I must admit I have paid a lot for many books, so this wouldnt be a first or even close to the most expensive, and if the entire war in 1914 is covered it is one of the most critical periods and therefore worth having detail on it, but it is still expensive at $95 really. The present economy may well see a few changes but I doubt the price will alter much. The accounts I dealt with were quite good, but I really only skimmed them as I was after other things and my translator was likley to be bored if I asked her to read too much! Official histories tend not to be too popular in some circles though as they tend to be balanced and not the stuff of fantasy so many prefer.
On a Schlieffen Plan note, have you ever seen some of Zuber's works? Even is he is far from undisputed, he has provided some interesting insights into thoughts at the time. It is a shame his conclusions wander a lot further than his evidence supports, but I guess it gets him publicity!
How could the Schlieffen plan have succedded?
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Terry Duncan
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Re: How could the Schlieffen plan have succedded?
I think that I have some acquaintance with Zuber through comments made on here but not directly. While reading Tyng it didn't occur to me that the Germans might not have been trying to force decisive battle on the French and that they weren't particular where, which seems to be Zuber's conclusion. The failings of the German effort seemed to flow naturally from the objective constraints they operated in and the capacity of the French to transcend them (operating under slightly different ones which had more than slight effects).
I see that Zuber is in paperback now but I succumbed to the temptation to buy some other stuff which was unusually cheap instead. The most I've spent on a book is £98 but that was a long time ago.
I see that Zuber is in paperback now but I succumbed to the temptation to buy some other stuff which was unusually cheap instead. The most I've spent on a book is £98 but that was a long time ago.
Re: How could the Schlieffen plan have succedded?
Zuber doesn’t say Moltke’s objective was other than to inflict a decisive defeat on the French. Rather, that this defeat was not going to knock France out of the war, and that it would come as a head-on collision between attacking armies, and not with France doing nothing as the 1905 Schlieffen Plan seemed to suppose.
The Plan was a beautiful thing destroyed in its execution.
We call it the Schlieffen Plan because of Schlieffen's 1905 Strategic Memo. This memo was the first weapon deployed by Germany in her inevitable war with France and Russia. It was in the hands of the French Gran Quartier General in its entirety so quickly, it could have only been given to the GQG by the German General Staff, under Schlieffen's direction. The French wasted no time sharing its contents with their Russian and British counterparts. 1906 is when joint rides on the Continent by the British and French general staffs began, with plenty of sight-seeing trips through Belgium as tourists. Schlieffen's strategy as outlined in the memo was deemed insane by the French and British planners in 1906. Still, it was a great excuse for cavorting around northeastern France and Belgium each summer. There were plenty of excursions through the countryside, followed by army field exercises and parades and inspections to keep everybody busy. Each year after that, German preparations seemed to point to one inescapable conclusion, they were really going to try to take on Britain, France (and the Benelux) and Russia at the same time! It was a strategy which gradually made the French and Russians certain that they could not be beaten by Germany. Finally convinced in 1911, that Germany really did intend to execute Schlieffen's 1905 Plan, the French GQG added an offensive arm to the defensive only strategy they had been following for nearly thirty years. This offensive addition evolved into 1914's Plan XVII.
The flaw of Schlieffen's Plan, as the French, British and Russians knew it, was that to succeed it asked the German soldiers of the right wing to march at quick-step to arrive southwest of Paris in six weeks. No provision was made in the time table for doing battle with the French Army along the way. If the Germans were delayed, they would not be able to transship troops east to defeat the Russian Armies before they rolled into Berlin. To foul up the Germans even more, the Russians prepared the two armies targeting Germany's eastern defenses to go into action immediately should the Germans really execute the plan outlined in Schlieffen's 1905 memo. Since Schlieffen's memo had all of the Continent's Channel ports falling into German hands, Britain could not ignore it. Self interest in keeping the Benelux countries independent of German control was certainly the foundation of Britain's shift in foreign policy in favor of the French, and by association with Imperial Russia. But the actual plan the Germans executed in August, 1914 was far more subtle than the brutal, crude one-armed haymaker which failed at the last minute on the banks of the Marne.
