The Schlieffen Plan (, ) is a name given after the First World War to German war plans, due to the influence of Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen and his thinking on an invasion of France and Belgium, that began on 7 August 1914. Schlieffen was Chief of the General Staff of the German Army from 1891 to 1906. In 1905 and 1906, Schlieffen devised an army deployment plan for a decisive (war-winning) offensive against France. German forces were to invade France through the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium rather than across the common border.
After losing the First World War, the German official historians of the and other writers, described the plan as a blueprint for victory. (Colonel-General) Helmuth von Moltke the Younger had succeeded Schlieffen as Chief of the German General Staff in 1906 and was dismissed after the First Battle of the Marne (5–12 September 1914). German historians claimed that Moltke had ruined the plan by tampering with it, out of timidity. They managed to establish a narrative that Moltke failed to follow the blueprint devised by Schlieffen, condemning the belligerents to four years of attrition warfare.
In 1956, Gerhard Ritter published (The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth), which began a period of revision, when the details of the supposed Schlieffen Plan were subjected to scrutiny. Treating the plan as a blueprint was rejected because this was contrary to the tradition of Prussian war planning established by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, in which military operations were considered to be inherently unpredictable. Mobilisation and deployment plans were essential but campaign plans were pointless; rather than attempting to dictate to subordinate commanders, the commander gave his intent and subordinates achieved it through (mission tactics).
In writings from the 1970s, Martin van Creveld, John Keegan, Hew Strachan and others studied the practical aspects of an invasion of France through Belgium and Luxembourg. They judged that the physical constraints of German, Belgian and French railways and the Belgian and northern French road networks made it impossible to move enough troops far enough and fast enough for them to fight a decisive battle if the French retreated from the frontier. Most of the pre-1914 planning of the German General Staff was secret and the documents were destroyed when deployment plans were superseded each April. The bombing of Potsdam in April 1945 destroyed much of the Prussian army archive and only incomplete records and other documents survived. Some records turned up after the fall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), making an outline of German war planning possible for the first time, proving wrong much post-1918 writing.
In the 2000s, a document, RH61/v.96, was discovered in the trove inherited from the GDR, which had been used in a 1930s study of pre-war German General Staff planning. Inferences that Schlieffen's war planning was solely offensive were found to have been made by extrapolating his writings and speeches on tactics into grand strategy. From a 1999 article in War in History and in Inventing the Schlieffen Plan (2002) to The Real German War Plan, 1906–1914 (2011), Terence Zuber engaged in a debate with Terence Holmes, Annika Mombauer, Robert Foley, Gerhard Gross, Holger Herwig and others. Zuber proposed that the Schlieffen Plan was a myth concocted in the 1920s by partial writers, intent on exculpating themselves and proving that German war planning did not cause the First World War. Later scholarship did not uphold the Zuber thesis except as a catalyst for research which revealed that Schlieffen had been far less dogmatic than had been presumed.
Background
After the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in 1815, European aggression had turned outwards and the fewer wars fought within the continent had been (cabinet wars) local conflicts decided by professional armies loyal to dynastic rulers. Military strategists had adapted by creating plans to suit the characteristics of the post-Napoleonic scene. In the late nineteenth century, military thinking remained dominated by the German Wars of Unification (1864–1871), which had been short and decided by great battles of annihilation. In Vom Kriege (On War, 1832) Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) had defined decisive battle as a victory which had political results
, (prostration strategy, later termed (destruction strategy) a policy of seeking decisive victory) replaced the slow, cautious approach to war that had been overturned by Napoleon. German strategists judged the defeat of the Austrians in the Austro-Prussian War (14 June – 23 August 1866) and the French imperial armies in 1870, as evidence that a strategy of decisive victory could still succeed.
Franco-Prussian War
Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800–1891), led the armies of the North German Confederation that achieved a speedy and decisive victory against the armies of the Second French Empire (1852–1870) of Napoleon III (1808–1873). On 4 September, after the Battle of Sedan (1 September 1870), there had been a republican coup d'état and the installation of a Government of National Defence (4 September 1870 – 13 February 1871), that declared (war to the uttermost). From the French Army confronted Moltke the Elder with new, improvised armies. The French destroyed bridges, railways, telegraphs and other infrastructure; food, livestock and other material was evacuated to prevent it falling into German hands. A was promulgated on 2 November and by February 1871, the republican army had increased to Despite inexperience, lack of training and a shortage of officers and artillery, the size of the new armies forced Moltke to divert large forces to confront them, while still besieging Paris, isolating French garrisons in the rear and guarding lines of communication from (irregular military forces).
