The Schlieffen Plan Essay -- First World War WWI

The Schlieffen Plan The Schlieffen Plan is commonly though misleadingy identified with the German western offensive at the start of the First World contendfare in August 1914, which began as a campaign of rapid front man but ended in deadlock and trench fightfare. The plan is slackly seen as a desperate gamble almost certain to fail, and its foolhardiness is counted as partially of Germanys fight guilt the plan held come in the false promise of a quick supremacy, and so it underpinned the footling fight illusion that led Germany into a long war of attrition, ending with her get the better of and collapse in 1918. This analysis confuses deuce quite different moments in history. The Schlieffen Plan was non designed to meet the strategic ch anyenge Germany face up in 1914, but rather to pre-empt it by winning a to a greater extent limited and manageable war at the time it was written in 1906.The consensus is that the Schlieffen Plan epitomized the arrogance of German mi litarism in believing that swift and essence 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 regular 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 in spite of appearance six weeks, Germany could turn her full might against the Russians. The standard verdict is that France could non 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 fictitious character at all to a six-week deadline for the defeat of France. The great historical error has been t o regard Schlieffens plan as a half-baked intent for fighting a war on two fronts, when it was in circumstance a carefully reasoned scheme for fighting a war limited to the west, at a time when this seemed to be a discrete possibility. The German west-front war-plan in 1914 was devised by the younger Helmuth von Moltke, and while it bore slightly resemblance to Schlieffens proposal, it was extensively adapted to the changed circumstances, in particular to the destiny of now deploying against Ru... ... of a two-front war in which both enemies would immediately go onto the offensive. He could not deploy the whole of the German army in the west, even though he needed a quick decisiveness there to release reinforcements for the eastern front. It was the Moltke Plan, not the Schlieffen Plan, which required a victory over France within six weeks. Nor could Moltke contemplate swinging a part of his right wing all the way around Paris, since that again needed more time and troops than could be spared in a war on two fronts. Moltkes right wing, already much weaker than Schlieffens, was nurture depleted during the course of the operation when he pulled out two of its army corps and transferred them to the east. The German army that was forced back from the Marne in kinfolk 1914 was but a pale shadow of the one that is drawn up against France in the Schlieffen Plan. Moltke held to the basic idea of that plan, but under the time and custody pressures of a two-front war he was unable to make the right-wing encounter as powerful and sustained as Schlieffen had prescribed for a one-front war in 1906. It was a diluted version of the Schlieffen plan that failed in 1914, not the original concept.