Ever since historians have argued as to why the Schlieffen Plan, as executed, failed. Most cite the tinkering done to Schlieffen's concept in the 1905 memo by von Moltke's staff. Many cite the gap between von Kluck's 1st Army and von Bulow's 2nd Army and the fatal shift to the left by von Kluck's Army, across the Marne to close it. The War College of the United States Army which has gamed the Schlieffen Plan many times concluded it was logistically impossible for Germany to win. The French and British general staffs concluded the same thing in 1906. Yet the Germans came so close to winning, that their failure was considered a miracle of God by the France's military and civil leaders.
The German General Staff of the period was rated by every nation to be the best on Earth. It was a rating they deserved. To believe that they were actually going to attempt to execute a sweep of 250 miles on foot in six weeks through the armies and defensive fortifications of Belgium, France and the BEF, illustrates how poorly the general staff's of the Allies must have done in strategy classes at Sandhurst and the Ecole' Militare. It is one of the great ironies that the battle plan von Moltke and his general staff at the Hotel Britannique in Spa, Belgium were attempting to execute was very different than the actual battle which perversely adhered to the plan and time table outlined in Schlieffen's purposefully leaked 1905 memo.
The Schlieffen/Moltke plan was not the plan outlined in Schlieffen's 1905 Memo. Nor in was it truly reflected by the actual events. The 1905 Memo was a document purposefully leaked to the French high command. Written for French consumption it was a battle-plan which evaded the French fortress system on the Franco German border by thrusting through the Benelux into northeastern France. The German Right Wing had to be crushingly powerful. To meet the man-power levels required to get Germany's First, Second and Third Armies (the Right Wing) to the Channel and down to Paris, would force the Germans to strip their garrisons along their mutual border with France up through Alsace and Lorraine.
This was the opportunity for which the French GQG had been praying for thirty years. With only skeletal forces guarding Germany's border with France, a powerful thrust out of the Verdun-Toul Fortress system would roll all the way to the Rhine with little opposition.* The French high command had every faith the German right wing would be stopped and held somewhere in the middle of Belgium by the combined might of fully half the French Army, all of the Belgian Army and the British Expeditionary Force. With the other half of the French Army occupying German soil, peace on French terms would occur before the Russians even got rolling. If it took a little longer, then peace would come on Franco-Russian terms in Berlin. Still, it took seven years and a change in command of the French Army before this response to Schlieffen's 1905 memo morphed into Plan XVII (17) executed by Joffre and the GQG with such disastrous results in August, 1914.
Faced with the tactical and strategic problems Germany faced in fighting 'a two-front war' the above is exactly what Schlieffen and Moltke wanted the French and Russians to prepare for. Schlieffen wanted both opposition armies to see an opportunity for an easy, quick victory. Nor did he want to tip his hand in any way. Knowing what the enemy is looking for and showing it to him is the easiest way to get him to do what you want.
Here's what the Schlieffen Plan really was. Schlieffen's plan did require an exceptional large right wing. Belgium as a future satellite state with its rich iron and coal deposits was certainly the main prize. If the adjacent coal and iron ore regions of northeastern France could be added into the bargain, at least for a time, that was a bonus. The First, Second and Third German Armies were expected to advance as far as they could into Belgium. Von Kluck's First Army was actually detained in Liege for 48 hours by the General Staff to give the French and British Armies enough time to arrive. The plan was to pin the Allied forces of France, Britain and Belgium as far away from their logistical support bases as possible, while the Germans remained directly linked to their own in Aachen and Cologne. Schlieffen and von Moltke also wanted to lure a high proportion of the remainder of France's field forces into Alsace and Lorraine, and if need be, Germany proper. This they succeeded in doing. The Kaiser's son Wilhelm, and the King of Bavaria's son Rupprecht, headed the two field armies which were assigned to pull back and get the French to empty their otherwise impregnable fortress system in pursuit of victory all along the Rhine. Once these forces were in the bag (surrounded on three sides) Wilhelm and Rupprecht's armies would close it. They would then invest the nearly unmanned fortress system, board the trains and ride into Paris and seize the government, in six weeks or less. The best that Germany's war planners hoped for the Right Wing was that it would be able to split the Allied Armies and seize the Channel Ports. This would compel the BEF and the Belgian Army to surrender.
