Was the German defeat on the Western Front caused by the failure of the Schlieffen Plan?
Was the German defeat on the Western Front caused by the failure of the Schlieffen Plan?
Alexander Jenkins
After German foreign policy had caused the country to have hostile countries on either side - France and Russia - Germany needed a plan to win a war on two fronts. This plan was devised in the early twentieth century by Count Alfred von Schlieffen and then tinkered with fairly extensively by the younger Moltke right up until 1914
It centred on a lightning invasion of France through the Low Countries while keeping light defensive forces on the Eastern Front with Russia, and when France was knocked out to turn the army to the East. It was based on the wars of the 1860s/1870s, which Germany had won: but what it forgot was that the enemy had come on a long way since then, as had technology, especially rapidly-firing machine-guns which favoured the defenders, and the use of rail for rapid military transport. The plan relied on the Russians either being incompetent and slow to mobilize, or just deciding to sit tight; the French also being slow to mobilize; and the Belgians and Luxembourgers being totally submissive to the Germans coming through their countries. The Germans' enemies caused the Schlieffen Plan to fail: the Belgians resisted valiantly, putting the plan a crucial two days behind schedule. This resistance also meant that Britain joined the war against Germany, and that the British and French had just enough time to mobilize using the new automobile as well as rail transport. And the Russians gallantly but unpreparedly invaded East Prussia only a couple of weeks after the outbreak of war.
The Plan had failed when the Germans, after the six weeks designated for beating France, had only got a few score miles into the country, and were markedly bogged down. A trite, but necessary, comment to make is that if the Schlieffen Plan had succeeded, then Germany would have won the war on the Western front: i.e. if Belgium had not resisted and thus Britain had not come into the war, and the French had not had the time to mobilize, then the Germans would have had a very good chance of succeeding in their knockout invasion of France: so whether or not its failure made German defeat in the West inevitable, it certainly stopped the Germans from winning, at least initially.
Part of the Plan's failure was that the Belgians offered resistance: as I have already touched upon, this allowed the French time to prepare and win some sort of a victory at the Marne. Belgian resistance also meant that Britain was obliged to join the war, being a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, and also had time to send the British Expeditionary force; this in turn indirectly meant that America joined the war on the Allied side, for it complicated the war, stretched it out for years, and thus gave time for the Germans to provoke the Americans with one of their 'alternatives', the U-boats in the Atlantic.
The failure of the "Plan" had created a war of attrition in the West. This suited the allies more than Germany: the side with the most men spare to be killed had best chance of winning. Here it was the Allies: the combined population of Britain and France was rather larger than that of Germany, and the French and British both had a large supply of colonial troops which the Germans did not. With their rigid Teutonic mind-set, the Germans only had plans for the short and decisive war, and were thus slower than the Allies to start ...
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The failure of the "Plan" had created a war of attrition in the West. This suited the allies more than Germany: the side with the most men spare to be killed had best chance of winning. Here it was the Allies: the combined population of Britain and France was rather larger than that of Germany, and the French and British both had a large supply of colonial troops which the Germans did not. With their rigid Teutonic mind-set, the Germans only had plans for the short and decisive war, and were thus slower than the Allies to start a full-scale war economy, i.e. putting all of the country's efforts into the fight. The Germans also suffered from a poorer munitions supply: their lines to the front were severely disrupted by Belgian resistance (which itself took soldiers to quell), causing shortages in the early stages of the war. And the implementation of the allied blockade in 1916 caused a shortage of raw material with which to make arms. The Germans also did not have the tank, which proved helpful to some Allied breakthroughs towards the end of the war: it was useful in industrialized warfare. So the Germans did not have enough of the right human or material resources necessary to fight the kind of war which was caused by the plan's failure.
The immediate consequence was to put Germany in a position which she very much did not want and which the Plan was designed to avoid: failure created the dreaded war on two fronts - or more, if one includes Serbia, the Sea War, and later Italy. Germany's enemies only really had one land front each: The British and the French had the Western Front; the Russians the Eastern Front; and the Serbians and Italians had their fronts. This multi-fronted war was certainly a major contribution to German defeat in the West. While Britain and France were concentrating their efforts on the Western Front, Germany had to see off Russian invaders in East Prussia in 1914 (who, according to the "rules" of the Schlieffen Plan should not have been there), which was done at huge cost, and then continue waging war in the East against Russia. The Germans also had to prop up Austria in the war against Serbia and Italy, and later invade and occupy Romania. All these things took soldiers away from fighting - and possibly winning - on the Western Front. And Germany, again in contrast to her western opponents, could not rely on colonial troops to make up the numbers. Her in any case small colonial 'empire' was quickly over-run by these two main opponents or by their local allies, notably Australia and Japan. Numerically therefore Germany was soon doubly disadvantaged.
The "failure" meant that the British had a chance to implement a naval blockade, to stop food and other supplies being brought to Germany. There was also the problem of having enemies all around who would not trade with her. Thus the Germans went hungry and there were shortages of vital materials.
