Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

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

#16

Post by Terry Duncan » 05 May 2015, 23:10

Icanonly suggest posters checktheir dates before posting.
Then I suggest you sort out the conficts in your own previous post;
Now (May 1906) the biggest loan of all time was required.
- 1906 yes?
Also Lambsdorf and Witte weren't there for the Brechlau Treaty - they were in Portsmouth, New England negotiating the peace treaty with Japan.
- 1906 again yes?
See the site "Concealment" and the SS Republic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Republic_%281903%29

RMS Republic. Sank on 24/01/1909 after collision on 23/01/1909.

You are the one posting claims about events of 1906 somehow being linked to the loss of a ship in 1909, so it is up to you to provide the supporting documentation as the site rules require.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#17

Post by favedave » 07 May 2015, 08:04

[quoteThat's quite a story! But what drove the younger Moltke to add notes to the memo as if he was taking it seriously?][/quote]

The Schlieffen Plan we know from the 1905 Memo was taken quite seriously by everybody who had direct knowledge of it. But as Terry pointed out, the concept of avoiding the French Fortress system by invading through the Benelux had been part of German war planning and war gaming since 1875, when the French announced their fortification program for the new Franco/German Border. The changes in the plan regarding the right wing's course of march and objectives made absolutely no difference to initial deployments of Germany's seven field armies facing France. The tip-off that "The Hay-maker" was a ruse is that none of the German Commanders of the 1st,2nd, 3rd and 4th German Armies ever mentioned having reconnoitered their assigned lines of march before the third of August, 1914. The only battle planned by the "Best General Staff in the World" in the West was the Battle of Liege. The only other battle the Germans planned and prepared for before the war was Tannenburg. Liege was meticulously planned by Col. Erick Ludendorff, who was then assigned to the 2nd Army to observe and advise Luck took the commander out and Ludendorff ended up leading the assault on Liege himself, capturing the city the second evening of the offensive.

With the capture of Liege and more importantly the capture of it's industrial sized railroad marshalling yards to support Belgium's iron and steel production facilities, the Germans had everything they wanted to successfully prosecute their battle plan. The fall of the entire fortress system was completed by the 14th of August, by which time the Belgian Army was long gone on the road to Antwerp, Belgium. This is precisely the moment the German battle came off the rails.

The 1st, 2nd and 3rd German Armies of the Right Wing were expected to advance thirty or forty miles into eastern Belgium before encountering three strong, well prepared French Armies, along with the assistance of the 130,000 man Belgian Army and 130,000 man BEF. All of the Allied armies in Belgium would be far from their logistical support bases with no planning or preparation or coordination, separated by imposing terrain from the other half of the French Army, and even farther from the kind of rail hub Liege gave the Germans. This meant that the defenders of France were put in the unusual position of fighting on exterior lines, while the invading Germans would be fighting on interior lines. Troops, food, and munitions could be moved at will to all seven German field armies directly from the cities of the Rhine and due south from Liege and Metz by the railroad grid that tied all the important places in the region together. Pin down half the French Army in Belgium and draw the other half out of their fortress system and into the Ardennes, Lorraine and Alsace with the promise of easy victory and then envelope them and demand surrender. Just as in 1870 and just as fast.

But the Allies did not cooperate with the Germans. Rather than rushing into Belgium towards Liege, the French dithered for several days to see if the thrust through Belgium indeed accounted for the bulk of the 800,000 men Germany had on active duty as of the 1st of August. Nor did the French immediately rush into Alsace and Lorraine which they assumed had to be denuded of troops to support the German Right Wing. When Joffre received the first of Lanrezac's fevered communiques as to the size of the enemy forces he'd encountered, it is reported Joffre said "Now we have them!" He released the French 1st and 2nd to advance, seemingly unopposed into Alsace and Lorraine, the 3rd into the Ardennes, and the 4th moved north to support the 5th.

