Keeping the Right Wing Strong: Historians and the Schlieffen Plan

[Justo]

Good read. When I first saw the title I thought this would be about right wing politics for some reason.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I attune to the chorus of praise.

 

[Glassfan]

..."But in 1906 von Schlieffen, although he was only seventy-three, was replaced. So was his plan. His successor, Johannes Ludwig Graf von Moltke was, at fifty-eight, a much younger man. He and the chief of Section Two (mobilization), an obscure major named Ludendorff, set about trying to devise an actual plan of operations for the German Army in the event of a war, one that would reflect military realities."
-John Mosier, The Myth of the Great War (2001), p. 35.


As a conservative thinker, my initial reaction to Dach's essay was skepticism. But after a week's casual research I have to admit it's growing on me. What's bothersome is that after nearly a century of historical commentary, and the existence of extensive memoirs by the principals, this can still be in dispute.

My remaining doubt has to do with the unanswered, "other half" of the issue. If not von Schlieffen, than what? What was the operational plan created by the General Staff of the German Army for the invasion of France? There would have been staff meetings, debate, angry second-guessing in diaries. There would have been orders issued. It would have been written down, commented upon, with multiple copies filtering down the chain of command. We know of the French Plan 17 - what were the Germans using instead of von Schlieffen?

With an answer to this question, the essay would be absolutely compelling. Without it, it is merely revisionist.

 

[Dachs]

Actually, that "other half" is answered in the article.

Zuber also made the point that the idea of the Schlieffen Plan totally misrepresented Germany's method of war planning. For example, the "Elder" Moltke, veteran of the Wars of Unification and Chief of the General Staff into the 1880s, had developed plans based on a movement into Belgium; so had Alfred von Waldersee, who came between the elder Moltke and Schlieffen. The idea was not entirely new. Plus, Schlieffen's war plans weren't just structured around One War that Germany would fight in every circumstance; he had several, at minimum two, at any given time.

[...]

So if Zuber doesn't really have the right answer, then what do we actually know?

For one thing, we know that his overall discussion of the way Germany created and employed war plans is true. A war plan, for the German General Staff, was not a plan of campaign. The Germans were intelligent enough to understand that war is variable, mutable, and above all else involves a helluva lot of what Clausewitz called "friction". Planning out an entire campaign in advance, especially with expected troop positions down to the day, would have seemed ridiculous to Schlieffen and Moltke both. What these German war plans actually were were Aufmärsche, a word that can get kind of sticky in translation but which more or less means "deployments" or "troop concentrations" (yes, those don't mean the same thing, but it's kind of difficult to describe). They were blueprints for getting the army to its jump-off point, ready to go to war, not for the plan of campaign itself. Now, those blueprints would necessarily have to incorporate a broad idea of how the General Staff wanted to conduct a campaign, in order for them to know what troops should go where. But the general idea of "defensive-offensive" or "flank march through Belgium" is a far cry from the regimented, day-by-day schedule that Ritter portrayed.

As for the memo itself, Holmes and Foley have argued that it was a sketch of the conduct of a campaign, but one that really isn't applicable to World War I. According to them, it would make no sense for Schlieffen to draw up a memo that long, complete with maps, for a budget battle that Moltke needed no help fighting. They saw it as a statement of a potential war against France in 1905, ignoring Russia, which would be inactive due to the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution. The numbers discrepancy was explained by the formation of new units on the declaration of war, with Schlieffen repeatedly stated was his intent in other media. But such a sketch of the conduct of the war was, indeed, not a war plan, much less the official German military plan of campaign against France for 1905. It was a Denkschrift, a position paper, and of only limited use in illuminating the German military's actual conduct of war in 1914.

 

[Glassfan]

I admit I gave this section short shrift, since it seems an obvious academic boiler plate to hide a glaring weakness in their theory. But since you draw attention to it, are we to believe that three German Armies hurled themselves upon the Belgians without a serious operational plan? A spontaneous aggression?

"Strategy is the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war. The strategist must therefore define an aim for the entire operational side of the war that will be in accordance with its purpose. In other words, he will draft the plan of the war, and the aim will determine the series of actions intended to achieve it: he will, in fact, shape the individual campaigns and, within these, decide on the individual engagements." -Clausewitz, On War.

