Schlieffen’s Perfect Plan
T
he heavily analyzed Schlieffen Plan was the perfect bad hand. The General Staff in Berlin faced known eneinvasion strategy, and the hardworking officers of mies on two fronts. To the west, the vengeful French marthe German General Staff knew it. The basic idea shaled their regiments, waiting for a chance to redress the
traced all the way back to Hannibal. That’s not the humiliating failures of 1870–71 and retake their lost
Hannibal known to Americans today as the vicious yet ur- provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. To the east, the dibane criminal mastermind of book and movie fame, but the sheveled but energetic millions of the Russian Empire
original: Hannibal Barca of Carthage, one of the greatest bat- threatened to roll across the frontier. So the top graduates
tlefield commanders in history. If you needed a good way to of the Berlin War Academy, the famous experts of the Gerwin—and win big—it only made sense to look to Hannibal.
man General Staff, wrestled with the same dilemma that
In his most decisive victory, Hannibal cornered a Roman plagued their country again and again: How do you win a
army sent to stop him. The two forces met on August 2, two-front war?
216 B.C., facing off across a hot, flat
Before Schlieffen’s time, Chancellor
plain called Cannae, south of Rome.
Otto von Bismarck and his General
Tempting the overly aggressive RoStaff chief, the elder Field Marshal
man commander to attack, Hannibal
Helmuth von Moltke, didn’t resort to
pulled back his center troops. Sensing
Hannibal or hope. To deal with the
Carthaginian weakness, exultant Rotwo-front problem, they just said
man foot soldiers surged forward. As
“no.” Both men accepted French enthey did, Hannibal swiftly swung in
mity, but the war of 1870–71 indicated
both of his flanking contingents, bagthat France alone could not beat Gerging the stunned Roman legionaries
many. The key was to keep France isoin a double envelopment. More than
lated, so Bismarck wove elaborate
60,000 trapped Romans died in the rediplomatic schemes to ensure good resultant slaughter. Historians rightly
lations with Russia. For his part, von
acclaimed Cannae as a brilliant battle
Moltke drew up defensive plans to
of encirclement and annihilation, with
avoid provoking Germany’s powerful
due credit to the vision and leadereastern neighbor. It made all the sense
ship of the intrepid Hannibal.
in the world. After 1888, however, the
Of course, one win does not a final
new German Kaiser, the headstrong
By Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger
victory make. People still know about
Wilhelm II, did not agree. He dumped
U.S. Army retired
Hannibal, but as for Carthage, not so
Bismarck, retired von Moltke and
much. The Romans learned from the Cannae debacle. watched calmly as Russia and France entered into formal
Chastened, the legions reorganized, retrained, reequipped alliance. Wilhelm II didn’t fear a two-front war. Confident
and struck back, grinding toward Carthage in campaign in Germany’s burgeoning strength, he intended to win it.
after campaign. Eventually, after killing thousands of their
Thus, Schlieffen and his General Staff mavens were told
opponent’s best troops, Rome’s hard-bitten legionaries to design a perfect plan to win a two-front war. They
took the fortified city of Carthage itself. They smashed the started with a big assumption on timing. In the west, the
stout walls to dust, pulverized the neighborhoods block by French would mobilize in two weeks and attack into Alblock, put most of the men to the sword and sold the sur- sace-Lorraine. To the east, the Russians would take six
viving population into slavery.
weeks to gather their forces before attacking. German inMore than 2,000 years later, at the dawn of the 20th cen- telligence was reliable, and both adversaries were not all
tury, the German General Staff—especially its dour chief, that careful about concealing their plans. General Staff offiField Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen—saw only the glitter- cers in Berlin crunched through population demographics,
ing promise of a smashing, Hannibal-caliber envelopment. industrial production figures, map measurements and railSchlieffen venerated Cannae. His staff diagrammed it, dis- road statistics, but the numbers consistently told the tale.
sected it and sought to replicate it. Having smashed the Beat the French in six weeks, and then race the German diDanes in 1864, the Austrians in 1866 and the French in visions across the country by rail to deal with the slower1870–71, Schlieffen’s officers figured that if anyone could arriving Russians. The trick was ensuring an early knockpull off a modern Cannae, it must be the guys in gray with out punch in France. As was their wont, the General Staff
the spiked helmets.
looked for relevant historical examples. Schlieffen and his
The Germans needed a Cannae. Geography dealt them a men came upon Hannibal at Cannae. That would do.
The Outpost
74
ARMY ■ August 2014
Bibliotheque Nationale de France
French infantrymen take aim from behind protective earthworks during World War I.
B
y 1905, the perfect plan came together. To ensure
rapid, decisive victory in the west, Schlieffen devised a modern Cannae on a continental scale. The
General Staff amassed a crushing superiority
against France, outnumbering the French almost two to
one. Two of the German corps defended Alsace-Lorraine,
beckoning the French to plunge forward to reclaim their
lost provinces, as Schlieffen well knew they wanted to do.