Beginning on the 10th of August, the German 1st crossed Belgium unopposed, followed very shortly by the 2nd, hard on the surrender of the Liege fortifications. Neither army encountered the expected enemy in any force for ten days, and when they did at Mons and Charleroi the BEF and French 5th immediately backed away, their commanders fearful they would be overwhelmed by the German Juggernaut. Suddenly von Kluck & von Bulow are heroes driving the Allied armies like sheep across Belgium and into France, with a real likelihood that they would soon be marching into Paris. It was on the 20th that the two Royal Generals had enough of retreating while the laurels of victory were being gathered by the generals of the right wing. They brought Royal pressure on von Moltke to spring the traps they'd lured the French into immediately. Unfortunately the French slowness to launch was their salvation. They were merely thrown back, with heavy losses into the Verdun-Toul Fortress system. Meanwhile the BEF and French 5th Army commanders engaged in a foot race to Paris with the Germans struggling to maintain contact. And the Schlieffen plan outlined in 1905 was almost successful and totally disastrous for German hopes.


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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#18

Post by ljadw » 07 May 2015, 09:06

As usual (?) one is neglecting the role of the French :the "Schlieffen Plan " failed because the Germans failed to defeat the French in the first weeks of the war .If the Germans had succeeded,every one would claim that Schlieffen was a genius .

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#19

Post by Latze » 08 May 2015, 10:36

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.
favedave wrote:The Schlieffen Plan we know from the 1905 Memo was taken quite seriously by everybody who had direct knowledge of it.
So Schliefen writes a memo, leaks it to the French and did not tell it to his staff... and that is why Moltke then uses it to scribble his notes on it. Or did Moltke indeed knew but just used the memo prepared for the ruse as a note pad because the real plan was not committed to writing and thus he had no other paper handy?

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#20

Post by favedave » 09 May 2015, 03:44

There was no reason for Moltke to use any other document, or modify the plan to reveal what would happen after the set piece battles of Liege and Tannenburg. It certainly made no difference for the field commanders of any of the 8 field armies from the 3rd of August until the 20th of the same month. The removal of two entire corps (about 200,000 men) from Belgium for transshipment to East Prussia was not seen by Moltke as anything likely to upset the battle in the West. The fact they would arrive weeks after the battle of Tannenburg was over seems to have not bothered anybody in the German command staff. This shows that they were not deemed as essential to success in either the West or the East. Sending Ludendorff (and Hindenburg) with them shows this Hero of Liege was no longer needed in the West, nor was he needed in the East, where his fellow staff planner, Col Max Hoffmann had things well in hand.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#21

Post by Latze » 18 May 2015, 11:18

favedave,

it took me a while to think this through... so you say that Schlieffen developed a plan that he never committed to writing, instead he wrote a Denkschrift meant to bait the French into Belgium and leaked that to the French general staff. The only one in to the secret (as far as I can follow your writing) was the younger Moltke. They didn't tell the army commanders and I wonder if the chiefs of staffs knew or the Kaiser or Falkenhayn or von Lyncker or other members of the Generalstab. In any case the real plan was never committed to writing because that was unnecessary. When the shooting started the French and British conducted their operations in such a way that 'the plant that was never intended to be put into action' was put into action because suddenly it was a rational thing to do. As no paper trail was left we needed the powers of logical deduction to arrive at these conclusions...
I say that this is the Omphalos hypothesis of the Schlieffen plan. I am inclined to think of it as a bizarre assessment.

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Matt

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#22

Post by chronos20th » 18 May 2015, 23:36

No, it is in the text of the two handwritten Great Memoranda, read it on-line. in the second he clearly intends to fight the Battle of Annihilation just west of Leige.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#23

Post by Attrition » 22 May 2015, 15:16

~~~~~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.~~~~~

I think this is the myth. No doubt that the Germans would have taken a decisive victory if it was on offer but I doubt that they banked on it, rather than they could ride out an entente siege by depleting French manpower, capturing valuable resources in Belgium and northern France and ensuring that the war took place outside Germany. It all went rather well and as predicted... apart from losing in 1918).

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#24

Post by Attrition » 22 May 2015, 15:23

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan

~~~~~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.~~~~~

I think this is the myth. No doubt that the Germans would have taken a decisive victory if it was on offer but I doubt that they banked on it, rather than they could ride out an entente siege by depleting French manpower, capturing valuable resources in Belgium and northern France and ensuring that the war took place outside Germany. It all went rather well and as predicted... apart from losing in 1918.