It was not intended by either Schlieffen or Moltke that von Kluck's and von Bulow's armies would actually make the 250-mile hike around Paris, as was called for in the leaked 1905 memo.
With the German right wing in Belgium preventing the French from reinforcing their own right wing thrusting into Alsace and Lorraine, and the Germans occupying all of the strategic rail lines in the regions, winning according to this plan which was not shared with the Allied high commands, was inevitable. We now know this is true because this version of the Schlieffen/Moltke plan was executed in six weeks in the spring of 1940.
So why did it fail in 1914? Von Moltke's staff vastly overestimated the fighting capabilities of the Allies. Von Kluck's First Army had to cover up to 30 miles a day just to stay in contact with the retreating French and British troops. The sight of such victories piling up for "nobodies" while their armies were falling back on to sacred German soil was literally more than the royal sons, Wilhelm and Rupprecht could bare. So rather than waiting until the bulk of French forces in Alsace and Lorraine were full enveloped, they launched their counter attacks about two weeks too early. The French army, badly bloodied but not broken, simply backed out of the trap and into the safety of the Verdun-Toul fortress system. With all of the Allied Armies arrayed in a line from Paris to Toul, on top of their supply bases, Joffre was able to transfer forces quickly wherever they were needed. This was the miracle of the Marne. The Germans, at the extreme end of their supply lines, shedding troops all the way for occupation duties and service on the Russian front, had captured no great number of guns nor bagged any armies. Even worse Wilhelm's and Rupprecht's armies were hopelessly stalled in a bloody mess on the Verdun-Toul fortress line. The overwhelming majority of German casualties in August and September were here.
This is when von Moltke had to pull the plug and order a general retreat to more defendable positions on the high ground of the Chemin des Dames that became the Western Front for the next four years.
*The Germans neatly solved their manpower shortage in 1914 by sending every reservist mobilized directly to combat units, rather than sending them to a refresher boot camp of 6-weeks duration, as had been their practice prior to the war. This was still SOP in the French Army in August 1914. Thus both wings of the German Army were of nearly equal size.
The flaw of Schlieffen's Plan, as the French, British and Russians knew it, was that to succeed it asked the German soldiers of the right wing to march at quick-step to arrive southwest of Paris in six weeks. No provision was made in the time table for doing battle with the French Army along the way. If the Germans were delayed, they would not be able to transship troops east to defeat the Russian Armies before they rolled into Berlin. To foul up the Germans even more, the Russians prepared the two armies targeting Germany's eastern defenses to go into action immediately should the Germans really execute the plan outlined in Schlieffen's 1905 memo. Since Schlieffen's memo had all of the Continent's Channel ports falling into German hands, Britain could not ignore it. Self interest in keeping the Benelux countries independent of German control was certainly the foundation of Britain's shift in foreign policy in favor of the French, and by association with Imperial Russia. But the actual plan the Germans executed in August, 1914 was far more subtle than the brutal, crude one-armed haymaker which failed at the last minute on the banks of the Marne.
Ever since historians have argued as to why the Schlieffen Plan, as executed, failed. Most cite the tinkering done to Schlieffen's concept in the 1905 memo by von Moltke's staff. Many cite the gap between von Kluck's 1st Army and von Bulow's 2nd Army and the fatal shift to the left by von Kluck's Army, across the Marne to close it. The War College of the United States Army which has gamed the Schlieffen Plan many times concluded it was logistically impossible for Germany to win. The French and British general staffs concluded the same thing in 1906. Yet the Germans came so close to winning, that their failure was considered a miracle of God by the France's military and civil leaders.
