Abstract
Ian Senior says that in August 1914 Moltke used the Schlieffen plan ‘with few reservations’ (pp. 16–17, 384): nothing new so far. But Senior also makes the startling assertion that for nearly a century no one has understood that Schlieffen’s real intent was not to send the right wing sweeping around Paris; rather, Schlieffen’s ‘preferred outcome’ was to attack between Paris and the French eastern border fortifications, and the plan ‘proved toxic’, failed on the Marne, and led to four years of bloody warfare (p. 384).
Senior bases his assertion on Gerhard Gross’s description of Schlieffen’s 1905 Generalstabsreise West (G. Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan’, in H. Ehlert, M. Epkenhans, G. Gross, eds, Der Schlieffenplan, Paderborn, Schöningh, 2006, pp. 139–40). Gross says that Schlieffen played the German side himself, attacking into France, against three of his officers, Kuhl, Freytag, and Steuben, and then replayed it against them, with ‘Kuhl II’ and ‘Freytag II’ being the clear predecessors of the Schlieffen plan. Gross says that it was unnecessary to describe the exercise in detail (‘Ohne die Operationsführung Schlieffens eingehend an dieser Stelle diskutieren zu wollen’); it was obvious (‘ganz offensichtlich’) that this was a test of the ‘Schlieffen plan’, and Gross clearly believes that the sketch maps of ‘Freytag II’ and ‘Kuhl II’ are decisive proof that they tested the Schlieffen plan. These maps bear no resemblance to any map in a real exercise critique. They are so crude and lacking in detail as to be completely worthless.
The ‘Freytag II’ sketch map consists of two red lines, the first one from Fontainebleau to Toul, south-east of Paris, showing the locations of five French armies, and a bunch of blue arrows pointing at the red lines, presumably representing the German armies, which have no unit designations whatsoever. Below that is another series of orange lines in an arc around Langres to Dijon and then south-east: this was along the French national redoubt on the plateau of Langres. Opposite these are blue dashes and only one blue arrow – the German advance had come to a halt.
The ‘Kuhl II’ sketch map is even less organized, with the sole exception being that the blue line around the Franco-Belgian border has army numbers. There are another series of lines and arrows from Nancy and Amiens, two lines on the Seine north of Paris, and scribblings south-east and south of Paris. The only real detail concerns the French attack all the way into Lorraine and then to the Saar, opposed by two German armies.
Not to be outdone, Senior came up with a map (p. 21) of ‘The Schlieffen Plan, Variant 1 (Schlieffen’s preferred outcome)’, which, on a scale of a little more than about 1 : 2,000,000, shows three French defensive lines as the Germans attack between Paris and the French eastern fortresses. It is neat and tidy, and Senior obviously intended it to be definitive. But Senior’s map is a fake, a fabrication, made up by mixing the ‘Kuhl II’ and ‘Freytag II’ sketch maps and making them much neater and orderly. The positions of the German 5th and 6th Armies are grossly distorted: on Senior’s map they enter France ‘Schlieffen plan’ style; on the ‘Kuhl II’ map they are inside Germany between Metz and St Wedel (north-east of Saarbrücken).
Senior obviously felt compelled by Gross’s skimpy treatment of the 1905 Generalstabsreise West to supplement it with the description provided in a 1938 article by Generalleutnant von Zoellner (‘Schlieffens Vermächtnis’, Militärwissenschaftliche Rundschau, Sonderheft, 1938, esp. pp. 48–52). Senior fails to point out that Zoellner did not mention exercises ‘Kuhl II’ or ‘Freytag II’, which are the exercises that Gross and Senior both maintain were the direct predecessors of the ‘Schlieffen plan’.
The source Gross used, however inadequately, for his description of the 1905 Generalstabsreise West was found not in Schlieffen’s papers, or in those of the German army archive proper, but in the papers of Friedrich von Boetticher, who did not die until 1967, and whose principal claim to fame was that he was the German military attaché to the US before the Second World War (Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau, Nachlass Boetticher N 323/9). So, neither Schlieffen nor the German army kept a copy of the document Senior maintained was Schlieffen’s ‘preferred option’. That is passing strange in itself. Nor is there any evidence Senior went to Freiburg to read what is supposedly the sole document describing Schlieffen’s ‘preferred option’.
There are four documents in the Boetticher file. (I give a 12-page summary of the exercise, including nine of the sketch maps, in T. Zuber, The Real German War Plan, 1904–14, Stroud, 2011, pp. 29–41.) The two largest, 38 and 19 pages respectively, are concerned only with the first three exercises played by Kuhl, Freytag, and Steuben. The sketch maps graphically illustrate that they had nothing to do with the ‘Schlieffen plan’. In Steuben the French attack into Lorraine forced the German 4th, 5th, and 6th Armies to ‘rear march’ back over the Moselle, and by the 22nd day four German armies were opposing the French from Metz east to the Saar river, that is, well inside Germany. Something similar occurs in Kuhl’s exercise. In Freytag two French armies got surrounded between Guise and Rethel in north-eastern France. Senior’s assertion that Schlieffen tested the Schlieffen plan in these three exercises has no basis in fact.
Document 4 says that Schlieffen terminated the Generalstabsreise West and played the three scenarios again as ‘studies’ (Studie). So, Senior’s contention that ‘Kuhl II’ and ‘Freytag II’ were part of the 1905 Generalstabsreise West is wrong. In Document 3 ‘Kuhl II’ is described on a single double-spaced page and in Document 4 in two double-spaced pages. ‘Freytag II’ is described in a page and a half in D 3 and in two and a half pages in D 4. These descriptions overlap and are repetitive. That’s all we know, which is to say, nearly nothing, about the two exercises that Senior says were the foundation of Schlieffen’s preferred war plan.