The Germans had defeated the forces of the Second Empire by superior numbers and then found the tables turned; only their superior training and organisation had enabled them to capture Paris and dictate peace terms. Attacks by forced the diversion of to guard railways and bridges, which put great strain on Prussian manpower. Moltke wrote later,
He had already written in 1867, that French patriotism would lead them to make a supreme effort and use all their national resources. The quick victories of 1870 led Moltke to hope that he had been mistaken but by December, he planned an against the French population by taking the war into the south, once the size of the Prussian Army had been increased by another of reservists. Moltke intended to destroy or capture the remaining resources which the French possessed, against the protests of the German civilian authorities, who after the fall of Paris, negotiated a quick end to the war.
Colmar von der Goltz (1843–1916) and other military thinkers, like Fritz Hoenig in (The People's War in the Loire Valley in Autumn 1870, 1893–1899) and Georg von Widdern in (Petty Warfare and the Supply Service, 1892–1907), called the short-war belief of mainstream writers like Friedrich von Bernhardi and Hugo von Freytag-Loringhoven an illusion. They saw the longer war against the improvised armies of the French republic, the indecisive battles of the winter of 1870–1871 and the against on the lines of communication, as better examples of the nature of modern war. Hoenig and Widdern conflated the old sense of as a partisan war, with a newer sense of a war between industrialised states, fought by nations-in-arms and tended to explain French success by reference to German failings, implying that fundamental reforms were unnecessary.
In (Leon Gambetta and the Army of the Loire, 1874) and (Leon Gambetta and his Armies, 1877), Goltz wrote that Germany must adopt ideas used by Léon Gambetta, by improving the training of Reserve and officers, to increase the effectiveness of the (supply service troops). Goltz advocated the conscription of every able-bodied man and a reduction of the period of service to two years (a proposal that got him sacked from the Great General Staff but was then introduced in 1893) in a nation-in-arms. The mass army would be able to compete with armies raised on the model of the improvised French armies and be controlled from above, to avoid the emergence of a radical and democratic people's army. Goltz maintained the theme in other publications up to 1914, notably in (The People in Arms, 1883) and used his position as a corps commander from 1902 to 1907 to implement his ideas, particularly in improving the training of Reserve officers and creating a unified youth organisation, the (Young Germany League) to prepare teenagers for military service.
Ermattungsstrategie
The (strategy debate) was a public and at times acrimonious argument after Hans Delbrück (1848–1929), challenged the orthodox army view and its critics. Delbrück was editor of the (Prussian Annals), author of (The History of the Art of War within the Framework of Political History; four volumes 1900–1920) and professor of modern history at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1895. General Staff historians and commentators like Friedrich von Bernhardi, Rudolph von Caemmerer, Max Jähns and Reinhold Koser, believed that Delbrück was challenging the strategic wisdom of the army. Delbrück had introduced (source criticism) developed by Leopold von Ranke, into the study of military history and attempted a reinterpretation of (On War). Delbrück wrote that Clausewitz had intended to divide strategy into (strategy of destruction) or (strategy of exhaustion) but had died in 1830 before he could revise the book.
Delbrück wrote that Frederick the Great had used during the Seven Years' War because eighteenth century armies were small and made up of professionals and pressed men. The professionals were hard to replace and the conscripts would run away if the army tried to live off the land, operate in close country or pursue a defeated enemy, in the manner of the later armies of the Coalition Wars. Dynastic armies were tied to magazines for supply, which made them incapable of fulfilling a strategy of annihilation. Delbrück analysed the European alliance system that had developed since the 1890s, the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War and concluded that the rival forces were too well-balanced for a quick war. The growth in the size of armies made a swift victory unlikely and British intervention would add a naval blockade to the rigours of an indecisive land war. Germany would face a war of attrition, similar to the view Delbrück had formed of the Seven Years' War. By the 1890s, the had entered public discourse, when soldiers like the two Moltkes, also doubted the possibility of a quick victory in a European war. The German army was forced to examine its assumptions about war because of this dissenting view and some writers moved closer to Delbrück's position. The debate provided the Imperial German Army with a fairly familiar alternative to , after the opening campaigns of 1914.
Moltke the Elder Deployment plans, 1871–1872 to 1890–1891