The Schlieffen Plan Essay -- First World War WWI

The Schlieffen blueprint The Schlieffen Plan is commonly though mis spark advancey identified with the German western discourtesy at the start of the First World War in elevated 1914, which began as a campaign of rapid movement merely terminate in deadlock and trench fightfare. The see is gener bothy seen as a desperate gamble almost certain to fail, and its recklessness is counted as representative of Germanys war guilt the plan held out the false look for of a quick victory, and so it underpinned the short war illusion that cope Germany into a long war of attrition, ending with her defeat and collapse in 1918. This analysis confuses devil quite different moments in history. The Schlieffen Plan was non designed to meet the strategic challenge Germany faced in 1914, but rather to pre-empt it by winning a more limited and directed war at the clock it was written in 1906.The consensus is that the Schlieffen Plan epitomized the high-handedness 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 inwardly six weeks, Germany could raise 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 reference at all to a six-week deadline for the defeat of France. The great historical misunderstanding has been to regard Schlieffens plan as a half-b aked scheme for fighting a war on two fronts, when it was in fact a guardedly 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 Schlieffens proposal, it was extensively adapted to the changed circumstances, in particular to the necessity 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 decision there to cut 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 s vaporizeing 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 righ t wing, already much weaker than Schlieffens, was further depleted during the cast 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 September 1914 was but a pale shadow of the one that is drawn up against France in the Schlieffen Plan. Moltke held to the grassroots idea of that plan, but under the time and manpower pressures of a two-front war he was unable to make the right-wing attack as flop 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.