The Schlieffen Plan: poor execution or doomed from the start?

Great Debates
1

A quick background: The Schlieffen Plan was written in 1905. It was a plan for the German army to defeat France by concentrating an overwhelming majority of its troops in a swinging movement through Belgium while leaving a small remnant along the German-French frontier. The idea was the French would attack where the Germans were weak (which was indeed the French plan), the Germans along the frontier would fall back drawing the French in, and then the main body of the German army would sweep down behind the French army, cutting them off from their logistic bases and overrunning a defenseless Paris. This single crushing defeat would force France to accept German terms to end the war.

What happened historically was that Schlieffen left office and was replaced by Moltke. Motlke modified his predecessor’s plan. He felt that it was unacceptable to allow French forces to enter German territory, even if they would soon be forced out. So Moltke pulled troops from the Belgian wing and reinforced the Lorraine front. The results in 1914 were that the French were unable to penetrate deeply into Lorraine and the reduced German right wing turned south east of Paris rather than west as originally planned. This combination allowed the French to move troops west just in the nick of time to halt the Germans from taking Paris. And then everyone started digging trenches.

So everyone blames Moltke for screwing up Schlieffen’s vision. But did Schlieffen’s plan ever have a chance? The German troops in France had pushed their supply system to the breaking point. If there had been more troops present, the system might have collapsed entirely. And while it was easy for Schlieffen to dismiss the loss of Lorraine in peacetime, the reality facing Moltke was a possible French breakthrough into the German heartland while the German army was stuck in Belgium. If nothing else, Moltke at least managed to have the trench warfare of the next four years fought in French rather than German territory.

There are of course other issues to take up with Schlieffen’s plan such as the fact that the Belgian invasion was one of the main reason’s for Britain’s entry into the war or the possibility that France might have acted differently. But strictly as an operational plan, was the Schlieffen Plan ever a good idea?

2

If “the last man on the right” was to “brush the English Channel with his sleeve”, he’d have had a marching posture straight out of the Ministry of Silly Walks. :smiley:

I’m no expert here, but my understanding is that the section of German-French frontier where a breakthrough would have been allowed was mountainous and forested, making it unlikely for the French to break through in force before losing Paris.

3

There are a few bits of the Schieffen plan as originally intended that you left out. The plan was for fighting a war on two fronts, against both France and Russia. East Prussia would be held by minimal forces which would conduct a fighting retreat against the Russians, who would be slower to mobilize than the French. France would be rapidly defeated, and then the bulk of the army could be turned east. Moltke wouldn’t accept the deliberate surrender of German territory, so he increased the proportion of forces in the east, which further eroded the strength of the right wing. The original plan also called for violating Dutch neutrality as well as Belgian, and Moltke cut this out of the plan, which did a lot to crowd the logistics.

My feeling is that the plan would have succeeded in overrunning France had it been carried out as originally planned. The decision to defend Alsace-Lorraine in force was a mistake which diluted the force available at the decisive point. The terrain could have been easily held with the forces originally intended. It is forests and hills, and was decently fortified. The German forces there turned out to be sufficient to launch a counteroffensive after the French had beaten themselves trying to break through. As it turned out, even the watered down Moltke version nearly succeeded.

As to whether overrunning France would have won Germany the war, that isn’t as clear. Violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality would have earned them an enemy in Britain, who could have then conducted the traditional British response to an out of hand European land power. Germany would not be able to reach England and end the war, and Britain could use its wealth and position to snipe at Germany and fight by proxy wherever Germany was weak. Even if the French army was defeated in the field, that might not mean the end of the war in France. In the Franco-Prussian war, the harder fight occurred after the French field army had been defeated at Sedan.

4

Also, do not underestimate the stiff fight the British gave on the left flank. Although defeated and in retreat, they did quite some damage and bought juuust enough time for the french to bring reinforcements to the joint. Which, in turn, forced the turning in of the German right flank.
It was a close call. Everything was meticously calculated, maybe too much calculation. One little hitch could upset the balance.

No, the British were already committed, they wanted this war just as much as anybody else. Germany was becoming far too powerfull at sea and was having colonial ambitions. Can’t have that, old sport.

5

The Russian advance into the East was far more rapid than had been allowed for, and this despite the fact that these forces had been augmented from the original disposition.

Troops were transferred from the Western front to counter this and this helped France with its defence.

Had the original Schlieffen dispositions been adhered to, the Russians would have advanced even more rapidly, and once that front was rolling backwards and open, Germany would have faced a much more acute problem.

