41 Facts About Schlieffen Plan

Schlieffen Plan is a name given after the First World War to pre-war German war plans, due to the influence of Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen and his thinking on an invasion of France and Belgium, which began on 4 August 1914.

Schlieffen Plan 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 war-winning offensive against the French Third Republic.

Post-war writing by senior German officers like Hermann von Kuhl, Gerhard Tappen, Wilhelm Groener and the historians led by the former Wolfgang Forster, managed to establish a commonly accepted narrative that Moltke the Younger failed to follow the blueprint devised by Schlieffen Plan and condemned the belligerents to four years of attrition warfare.

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, a view which was supported by Hew Strachan.

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Schlieffen Plan had already written, in 1867, that French patriotism would lead them to make a supreme effort and use all the national resources.

Schlieffen Plan was seen as a safe choice, being junior, anonymous outside the General Staff and with few interests outside the army.

Schlieffen Plan concentrated on matters he could influence and pressed for increases in the size of the army and the adoption of new weapons.

Schlieffen Plan tried to make the army more operationally capable so that it was better than its potential enemies and could achieve a decisive victory.

Schlieffen Plan continued the practice of staff rides tours of territory where military operations might take place and war games, to teach techniques to command a mass conscript army.

The new national armies were so huge that battles would be spread over a much greater space than in the past and Schlieffen Plan expected that army corps would fight equivalent to the tactical engagements of smaller dynastic armies.

War against France, the memorandum later known as the "Schlieffen Plan", was a strategy for a war of extraordinarily big battles, in which corps commanders would be independent in how they fought, provided that it was according to the intent of the commander in chief.

In 1899, Schlieffen added the manoeuvre to German war plans, as a possibility, if the French pursued a defensive strategy.

The German army was more powerful and by 1905, after the Russian defeat in Manchuria, Schlieffen judged the army to be formidable enough to make the northern flanking manoeuvre the basis of a war plan against France alone.

In 1905, Schlieffen Plan wrote that the Russo-Japanese War, had shown that the power of Russian army had been overestimated and that it would not recover quickly from the defeat.

Schlieffen Plan considered other possibilities in 1905, using war games to model a Russian invasion of eastern Germany against a smaller German army.

Schlieffen Plan was open-minded about a defensive strategy and the political advantages of the Entente being the aggressor, not just the "military technician" portrayed by Ritter.

The variety of the 1905 war games show that Schlieffen Plan took account of circumstances; if the French attacked Metz and Strasbourg, the decisive battle would be fought in Lorraine.

Copies of Schlieffen Plan XVII were issued to army commanders on 7 February 1914 and the final draft was ready on 1 May The document was not a campaign plan but it contained a statement that the Germans were expected to concentrate the bulk of their army on the Franco-German border and might cross before French operations could begin.

Schlieffen Plan XVII was an offensive into Alsace-Lorraine and southern Belgium.

Schlieffen Plan'storians produced Der Weltkrieg, a narrative history in fourteen volumes published from 1925 to 1944, which became the only source written with free access to the German documentary records of the war.

Creveld thought that Schlieffen Plan had paid little attention to supply matters, understanding the difficulties but trusting to luck, rather than concluding that such an operation was impractical.

Schlieffen Plan was able to predict the railway demolitions carried out in Belgium, naming some of the ones that caused the worst delays in 1914.

In 1998, John Keegan wrote that Schlieffen Plan had desired to repeat the frontier victories of the Franco-Prussian War in the interior of France but that fortress-building since that war had made France harder to attack; a diversion through Belgium remained feasible but this "lengthened and narrowed the front of advance".

Schlieffen Plan pored over maps of Flanders and northern France, to find a route by which the right wing of the German armies could move swiftly enough to arrive within six weeks, after which the Russians would have overrun the small force guarding the eastern approaches of Berlin.

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Schlieffen Plan wrote that commanders must hurry on their men, allowing nothing to stop the advance and not detach forces to guard by-passed fortresses or the lines of communication, yet they were to guard railways, occupy cities and prepare for contingencies, like British involvement or French counter-attacks.

Schlieffen Plan advocated an army, bigger by using untrained and over-age reservists.

Whenever we come across that formula we have to take note of the context, which frequently reveals that Schlieffen Plan is talking about a counter-attack in the framework of a defensive strategy.

In 2005, Robert Foley wrote that Schlieffen Plan and Moltke had recently been severely criticised by Martin Kitchen, who had written that Schlieffen Plan was a narrow-minded technocrat, obsessed with minutiae.

Schlieffen Plan had been convinced that only in a short war was there the possibility of victory and that by making the army operationally superior to its potential enemies, could be made to work.

Schlieffen Plan wrote that people believed that the Schlieffen Plan was for a grand offensive against France to gain a decisive victory in six weeks.

Holmes wrote that no-one had produced a source showing that Schlieffen Plan intended a huge right-wing flanking move into France, in a two-front war.

In none of these plans was a two-front war contemplated; the common view that Schlieffen thought that such an offensive would guarantee victory in a two-front war was wrong.

Schlieffen Plan wrote that the Germans must "wait for the enemy to emerge from behind his defensive ramparts" and intended to defeat the French army by a counter-offensive, tested in the general staff ride west of 1901.

In 1904, Schlieffen Plan had emphasised that the German fortress zones were not havens but jumping-off points for a surprise counter-offensive.

Holmes wrote that Schlieffen Plan never intended to invade France through Belgium, in a war against France and Russia,.

That radical break with Schlieffen Plan's strategic thinking ruined the chance of an early victory in the west on which the Germans had pinned all their hopes of prevailing in a two-front war.

Zuber wrote that the Schlieffen Memorandum was a "rough draft" of a plan to attack France in a one-front war, which could not be regarded as an operational plan, as the memo was never typed up, was stored with Schlieffen's family and envisioned the use of units not in existence.

Schlieffen Plan anticipated that the French could block the German advance by forming a continuous front between Paris and Verdun.

Holmes could not adequately explain this deficiency but wrote that Moltke's preference for offensive tactics was well known and thought that, unlike Schlieffen Plan, Moltke was an advocate of the strategic offensive,.

Schlieffen Plan was faced by a contradiction between strategy and national policy and advocated a short war based on, because of the probability of a long one.