When the war began, over a year ago, the one
thing Germany absolutely did not want was what Germany got, a war on two fronts. Indeed,
the initial German plan for the war was designed to specifically avoid that, and it was called
The Schlieffen Plan. I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War
special episode about the Schlieffen Plan. Now, in our regular episodes last summer we
saw how the German war plans played out in real life as they advanced into Belgium and
northern France before being stopped at the Battle of the Marne, but for those of you
who have only recently joined us, here’s a broader overview of what the German plans
were before the war. Okay, the Schlieffen Plan! The brainchild
of Alfred von S chlieffen, Chief of Staff of the German Imperial Army from 1891 to 1906.
The plan itself began to take form in 1905, and the idea was to find a new general war
plan that would take into account the many new factors that had arisen since the Franco-Prussian
of 1870 and 1871. Factors such as Germany’s diplomatic isolation, which basically left
only Austria-Hungary as a dependable partner and created the problem of a two-front war,
since Russia and France were staunch allies. There were also military and technological
issues to deal with- you now had machine guns and modern artillery, new forms of communication
like the telephone and the radio, and the skyrocketing size of national armies. The
Schlieffen Plan was designed to compensate for the belief that German forces would be
outnumbered by around 5 to 3, and thus a war of attrition would not be winnable. It was
an offensive plan to avoid that future and also: against archenemy France, you don’t
take a defensive posture. So... the original plan was that 7/8 of the
troops deployed to the west were going to circumvent the strong French defenses on the
Franco-German border by marching through Belgium and the Netherlands. This was, already in
1905, an acknowledgement that violating Belgian neutrality might well bring Britain into the
war. Anyhow, the remaining troops would be at the border and would draw the French into
battles with them and then would get outflanked from the north, encircle Paris and drive the
remaining French forces to the south. After this swift success, they could then send most
of the troops over to fight against Russia. There was no plan in place for dealing with
Russia, though, just the French part. Schlieffen was no longer Chief of Staff when
the war broke out, he had been succeeded by Helmut von Moltke- the younger, and Moltke
made a few changes to the plan. For starters, he changed the plan so it only
invaded Belgium and not the Netherlands. He wanted to leave the Netherlands as a supply
corridor since Germany itself might be blockaded. Also, the defense of East Prussia was of greater
importance to Moltke than Schlieffen and had to be provided for. Good thing that he had
a lot more men at his disposal than Schlieffen had had. As we know now, the Schlieffen plan failed
and Germany was forced to fight a two-front war that was often a war of attrition, and
there were a number of reasons for this failure. Indyyy! Yes? Indyyy! Yees? Indyyy! Yeees? *cough* Sorry, hi Indy, it’s Cody from AlternateHistoryHub. Oh hey, I watched your video about Britain
siding with the Central Powers last year. Glad you liked it. I watched your show too
and because of that wanted to go back to some World War 1 scenarios. Since you’re talking
about the Schlieffen Plan, I wanted to mention that I just published a video asking the question:
What if the Schlieffen plan had actually worked? That sounds great! Guys, you should check
out Cody’s video for sure and see how elemental the Schlieffenplan was to the outcome of WW1. Alright! Really like your fire extinguisher
with the clock you have there. But I will be on my way then. Yeah, it’s a real antique. Thanks for stopping
by. Alright, so why did the Schlieffenplan actually
fail? Just looking at the numbers objectively, it
seems doubtful that there were ever enough German troops to achieve the encirclement
of Paris and driving the remaining French troops southward. Not so much that there weren’t
enough men initially, but the fact that casualties couldn’t really be properly replaced. See,
the German Army was as well equipped in general as anyone else, but that was the regular troops.
This was not so for the reserve and replacement troops, who were not even trained with the
new equipment, were not as well trained anyhow, did not have machine gun crews or artillery
regiments, and could not really implement the plan. The plan relied on speed for success, and
speed relied on transportation. So how would that work? At the beginning of the war, Germany had 5,000
cars and 1.4 million horses, but to really move the troops you’d need trains, right?
So you can only go where the tracks go, and once they invaded Belgium and France, the
Belgians and French destroyed the track as they retreated, so it had to be laid again.
One reason Liege was so important to take was that it was a rail way hub; so you couldn’t
go anywhere till you took it, and the railway issues produced big supply issues too. See, much as railways are inflexible, the
whole Schlieffen Plan was inflexible. Once it was set in motion, there was no turning
back and no alternative plan. Here’s a little anecdote from the first days of the war: the
Kaiser got a misleading telegraph from London that claimed the French weren’t mobilizing
at all, so he ordered Moltke to deploy all his troops against Russia. Moltke replied,
“The deployment of millions of men cannot be improvised, it is the result of years of
planning, once set, it cannot be changed. If His Majesty insists on sending all available
troops to the East, they would not get a battle ready army but a bunch of armed men without
any food.” And the movement was so tight that any mistakes
or delays would cause the plan to crumble. And the train schedule didn’t even account
for delayed trains or broken tracks, and the siege of Liege took nearly two weeks instead
of the two days that the Germans had expected, which tied up a lot of troops and prevented
the Germans from using most of the Belgian railways until Liege fell, delaying the plan. Good communication was also important if you
want to get things moving quickly. Germany was on the same technical level as
the other nations when it came to communications. The problem was that telegraphs and radios
became scarce the closer you would get to the front. And right at the front, pigeons
and flags were still used. All this meant that the high command would get an outdated
picture of events and was giving orders based on outdated situations. But one of the biggest mistakes of the whole
thing was misinterpreting how things would be in the east. The original Schlieffen Plan dismissed Russia
as a strong enemy because Russia had just lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, and
the version of the plan in 1914 basically ignored how much Russia had modernized in
the past decade. Russia also mobilized before France, adding additional time pressure on
Moltke in the west, and forcing him to send troops from the western front to the eastern
front before he wanted to. But guess what? Some of them refused to go.
The Bavarian forces at the Franco-German border were the logical choice to send to the east
to defend Prussia; they were on or near German soil and were the easiest to divert, but the
Bavarians refused to go and defend Prussia. Moltke was forced to take troops from Belgium,
much more difficult and time consuming. He had problems with making his generals obey
his exact orders in general. Those Bavarian troops, for example, were under the command
of Prince Ru pprecht, the last Bavarian crown prince, and he had his own interests. See,
the German army was organized federally during peacetime and only during war was it all united
under one command. So Rupprecht refused to take his Bavarian
troops to defend Prussia, and even when he was given the task of just keeping the French
troops at the border occupied, he didn’t like that either, so he went on the offensive,
clearly violating the plan. A German officer was caught by the French
and told them details of the plan, and the French could retreat much more efficiently.
Delays, sieges, poor communications, and the transportation mess that really should have
been anticipated, served only to throw the plan off kilter, even before the Battle of
the Marne. But really, the lack of alternatives and the total inflexibility of the Schlieffen
Plan in many ways doomed it from the start and led to what Germany most wanted to avoid:
a two front war and a bloody war of attrition. They really should have anticipated better
if they ever wanted the plan to work and you are probably wondering what had actually happened
if it actually worked. So, click right here to go over to Cody’s Channel AlternateHistoryHub
and find out. And if you came over from Cody