Von Schlieffen’slast words were supposedly, “Keep the Western front strong!” But future officers worried, “What about all those Russians to the East with no railways?”
I think that is where the idea of a six week war against France came about.
What a lot of people forget was that Mitchell was mostly wrong. Nobody disputed his claim that a bomb could sink a ship. They disputed his claim that a plane could hit a ship with a bomb. And on that issue, they were mostly right.
Mitchell claimed that a bomb could fly over a ship and drop a bomb down on to the ship and hit it. The Navy said it was virtually impossible for a moving plane to hit a moving ship like that, especially if the ship was making any effort to defend itself.
Mitchell’s famous Project B test where he supposedly proved his point was pretty much fixed. The ships he was attacking were all anchored in place and Mitchell had made practice runs across the test site to get his ranges right. And of course the unmanned ships were not firing back at the planes or following any damage control procedures.
It’s worth noting that Mitchell’s techniques would not be used in World War II. Air units found they couldn’t hit ships in real world situations with dropped bombs. New techniques like dive bombing and torpedo bombing were developed.
Mitchell may have been a classic example of somebody who has a hammer and therefore sees every problem as a nail. There was a coal miner strike in 1921 and there had been shooting between the strikers and guards hired by the mining company. Mitchell was dispatched to restore the peace. His proposal for breaking up the strike? Aerial bombardment. That’s right - Mitchell was seriously claiming that strategic bombers were the best tool to use in riot control.
Jan Gotlib (Ivan) Bloch predicted it accurately, but didn’t find enough of an audience.
There was a common belief in well-informed circles that war couldn’t possibly go on for more than a few months, because the bankers would not allow it to.
Yeah, I concede the point. I’m actually somewhat embarrassed, as I’ve read a lot of books about both world wars.
Speaking of ‘savages’: The Brits who fought in Africa against German-trained African troops in the East African Campaign of WWI found out quickly that African soldiers could fight every bit as well as their European counterparts. Must have been quite a shock to many of them to be defeated by what they considered to be savages. “The Great War in Africa”, by Byron Farwell is a good read about a little-known part of the war.
Sadly, the arrogance of the time hasn’t taught us many lessons, as we continue to underestimate our enemies to this day.
It was thought at the time that the key was rapid mobilization. If you could mobilize every able-bodied man first then you’d so outnumber the enemy that you could simply smash through their half-mobilized forces.
This is why everyone expected a quick war. No country could maintain a giant standing army, the men were needed at their regular jobs. But in a national emergency every man could be issued a rifle and march to the front. And sheer numbers would prevail, even if one Frenchman/German was worth two Germans/Frenchmen.
In other words, they expected something a lot more like World War II, where one side would simply overmatch the other and march right over them, and the defeated countries would fall in months when they could no longer organize defensive efforts.
And as has been mentioned above, Germany came very close to actually accomplishing this. With a bit more luck they would have done in WWI what they actually accomplished in WWII and knock France out of the war very quickly. And then the war would be over except the peace negotiations.
Well, it would certainly work.
Bomb the town in which the strike was taking place, and the inhabitants would, presumably, lose all interest in their labour dispute, right? 
Actually, “Keep the right wing strong.” The Schieffen plan hinged on a rapid advance through the Low Countries so that the entire line of battle would swing like a gate. If the right wing wasn’t strong the advance would stall.
I agree with Malthus. They were expecting a replay of the Franco-Prussian war forty years before. Doctrine said that the side that mobilized the fastest and got their troops to the front soonest would carry the day. The Germans expected their superior operational efficiency would result in the French being caught unprepared. The German armies would smash through the French left and be in Paris in a few weeks. They’d negotiate a quick truce and then redeploy to the east to drive out the Russians who would only just be getting started with their invasion of East Prussia.
As it happened, they underestimated how technological advances had tipped the odds in favor of the defenders. As the German advance swung on its pivot, the Germans had to keep shortening their line to mass enough troops to advance. So the swinging gate fell short of Paris and the French were able to dig in and 4 years of brutal trench warfare followed.
Von Schliffen’s last words were “keep the right wing strong”, not the western front. He was referring to the main line of attack on the German right/northern flank that went through Belgium - the hammer of the Schlieffen plan.
The plan was for France to be knocked out of the war effectively by the time Russia could mobilize, so he wouldn’t have said that - Germany was not planning on fighting a two front war simultaneously.
I thought the plan in the test was for “near misses” to cause hull damage from the concussion of the water.
I correct you– they believed that their own solders were superior. Other Europeans were regarded as “lacking in fighting spirit”, and would surrender after a few brief, sharp battles.
WW1 happened because of a brainless tribalistic attitude towards other Europeans, as much as anything else.
