In the interests of shattering a few myths, 100 years ago (give or take a few months) when the Great Powers of Europe decided to declare war on each other what exactly did they think they were getting in to?
What was the popular conception of war at the time - did the generals share it? Is it true that there was a ‘done by Christmas’ attitude or did anyone predict that it would be 4 miserable years before it was finished?
Were they planning on an 18th century conflict only to be surprised by the machine guns, trenches, tanks planes and gas?
AFAIK Germany expected to defeat France in a few weeks by allowing them to take Alsace Lorraine and then encircling them via Belgium to take Paris. They would then be able to concentrate on Russia.
With such close royal links, Bismark thought that Britain would stay out of it.
Nonsense. Gatling guns had been around since 1862 and their efficacy proven in the Civil War. The Maxim machine gun was used by Britain in the colonial wars in the 1800s.
The machine guns used previously were less reliable than those in 1914, and there were fewer of them. They were certainly effective in colonial wars, but the feeling was that European soldiers were made of sterner stuff.
The German war plan came very close to succeeding; if the French hadn’t noticed a gap in the German attack and sent their troops to the Marne, Germany would have overrun Paris and put France in disarray. But the battle forced German to entrench and the war became a stalemate.
If you are interested in myth-busting, by hook or crook get hold of a copy of “The Smoke and The Fire” by John Terraine. Brilliant book.
The Christmas bit seems to be apocryphal, but the Kaiser certainly said to some soldiers in August 1914 “You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees.” which was even more optimistic.
Well hardly, though they might have been planning a 19th century conflict.
Machine guns as such would not have been a surprise, but reliable fast-firing machine guns would have come as an unpleasant shock to some people.
Trenches were nothing new.
Tanks were indeed a surprise for the Germans, but they did not appear until 1916.
The military potential of aeroplanes (for observation, at least) was obvious from the time of the Wright brothers.
Gas in the form of chlorine was indeed a horrible surprise for the Allies in 1915, though the French had tried using tear-gas in 1914- it was so ineffective that the Germans did not notice.
In terms of modern warfare, there were many lessons to be learnt from the Russo-Japanese war 1904-1905, particularly as regards modern machine guns and rapid-firing artillery.
You didn’t.
Not at home now, but I believe the British observer who returned from the Sino-Japanese conflict predicting the end of cavalry due, in part, to machine guns was dismissed as loopy.
I think I read somewhere a commentary on Hollywood westerns - that the hand-cranked multi-barrel machine guns that show up in almost every silly western over the last 3 decades - that only a few dozen of these had been made for the entire civil war, and yet every collection of western baddies out of Hollywood seems to have gotten their hands on one (and the unlimited ammunition necessary to feed it).
Against savages. Not against civilized human beings.
The fact of the matter is, the military thinkers at the time thought that only wars between Europeans “counted”. The fact that a weapon was effective against Indians or Africans or Chinese didn’t mean it would be effective against *actual *soldiers.
The Germans were expecting another Franco-Prussian war and the French were thinking they had corrected the mistakes they made in the last one. Heaven knows what the Russians thought - probably what glorious fun it would be to herd serf’s into battle.
Lord Kitchener predicted a long war and he actually began to make plans for an extended war right from the beginning.
One other surprising person who made an accurate prediction was Rasputin. He told the Romanovs that a war would be a disaster for Russia and their dynasty and urged them to stay out of it. Ironically, it was one of the few times he was giving good advice and one of the few times his advice was ignored.
An officer did point out to Nicholas II that every rifle cartridge had to reach the front on a sled. The first wave of infantry was armed, but not the second. They were instructed to pick up the weapons of their fallen comrades. This must have done wonders for morale.
Most people expected a quick war, similar to the Franco-Prussian war forty years previous (only on a larger scale). Hence, the importance attached to swift mobilization and efficient use of the railways to concentrate troops.
Few predicted a static, trench war that would drag on for years. Certainly the Germans didn’t.
The German plan was to knock France out of the war - fast - and then turn and destroy the Russian armies before they could do any damage. The Germans had few qualms about violating Belgian neutrality, even if this brought the UK into the war against them, because (based on the Franco-Prussian example) they assumed the whole thing would be over long before the UK could recruit a sizable army, or impose a meaningful blockade.
