew up his outline deployment plans for the year 1905-6, and one of the alternatives he gave was to commit the whole of the German army to the west in the case of a one-front war (Aufmarsch I), an option which was also retained for the year 1906-7. Even now Schlieffen did not discount the possibility of a two-front war, and he kept an alternative Aufmarsch II for this eventuality. But he clearly believed that if it came to war with France, Russia would probably be out of the picture for the time being. Furthermore, the first Moroccan crisis of 1905-6 exacerbated tensions between France and Germany. Schlieffen did not try to use his influence to bring about a preventive war at this favourable juncture, but he did write the Schlieffen Plan to show in detail how France might be completely vanquished if she were to take on Germany without Russian support. Shortly before stepping down from his position, Schlieffen had begun work on the document known as the Schlieffen Plan.

The first month of his retirement was spent in completing the project so that it could be handed on to his successor, the younger Helmuth von Moltke, in February 1906. This long memorandum, entitled "War against France", outlined a strategy for enveloping and destroying the French army. It was based on the premise that France "cannot count on effective Russian support". In accordance with the existing Aufmarsch I, Schlieffen proposed that the whole of the German army should be deployed in the west. Seven-eighths of this force would be concentrated on the right wing for a massive sweep through Belgium and the Netherlands into northern France. The violation of Dutch and Belgian neutrality was accepted as a strategic necessity enabling the Germans to by-pass the enemy fortifications on the Franco-German border, which Schlieffen regarded as "almost impregnable".

Once inside the enemy homeland, the German right wing was to carry out a continuous leftward wheel, driving the French away from Paris in a south-easterly direction until they were helplessly pinned against their own eastern borders. Schlieffen thought that any French counter-attack would be hastily improvised and would run up against a solid wedge of German formations: therefore it would probably be repulsed and the German advance would be made that much easier. This was Schlieffen's best-case scenario, but there was another variant of the plan. The Germans would face a more difficult task if the French decided to await them on the most advantageous line of defence, along the rivers Oise and Aisne, with the Marne and the Seine to fall back upon if need be. In that event Schlieffen said that the defensive complex could not be penetrated in front but would have to be outflanked by a march around the western side of Paris with seven German army corps. Six new corps, raised from the army's replacement units, would have to screen the outflanking force as it made its way around the capital city.

Schlieffen insisted, however, that the outflanking manoeuvre could succeed only in conjunction with an all-out assault by eighteen army corps with heavy artillery support on the entire enemy front between Paris and Verdun - which disproves the widely held view that the Schlieffen plan was based exclusively on the idea of outflanking the enemy. If it became necessary to envelop Paris, that would be only one part of an enormous battle in which the bulk of the German army - some three-quarters of a million men - would be engaged in a frontal attack against entrenched positions. The scale and determination of this frontal onslaught would prevent the enemy from responding adequately to the German attack to the west of Paris, which would then threaten the French from behind and dislodge them from their line of defence. The ultimate aim, as in the first variant of the plan, was to drive the enemy back against his own eastern borders and destroy him there.

The Schlieffen Plan envisaged a total victory in the west as long as Germany did not have to fight simultaneously in the east. Given that freedom of action, the Germans could bring their entire military force to bear immediately on France in an operation not subject to a tight schedule. The idea that the whole offensive had to be carried out at top speed is a myth. In the event of a British landing on the northern coast of France, Schlieffen explicitly allowed for the advance to be halted temporarily while sufficient forces were detached to deal with this threat. There would be no need to race around the western side of Paris before the French could escape to the south. Schlieffen thought that the French would regard the Aisne-Oise position as their best line of defence and would not give it up without a fight.

Any delay in the German advance would probably be used by the French to strengthen that position, not to pull back from it. While the French stood fast and dug in, the Germans would have time to bring up the reinforcements needed for the lunge around Paris, and to prepare for the complementary assault along the Aisne-Oise front. The march around Paris was not conceived as a breakneck dash, but as part of a systematic set-piece battle that would decide the outcome of the war. Schlieffen judged that in a one-front war there was a realistic chance of totally defeating the French, and that is what the Schlieffen Plan aimed for.

If it were achieved, that result would be of enormous significance, as it would also remove the threat of an encircling enemy coalition for the foreseeable future. Had the Schlieffen Plan been successfully implemented in 1906, then the First World War as we know it could never have happened. But the peace was preserved in 1906 and the Schlieffen Plan was not put to the test. When the real war began eight years later it presented a quite different scenario. We may conclude by looking at some of the differences between the Schlieffen Plan and the west-front campaign that was actually fought by Moltke in 1914. Moltke agreed with the idea of using a strong right wing to envelop the French army, but his order of battle was not as heavily weighted to the right as Schlieffen's because he also wanted to deploy strong forces on his left wing to counter the enemy attack he expected in Lorraine.

Russia had long since recovered from her defeat by Japan, so Moltke was faced with the near-certainty of a two-front war in which both enemies would immediately go onto the offensive. He could not deploy the whole of the German army in the west, even though he needed a quick decision there to release reinforcements for the eastern front. It was the Moltke Plan, not the Schlieffen Plan, which required a victory over France within six weeks. Nor could Moltke contemplate swinging a part of his right wing all the way around Paris, since that again needed more time and troops than could be spared in a war on two fronts. Moltke's right wing, already much weaker than Schlieffen's, was further depleted during the course of the operation when he pulled out two of its army corps and transferred them to the east. The German army that was forced back from the Marne in September 1914 was but a pale shadow of the one that is drawn up against France in the Schlieffen Plan.

Moltke held to the basic idea of that plan, but under the time and manpower pressures of a two-front war he was unable to make the right-wing attack as powerful and sustained as Schlieffen had prescribed for a one-front war in 1906. It was a diluted version of the Schlieffen plan that failed in 1914, not the original concept.