Boetticher was a proponent of the ‘Schlieffen plan’, and wrote articles on it in 1933 and 1957. It is also significant that Boetticher, like Zoellner, did not maintain that ‘Kuhl II’ and ‘Freytag II’ were the direct predecessors of the Schlieffen plan. Small wonder – both knew that these two exercises were utterly unable to support such an assertion.
The 1905 Generalstabsreise West was over in mid-July. In November and December 1905 Schlieffen held a massive war game. The exercise critique is 36 typed pages long, with 17 maps. The Bavarian Army Archive has a complete copy; another is in Schlieffen’s papers. Schlieffen used rail mobility to counter-attack against simultaneous Franco-Russian attacks on Germany. (For an analysis, see Zuber, Real German War Plan, pp. 41–6; for an English translation of the exercise critique, see T. Zuber, German War Planning, 1891–1914: Sources and Interpretations, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2004, pp. 167–185.) If the ‘Schlieffen plan’ offensive against France was really Schlieffen’s war plan, why did his last exercise play counteroffensives against both France and Russia? Not that there is any evidence Senior ever read it.
German archives have the exercise critiques for four of Schlieffen’s Generalstabsreisen West and the 1902 Generalstabsreise Ost. The German army published the critiques for five more Generalstabsreisen Ost, including the 1894 exercise, the template for the battle of Tannenberg. (See Zuber, German War Planning, 1891–1914, for the exercise critiques for 1894 Ost, 1901 Ost, second 1902 Ost, 1903 Ost, and first 1904 West; see T. Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1891–1914, Oxford, OUP, 2002, for second 1904 West.) These exercises generally play counter-attacks against French or Russian offensives. Except for one of the 1904 exercises, there is no evidence that Senior has read any of them. All these exercises show that the ‘Schlieffen plan’ was not the result of ten years of planning, as Senior contends (p. 47). Rather, the ‘Schlieffen plan’ was an anomaly, an outlier.
In January and February 1906, after he retired, Schlieffen wrote his famous Schlieffen plan Denkschrift (see Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan, esp. pp. 24–34, 212–19; German War Planning, 1891–1914, pp. 187–204; and Real German War Plan, pp. 55–9), in which he says that any attack east of Paris, Senior’s ‘preferred option’, will be stopped on the Aisne, Oise, Marne, or Seine, and for that reason it would be necessary to send an army west of Paris, to outflank these lines, and to blockade the west and south sides of Paris with ersatz divisions (Zuber, German War Planning, 1891–1914, p. 195). Senior’s only comment (p. 39) on this was that the German army did not have enough troops to execute this manoeuvre, and there was no way to supply the ersatz divisions anyway.
So, ironically, Senior agrees with me that the ‘Schlieffen plan’ was unworkable.
Senior completely passes over the fact that Schlieffen has just plainly said, twice, that Senior’s ‘preferred option’, the attack east of Paris, won’t work: don’t do this. Moltke attacked east of Paris anyway, and lo and behold, it didn’t work. Senior’s conclusion is to blame Schlieffen!
His description of the operational/tactical conduct of the Marne campaign is also full of errors, magnified by the fact that he says nothing of value about the German 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th Armies in the west or the 8th in the east, because, according to Senior, in the ‘Schlieffen plan’ only the 1st and 2nd Armies mattered.
Senior’s errors concerning Le Cateau can serve to illustrate the errors in the whole. He says that Kluck wanted to envelop the British flanks, but that these forces had conducted a ‘leisurely march’ and arrived too late. II Corps succeeded in ‘holding off a superior enemy for almost nine hours, under extremely difficult conditions, breaking off the fight and making an orderly retreat’ (p. 129). He liked this description so much that he repeated it again (pp. 381–2). He is entirely wrong.
Had Kluck just continued the march to the south-west on 25 August, II Corps would have easily been overtaken by the far more mobile German IV and III Corps and been destroyed (T. Zuber, The Mons Myth, Stroud, 2010, pp. 199–259). Instead, Kluck got it into his head on the morning of 25 August that the British were going to hole up at Fortress Maubeuge, and turned the 1st Army south-east and away from II Corps. The only German forces that could engage II Corps at Le Cateau on 26 August were three infantry brigades and 2nd Cavalry Corps, with an infantry force of about a brigade, four brigades total, against seven British brigades, and 162 German guns against 246 British guns. The British had a massive numerical superiority.
Owing to the utter failure of the British cavalry to screen II Corps, the Germans gained complete operational and tactical surprise. On the British left flank the 1/King’s Own was caught in battalion mass formation, arms stacked, by two German MG companies firing at 600 m range and immediately destroyed; this was followed by heavy casualties in 11 Brigade. The British right was pinned down near its bivouac areas and crushed by a brilliant combined-arms attack conducted by Infantry Regiment 66 and Field Artillery Regiment 40: the 2/KOYLI, XV Artillery Brigade, and XXVIII Artillery Brigade were destroyed in place. In the centre, 1/Gordon Highlanders did not get the order to withdraw and was destroyed early on the 27th. II Corps disintegrated; many battalions just dissolved, and the corps was combat-ineffective for days. The British lost 7,800 men and 38 guns; the Germans lost about 2,900 men.
Any further recital of Senior’s errors is flogging a dead horse.