According to Tuchman, for what it’s worth, the failure of the Schlieffen plan, exhibited in the wheel to the east of Paris that opened up the German flank (because there weren’t enough men to keep the extended German line) was probably the result of (1) Moltke’s successor losing his nerve in the face of Junker pressure to keep more forces in the East. Moltke had planned to simply retreat in good order as the Russians advanced, so that minimal forces would be needed in the East, and every unit possible could be used on the drive through the low countries. He figured any actual German territory lost could readily be reconquered once the French had been disposed of. But he and his Kaiser were men of steel, and could easily resist the imploring of wealthy Prussian landowners to not let the God-damned Cossacks overrun their farms and burn their hayricks. Their successors could not. (2) The Crown Prince was sent to hold the Rhine in the area of Alsace-Lorraine – just hold it, mind you – while the right wing did the real work. You need far fewer men to hold than to advance. But he wanted a share of the conquering glory. Since it was the Crown Prince, there was insufficient spine at HQ to resist his calls, and, again, the right wing was robbed of men to allow him to indulge his fancies. (Not to mention the fantasy of executing a classic Cannae double envelopment on the French.) In fact, the Germans did advance both in the East and along the southern border with France, both of which Moltke had wanted specifically to avoid, and which may well possibly have robbed the right wing of the critical strength and power it needed to pull off the victory on schedule.
Taking the larger viewpoint, it’s possible to argue the essential problem was that while Germany was nominally unified, it still contained strong independent elements of aristocratic power from it’s 16th through early 19th century history as a loose amalgamation of principalities, and these were insufficiently subordinate to the central planning authority. Hence, the master plan, while sound, was sabotaged by the inability of Germans (ironically) to follow a plan, obey orders, and march in step. It’s a mistake they did not repeat in the Second World War.
My history professor agrees with the first.
For the second, who coined the term, “the Geographic expression of Germany”?
This was a trope portrayed in the World War II film Enemy at the Gates. Don’t know if it was true or not, but there was a scene of unarmed Russian soldiers being trucked to the front, with commisars with bullhorns shouting at them to move forward and pick up the rifles of their fallen comrades.
Well… kinda. I wouldn’t argue that was a major deciding element. Germany had a top-notch officer corps, but they lacked a civilian (or at least bureaucratic) organization to keep the country functioning. They might still have pulled off a victory but basically had to built an entire equivalent to our DoD from scratch, including entire departments to manage strategic materials. Moreover, the war created a lot of very ugly social schisms, both between and inside of classes (in this, case, the economic more than social). Berlin became somewhat, well, hated by just about everyone, while a great many people came to despise the burgeoning bureaucratic class, and everyone hated the insiders who could siphon off money or materials.
It’s not that the aristocratic aspects or the federal state that hindered the war effort. If anything, they helped. No, the biggest issue was that Germany hadn’t built a government structure necessary for the kind of mobilization and resource direction that it’s planners envisioned. And as the war continued, Germany discovered it simply didn’t have the resources necessary to maintain the fight, until it was verging on mass starvation.
If Dr. Bolus said that in His Lecture, it was true.
:rolleyes:
Does anyone recall if that is mentioned in Tuchman?
“Machine guns” (which I put in quotes because technically a hand cranked gun isn’t a machine gun - it’s just a repeating gun) existed in small numbers during the Civil War, but they didn’t really prove their worth on the battlefield.
They did show their power during demonstration tests. For example, Lincoln himself saw a demonstration of the Agar Gun (aka the Coffee Mill gun), which was advertised as “an army in six feet square”, and was so impressed that he ordered it to be put into production immediately. As md2000 noted though, these types of weapons were not produced in large numbers. They also suffered from reliability problems, as you might expect with a weapon that was new and complex at the time.
These weapons also weren’t used very effectively. Because they went through so much ammunition so quickly, military commanders typically placed them in defensive positions guarding choke points like bridges and narrow passes so that they wouldn’t waste their valuable ammunition. They weren’t placed out on the front lines where they could have really shown their deadly capability. As a result, they never really got to prove their worth during the Civil War.
One of the keys to the modern machine gun was the improvements they made to the production of brass in the decades following the Civil War. This made the production of much larger quantities of cartridge type ammo at reasonable prices possible.
The Gatling Gun didn’t really get to show its value until the Spanish-American war. They had a lot of success with it in some battles, like the battle for San Juan Hill, but they also found it to be just a huge cumbersome weapon that was very difficult to lug around.
The British Maxim Gun also showed its worth in battle in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
That said, WWI really showcased machine guns on a scale that hadn’t been seen in prior wars and battles.
I don’t think the Schleiffen plan could have existed even if everything had been followed to the letter. The logistics just weren’t there. Germany couldn’t get supplies up to the front fast enough to replace consumed supplies; they just didn’t have the infrastructure. By the time of the Battle of the Marne, they had stretched their supply train to the limit, so even if they won, they would have had to stop.
There is a tale of Teddy Roosevelt’s unit capturing a machine gun position and his forcing the gunner to show them how to use it.