At some point troops would have had to be transferred back and it would have needed far more of them, and it is not all that certain France would have capitulated if Paris had been lost.

6

True, but the British government had been writing checks to the French that it wasn’t clear they’d be easily able to cash. The violation of Belgian neutrality made the war an easy sell to the public and cabinet. The invasion of Belgium was a violation of the 1839 treaty of London in which Britain and Prussia (among others) pledged to observe the neutrality of Belgium.

7

I think that as long as the French cooperated (by attacking in Alsace-Lorraine), a certain amount of German success is probable. However part of the German problem is logistics - keeping huge armies supplied was a big problem, especially away from rail lines. IIRC part of the reason for the separation of the German Armies that allowed the Miracle of the Marne was logistical in nature (a combination of effective railroad destruction by the retreating allies and long distances for horse-drawn supply from such poor railheads as were in order ). In which case more troops on the right would compound the problem, not alleviate it.

A second problem for the Germans was command and control - orders and information had almost as hard a time moving from front to rear (where Moltke remained) as did bullets and food moving the other direction.

And of course, as soon as the Russians enter East Prussia, it will be very hard to stop the Kaiser from ordering more troops east - sacrificing the east to win quickly in the west works a lot better in theory than in practice.

I think in the end the difficulties in commanding and supplying such huge forces, especially with armies extremely dense on both sides require perfect execution of whatever plan while requiring the allies to make even more mistakes than they did in reality.

Now, if the French had tried one of their plan 16 variants (I think it is plan 16 anyway), which had the main French attack across the plains of Belgium rather than the heavily defended forests and mountains of Alsace/Lorrain , that could have been interesting.

8

My read on Great Britain was that Great Britain didn’t really want a war at all - there was precious little advantage to them. France and Russia wanted a war, but not for a few more years, when the full effects of Russia’s (French funded) post 1905 reforms and France’s 3 year law would be available.

Only Germany had any particular use for a general war in 1914 (although Russia and Austria both would have like localised conflicts that their enemies would not permit)

9

It’s true that there would have been enormous political pressure to send additional forces to the east, but I thought I’d point out that the original plan assumed that France would be defeated by the time the covering force in the east had been pushed back to the Vistula. In short, the plan as written wrote off all of East Prussia to the Russians, to be retaken in a counteroffensive.

In the actual event, the Russians did mobilize faster than anticipated, but suffered catastrophic defeats at Tannenburg and Masurian Lakes before the forces diverted from the right wing as reinforcements had arrived. Though no one would have assumed it at the time, it turned out that the diversion was unneeded.

10

According to John Keegan’s history of the First World War, the Schliefen Plan was unworkable from the start, with or without vonMolke’s modifications to reenforce the left flank and the diversions to face the Russians in the East.

The fatal flaw was logistical. While I am no logistician, as I understand Keegan’s analysis, the density of troops needed at the leading edge as the attack turned the corner from going westerly into Belgium to going southwesterly into France required more troops and material than could be pushed forward. The solution was to halt in place to allow the necessary build up (this meant a loss of the initiative and gave the Anglo-French the opportunity to regroup), pull the right flank in (which is what happened and allowed a flanking attack out of the Paris fortress), or digging in along the line of exhaustion where the necessary troop density could be supplied (a politically unacceptable option that forfeited the whole attack).

Apparently Schleifen’s solution to the logistical problem was to ignore it. VonMolke took the same view even though pre-war map exercises disclosed the problem. In other words, the Plan was conceived as a knockout blow, but in reality it never did have enough force behind it to achieve the knockout.

11

MMI and Spavined Gelding make a point that I think is important; the vulnerable point in the German’s 1914 operation was not manpower, it was logistics. The Germans had failed to make realistic plans for supplying their advance at the pace it needed to move to succeed.

And if it’s true that logistics defeated the Moltke plan, it would have been even worse for the original Schlieffen plan which called for more troops moving greater distances.

12

Also, remember that Hitler’s invasion of France in 1940 effectively WAS the Schlieffen plan, even though the German army in 1940 stressed mobility more than in 1914. And remember, with the plan, even with the modifications weakening it, the Germans did get within 40 miles of Paris

13

Something not recognized yet on this board is that there was one assumption of Schlieffen’s plan that was, well, not realistic. He assumed France would mobilize faster. This was partly true, but the Russians started mobilizing some weeks before the war officially started. This meant they had to put more resources, faster, into the Eastern front, and was another nail in the coffin of the French campaign.

