The army in the German Empire represented the epitome of these principles, while its development after 1871 reflected both the demographic and technological transformations of the late nineteenth century. Technically, there was no single “German army.”16 Its great core was the army of the state of Prussia, which had absorbed the armies of most of the smaller German states after unification in 1871. Several of the larger German states – the kingdoms of Saxony, Württemberg, and Bavaria – retained degrees of administrative control over their own units in peacetime, including the powers of promotion within their officer corps. Upon declaration of war, however, the constitution provided that all German contingents came under the command of the German emperor. The effect of this provision was to place all German units under the operational control of the Prussian General Staff.
The pattern of military administration was nonetheless uniform throughout the German empire. On the eve of war in 1914, German land forces were organized into 217 infantry regiments distributed into twenty-five corps, all but one of which (the Prussian Guard Corps) were in turn based in “home” military districts. The peacetime strength of the army numbered about 800,000 soldiers of all arms, who had been called up at the age of twenty. Upon completion of a two-year term of service these young men passed for five years into a first levy of reserves, where they remained available for action alongside the active troops, and then into the Landwehr, or second levy of reserves, in which they served until they were nearly forty years old. The active peacetime army thus remained small, but combining the active troops with the first-levy reserves made it possible within a matter of days to mobilize a well-trained combat force nearly three times as large.
The soldiers who were the objects of these maneuvers were supplied with the military fruits of industrial advance.17 In Germany and elsewhere, combining the technologies of steel and nitrate explosives had led to the introduction of rapid-firing weapons that were vastly more durable, long-ranged, accurate, and destructive than those of the Franco-Prussian war. The standard infantry weapon in the German army was a bolt-action magazine rifle, which fired 7.65mm shells. Its effective range was two kilometers. The heavier weapons were more fearsome still. To every infantry regiment was attached a machine-gun company, each of which tended six weapons that fired up to 500 rounds per minute at a range of four kilometers. The standard artillery piece was a breech-loading 77 mm field gun, which had a range of 8.4 kilometers; this weapon, which represented the foundation of the artillery arm, was distributed in 633 batteries throughout the army. It was supplemented by an array of heavier guns and howitzers, most of which were designed to accompany the movements of foot soldiers and cavalry.
The dramatic increase in the size of European armies generally and the sophistication of the tools that they employed portended far-reaching changes in the face of warfare; but their impact was difficult for planners to gauge. Most indications suggested the growing difficulty of mobile, offensive operations by mass armies in the face of entrenched defenses and the intense firepower of these new weapons. For the German planners, these prospects presented special strategic problems. The great challenge in Berlin was to devise an effective way to fight on two fronts against the allied armies of France and Russia, both of which offered formidable obstacles to offensive operations. If the sheer size of the Russian army militated against a rapid German victory in this theater, the construction of a string of redoubtable fortresses in eastern France, from Belfort to Verdun, dimmed German hopes for a reprise of the triumphs of 1870 in the west.
German planners had designed a succession of unpalatable solutions to these strategic problems before Alfred von Schlieffen became chief of the General Staff in 1891.18 Schlieffen embodied – to the point of caricature – the German conviction that planning represented the key to success in modern warfare. He was more alive than most of his contemporaries to the difficulties of mounting offensive operations against well-established defensive positions; and he had a dread of frontal offensives at all levels of combat. He was also convinced that his forces could not prevail in a long war against the combined resources of Germany’s likely antagonists. If he believed nonetheless that the country could win a two-front war, his confidence resided above all in the organization and managerial efficiency of the German army – the virtues required to mobilize a force that would be initially so superior in numbers and mobility as to inflict decisive defeats on its enemies.
Schlieffen’s tenure in office was devoted to planning a war that Germany could win against both France and Russia. He concluded that German forces would have to engage these antagonists one at a time and that the anticipated sluggishness of the Russian mobilization recommended an initial campaign in the west, against the French. The specifics of this campaign, which was to culminate in the destruction of the French armies, then became Schlieffen’s obsession. The general envisaged a colossal strategic envelopment, a twentieth-century reprise of Cannae, the great battle in which the Carthaginian warrior Hannibal had destroyed an entire Roman army in 216 BC. Schlieffen’s vision featured the outflanking of the French fortress system by means of a grandiose wheeling movement through Belgium and into France from the north. That this scenario meant the violation of a sovereign state’s neutrality, hence the addition of Belgium and probably Britain to the roster of Germany’s enemies, weighed little on Schlieffen, for whom diplomatic considerations (and their long-term military implications) signified in all events less than the immediate calculations of war. The contours of his vast design were already in evidence in the first drafts of the plan that bore his name.19 In subsequent revisions it became bolder still (see Map 1). The arc of the German pivot broadened, and the route of its forward elements extended northward into the Netherlands and westward to the English Channel. The furious advance of the right wing of the German armies into France from the north was to complement the retreat of German forces in the south, so the French would be lured into a breathtaking “reversal of fronts,” a strategic “revolving door,” in which the French armies would find the bulk of the German forces in their rear.
