Schlieffen Plan

The Schlieffen Plan is commonly Ð'- though misleadingy Ð'- identified with the German western offensive at the start of the First World War in August 1914, which began as a campaign of rapid movement but ended in deadlock and trench warfare. The plan is generally seen as a desperate gamble almost certain to fail, and its recklessness is counted as part of Germany's war guilt Ð'- the plan held out the false promise of a quick victory, and so it underpinned the "short war illusion" that led Germany into a long war of attrition, ending with her defeat and collapse in 1918. This analysis confuses two quite different moments in history. The Schlieffen Plan was not designed to meet the strategic challenge Germany faced in 1914, but rather to pre-empt it by winning a more limited and manageable war at the time it was written in 1906.

1. The consensus is that the Schlieffen Plan epitomized the arrogance of German militarism in believing that swift and total victory could be gained in a war on two fronts against a numerically superior coalition. It is held that the Schlieffen Plan initially deployed most of the German army in the west, with a small force left in the east to conduct a holding operation against the Russians. After a lightning campaign leading to a decisive victory over France within six weeks, Germany could turn her full might against the Russians. The standard verdict is that France could not have been comprehensively defeated within such a short time, so the plan was quite inadequate to the strategic dilemma confronting Germany.

Anyone who believes all this has simply not read the Schlieffen Plan. That document is solely concerned with a war in the west. It does not call for the deployment of any forces against Russia, and contains no reference at all to a six-week deadline for the defeat of France. The great historical misunderstanding has been to regard Schlieffen's plan as a half-baked scheme for fighting a war on two fronts, when it was in fact a carefully reasoned scheme for fighting a war limited to the west, at a time when this seemed to be a distinct possibility. The German west-front war-plan in 1914 was devised by the younger Helmuth von Moltke, and while it bore some resemblance to Schlieffen's proposal, it was extensively adapted to the changed circumstances, in particular to the necessity of now deploying against Russia as well as France. If we are to understand the original Schlieffen Plan, we must disentangle it from the events of 1914 and examine it in its own right and context. Then we can turn to the altered version that Moltke actually used at the beginning of the First World War.

In February 1891 Count Alfred von Schlieffen was appointed Chief of the Prussian General Staff, a post which he held until the end of 1905. The most important responsibility of the General Staff was to produce the annual deployment plans, which stipulated how the German army was to be drawn up ready for battle in case of war. The initial pattern of deployment was the basis of the operational plan for the conduct of the war itself. The General Staff routinely tested these war plans in studies and exercises. During most of Schlieffen's time as Chief of Staff, the essential strategic problem for Germany was indeed the likelihood that the next war would have to be fought against two enemies on widely separated fronts, the French in the west and the Russians in the east. Schlieffen never found a convincing solution to this problem. His suggestion was to deploy much greater forces on one of the fronts in order to defeat that enemy quickly and decisively, and then to use rail mobility to reinforce the other front and win a decisive victory there too. That sounded fine in theory, but when it was tested in exercises it proved hard to achieve. An initial victory on one front could not be fully exploited because of the need to switch forces promptly to the other front. Once that happened, the first enemy could recuperate and resume the struggle Ð'- thus giving support and encouragement to the second enemy and making his defeat more difficult. None of Schlieffen's two-front exercises resulted in the complete eradication of either of Germany's foes, and in his bleaker moments he could envisage the German army shuttling back and forth between the two theatres of war until it was completely exhausted. He reassured his staff officers that it should be an advantage to fight on "interior lines", that is, in between two enemy forces, picking them off one at a time. In reality, though, he remained uncertain about the chances of solving the two-front problem.

But with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, it suddenly appeared that Russia might be unable to come to the aid of her French ally in the case of a war in Europe. Schlieffen was eager to explore the strategic potential of this new situation, and his outdoor staff exercises (Generalstabsreisen) of June and September 1904 simulated a concentration of the entire German army in the west. In November 1904 he drew up his outline deployment plans for the year 1905-6, and one of the alternatives he gave was to commit the whole of the German army to the west in the case of a one-front war (Aufmarsch I), an option which was also retained for the year 1906-7. Even now Schlieffen did not discount the possibility of a two-front war, and he kept an alternative Aufmarsch II for this eventuality. But he clearly believed that if it came to war with France, Russia would probably be out of the picture for the time being. Furthermore, the first Moroccan crisis of 1905-6 exacerbated tensions between France and Germany. Schlieffen did not try to use his influence to bring about a preventive war at this favourable juncture, but he did write the Schlieffen Plan to show in detail how France might be completely vanquished if she were to take on Germany without Russian support.

Shortly before stepping down from his position, Schlieffen had begun work on the document known as the Schlieffen Plan. The first month of his retirement was spent in completing the project so that it could be handed on to his successor, the younger Helmuth von Moltke, in February 1906. This long memorandum, entitled "War against France", outlined a strategy for enveloping and destroying the French army. It was based on the premise that France "cannot count on effective Russian support". In accordance with the existing Aufmarsch I, Schlieffen proposed that the whole of the German army should be deployed in the west. Seven-eighths of this force would be concentrated on the right wing for a massive sweep through Belgium and the Netherlands into northern France. The violation of Dutch and Belgian neutrality was accepted as a strategic necessity enabling the Germans to by-pass the enemy fortifications on the Franco-German border, which Schlieffen regarded