The Strategic Concept must be translated into a real-world operation. It can't be kept in one's head or scribbled on a cocktail napkin. I'm not talking about Ritter's' memo - you don't launch a million men and horses off into the abyss and risk your national existence on a memo. I'm talking about the operational plan the German General Staff would have prepared for the opening offensive of the war. Endless calculations must be made - X number of troops with Y horses and Z artillery batteries require: A tons of food and supplies, B tons of ammunition, and C tons of fodder, per day, per Army. That has to be extensively planned. Phase lines must be drawn up , and axis of advance must be mapped out, so that the field forces do not blunder into each other or work at cross purposes. The General Staff would have taken into account the season of the year, weather patterns, geographical and political obstacles, likely resistance, water availability, and dozens of other factors. How long to reduce the fortresses guarding Liege? Can super heavy artillery from Skoda be brought up to help? Several general plans would be formulated, the specific one selected would be based on the conditions and requirements existing at the opening of hostilities. It must be written down on paper (lots and lots of paper), and therefore it will have a designation, a name - Plan Orange? OVERLORD? Case White? Plan Schlieffen?

"As early as 1843, when Europe had been largely at peace for nearly thirty years and most major nations had no plans for war, observers noted sheaves of orders at the Prussian War Ministry, already made out to cover all foreseeable contingencies and requiring only a signature and a date stamp to be put into effect." -wiki, "German General Staff."

So besides the main plans there will also be subvarients for major factors like seasons and what additional enemies might have to be faced. The complexity is staggering, and is one of the reasons why a country with a general staff has an advantage over another which doesn't - and why a defeated nation might be required to eliminate it's GS, as was Germany after Versailles.

Of course, we are talking Schlieffen as modified by Motlke. Of the possible ways to invade France, the Germans chose one that resembles von Schlieffen's - the thrust through Belgium rather that the previously successful (1871) drive across the Franco-German border. Helmuth von Moltke altered and weakened the plan, but unless some reasonable alternative is offered, it still appears essentially Schlieffen's'.

The whole argument that there would be no formal, strategically detailed plan is absurd. The very idea that the agency tasked with war planning did not actually make war plans stretches credulity. Of course they did. I could accept the reasoning that a retreating army would burn its' papers. That the high command of a defeated power would destroy its' records, that skeletons would be closeted and ugly things hidden, particularly keeping in mind the elimination of the German General Staff after the war. In such cases the absence of evidence can not be taken as proof the plan didn't exist. There must have been a plan. And in the absence of an alternative "Real Plan" by revisionists, one must accept that the Schlieffen plan - modified by Moltke - is not overturned.


This reminds me of an old OJ joke from the 90's;

OJ's lawyers say he didn't kill Nichole.
Well then who did?
Nobody, it was an accident. She fell on her knife - 27 times.

A question on the Zuber interpretation of the Schlieffen plan as a tactic in the budget debate to get more troops. I honestly have not read it and have only your essay to go on. But does it actually make sense to you? The traditional interpretation of the Schlieffen plan as an attempt to fight a two-front war - one front at a time - seems to me a desperate and risky acceptance of limitations imposed. If it was the old General's purpose to "trick" the authorities into giving him more troops, wouldn't he have presented a plan requiring more troops? A general advance across the Franco-German border for instance; requiring the methodical and time-consuming reduction of the French frontier defenses, leading then to the need for more troops to form a second Army Group in the east to deal with the Russians...

 

[LightSpectra]

Where did Dachs's article say that there was no plan at all?

 

[Dachs]

I admit I gave this section short shrift, since it seems an obvious academic boiler plate to hide a glaring weakness in their theory. But since you draw attention to it, are we to believe that three German Armies hurled themselves upon the Belgians without a serious operational plan? A spontaneous aggression?

No, nobody really suggests that. The German war plan for 1914 is probably best understood in the same light as the French Plan XVII has been understood for decades: chiefly concerned with mobilization and deployment, both of which needed to be conducted with a framework already in mind for a vague plan of campaign, but with ultimate authority as regards the operations of the armies to rest with the head of OHL, not with some iron-deadline day-by-day schedule. Operations were undoubtedly provided for in the German war plan, but, rather like the Codex Pirata, they were intended to be more like guidelines than actual rules.

You repeatedly argue in your post that it is ridiculous that the German General Staff, comprised of hundreds of learned men in the art of warfare, would not have developed bazillions of war plans to encompass loads of possible war scenarios, with alterations for each based on contingency. I don't disagree with the basic principle, and in fact this is a key part of Zuber's restatement: why would the German General Staff rely on one plan - "Schlieffen's" - making only minor adjustments as necessary over the course of at least ten years? Most of his book is devoted to sketching out the evolution of German war games and staff rides, and showing how he believes these demonstrate Schlieffen's thought process.

