by Hew Strachan
Although the distinction between tactics and operations, therefore, proved as difficult for the Germans to sustain as for the French, it does not—as it does for the French—provide such a convincing explanation as to why German tactics were so confused in 1914. Some reports of the fighting in the first six weeks show the German excellence in the use of ground, the rapidity with which they built up fire superiority, and the small, dispersed formations in which they delivered the final assault. But in other cases the Germans came on in dense formations, without adequate preparation and with insufficient artillery support. A couple of reasons for this contrast reside in the immediate circumstances of the German advance.
First, much of the fighting in the advance was the product of encounter battles: troops moved from the line of march to combat. Fully to deploy for the attack could take a corps, which occupied 24 kilometres of road space, as much as twenty-four hours.109 In some cases they did not have the time, or they deemed it unnecessary to await the artillery to prepare the assault. Given the needs of the siege operations in their rear, and the supply problems for artillery horses, the German front-line advantage in heavy artillery—their best counter to French superiority in field artillery—was not as great as their established strength would suggest. German 77 mm batteries, in their anxiety to give moral support to the infantry, rushed forward, frequently siting their guns on forward slopes and thus rendering themselves vulnerable to the French 75 mms.
Secondly, poor tactical performance may have been the pay-off for including reserve formations at the outset of the campaign. The tendency to rush forward prematurely, to clump together and not to disperse, to become overexcited in the heat of battle, was exactly what the professionals had expected of reservists. Furthermore, German reserve corps did not have the sixteen heavy field howitzers possessed by the active corps, and reserve infantry divisions had only thirty-six field guns, half the allocation of an active division. Nor did all reserve infantry regiments have machine-gun companies.110 With inadequate firepower, careful instructions about artillery preparation and establishing fire superiority before the assault could prove impossible to effect.
However, Germany’s tactical inadequacies stretched beyond its reserve formations and lasted longer than the first six weeks of the war. The 1888 infantry regulations, with which incidentally the name of the young Wilhelm was associated, had spoken much good sense. They instructed the infantry to deploy in swarms, not in closed formations. They had distinguished between an encounter battle and an attack against an enemy in a prepared position; in this latter case fire preparation would be a lengthy process and the attack would not be delivered until fire superiority had been gained. The infantry regulations of 1906 represented little advance on those of 1888, and in some respects were distinctly retrograde. The big issue in the decade before the war was whether the priority in infantry tactics should be the use of ground, which implied dispersion, or the acquisition of fire superiority, which implied concentration. Both were versions of modernization: the compromise was a skirmish line capable of fire effect. But what followed, and was embodied in the 1906 infantry regulations, was a skirmish line so thick that it forfeited the security of looser formations or small groups. The 1906 regulations were modified in 1909 to allow for thin lines at the outset of the advance, thickening prior to the final assault. But what they did not contain was any recognition that fire superiority could be achieved by supporting units or even by machine-gun fire, rather than by the attacking infantry itself. The infantry regulations treated the infantry as the main arm, capable of attacking independently. The artillery regulations talked of co-operation between the two arms, but no regulations for combined tactics were published. Furthermore, in Germany as elsewhere, it was recognized that the fire-swept battlefield would increase the demands made of man’s morale. Thus, in coming to grips with the modern battlefield the 1906 regulations fell back on vocabulary that was traditionalist. Prudent recommendations about field fortification were lost in the general tenor, which highlighted the attack regardless of casualties, and put the weight on morale and not material. The principal lesson the Germans derived from the Boer War was that effective tactical exploitation of the new firepower in itself only produced defensive successes: in the end the Boers had lost the war. The offensive spirit was cultivated no less assiduously in Germany than in France. The emptiness of the modern battle-field, the strength of the tactical defensive, the importance of field fortifications—all were reflected in official publications, but were then categorized as ‘uncanny’, atypical, or one-sided, and so not placed at the heart of tactical thought.
Even if tactical theory was grounded in reality, and much of it—including parts of the 1906 infantry regulations—was, training and practice were very different. Most officers were technologically unsophisticated: the domestically conservative role of the army, its function as a counterweight to urban influences, and its potential use in suppressing revolution militated against tactical innovation.111 Parade standards were appropriate in aiding the civil power, but were also applied in manoeuvres. Commanders liked to have their units well in hand, and therefore regarded close formations as normal and dispersal as exceptional. The regulations for the field artillery assumed, even with guns not firing at their maximum ranges, that the fire-zone would be 6 to 7 kilometres deep; yet the infantry were still instructed to approach the battle-field in marching columns and to deploy into shallower columns, both good targets for artillery. In October 1911 the military correspondent of The Times, Colonel Repington, attended the German manoeuvres: ‘No other modern army’, he concluded, ‘displays such profound contempt for the effect of modern fire.’112
The popular estimate of German military superiority, held abroad as firmly as in Germany itself, and sustained as much after the First World War as before it, obscured its remarkably traditional, even Napoleonic, nature. What is striking about the German general staff in 1914 is not its political hamfistedness, its advocacy of preventive war, and its brutal invasion of Belgium. It is the contradictions and gaps in the areas of its own professional competence. In 1866 and 1870 the Germans had led the way in the use of railways in warfare. And yet in 1914 their practice in this regard had changed little. Trains brought the troops to their concentration areas; thereafter soldiers moved as they had always done—on foot or on horseback. Kluck’s 1st army, in its massive wheel, marched on average 23 kilometres a day every day for three weeks. Even Hausen’s 3rd army had to sustain a comparable rate, albeit over two weeks.