Map 1 Schlieffen’s plan
The famous memorandum, “War against France,” that Schlieffen composed on the eve of his retirement was devoted to this vision. “The Germans must,” it concluded, “be as strong as possible on their right wing, because here the decisive battle is to be expected.”20 This expectation became the basis of German operational planning for the remainder of the prewar period. It fell to the man who succeeded Schlieffen, in 1906, to realize the potential in Schlieffen’s vision, as well as to contend with the enormous practical problems it posed.
Schlieffen’s successor was Moltke, the nephew of the great soldier who had led the Prussian armies to victory in the mid-century wars of unification.21 The younger Moltke’s legacy was thus difficult in more than one respect; and his caution reflected a deep sense of personal insecurity, as well as his professional doubts about the military plan that he had inherited. Many of the adjustments that he wrote into Schlieffen’s plan addressed its logistical deficiencies, but his critics later charged that his alterations also sapped the plan of its basic conception and brilliance. In the calculation that Germany could ill afford another enemy in the field, he decided not to invade the Netherlands – a step that reduced the arc of the German wheeling motion and shortened the supply lines of its vanguard units, although it also threatened to bottle the movement of both troops and supplies in the more constricted spaces of the Meuse valley. More controversial was another decision, which followed from his reluctance to allow French forces onto German territory. Moltke strengthened the left wing of his forces, the southern sector along the French border, at the expense of his right wing, which comprised the armies that were to undertake the invasion of Belgium. Not only did this decision weaken the spearhead of the great flanking movement, but it also robbed the plan of its revolving-door effect, which was, in Schlieffen’s thinking, a key to the annihilation of the French forces.
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bsp; The modified Schlieffen Plan was nonetheless the basic operational plan with which the German army entered the war. Whether or not it was conceived as a panacea or a “recipe for victory,” it provided German military leaders with cautious confidence in the face of the impending uncertainties of war. Armed with the plan, most soldiers – and civilians – expected a campaign on the model of 1870, in which a victory over the major elements of the French forces would eventuate within the first months of hostilities, reducing the western campaign to minor operations as the bulk of German forces redeployed in the east.22 The absence of plans or stockpiles for a war of more than several months was not due to frivolity or incompetence; it bespoke the widely shared assumption that the conflict would end within a year.23 In the event, the defeat of these expectations was the defining moment of the First World War.
Tannenberg and the Marne
It started well. The German troops who had departed amid the public celebrations of early August were dispatched with remarkably little confusion by train to the east and west, where their corps were amalgamated – in keeping with the priorities of the Schlieffen Plan – into eight armies. Seven of them, which together comprised 1,600,000 men, accordingly deployed in the west; five of these, which represented two-thirds of the German forces in the west, were concentrated in the northern sector.
The initial action appeared to reward the care with which the German planners had prepared for it. On August 4, the day after the declaration of war on France – and, more pertinently, day three of the great plan – German forces were in Belgium in order to seize the fortress of Liège on the Meuse, whose position athwart the designated marching routes of the northernmost German armies made it a strategic objective of the utmost urgency. After a brief battle, which exhibited the destructive power of the German heavy guns, the fortress fell punctually, allowing the German armies to begin their march through Belgium on schedule. This march commenced on August 16 and made spectacular progress against light resistance (see Map 2). The Belgian capital fell four days later, as German armies to the southeast entered France. The magnitude, speed, and scope of the German advance surprised alike the Belgians, the French, and the British, whose Expeditionary Force arrived on the continent in time to engage the lead German army in southern Belgium on August 23, before falling back, like the French, in general retreat. By August 25 predictions of a brilliant German triumph, a repeat of 1870, began to look sober.
Map 2 The German advance, August–September 1914
The confidence was premature. It disguised difficulties that were basic to the German campaign and could only accumulate with the continuation of operations. The rapidity and expanse of the German advance required enormous, prolonged exertions of armies that did not yet enjoy the support of motorized vehicles. To the insistent dictates of the schedule, soldiers in the lead armies marched up to twenty-five miles a day. Problems of provisioning these men – and their horses – grew with each day’s advance beyond assigned railheads. Roads that were jammed with thousands of horse-drawn wagons made the supply and reinforcement of the units increasingly difficult. Resistance from the Belgian army remained an annoyance. Meanwhile, unforeseen developments threatened the strategic conception of the campaign. To the south, in Lorraine, initial German successes in action against the French tempted Moltke to seek a decision in this theater and to launch an offensive on August 25, for which he drew reserves that might otherwise have gone to his northern wing.