Overall, Germany was left with impossible aims: to knock out Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, all at the same time, and later Italy and Romania. This meant that only the smallest countries, i.e. Belgium, Serbia, and Romania, could be overwhelmed, and then only after stiff and delaying resistance: the Western Front had become just too hard to win on amidst all the other fighting elsewhere. Admittedly the Russians did take an early bath in 1917, but at the price of heavy German casualties; and this was matched by fresh American troops on the Allied side on the Western Front. What were weary Germans from the East against these? Compared to Germany's war aims, those of the allies were modest: simply to drive the Central Powers out of their own countries.
A major problem for the Germans on the Western Front was that the Schlieffen Plan had as part of its design the assumption that it would work. The Germans had always treated the Plan like a beautiful, well-oiled and meticulously manufactured machine: they had seen no need for an alternative one to do the task in question, a backup in case the first failed: the first would work. So the machine having been put into operation, when someone broke a few of its vital internal components and it was halted and then attacked from either side, there was no other which would do the task. In other words, the Germans had no "Plan B" initially, and did not think of an effective one in time.
So, looking at all this, it is tempting to say that on 14 September 1914 what the mildly depressive Moltke said was true: "The war is lost." But we must look at whether the Germans had any other opportunities which they missed, given that the Plan had failed.
First, could the stalemate on the Western Front have been broken, with the Franco-British forces crumbling under stress? This threatened to happen as late 1917 (see later). The Germans could have concentrated everything on the Western Front, by making an even earlier peace with Russia and leaving the other fronts to Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria, and making sure that neither Italy nor America joined the Allies. Had these things been done, the German army would have had a fighting chance on the Western Front.
The fact that in 1915 the Allies were so desperate to get Italy on their side that they bribed her with amazing promises - e.g. territories of Slavonic Illyria and of the (then) Greek Asia Minor littoral - itself shows that at that time the war could have gone either way. Italy had been an ally of Austria and Germany before the war, so perhaps with similar promises Italy could have been another Central Power, providing troops for the Western Front, and not of course fighting Austria.
The Germans could have won the war at sea: on the day of the Battle of Jutland, Jellicoe described himself as the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon. If the Germans had perhaps been a little more daring during that battle, the Royal Navy may have been badly damaged and control of the northern seas handed over to Germany. This would have stopped the blockade of Germany and caused the British and French to crumble on the Western Front, and perhaps would have led to the invasion of Britain herself. As it was, the battle was indecisive and the German surface fleet made few other outings during the war, despite all the pre-war alarm its building had caused in Britain.
The Germans preferred another sort of maritime gamble: unrestricted submarine warfare. This was another scheme for a decisive victory in the war: to starve out Britain and, to a lesser extent, France. It was another risk: would destroying neutral ships trading with the allies bring neutral countries, most notably America, into the war against Germany? The German High Command concluded that it probably would, but were so confident that Britain and France would quickly crumble that they believed the war would be over before any new ally arrived at the Western Front. This Schlieffen-Plan substitute, like the Plan itself, would be brilliant if it succeeded, but disastrous if it failed. And of course it failed: the convoy system came in, and American troops came to the Western Front.
Could the Battle of the Atlantic have been won by more careful and skilful U-boat use? Perhaps: with some skill the submarine destruction of ships supplying Britain could have caused the country to starve. But as it was conducted, it only provoked America to join the war. To avoid this fatal outcome, perhaps the Germans should have carried on ordering the occupants of a ship to leave before sinking it, and then not sunk passenger ships at all. As it was, the Allies won the battle of the blockades.
What was the German position on the ground like after the Schlieffen Plan had failed? The answer is not too bad: in Russia, the German army had splendid victories, but even in the west there were some advantages to the German position: they held a large swathe of industrial France, at one point famously coming within 30 miles of Paris. The stalemate itself still means that neither side had actually lost: the Germans, if they could display superior leadership and determination, i.e. superior quality, had a chance of winning the war of attrition before their inferiority in men and materiel (quantity) became too crushing. The year 1917 was appalling for the Allies, involving: (1) two bloody and ineffective offensives on the Western Front; (2) mutiny in the French army at Verdun and elsewhere; (3) headlong retreat on the Italian front; and (4) the collapse of Russia leading to her eventual peace with Germany.
Then the Germans did make one last initially successful offensive on the western front, after the Americans came in: the 1918 Ludendorff offensive. But this was rather like a re-run of the Schlieffen Plan , and a WW1 version of Hitler's Ardennes offensive: the troops, transferred from the East, were too tired, especially against fresh Americans, and supplies of all sorts were inadequate. Perhaps if peace had been made earlier with Russia, say in 1916 before the Americans had come, before Germany's main allies, Turkey and Austria, were imploding, such an offensive could have happened then and won Germany the war in the West.
The fact that the Schlieffen Plan failed did not mean it was no longer possible for Germany to win in the west: there were other possibilities for German success. It did, however, make it a whole lot harder.
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