While the French attacked, the bulk of Schlieffen’s forces
would sweep out in a great arc, marching through neutral
Belgium, “letting the last man on the right brush the [English] Channel with his sleeve,” in the field marshal’s descriptive phrasing. This vast German array would descend
on their foe’s rear echelon, cutting off French forces in Alsace-Lorraine, outflanking the panicked citizenry of Paris,
and ending the war in the west in 42 days. The French
were assessed as squabbling, excitable amateurs certain to
advance merrily into the fatal trap. The few British divisions amounted to what the Kaiser dismissed as a “contemptible little army.” The Belgians were discounted altogether. The morality of bludgeoning through a neutral
country did not figure in Schlieffen’s calculations.
Clearly, Schlieffen took a lot of risk in the east. Only two
Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, USA Ret., was the commander of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan and NATO
Training Mission-Afghanistan. Previously, he served as the
deputy chief of staff, G-3/5/7, and as the commanding general,
1st Cavalry Division/commanding general, Multinational Division-Baghdad, Operation Iraqi Freedom. He holds a doctorate in
Russian history from the University of Chicago and has published a number of books on military subjects. He recently was
named a senior fellow of the AUSA Institute of Land Warfare.
corps would hold the line as the Russians built up, but the
Germans thought little of the Russians. Tsar Nicholas II appeared weak and easily confused, his armies humbled by
the Japanese in a brutal 1904–05 war, his restive populace
shot through with revolutionary sentiment and hobbled by
widespread illiteracy. The supposed “Russian steamroller”
leaked steam at every joint, and the roller looked pretty
cracked and rusted. The tsar’s hapless hordes would be
easy prey once France had fallen.
The Germans rehearsed their perfect plan over and over.
Mobilization drills linked up 2 million men, weapons, uniforms, supplies and horses at key German railway stations.
Then, in an intricate, well-oiled ballet, more than 200,000
rail cars practiced forming into trains and heading west.
When German mobilization ran flat out, one troop train
crossed the Rhine River at Cologne every six minutes, monitored by General Staff men with perfectly synchronized
stopwatches. Schlieffen’s successor, the younger Helmuth
von Moltke, tinkered with the details. He moved two more
corps to the east—you never knew with the Russians, since
they might be early—and shifted six more corps into Alsace-Lorraine, just in case the French got lucky. But that still
left 27 German corps to make the big envelopment. The basics remained intact: blow away France with a massive
right wheel through neutral Belgium, then use the wonderful German railway network to speed the victorious veterans to the east to clobber the slow-assembling Russians. It
was massive. It was beautifully crafted. It was perfect.
On August 1, 1914, von Moltke got his chance. A fracas
in the Balkans pitted Austria-Hungary against Russia. Ever
excitable—and a bit fuzzy on the current war plan—Wilhelm wanted to support his Austrian ally without tangling
with France or bringing in Britain by violating neutral BelAugust 2014 ■ ARMY 75
gium. Hearing the Kaiser’s intent, von Moltke nearly
passed out. With all the tables of figures, all the battle
drills, all the practice maneuvers, the millions moving, the
hundreds of trains clicking west, von Moltke gasped,
“Your Majesty, it cannot be done.” The great German General Staff, the finest military minds in Europe, the scions of
the great Hannibal, had only one plan. They had to attack
France. They had to go through Belgium. And so they did.
tle of France occurred on the Marne River, but the wrong
side won. Exhausted German troops faltered and fell back.
The perfect plan didn’t allow for that. There was no Plan B.
Four horrific years of trench warfare ensued.
A century later, what can we learn from Schlieffen’s perfect plan? Rather than trying to conjure the ghost of Hannibal, Schlieffen and his proud General Staff cadres might
have been better served to look to one of their own, Carl
von Clausewitz. In his magisterial work On War, Clausewitz, who had fought in all too many battles, warned of
what he termed friction: “Countless minor incidents—the
kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the
general level of performance.” Clashing armies, bent on
mortal combat, generate friction as surely as two sticks
rubbed together. It’s as endemic to war as wetness is to water. No computer, no secret weapon and no trickery can
banish friction. That was true in France in 1914. It’s true today. Beware the perfect plan: It will fail.
And then what? In 1914, the result was World War I. A
hundred years later, it’s a sobering reminder of the high
price of military arrogance. We do well to keep it in mind
as we fight today’s wars and prepare for those to come. ✭
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76
ARMY ■ August 2014
3
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LEFT WING: Sixth and
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U.S. Army/USMA Campaign Atlas to the Great War
10
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T
he perfect plan came unglued almost from the start.
The German General Staff could control the railroads
and the supply depots, but couldn’t direct the activities of their enemies. The Belgians resisted and did
so fiercely, gumming up the timetable. Four tough British divisions, manned by sharpshooting regulars with bolt-action
Lee-Enfield rifles, convinced battered German divisions that
each opposing battalion fielded dozens of machine guns.
The French pushed into Alsace-Lorraine right on schedule—
and failed in a bloody riposte—but they also rapidly assembled tens of thousands of spirited reserves and disciplined
colonial troops to block the great German right wing. At the
six-week mark, just as Schlieffen predicted, the climactic bat-