what did germany’s schlieffen plan call for?

 

The consumption of food and ammunition at times and places are unknown, as are the quantity and loading of trains moving through Belgium, the state of repair of railway stations and data about the supplies which reached the front-line troops. It would have to be coupled with a tactical offensive of the greatest possible impact until the enemy was paralysed and exhausted to the point where diplomacy would have a chance to bring about a satisfactory settlement. Schlieffen replaced the Clausewitzian concept of Schwerpunkt (“centre of gravity”) in operational command with the idea of continuous forward movement designed to annihilate the enemy. The adaptations made by Moltke were treated in Die Grenzschlachten im Westen, as necessary and thoughtful sequels of the principle adumbrated by Schlieffen in 1905 and that Moltke had tried to implement a plan based on the 1905 memorandum in 1914. We are not superior to the French." The Germans would rely on an Austro-Hungarian and Italian contingents, formed around a cadre of German troops, to hold the fortresses along the Franco-German border. By the 1890s, the Strategiestreit had entered public discourse, when soldiers like the two Moltkes, also doubted the possibility of a quick victory in a European war. The central group—consisting of six infantry corps, Landwehr brigades, and a cavalry division—was to attack the French at La Feré and Paris, eventually encircling the capital on the north and east. a two-front war on the eastern and western borders of Germany What was an unintended effect of the sinking of the Lusitania? The deployment plan assumed that Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops would defend Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen). Schlieffen was open-minded about a defensive strategy and the political advantages of the Entente being the aggressor, not just the "military technician" portrayed by Ritter. Schlieffen was convinced that a modern enemy force could be defeated in the same way, and the execution of a massive flank attack became the main focus of his plan. In the strategic circumstances of 1905, with the Russian army and the Tsarist state in turmoil after the defeat in Manchuria, the French would not risk open warfare; the Germans would have to force them out of the border fortress zone. The writers blamed Moltke for altering the plan to increase the force of the left wing at the expense of the right, which caused the failure to defeat decisively the French armies. Add your answer and earn points. Creveld also wrote that had the French been defeated on the Marne, the lagging behind of railheads, lack of fodder and sheer exhaustion, would have prevented much of a pursuit. The only way to avoid becoming bogged down in the French fortress zones was by a flanking move into terrain where open warfare was possible, where the German army could continue to practice Bewegungskrieg (a war of manoeuvre). If the French retreated into the "great fortress" into which France had been made, back to the Oise, Aisne, Marne or Seine, the war could be endless. The enveloping move of the armies was a means to an end, the destruction of the French armies and that the plan should be seen in the context of the military realities of the time. The instruction of the Commander in Chief was that. To win the war, Germany and its allies would have to attack France. Since the French had a defensive strategy, the Germans would have to take the initiative and invade France, which was shown to be feasible by war games in which French border fortifications were outflanked. The German offensive of 1914 failed because the French refused to fight a decisive battle and retreated to the "secondary fortified area". In 2014, Terence Holmes wrote, Moltke followed the trajectory of the Schlieffen plan, but only up to the point where it was painfully obvious that he would have needed the army of the Schlieffen plan to proceed any further along these lines. The Germans would defend against the French, who would be enveloped on three sides then the Germans would attempt an encircling manoeuvre from the fortress zones to annihilate the French force. As President of the Reichsarchiv, General Hans von Haeften led the project and it overseen from 1920 by a civilian historical commission. Some German territorial gains were reversed by the Franco-British counter-offensive against the 1st Army (Generaloberst Alexander von Kluck) and 2nd Army (Generaloberst Karl von Bülow), on the German right (western) flank, during the First Battle of the Marne (5–12 September). Germany would execute an "active defence", in at least the first operation/campaign of the war. The role claimed by the German army as the anti-socialist foundation on which the social order was based, also made the army apprehensive about the internal strains that would be generated by a long war. Their preferred strategy was to knock out one quickly before dealing with the other. The studies in 1905 demonstrated that this was best achieved by a big flanking manoeuvre through the Netherlands and Belgium. Hanna, S.) pp. In Sword and the Sceptre; The Problem of Militarism in Germany (1969), Gerhard Ritter wrote that Moltke (the Elder) changed his thinking, to accommodate the change in warfare evident since 1871, by fighting the next war on the defensive in general. The plan's ultimate goal was the encirclement of the French army along the German-French frontier. The Schlieffen Plan was a German war plan designed by General Alfred von Schlieffen. Holmes asked why Moltke attempted to achieve either objective with 34 corps (970,000 first-line troops) only 70 per cent of the minimum required. Thus, one battle might be fought in order to secure victory on another battlefield. [74], There had been a revolution in firepower since 1871, with the introduction of breech-loading weapons, quick-firing artillery and the evasion of the effects of increased firepower, by the use of barbed wire and field fortifications. Goltz advocated the conscription of every able-bodied man and a reduction of the period of service to two years (a proposal that got him sacked from the Great General Staff but was then introduced in 1893) in a nation-in-arms. Advancing only through Belgium, meant that the German armies would lose the railway lines around Maastricht and have to squeeze the 600,000 men of the 1st and 2nd armies through a gap 19 km (12 mi) wide, which made it vital that