Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

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Ken S.
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Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#1

Post by Ken S. » 29 Apr 2015, 23:01

:lol:
Great War Centenary: Schlieffen's plan was an arrogant suicide note
By John Lewis-Stempel
PUBLISHED: 00:40, Sun, May 25, 2014 | UPDATED: 19:14, Sun, Feb 8, 2015

...

Micro-plotted to almost psychiatric degree, the Schlieffen Plan was strategy, tactics, and timetable for Deutschland's army to defeat all comers. On it rested the destiny of nations.

...

In fairness to Alfred von Schlieffen, he was handed a poisoned beer stein. For all of the complaining by the Kaiser's Germany that it was "encircled" by enemies, it wholly caused its own isolation. In 1890 the Kaiser, in a typical fit of Prussian arrogance, refused to extend Berlin's mutual neutrality pact with Moscow.

...

Like many a military planner Schlieffen suffered an obsession with the Cannae, the battle in 216 BC in which Hannibal encircled the Roman legions and annihilated them. Hannibal was tactically brilliant and utterly ruthless as a fighting man; his Carthaginians slaughtered the trapped legionnaires at the rate of 600 a minute.

...

What was the Schlieffen Plan's main strength was simultaneously its main weakness. The Plan cleverly avoided a German headlong assault on the heavily fortified French border in favour of sneaking the main German army into France through the "backdoor" of the Lowlands but infringing the neutrality of Belgium and Holland was politically dangerous, since it threatened to escalate the war by bringing in other countries against Germany.

[PHOTO CAPTION: Schlieffen had not taken into account that riflemen sheltered from bullets]

There were other inconvenient truths that Schlieffen overlooked in his master plan. Schlieffen was no Hannibal; he was a paper warrior, the General Staff's military historian before becoming its head man.

Narrow-minded, pietistic, his only relaxation was reading military history to his daughters. Lacking humanity himself, it was no surprise that his great plan was abstract, gloriously remote from the little realities of the soldier's lot, such as battle.

The Schlieffen Plan was war by a dreamer's schedule. In the eventuality of British intervention, Schlieffen merely stated that the Germans would "defeat the English and continue". There was no allowance for disruption, let alone set-back. Victory was to be achieved in the west in 42 days. Not a day more, not a day less.

Schlieffen spent long hours by gaslight fine-tuning an attack on a fort here, an offensive thrust there...

Equally naive, was Schlieffen's belief that the telegraph would enable the supreme commander to manage the offensive as if he was an omnipotent, omniscient god.

Like the rest of the Generalitat, Schlieffen was secretive, self-regarding, and utterly reactionary. There was no place in his war plan for the Kaiser's favourite toys, the battleships in the Baltic bath. Worse yet, Schlieffen disregarded the need for diplomats to win friends in war and he was fearful about enlarging the German army because conscripted city boys might taint it with the bacillus of socialism.

...

The single defining object of the Great War? The spade. On real-life battlefields speedy onslaughts such as Schlieffen's "right hook" were out, lengthy toe-to-toe pugilism was in.

...

Not so; the basic flaws remained the same, including a chronic underestimation of British fighting strength. Mind you, Moltke and Schlieffen were hardly alone in this Teutonic prejudice; Otto Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" who created Germany in 1871, used to jest that should the British Army land in the country he would send the police to round them up.

If anything, Germany's poisonous problem of a two-front war was even more toxic when it reached Moltke because Schlieffen had only needed to account for a Russia that was, militarily-speaking, the sick man of Europe. By 1914 Ivan was out of hospital and actually looking quite perky.

Just to compound Moltke's problems, the French were also getting all assertive. To counter the threat of a reviving Russia and a frisky France, Moltke began moving men from the German offensive "right hook" to defensive border-stiffening duties in Russia and Alsace-Lorraine. First off went 180,000 men. Then more. More still...

Inevitably, these transfers of men drastically weakened the "right hook" that was Germany's putative haymaker punch. Moltke's tinkering has been castigated down the decades by armchair-strategists wearing slippers and smirks but in reality a redistribution of German forces was forced on him by circumstance. The nation's enemies were getting stronger by the day.

...

In the event, the unwelcome crossing of the feldgrau divisions into Belgium did more than bring Britain into the war, it turned world opinion against Germany and the world included big, bustling, armsmaking America. The slow-burn of US involvement in the Great War began the moment the first leather jackboot crossed the border into Belgium.

So class, why did the Schlieffen Plan fail? Answer: Already generously beset by military shortcomings, the Plan ensured its own downfall with its absolute political crassness. Kaiser Billy had few enough mates as it was. Herr Schlieffen and Herr Moltke, by bashing up Belgium, gave him even fewer.

The Schlieffen Plan: The suicide note of an entire nation.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war ... icide-note

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#2

Post by Halle » 30 Apr 2015, 00:10

It's not the best written piece but it's essentially correct.