But there is something ridiculous in your argument, too: it is ridiculous that the German General Staff, an organization practically worshiping at the First Church of Carl von Clausewitz since 1871, would have created the sort of war plans you allude to in your post, which seem to me to be more like schedules for a route march than the plan of a war. Clausewitz's favorite principles involved the unpredictability and the raw emotive force of war. Even taking a cursory glance at his unfinished section on the plan of a war shows that the man was chiefly concerned with concentration points for armies and vague, theoretical axes of advance, subject to change on the ground as circumstances militated. (Rather like what the current conception of the 1914 war plan is: a plan chiefly for the concentration and deployment of forces, appropriation of matériel, amassing of ammunition and heavy equipment, with a basic theoretical framework of planned operations beyond, say, a week or two in advance.) There's no way in hell these Germans would have set their entire armed forces on a schedule - plotted out years in advance! This is not like discussing synchronizing watches at the Malakov and the Redan at Sevastopol, or like having a plan sketching out timing for a single operation like D-Day. As far as I'm aware, the only people who were fool enough to think that warfare followed some sort of set timing in the Great War were the British, with their theoretically neat (but horrific in a practical sense) "creeping barrages" at the Somme and Passchendaele.

The Strategic Concept must be translated into a real-world operation. It can't be kept in one's head or scribbled on a cocktail napkin. I'm not talking about Ritter's' memo - you don't launch a million men and horses off into the abyss and risk your national existence on a memo. I'm talking about the operational plan the German General Staff would have prepared for the opening offensive of the war. Endless calculations must be made - X number of troops with Y horses and Z artillery batteries require: A tons of food and supplies, B tons of ammunition, and C tons of fodder, per day, per Army. That has to be extensively planned.

Covered above. Like I said, nobody thinks that there was no plan of any sort at all.

Phase lines must be drawn up , and axis of advance must be mapped out, so that the field forces do not blunder into each other or work at cross purposes.

Funny, by looking at the actual campaign of 1914 you wouldn't have thought that anybody had drawn up axes of advance or Army-level operational boundaries prior to the war. (We don't actually know if they did or not, AFAIK; there's no direct documentary data. We do know that operational boundaries of these kinds were set and reset during the campaign itself. It seems likely to me that there were such organizational boundaries in the war plan, but that they only applied for a very short distance into French territory, subject to change upon the initiation of combat operations.)

The General Staff would have taken into account the season of the year, weather patterns, geographical and political obstacles, likely resistance, water availability, and dozens of other factors. How long to reduce the fortresses guarding Liege? Can super heavy artillery from Skoda be brought up to help? Several general plans would be formulated, the specific one selected would be based on the conditions and requirements existing at the opening of hostilities. It must be written down on paper (lots and lots of paper), and therefore it will have a designation, a name - Plan Orange? OVERLORD? Case White? Plan Schlieffen?

Yes, yes, yes, this is getting somewhat tiresome now. Did you really have to spend all that space on what is essentially rhetoric?

Of course, we are talking Schlieffen as modified by Motlke. Of the possible ways to invade France, the Germans chose one that resembles von Schlieffen's - the thrust through Belgium rather that the previously successful (1871) drive across the Franco-German border. Helmuth von Moltke altered and weakened the plan, but unless some reasonable alternative is offered, it still appears essentially Schlieffen's'.

Actually, it's essentially the same as Alfred von Waldersee's Westaufmarsch from about 1890. Which itself is merely a concept that the elder Moltke had gamed out several times in staff rides and contemplated theoretically. The 1914 Aufmarsch is radically different from Schlieffen's Denkschrift in certain particulars, as I noted in the article, because it detaches large numbers of troops to East Prussia and to Alsace-Lorraine, because it does not involve a violation of Belgian neutrality...these are fairly large discrepancies, given how similar many of Schlieffen's and Waldersee's - and presumably Moltke's, although we lack the documentary evidence - war plans actually were. This is where Zuber inserts his argument. Hell, it looks like you barely read my article at all.

I also strongly object to the characterization of the 1914 plan as a 'weakening' of the Denkschrift plan. Per Holmes and Foley, the two plans were designed for totally different circumstances, the one for a war on France alone (or an ineffective Russia in alliance with France), and the other for a two-front war. They aren't comparable, and one certainly can't say that Schlieffen's was 'stronger' than Moltke's plan for a totally different war. This is the old trap of the historiography that dominated the twentieth century on this issue.

A question on the Zuber interpretation of the Schlieffen plan as a tactic in the budget debate to get more troops. I honestly have not read it and have only your essay to go on. But does it actually make sense to you? The traditional interpretation of the Schlieffen plan as an attempt to fight a two-front war - one front at a time - seems to me a desperate and risky acceptance of limitations imposed. If it was the old General's purpose to "trick" the authorities into giving him more troops, wouldn't he have presented a plan requiring more troops? A general advance across the Franco-German border for instance; requiring the methodical and time-consuming reduction of the French frontier defenses, leading then to the need for more troops to form a second Army Group in the east to deal with the Russians...