You might find the section on the various aufmarsch outlines interesting.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#25

Post by michael mills » 01 Jun 2015, 14:01

What most of you are failing to recognise is that Schlieffen's Grand Memorandum of 1905-06 was not a strategic plan approved by the German General Staff and issued to the army commanders.

Rather, it was a purely hypothetical exercise written by Schlieffen just after he had retired as Chief of the General Staff, having as its theme how Germany could defeat France if it were fighting a single-front war against that country alone, with no involvement by Russia, and if it possessed and army much larger than it actually did possess in 1905, or even in 1914. There is no hard evidence that it was ever accepted as an actual war plan, although Moltke did look at it in 1911 and wrote some comments on it.

It also needs to be remembered that the Grand memorandum remained entirely secret until the 1950s, when the German historian found it in the US National Archives, where it had been deposited after being seized with a lot of other material from the German archives at the end of the Second World War, and published it.

Ritter thought that he had discovered the actual war plan implemented by the German Army in 1914, but the fact is that nobody knows exactly what that plan was since the only full copies of it, stored in the Reichsarchiv in Berlin, were destroyed in a bombing raid in 1945. The only preserved parts of the plan are those covering the operations of the Bavarian Army on the German left flank, which were stored in an archive in Bavaria.

Since the Allies did not occupy Germany at the end of the First World War, they never gained control over the German archives, with the result that the German Government was able to keep its war plans for 1914 and previous years secret, locked away in the Reichsarchiv. Although in the interwar period German military historians published histories of the operations of the German forces during the First World War, the actual operational plan of 1914 was never published in full.

Although the full operational plans for 1914 and preceding years are no longer extant, it has proved possible to reconstruct them from fragmentary records of war games carried out during those years, and more particularly from an unpublished summary of pre-1914 planning (but not the 1914 plan) prepared in the 1930s by someone who had access to the copies of the plans stored in the Reichsarchiv; that summary was captured by the Soviets in 1945, stored in Moscow as war booty, and then returned to Germany after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

From those sources it has been possible to deduce that the German operational plan in each year leading up to 1914 had four variants:

1. for a single-front war in the West only;
2. for a single-front war in the East only;
3. for a two-front war in both West and East, with the concentration of forces in the West;
4. for a two-front war with the concentration of forces in the East.

In any given year, the variant of the operational plan that was given emphasis depended on the objective situation in that year. In 1914, the German High Command was apparently implementing the third variant above, for a two-front war with the concentration of forces in the East.

Since Schlieffen's Grand Memorandum of 1905-06 described a hypothetical war against France alone, it was relevant only to the first variant of the operational plan, and it is obvious that the German armed forces cannot have been trying to implement the concepts of the Grand Memorandum in 1914 since they were fighting a two-front war, not a war against France alone.

The actual movements of the German armed forces in August 1914 do bear a superficial resemblance to some of the hypothetical actions described in the Memorandum in that those forces did move through Belgium, but the move through Belgium was not an invention of Schlieffen in 1905. It had in fact been part of German planning since the 1890s, when the concept of a swift movement through the south-eastern corner of Belgium, moving to the east of the Meuse River, for the purpose of getting in behind the line of French frontier forces and encircling the French forces on the frontier, was incorporated into German operational planning.

Bear in mind that Germany had originally demanded that Belgium grant free passage for German forces through its territory. If that demand had been granted, it is likely that the German forces would have moved very quickly up the valley of the Meuse and been able to catch the French forces assembled on the frontier for the planned invasion of Lorraine before those forces could have moved back to the west to escape the trap.

As it was, the German forces were held up for several days trying to reduce the fortifications around Liege, so they were only able to begin their movement en masse through Belgium at around the same time as the French forces began their invasion of Lorraine. Thus, by the time the German forces had won the Battle of the Frontiers and forced the British and French forces out of Belgium and back into France, the French forces that had invaded Lorraine were already moving back toward Paris. It was at that point that Moltke decided to his advance toward Paris, which probably had not been part of the original German operational plan.