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Terry Duncan
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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#3

Post by Terry Duncan » 30 Apr 2015, 02:03

Some of the article is correct, a lot of it is highly questionable with the knowledge of the time and only gives a semblance of being correct with a huge dose of hindsight. Other parts go well beyond what Schlieffen had any real power to effect, such as including the HSF in his war plans, a factor that did not matter at all if France could be beaten quickly as Russia was never going to beaten by battleships, and Schlieffen had no jurisdiction over its deployment - even von Ingenohl and Tirpitz found out that they had little ability to deploy it as they wanted as the Kaiser forbade its use to any meaningful degree at the start, and even for much of the war after that too!

The idea that the spade defined WWI is certainly not correct for the opening months (or the closing months for that matter) as the fighting was in the old war of movement fashion, where maneuver was still possible and flanking movements were attempted by both sides right up to the end of the 'Race to the Sea' phase of the war. The entire point of the Schlieffen Plan, or even the Schlieffen-Moltke Plan, was to deliver a knockout blow to France before static warfare and attrition set in. The plan was rigid in many respects, but nowhere near as bad as has been claimed, but to be fair, Germany had few options given they knew a long war was impossible to win.

Today it might appear the plan was the suicide note of a nation, but it was also its best hope of victory militarily. The plan was diplomatic suicide, not that author even touches on that aspect, but from a military point of view the strategy made sense at the time.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#4

Post by Latze » 30 Apr 2015, 09:50

I think one can safely assume that the author never read Schlieffen's 1905 memorandum. Just some selected examples:
1) Nowhere in the memo is a 42-days timetable mentioned...
2) ... neither "minor-plotted" tactics.
3) Concerning spades: "All along the line the corps will try, as in siege-warfare, to come to grips with the enemy from position to position, day and night, advancing, digging in, advancing again,digging in again, etc., using every means of modern science to dislodge the enemy behind his cover."

Besides: Schlieffen had active duty experience in the wars of 1866 and 1870/71.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#5

Post by Graeme Sydney » 30 Apr 2015, 10:54

Calling it a National suicide note is more 20/20 hindsight and emotional than helpful (but hey, its a newspaper article :milwink: ) but not a bad summary I would have thought.

"So class, why did the Schlieffen Plan fail? Answer: Already generously beset by military shortcomings, the Plan ensured its own downfall with its absolute political crassness. Kaiser Billy had few enough mates as it was. Herr Schlieffen and Herr Moltke, by bashing up Belgium, gave him even fewer."

Thanks for the link. :milsmile:

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#6

Post by Latze » 30 Apr 2015, 13:05

Graeme Sydney wrote: "So class, why did the Schlieffen Plan fail? Answer: Already generously beset by military shortcomings, the Plan ensured its own downfall with its absolute political crassness. Kaiser Billy had few enough mates as it was. Herr Schlieffen and Herr Moltke, by bashing up Belgium, gave him even fewer."
But, but Mr. Graham? Sir? What mates would that have been? I mean who would have fought with Germany if the did not invade Belgium besides those who fought with Kaiser Billy anyway?

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#7

Post by favedave » 30 Apr 2015, 13:44

This "bizarre assessment" is really the post war assessment made by a majority of the allied generals. In my opinion, it ignores the incredible nuances of Schlieffen's plan which if it had not gone off the tracks due to its unexpected success in the West, would have yielded complete victory in the 42 day time table.

We call it the Schlieffen Plan because of Schieffen'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 Schieffen'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 bear. 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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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#8

Post by Latze » 30 Apr 2015, 18:10

favedave wrote: We call it the Schlieffen Plan because of Schieffen'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 Schieffen's direction.
That's quite a story! But what drove the younger Moltke to add notes to the memo as if he was taking it seriously?

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#9

Post by glenn239 » 30 Apr 2015, 18:17

Halle wrote:It's not the best written piece but it's essentially correct.
On another site we're discussing High Seas Fleet strategy, (which is always of interest because, while the Entente evolved a 'correct' strategy, the HSF's was clearly wrong). As part of that I found some interesting information on nitrates that pertains to the Schlieffen Plan,

http://encyclopedia....article/nitrate

https://www.uvm.edu/...trechtpaper.pdf

The second paper says that Germany seized of 400,000 tons of nitrates in Antwerp at the start of the war – an incredible figure. From the limited information I've seen, Germany might have imported - maybe - 150,000 tons total during the war on neutral hulls. It manufactured 571,000 tons of synthetic nitrate, (about 11,000 tons average monthly production, but a much greater production in the second half of the war than the first). The capture of Antwerp was 36% of Germany's whole total!