Schlieffen’s approach to logistics had been to think through an operational solution and then to expect the railways to conform. He used the argument that the Belgian network provided the best link between France and Germany to justify his decision. Moltke disagreed. From the outset he recognized the vulnerability of the German plan to the destruction by the Belgians and the French of their railway systems.113 His fears proved justified. Groener did a magnificent job in managing the railways. He had a line open to Cambrai by 3 September, and to Noyon by the 8th and Compiègne by the 9th. But the total number of railway troops available to him was small given that Germany was fighting a two-front war, and peacetime service had not practised them in repairing wartime damage. Furthermore, although the railway department was directly responsible to the chief of the general staff, the main supply departments were not; the quartermaster-general—who was charged with the oversight of the supply trains—was not kept fully informed as to the operational picture. Thus, inevitably, the full functioning of the railways lagged behind the armies’ advance. When the battle of the Marne began on 6 September the key railheads for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd armies were 136 to 168 kilometres behind their front.114
The army recognized the utility of the lorry to cover the gap between the railhead and the front. Subventions to encourage civilian ownership, introduced in 1907, resulted by 1912 in an increase in Germany’s lorries which was more than twice that of vehicles in general. By 1913 3,744 lorries were available
for military use. In peace almost half of them were employed in the haulage of beer, but in war their task was munitions supply: the 1st and 2nd armies each had 198 on their establishment. However, the roads were so congested that their speed was of limited value. Schlieffen’s deployment frequently required two corps to use a single line of communications. By the time of the Marne 60 per cent of lorries had broken down.115
Horse-drawn transport, therefore, remained fundamental to forward supply. Kluck’s 1st army had 84,000 horses. Nearly 2 million pounds of fodder a day was needed to feed them. Thus, the greater the distance from the railhead, the more transport was devoted to servicing itself rather than the front-line soldier. A single infantry regiment of three battalions, with 233 horses and seventy-two wagons, took up 2 kilometres of road. Most of the transport formations were newly formed on mobilization, their men predominantly reservists who had not served in transport when originally conscripted, and the horses recently requisitioned and not used to military harness. Often fed on green fodder, horses succumbed at a high rate (hence another reason for the cavalry’s deficiencies and for poor reconnaissance). For those that were sick and exhausted, veterinary surgeons were in short supply: an infantry brigade with 480 horses had none.
Logistically, therefore, Schlieffen’s plan was a nonsense. But there is a danger in exaggerating the significance of Germany’s problems with transport. Most serious were the problems of ammunition supply. The 6th army was told to restrict its consumption of heavy artillery shells on 6 September, but sufficient got through for the other armies. Although there was never enough bread, each regiment was equipped with a field kitchen and its members managed to feed themselves by requisitioning. Three days before the Marne von der Marwitz, whose cavalry was as far ahead as anyone, recorded that the supply arrangements were still well regulated.116 As forward troops, the horsemen were of course first into new areas in which to requisition, but the German army was not about to be defeated because of the logistic weaknesses in its war plan. What remains true, however, is that it performed well in 1914 in spite of its supply arrangements, not because of them. Moltke’s post-war critics blamed him, above all, for not hearkening to the words of the dying Schlieffen, that the right wing be kept strong. In 1914 the right wing was as strong as the logistics of the Schlieffen plan permitted it to be. By the beginning of September those soldiers who marched with it were totally exhausted; many were reservists and had necessarily been unfit at the start of the campaign; all, their day’s march completed, had then to begin foraging for food.
The biggest drain on the German army’s manpower, and cause of the eventual weakness of the right wing, was the consequence of the advance itself. Constant fighting, particularly in the light of ill-conceived tactics, wore down the strength of regiments. On the right of the line many units had suffered 40 per-cent losses. On the left, the 1st Bavarian infantry regiment lost fifteen officers and 1,000 men, over a third of its strength, on 28 August alone. Each battalion of one regiment of foot guards was down to company strength by 29 August. The fact that so many reservists had been used from the outset, and the fact that what transport there was was needed for supply, meant that these gaps could not be made good. By 6 September the German army’s field strength had fallen by about 265,000 men, the total of killed, wounded, and missing.117
Relatively, therefore, even the loss of five corps—which was what the right wing bore by 6 September—was less important in the manpower balance. After the fall of Liege the Belgian army had pulled back to the fortified camp of Antwerp: two German corps had therefore been detached to cover Belgium. The investment of Maubeuge was completed by 27 August, but the town, despite the inadequacies of its defences, held out until 7 September, so pinning a further corps and also blocking the main Cologne-Paris railway line. But the decision for which Moltke has been most severely censured was his reaction to the alarm of the 8th German army in East Prussia, faced by a Russian advance of considerable strength. Moltke’s initial inclination was to send up to six corps, and he considered drawing them from his left wing. However, it was felt that the Bavarians, who constituted the 6th army, were unlikely to be ardent defenders of Prussia, not least because their army wished to be kept as an intact unit. Nor was it clear in operational terms that the 6th army had corps to spare. Bülow, on the other hand, declared that the two corps besieging Namur were available when their task was completed. On 25 August, the day of apparent victory, Moltke ordered these two corps to the aid of the 8th army. At the time neither Bülow nor Tappen, both convinced that the campaign in the west was settled, deemed the decision unwise. The two corps mattered less in themselves than as part of a gradual erosion of German strength. Moltke’s lines of communications were lengthening by the day; his front broadened as the movement through France developed—by 30 August it would be 50 kilometres longer than it had been a week previously. The combination of the detached corps, the heavy losses through tactical ineptitude, and exhaustion through the march and its attendant supply problems meant that a stage would be reached when the Germans had too few men.