This is Zuber's reconstruction of the German strategic plan of 1914, in his book "The Real German War Plan 1904-14":

Pages 147-148:
The German war plan in 1914 was relatively simple. It followed Schlieffen's counter-attack doctrine. In the west, the German army would deploy on a broad front to make maximum utilisation of the rail net and the available space for manoeuvre. It would then find the French main body, move against it, and defeat it as quickly as possible. The French army would withdraw to next defensive position. The Germans would probably use this pause in the west to transfer up to seven corps to the east for a counter-attack there.

In the east the Germans would be outnumbered 2:1, but would use their interior position to mass against one of the two attacking Russian armies. If necessary, the Germans would fall back to the Vistula fortifications. The Central Powers' Achilles heel was the Austrian army, which was weak and outnumbered 2:1.

The German advantage lay in its interior position and rail mobility - the ability to mass on one front, win, and then mass on the other. This would make optimal use of German tactical and operational superiority over all of its opponents. This ability is known today as a "force multiplier" and was the sole means the Germans had of offsetting their numerical inferiority. Such a strategy would not produce strategic victory, but successive defeats of French and Russian armies would destroy their capacity for offensive action.

A German strategic offensive deep into the interior of either enemy territory negated the German advantages of interior position and rail mobility; indeed, the rail mobility advantage would pass over to Germany's opponent. A German strategic offensive, such as the one Moltke launched into France on 24 August, after he had won the Battle of the Frontiers, was a gamble that Germany had the means of winning an immediate victory on one front.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#26

Post by Terry Duncan » 01 Jun 2015, 15:14

The major problem with Zuber's outline of what was intended is that it places Germany in the long war scenario from the outset, and the GGS had concluded that this was an unwinnable war as early as 1890, when they moved away from Moltke the Elder's strategic defensive/tactical offensive planning. From the comments at the time, it is fairly obvious the commanders felt something had gone badly wrong by the time of the retreat from the Marne, which doesnt entirely fit if there had been no real belief in winning quickly - maybe not a total defeat, maybe a crippling defeat of the French would have been enough - as by this point they had certainly not moved too far from the outline Zuber gives when he talks of swapping troops from front to front. They may have advanced further into France than intended, but they held excellent defensive ground there now, and the situation in the east was stable.

The German political actions when they entered the war also seem to represent a government and military that thought they could still win, rather than one where they were being forced to enter a war they had believed lost for over twenty years. I am not saying Zuber is certainly wrong, but there is still a lot that makes little sense.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#27

Post by glenn239 » 01 Jun 2015, 18:59

I thought Zuber's thesis was that the battle of annihilation was to take place in Belgium with the expected advance of the French army into Belgium, not after a long pursuit into France.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#28

Post by ljadw » 01 Jun 2015, 19:20

For once, I agree: Zuber is right .

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#29

Post by Terry Duncan » 01 Jun 2015, 19:32

glenn239 wrote:I thought Zuber's thesis was that the battle of annihilation was to take place in Belgium with the expected advance of the French army into Belgium, not after a long pursuit into France.
He has changed a bit between his books, the one Michael refered to has him offering that the German army planned a strategic defensive on both fronts whilst swapping troops between east and west to inflict tactical defeats on the Russians and French. It is effectively the plan of Moltke the Elder that was rejected in 1890 as being a long war that Germany couldnt win as it accepts that the Germans cannot follow the French armies deep into France and that a decisive battle might not occur at all.

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Re: Bizarre Assessment of the "Schlieffen Plan"

#30

Post by Attrition » 02 Jun 2015, 00:08

A long war considered unwinnable in 1890 may have been feasible in 1914, bearing in mind the developments in firepower, mobility and medicine and the precedents of South Africa and Manchuria, where outclassed armies had lasted longer than expected. If the 1914 campaign wasn't expected to be decisive (but a win which fell into Germany's lap would have been accepted) the attritional concept for Gorlice-Tarnow 1915 and Verdun 1916 look like logical corollaries and the decisions to leave Holland alone in 1914 and stock strategic commodities before 1914 look like more than bet-hedging.

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