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#10

Post by Terry Duncan » 30 Apr 2015, 19:43

Latze wrote:That's quite a story! But what drove the younger Moltke to add notes to the memo as if he was taking it seriously?
Because he was taking it seriously, it was the main German warplan and had been in various forms for some years prior to 1906. The scale and exact deployments changed, but the idea of taking France out of the war fast was always the best iption for Germany if she wanted to fight an offensive war.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#11

Post by Graeme Sydney » 01 May 2015, 11:44

Terry Duncan wrote:......, but the idea of taking France out of the war fast was always the best iption for Germany if she wanted to fight an offensive war.
I would have thought that when surrounded by perceived enemies the best option would be make friends and divide your enemies by diplomacy. How about an alliance with Russia. The Royal families are close, 'we have money and technology and you have need for money and technology, you have resources and we have the need for resources'.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#12

Post by Terry Duncan » 01 May 2015, 13:04

Graeme Sydney wrote:I would have thought that when surrounded by perceived enemies the best option would be make friends and divide your enemies by diplomacy. How about an alliance with Russia. The Royal families are close, 'we have money and technology and you have need for money and technology, you have resources and we have the need for resources'.
Much of this would have been sensible, but for one reason or another proved impossible. The Kaiser and Tzar came to an agreement with the abortive Bjorko 'Treaty' of 1905, which failed because both governments refused to ratify it - the impression it gives is that both governments thought their sovereigns had lost their minds! Germany did not have the money to lend Russia in this period, the nation with most capital to invest abroad was France, and Russia already had an alliance with her.

The problem of an alliance with Russia from a German point of view is that it had already proven very hard to balance Russian interests with Austrian interests, as the two had been clashing for years in the Balkans even by 1890. There was a fear that if Germany took up a Russian alliance, then Austria would move close to France as had been the case in 1866-1870, even if this seems unlikely now it was a concern at the time.

The best bet would have been to abandon building a fleet that irritated Britain, as it was British involvement that ensured a long war was unwinnable, and to concentrate on better relations with France and Russia short of a treaty.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#13

Post by chronos20th » 05 May 2015, 16:09

I would agree with much of what FaveDave has written.

Especially that schlieffenwas a asthetic academic.


Also this is American and british officers assessment of thePlan in the '20's.


it also gives the impression it was isolated and without the British - The British War Book and French Plans XVI and XVII.


Had Schlieffen's intended battle of Annihilation taken place in Eastern Belgium and Lazerac,the commander of the French left wing not only not retreated but shown the "aggression" Joffre and Foch expected of him, then the Plan is likely to have succeeded and the war won in 6 weeks.


Yikes !


read the texts of the two Great memoraranda of Nov. 1005 and Feb. 1906.


They are on the net.


In the first Schlieffen warns about impetuous advancing into France, especially as it is a land of fortresses.


In the second he clearly envisages the Battle of Annihilation with the French taking place just in front of Liege, with us advancing southwardsfromAntwerp.


The background has to be relaised;-

Russia was heavily dependent on francefor loans since 1887 - "Russia went again and again to refill her Danaean Jar at the French spring"


See the site "Concealment" and the SS Republic.


The R-J War had been paid for by a short-term loan from France.


Now (May 1906) the biggest loan of all time was required.


Also Lambsdorf and Witte weren't there for the Brechlau Treaty - they were in Portsmouth, New England negotiating the peace treaty with Japan.


Lambsdorf particularly wanted the French treaty inorder to get loans.


Uptill 1906 there had been anti-British clauses and a naval convention against us in the F-R alliance, which was now eliminated.

See Jane's Book of Fighting Ships Centenniary Edition.





.

d

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#14

Post by Terry Duncan » 05 May 2015, 21:40

The British War Book and French Plans XVI and XVII.
The British War Book is something that lays out the assemby and dispatch of the BEF in times of war (as it happened, in the event the government did not adhere to its timetable), not a plan of attack. Plan XVI and XVII are both deployment plans, and do not enforce any requirement for attack or defence on France. The major difference between all these plans and the Schlieffen/Moltke plan, is that the German plan did require troops to invade foreign nations as soon as they were put into operation.
See the site "Concealment" and the SS Republic.
http://www.rms-republic.com/index.php

The RMS Republic sank in 1909, not 1906 so would have nothing to do with any loans in that year. However, whilst it is unknown what the ship contains with 100% certainty, as people have already pointed out, it is yet another one of the 'the proof that X exists is that there are no documents proving X exists'. Either way it hardly matters, Russia and France were perfectly at liberty to raise loans anywhere they wished, as were other nations - France lent large sums to the Ottoman empire too, though we see few conspiracy theories raised about those loans.
Also Lambsdorf and Witte weren't there for the Brechlau Treaty - they were in Portsmouth, New England negotiating the peace treaty with Japan.
The peace with Japan was in 1906, the Buchlau agreement was 1909 (and there wasnt a Breslau or similar treaty in 1906 or 1909), so that certain statesmen were un the US in 1906 would hardly impact on loan negotiations in 1909. Given Lamsdorf died in 1907, that would appear to have been a far greater impediment to his playing a role in loans being funded in 1908-1909.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#15

Post by chronos20th » 05 May 2015, 22:17

Icanonly suggest posters checktheir dates before posting.



The text of Schlieffen's memoranda is clear and surprising.


I donot goas a far as completely accepting Terence Zuber's thesis but he clealy has a case inhis "Myth of the Schlieffen Plan" argument.

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