14

No, it wasn’t. The German plan (it wasn’t Hitler’s plan) was to feign another Schlieffen plan. They made a false thrust through Belgium and the Netherlands (assuming correctly that the French and British would anticipate a WWI repeat) but actually made his main thrust through the Ardennes, bypassing the main French army and making a massive armor thrust straight through the French heartland.

15

And just to complicate things, there is Terence Zuber’s argument - as set out in his recent book, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan (Oxford University Press, 2002) - that the ‘Plan’ never existed. A summary of his arguments can be found here (if you register).

16

Or you can read the same Zuber article here and a letter commenting on it, both without needing to register. (www.findarticles.com appear to have access to all recent History Today articles.)

17

I think it’s important to note that while the Germans were among the first to note that an enemy’s capital city was far less important than destroying the enemy’s army in the field, Paris represented an unusual case in 1914.

As you can see from this modern map the French rail network is a radial one, extending out from Paris.

This is why I find the German decision to turn south-east before Paris to be so perplexing. Any move in that direction may give an attacker the temporary benefit of logistically isolating French armies to the east, but it also virtually guarantees a French concentration on the outskirts of the Paris, which is exactly what happened.

Had the Germans had the energy and supplies left to instead envelop and capture Paris, the Germans would have been able to concentrate their force around the city by using the repaired rail lines. Moreover, French reinforcements moving into the area would only be supplied by single rail lines, and would naturally have to concentrate at the railheads of the severed spokes closest to Paris, possibly inviting defeat in detail.

What’s even more baffling to me is that the Germans used the siege of Paris to their extreme advantage in 1870-71, so it’s not as if they didn’t know how to do it.

Therefore my bent on the Schieffen plan (if it existed–interesting article, APB) is that the Germans somehow managed to lose sight of the logistical victory which was within their grasp, and as soon as that happened, they lost the war.

18

Odd, Spavined Gelding matched what my post was going to be after I read the OP almost word for word - same reference and everything.

Another note about that is that various units were assigned to the same roads at the same time - both for logistics and movement. The plan, even in it’s ideal form, had conflicting information regarding who would be on what road at what time. This was largely ignored, and so, even if the plan were pulled off perfectly, it still wouldn’t have worked smoothly.

Regarding Germany’s attack in WW2 - the original plan for the attack was a slightly modified Schlieffen plan. The German general staff had signed off on the idea, but, IIRC, Von Mainstein, a minor player in the OKW at the time discussed the faults of the plan with Hitler and devised an alternate plan that included a feint of the Schlieffen plan.

I can’t recall the name of the operation - something to do with the German word for ‘sickle’, I believe - but basically a detachment of the German army would attack through Belgium, prompting France to believe it was a repeat of WW1. The French army moved up to meet them there, and a large armored force moved through the Ardenne forest to strike at the right flank of that army group, cutting them off and trapping them between the two German units.

It’s a common misunderstanding/simpification that most people think France thought that the Ardenne couldn’t be crossed by armored forces (this is the sort of quick explanation the history channel gives), but rather, they knew that it was crossable by armies, but would be very limited in the amount of supply that was able to be moved in. As France expected another drawn out WW1 scenario, the Ardenne was an improbable place for the Germans to attack from, because if both sides began to entrench, the Germans would have severe logistical problems.

Of course, Germany had no interest in a drawn out war - the rebuilt military was geared around new ideas in mobile warfare. They were able to bring enough supply through the forest to keep their forces going for the short period the war lasted, and France was caught in a terrible position.

19

Apparently the German repair teams (26000 railway costruction workers) had only repaired a small fraction (~15%) of the Belgian railway network by the first week of September - let alone the equally competently destroyed French rail lines. The Germans themselves noted the fact that the French were able to use their remaining rail lines to rapidly move troops where needed. (Without the rail lines the Germans couldn’t advance to take the rail lines they needed to advance.) Even had they taken Paris (highly questionable) being in the wrecked railroad hub would not alleviate logistical difficulties until thousands of miles of track were repaired - although it would certainly discomfit the French

The above information taken from Martin Gilbert’s The First World War: The Complete Story

20

One reason Manstein’s plan was used was because a few weeks before the German attack was set to begin, a plane carrying two German officers with a complete outline of the original plan was shot down and the allies obtained the whole plan. The Germans realized they couldn’t use the exposed plan, so they quickly substituted the only other usable plan they had ready - Manstein’s.

On the other hand, most of this was based on post-war reporting and Manstein was notorious for “improving” his record after the outcome of a campaign.