The German General Staff of the period was rated by every nation to be the best on Earth. It was a rating they deserved. To believe that they were actually going to attempt to execute a sweep of 250 miles on foot in six weeks through the armies and defensive fortifications of Belgium, France and the BEF, illustrates how poorly the general staff's of the Allies must have done in strategy classes at Sandhurst and the Ecole' Militare. It is one of the great ironies that the battle plan von Moltke and his general staff at the Hotel Britannique in Spa, Belgium were attempting to execute was very different than the actual battle which perversely adhered to the plan and time table outlined in Schlieffen's purposefully leaked 1905 memo.
The Schlieffen/Moltke plan was not the plan outlined in Schlieffen's 1905 Memo. Nor in was it truly reflected by the actual events. The 1905 Memo was a document purposefully leaked to the French high command. Written for French consumption it was a battle-plan which evaded the French fortress system on the Franco German border by thrusting through the Benelux into northeastern France. The German Right Wing had to be crushingly powerful. To meet the man-power levels required to get Germany's First, Second and Third Armies (the Right Wing) to the Channel and down to Paris, would force the Germans to strip their garrisons along their mutual border with France up through Alsace and Lorraine.
This was the opportunity for which the French GQG had been praying for thirty years. With only skeletal forces guarding Germany's border with France, a powerful thrust out of the Verdun-Toul Fortress system would roll all the way to the Rhine with little opposition.* The French high command had every faith the German right wing would be stopped and held somewhere in the middle of Belgium by the combined might of fully half the French Army, all of the Belgian Army and the British Expeditionary Force. With the other half of the French Army occupying German soil, peace on French terms would occur before the Russians even got rolling. If it took a little longer, then peace would come on Franco-Russian terms in Berlin. Still, it took seven years and a change in command of the French Army before this response to Schlieffen's 1905 memo morphed into Plan XVII (17) executed by Joffre and the GQG with such disastrous results in August, 1914.
Faced with the tactical and strategic problems Germany faced in fighting 'a two-front war' the above is exactly what Schlieffen and Moltke wanted the French and Russians to prepare for. Schlieffen wanted both opposition armies to see an opportunity for an easy, quick victory. Nor did he want to tip his hand in any way. Knowing what the enemy is looking for and showing it to him is the easiest way to get him to do what you want.
Here's what the Schlieffen Plan really was. Schlieffen's plan did require an exceptional large right wing. Belgium as a future satellite state with its rich iron and coal deposits was certainly the main prize. If the adjacent coal and iron ore regions of northeastern France could be added into the bargain, at least for a time, that was a bonus. The First, Second and Third German Armies were expected to advance as far as they could into Belgium. Von Kluck's First Army was actually detained in Liege for 48 hours by the General Staff to give the French and British Armies enough time to arrive. The plan was to pin the Allied forces of France, Britain and Belgium as far away from their logistical support bases as possible, while the Germans remained directly linked to their own in Aachen and Cologne. Schlieffen and von Moltke also wanted to lure a high proportion of the remainder of France's field forces into Alsace and Lorraine, and if need be, Germany proper. This they succeeded in doing. The Kaiser's son Wilhelm, and the King of Bavaria's son Rupprecht, headed the two field armies which were assigned to pull back and get the French to empty their otherwise impregnable fortress system in pursuit of victory all along the Rhine. Once these forces were in the bag (surrounded on three sides) Wilhelm and Rupprecht's armies would close it. They would then invest the nearly unmanned fortress system, board the trains and ride into Paris and seize the government, in six weeks or less. The best that Germany's war planners hoped for the Right Wing was that it would be able to split the Allied Armies and seize the Channel Ports. This would compel the BEF and the Belgian Army to surrender.