He did, in fact, present a plan requiring more troops than comprised the entire German military in 1905/6. I believe Zuber explained away the lack of serious forces on the eastern front with references to current political situations, saying that the Reichstag would certainly not believe anything about keeping massive numbers of troops in the east to face revolution-wracked Russia. (But if that's the case, then why would they be so inclined to accept the invasion of the Netherlands?) I myself don't hold much stock by Zuber's conclusion about the nature of the Denkschrift, as you may have noticed.

By the way, the traditional narrative of the German war plans against France and Russia as being designed to quickly knock one enemy out, then focus on the second, (good decisive interior-lines type stuff in the tradition of Napoleon) as Zuber has pointed out, do not mesh well with the General Staff war games before the war. In virtually all of the two-front war scenarios, both Schlieffen and Moltke seem to have employed their troops to win operational victories on one front to keep it relatively quiescent, allowing them to shuttle reinforcements to the other to try again. Rinse and repeat until the enemy was destroyed, although invariably the exercises ended long before that and were chiefly concerned with the initial series of victories on both fronts. Schlieffen's comments on several of these war games reports seem to indicate that he himself did not perceive a likely end to a two-front war for one to two years of these repeated back-and-forth victories. Purely speculative on my part, but perhaps the Germans noticed how hard it actually is to destroy a modern army from the experiences in the United States in the 1860s (not likely) and in Manchuria in 1904-5 (likely, but does not mesh well with the time frame).

 

[Glassfan]

Yes, the Germans would have had several invasion plans worked out, I believe I said that (#45). But at the opening of hostilities, they would have settled on one. Which one was that Dachs? Not von Schlieffen's? Then which? What was it called ?

I don't think you have a direct answer.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're right. That the Germans did not use a detailed operational plan, but only this Aufmarsche as you say. "Hello Generals! Here's troops and guns and horses! France is that way. Gluck Auf!" Well, this still would have been written down on paper, right - how could the German bureaucracy not? Go to the first page, look up near the top - just below "Top Secret" - What does it say there? The Title? The name of this Aufmarsche? What was it called?

The answer to this question would be strong support for your essay. I would then gladly join in the chorus of puppy worship on the first two pages of this thread. A strong argument not only questions a widely accepted orthodoxy, but also provides a demonstrable alternative - hidden all these years by the falsehood. Without it however, it's half an argument and just another debatable revisionist history.

 

[Dachs]

Yes, the Germans would have had several invasion plans worked out, I believe I said that (#45). But at the opening of hostilities, they would have settled on one. Which one was that Dachs? Not von Schlieffen's? Then which? What was it called ?

I don't think you have a direct answer.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're right. That the Germans did not use a detailed operational plan, but only this Aufmarsche as you say. "Hello Generals! Here's troops and guns and horses! France is that way. Gluck Auf!" Well, this still would have been written down on paper, right - how could the German bureaucracy not? Go to the first page, look up near the top - just below "Top Secret" - What does it say there? The Title? The name of this Aufmarsche? What was it called?

The answer to this question would be strong support for your essay. I would then gladly join in the chorus of puppy worship on the first two pages of this thread. A strong argument not only questions a widely accepted orthodoxy, but also provides a demonstrable alternative - hidden all these years by the falsehood. Without it however, it's half an argument and just another debatable revisionist history.

Hence we return to the whole reason Ritter had to use a glorified memorandum to reconstruct his conception of the plan. In 1944-5, Allied bombing destroyed the Kriegsarchiv at Potsdam, and with it the army's copies of the war plans from Moltke's tenure and part of Schlieffen's. Other copies, and details of the staff rides and war games, were kept at other archival centers in what became East Germany (these are what Zuber worked off of) and other of the federal states. But there's no direct evidence in the form of a copy of the 1914 war plan with 'STRENG GEHEIM' written on it, hence why we have to work off of hints and suppositions in memoirs, war games, diaries, and so forth.

So if the evidence supplanting the old Ritteresque interpretation seems sparse to you, well, that's because it is, compared to many similar situations in modern history. But the evidence supporting it was never very strong either, and Zuber more or less eviscerated any good reason to work from it to determine what the 1914 war plan was. The only thing the old "Schlieffen Plan" narrative has left is sheer inertia.

 

[Glassfan]

Agreed.

As you can plainly see, I'm a bit old fashioned and will maintain the traditional argument until faced with compelling evidence to the contrary.

But I do recognize that there are other schools of thought...