Thus, in almost every key index of military strength—in command, in communications, in manpower, in tactics—the balance was swinging from Germany to France. Much of the swing was inherent in the advance itself and in the plan which had given rise to it. But the Germans did not defeat themselves. All too much attention has been devoted to what the Germans did or did not do, to asking why the Schlieffen plan failed. The Marne was a French victory. The French had to manoeuvre in order to win; they had to fight in order to check the Germans; and to do this the morale of the army and its commanders had to be sustained despite punishing retreats.
THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE
Up until 25 August Joffre’s attention to his left wing had been grudging. The conventional wisdom is that what little he did was no more than the product of Lanrezac’s importunities and unanticipated German advances. But the idea of manoeuvring in the space on the left and defending in the wooded hills on the right had been present in his calculations in 1911–12, and had re-emerged once more on 2 and 3 August 1914. On both occasions what had held him back was uncertainty about Britain—whether it would condone a French breach of Belgian neutrality, whether it would deploy the BEF on the continent, and, if it did, whether the latter would be in time.118 On this interpretation the battles in Alsace and Lorraine were fought because British strategy meant that an offensive in the east was the only option available to Joffre if he was to support the Russians and to fix the Germans. Even if such an analysis is overstated, its relevance is endorsed by two further observations. The first is the alacrity with which Joffre responded to the threat of the German right wing after 25 August, and the second is his refusal then to adopt the more cautious and conservative strategy advocated by Berthelot.119 The latter proposed an offensive directed against the inner flank of the German right wing, opposite the BEE Joffre, however, ordered the centre of gravity of French operations to be switched from Lorraine to Amiens. His object was to create a fresh army to be outside the German enveloping wing, and to strike it from west to east as it passed on its march south.
Military orthodoxy in 1914 regarded redeployment by rail during the course of operations as excessively dangerous. Troops in trains were necessarily out of the fighting line. But Joffre’s own experience with railways, and the fact that he had already—before the war—studied the possibility of just the operation which he now proposed, encouraged him to try it. The legacy of his predecessors gave him the means to do so. The multiplication of track between central France and the eastern frontier, designed to hasten the concentration which had just taken place, was now used to bring the troops back again. Maunoury’s army of Lorraine and part of Pau’s army of Alsace were brought west to form a new 6th army, under Maunoury and formed of nine infantry divisions and two cavalry. A total of 163 trains were required, and between 27 August and 2 September an average of thirty-two trains sped westwards every twenty-four hours. By 10 September a
total of twenty infantry divisions and three cavalry divisions had been moved by rail from the French right to the centre or left.120 On 23 August the three armies constituting the German right wing could muster 24.5 divisions against 17.5 allied divisions: on 6 September they confronted forty-one allied divisions.121
Such a manoeuvre would not have been possible without the defences of the Meuse and of Lorraine. The French redeployment meant that the German left wing was now stronger than the troops which opposed it. Because of the overall manpower superiority which France was now beginning to enjoy, the margin was not as great as that gained by the French in the west. But the corollary of the manoeuvre which Joffre initiated on 25 August was a successful defence in the east, one in which the fortifications of Séré de Rivières, and even of Vauban, helped compensate for local manpower inferiority.
The possibility of the French withdrawing troops from the east to the west was one regularly reviewed in German general staff studies between 1905 and 1914.122 It meant that the task of the German 6th and 7th armies was always much more ambivalent than that of the right wing. Even Schlieffen himself never saw it as that of a ‘revolving door’: he assumed the French would defend, not attack, and therefore the German left wing was itself to attack, in order to fix the French and prevent their redeployment in the path of the German right. Moltke, recognizing the likelihood of a French attack into Lorraine, had favoured pulling back so that the French advance would enter a sack and be enveloped from either wing. In the event, the battles of Morhange and Sarrebourg had been partial engagements from which the 1st and 2nd French armies had been able to extricate themselves. The chief of staff of 6th army itself had, at the start of the war, seen the principal role of the left wing as being that of the protector of the flank of the right. Its defensive roles accomplished, the German left could—he reckoned—either attack so as to fix the French or, if the French proved weaker than the Germans, it could carry the offensive across the Moselle.