It was not intended by either Schlieffen or Moltke that von Kluck's and von Bulow's armies would actually make the 250-mile hike around Paris, as was called for in the leaked 1905 memo.
With the German right wing in Belgium preventing the French from reinforcing their own right wing thrusting into Alsace and Lorraine, and the Germans occupying all of the strategic rail lines in the regions, winning according to this plan which was not shared with the Allied high commands, was inevitable. We now know this is true because this version of the Schlieffen/Moltke plan was executed in six weeks in the spring of 1940.
So why did it fail in 1914? Von Moltke's staff vastly overestimated the fighting capabilities of the Allies. Von Kluck's First Army had to cover up to 30 miles a day just to stay in contact with the retreating French and British troops. The sight of such victories piling up for "nobodies" while their armies were falling back on to sacred German soil was literally more than the royal sons, Wilhelm and Rupprecht could bare. So rather than waiting until the bulk of French forces in Alsace and Lorraine were full enveloped, they launched their counter attacks about two weeks too early. The French army, badly bloodied but not broken, simply backed out of the trap and into the safety of the Verdun-Toul fortress system. With all of the Allied Armies arrayed in a line from Paris to Toul, on top of their supply bases, Joffre was able to transfer forces quickly wherever they were needed. This was the miracle of the Marne. The Germans, at the extreme end of their supply lines, shedding troops all the way for occupation duties and service on the Russian front, had captured no great number of guns nor bagged any armies. Even worse Wilhelm's and Rupprecht's armies were hopelessly stalled in a bloody mess on the Verdun-Toul fortress line. The overwhelming majority of German casualties in August and September were here.
This is when von Moltke had to pull the plug and order a general retreat to more defendable positions on the high ground of the Chemin des Dames that became the Western Front for the next four years.
*The Germans neatly solved their manpower shortage in 1914 by sending every reservist mobilized directly to combat units, rather than sending them to a refresher boot camp of 6-weeks duration, as had been their practice prior to the war. This was still SOP in the French Army in August 1914. Thus both wings of the German Army were of nearly equal size.
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Terry Duncan
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- Joined: 13 Jun 2008, 23:54
- Location: Kent
Re: How could the Schlieffen plan have succedded?
Welcome here Dave, it is nice to see you here. I fear Peter will not sign up here, as he never replied to my email, though he may have been disuaded by this site have more rules on what he could call people?
Re: How could the Schlieffen plan have succedded?
Now that he's published he may think better of exposing his theories to the likes of us. I do owe the man a huge debt of gratitude for causing me to think, read, research and ponder the opening days of August 1914 for the last decade. I've also met more than a few fantastic experts on these events. I do hope that Lannes will join us here. And of course, James Quinn. I see Glenn is already here and hope Jon and some of the other old gang are here too. I'm also looking forward to meeting those I've never known. Thanks for asking me to the site.
Dave
Dave
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Terry Duncan
- Forum Staff
- Posts: 6272
- Joined: 13 Jun 2008, 23:54
- Location: Kent
Re: How could the Schlieffen plan have succedded?
Maybe, it wouldnt be correct but it would be one more delusion.Now that he's published he may think better of exposing his theories to the likes of us.
Welome to the site, I hope you enjoy it.
Re: How could the Schlieffen plan have succedded?
Out of curiosity--would this have been just as true in 1905 and/or in 1906 as it was in 1914?stg 44 wrote:There was no way that it could have, the logistics were not there, even without Kluck's inward turn.
Re: How could the Schlieffen plan have succedded?
The issues of the "Schlieffen Plan" are addressed at some length in my book. See link below for its Web page.Futurist wrote:Out of curiosity--would this have been just as true in 1905 and/or in 1906 as it was in 1914?stg 44 wrote:There was no way that it could have, the logistics were not there, even without Kluck's inward turn.
William D. O'Neil
The Plan That Broke the World
http://whatweretheythinking.williamdone ... /Index.htm
The Plan That Broke the World
http://whatweretheythinking.williamdone ... /Index.htm