The news from the east threatened the German plan more profoundly.24 The Russian mobilization was swifter than the Germans had planned; by mid-August two massive Russian armies, which together numbered 650,000 men, were preparing to march from the south and east onto German soil in East Prussia, a province that was screened, in keeping with Schlieffen’s projections, by a single German army of about 135,000 men. An initial encounter with the eastern Russian army on August 20 resulted in a German defeat and a panicky decision by the German commander in the theater to order a general withdrawal westward. When reports of these developments reached Moltke, at his headquarters in Luxembourg, he himself made several momentous decisions. He first called Paul von Hindenburg out of retirement to replace the German commander in the east; and he named Erich Ludendorff, who had led the German attack on Liège a few days earlier, to be Hindenburg’s chief of staff. Then, on August 25, in a sign of his confidence in the outcome of the western campaign, Moltke decided to remove two corps from Belgium in order to reinforce the forces in the east.
The situation in the east had already turned significantly for the better, however. When Hindenburg and Ludendorff arrived in East Prussia, they discovered that the staff of the eastern command had already reversed the decision to withdraw and had ordered a general redeployment, which the new commanders endorsed. Capitalizing on the failure of all coordination between the two Russian armies, as well as on the availability of a modern rail system in East Prussia, the bulk of the German armies moved rapidly from the eastern part of the province to converge opposite the southern Russian army, which they surrounded on three sides (see Map 3). The encounter that followed was one of the great strategic achievements of the war. In a maneuver that would have made Schlieffen proud, the German forces in the center withdrew, luring the Russians into a pocket where they found themselves nearly surrounded. In three days of fighting, between August 27 and 30, the Germans compensated in their mobility and weaponry – particularly their artillery – for their great inferiority in numbers. The Battle of Tannenberg, as it quickly became known, resulted in Russian losses of 120,000, most of whom were taken prisoner. The Germans, joined only now by the reinforcements from the west, thereupon turned eastward, where, in a series of encounters in early September known as the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, they pushed the eastern Russian army out of Germany and took an additional 125,000 Russian prisoners.
Map 3 The Battle of Tannenberg, August 1914
There was no little irony to these developments in the east. The Germans had exploited their mobility and planning to defeat two superior enemy armies in succession, in a campaign whose high point was a strategic envelopment reminiscent of Cannae. Schlieffen’s vision had materialized in the wrong theater.
In the right theater, circumstances were meanwhile conspiring to defeat this vision. In the east the Germans had enjoyed a clear superiority in the coordination of their forces. In the west they faced much greater challenges in harmonizing the movements of the five armies that were wheeling though Belgium and northern France. The plan demanded that the flanks of these huge moving bodies remain in contact – an undertaking that grew more difficult as each day’s march broadened the gaps to be spanned. The technologies that linked the advancing armies to Moltke’s headquarters, and to one another, were inadequate to the challenge. Wireless telegraphy was in its infancy and easily jammed, while wires strung through hostile rear areas were easily cut. As a result, vital information traveled the crowded roads, via couriers on horseback or in motor vehicles, along the German lines.
The hope of reducing these difficulties of communication figured in the controversial German decision of August 30. The commander of the lead German army resolved to swing to the southeast in pursuit of retreating French and British forces, rather than continuing to the southwest, as planned, in order to encircle Paris. Moltke, who still awaited a German breakthrough in Lorraine and welcomed the convergence of his own forces, concurred. The decision meant the abandonment of the Schlieffen Plan, however, and whatever basis the German commanders had had for anticipating one another’s moves. Contact between the two westernmost German armies thereupon broke down as they advanced in early September towards the river Marne, where, to the east of Paris, the French and British forces were regrouping.
The furious hostilities that raged in the vicinity of this stream in the first half of September became known as the First Battle of the Marne.25 It represented a decisive moment in the war. The position of the three German armies in action became precarious. The Brit
ish drove into the gap between the two western armies, while a French army, newly assembled in Paris out of units brought in from the southeast, threatened the German position from the west. The German decision on September 9 to retreat belonged to a lieutenant-colonel, who was Moltke’s only contact to the scene of battle; the decision of needs applied to all three German armies, which began a concerted withdrawal to a more secure line to the north, along the river Aisne, where they dug in.
The aftermath of this battle witnessed a desperate German attempt to salvage the remnants of Schlieffen’s plan by means of a renewed flanking movement, this time to the north. For the next two months the opposing armies were in constant contact, as they sought, as if in a clinch, to maneuver around one another towards the coast of the English Channel. This action culminated in late October and early November, in an extended battle around the city of Ypres in the southwestern corner of Belgian Flanders. The failure of either side to break through the other’s position cast the final piece into the impenetrable wall known henceforth as the western front (see Map 4). There were no more flanks to turn. From the Flemish coast to the Swiss border, the armies of Imperial Germany faced those of the allied western powers along a continuous front of some 450 miles.
Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 Page 4