the Belgian railways were captured quickly and intact. [9], Assuming French hostility and a desire to recover Alsace-Lorraine, Moltke (the Elder) drew up a deployment plan for 1871–1872, expecting that another rapid victory could be achieved but the French introduced conscription in 1872. The deadline did not appear in the Schlieffen Memorandum and Holmes wrote that Schlieffen would have considered six weeks to be far too long to wait in a war against France and Russia. [39] The writers called the Schlieffen Memorandum of 1905–06 an infallible blueprint and that all Moltke (the Younger) had to do to almost guarantee that the war in the west would be won in August 1914, was implement it. The French attack into Alsace-Lorraine resulted in worse losses than anticipated, because artillery–infantry co-operation that French military theory required, despite its embrace of the "spirit of the offensive", proved to be inadequate. It was called the Schlieffen Plan. Moltke (the Younger) was realistic about the nature of a great European war but this conformed to professional wisdom. The variety of the 1905 war games show that Schlieffen took account of circumstances; if the French attacked Metz and Strasbourg, the decisive battle would be fought in Lorraine. The Schlieffen Plan, devised by Germany, was intended to force France into submission and then invade Russia. in Land Warfare (International Perspective) with honors and a graduate certificate in German Military Studies from the American Military University.... Years before 1914, successive chiefs of the German general staff had been foreseeing Germany’s having to fight a war on two fronts at the... Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. By 1873, Moltke thought that the French army was too powerful to be defeated quickly and in 1875, Moltke considered a preventive war but did not expect an easy victory. The plan was heavily modified by Schlieffen’s successor, Helmuth von Moltke, prior to and during its Schlieffen may or may not have written the 1905 memorandum as a plan of operations but the thinking in it was the basis for the plan of operations devised by Moltke (the Younger) in 1914. Get the answers you need, now! The trove shows that Der Weltkrieg is a "generally accurate, academically rigorous and straightforward account of military operations", when compared to other contemporary official accounts. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Schlieffen’s plan would be altered by Moltke, but it would never be fully implemented as he envisioned. The Schlieffen Memorandum of 1905 was presented as an operational idea, which in general was the only one that could solve the German strategic dilemma and provide an argument for an increase in the size of the army. A decisive victory might no longer be possible but success would make a diplomatic settlement easier. The 6th and 7th armies with eight corps were to assemble along the common border, to defend against a French invasion of Alsace-Lorraine. The "plan" was not published after the war, when it was being called an infallible recipe for victory, ruined by the failure of Moltke adequately to select and maintain the aim of the offensive. From the 1870s, German strategists had one particular concern. Der Weltkrieg portrays Moltke (the Younger) in command of a war machine "on autopilot", with no mechanism of central control. He gave precise figures for the strength required in that operation: ​33 1⁄2 corps (940,000 troops), including 25 active corps (active corps were part of the standing army capable of attacking and reserve corps were reserve units mobilised when war was declared and had lower scales of equipment and less training and fitness). The Germans then made a devastating counter-attack on the left bank of the Rhine near the Belgian border. Aufmarsch I West had the more modest aim of forcing the French to choose between losing territory or committing the French army to a decisive battle, in which it could be terminally weakened and then finished off later. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the Schlieffen Plan Germany’s Situation in Europe, 1914 The Ottoman Empire was crumbling, but new powers grew and prospered- The German Empire, The Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the largest of them all- The Russian Empire. Holmes wrote that no-one had produced a source showing that Schlieffen intended a huge right-wing flanking move into France, in a two-front war. The gap between the Fifth Army and the North Sea was covered by Territorial units and obsolete fortresses. The 1905 Memorandum was for War against France, in which Russia would be unable to participate. Schlieffen wished to emulate Hannibal by provoking an Entscheidungsschlacht (“decisive battle”), using a massive force, in a single act, to bring a swift and conclusive victory. After that, it would be difficult for Russia and Britain to continue the war. [70], In 2013, Mark Humphries and John Maker published Germany's Western Front 1914, an edited translation of the Der Weltkrieg volumes for 1914, covering German grand strategy in 1914 and the military operations on the Western Front to early September. The most difficult problem was to advance railheads quickly enough to stay close enough to the armies. Driving out the French from their frontier fortifications would be a slow and costly process that Schlieffen preferred to avoid by a flanking movement through Luxembourg and Belgium. Growth in the size and power of rival European armies increased the pessimism with which Moltke contemplated another war and on 14 May 1890 he gave a speech to the Reichstag, saying that the age of Volkskrieg had returned. and that to achieve this, the French armies were to concentrate, ready to attack either side of Metz–Thionville or north into Belgium, in the direction of Arlon and Neufchâteau. Italy was only expected to join Germany if Britain remained neutral; 60 per cent of the German army would deploy in the west and 40 per cent in the east. Most of the pre-1914 planning of the German General Staff was secret and the documents were destroyed when deployment plans were superseded each April. Doubts about the possibility that a defeated enemy would not intervene made Schlieffen! Russians would be necessary for which there was no room ; Schlieffen weak! Incapable of fulfilling a strategy of annihilation demonstrated that this was judged impractical of! 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