Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The German campaign plan for the Western Front was the keystone of the Central Powers’ strategy in 1914. Moltke was broadly correct when he told Conrad in February 1913 that ‘Austria’s fate will not be definitively decided along the Bug but rather along the Seine.’6 His aim was to turn encirclement to advantage, concentrate his forces overwhelmingly against France and then, once that enemy was eliminated, use the Reich’s efficient railway system to transport them eastwards. Time was critical: if the western campaign took longer than six weeks, the slow but powerful Russian army would be able to mobilize fully, giving it the opportunity to overwhelm the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia and the weak German force left in East Prussia. The German Chief of Staff’s key challenge was thus to defeat France quickly. German officers in the war’s aftermath claimed that the answer to this problem was bequeathed to Moltke in a memorandum written in 1905–6 by his illustrious predecessor: the infamous ‘Schlieffen Plan’. This plan envisaged an army of ninety-six infantry divisions, eighty-two of which, later joined by five others from the south, were to be deployed as a strong right wing between Metz and Aachen and tasked with sweeping through the Benelux countries in order to bypass France’s chain of border fortresses and break into its north-east. The point of Schlieffen’s plan was not, contrary to an oft repeated claim, to capture Paris. The encirclement of the French capital that it proposed was merely a highly undesirable last resort, necessary only if the enemy retreated so far that his left flank rested on the fortified city. Instead, the plan’s primary objective was the envelopment, wherever that might prove possible, and through it the annihilation, of France’s army.7

  Moltke was heavily influenced by Schlieffen’s memorandum.8 Like his predecessor, he envisaged a strong right wing conducting a decisive offensive through Belgium, outflanking the French fortress belt and enveloping the enemy army. However, Schlieffen’s plan had been completed while Russia was incapacitated by revolution. Moltke worked in far less favourable circumstances: he was confronted not only with a two-front war, which necessitated leaving nine divisions in the east, but also with a western enemy likely to fight more aggressively than ten years earlier. He was also pessimistic, or rather more realistic, about many of the assumptions built into the Schlieffen Plan. Consequently, he introduced important modifications. Most notably, and against his predecessor’s legendary deathbed exhortation to keep the right wing strong, he weakened it; whereas Schlieffen placed eighty-seven divisions there, Moltke had only fifty-four. The ratio of forces between the left and right wings was also changed, from one-to-seven in the original 1905–6 plan to one-to-three in 1914. To Moltke’s post-war denigrators, this was a disastrous decision that cost Germany its chance of an early victory. In actuality, it made a lot of sense. Moltke needed fewer divisions on the right because unlike Schlieffen, he neither intended his troops to march through Dutch, as well as Belgian, territory nor in any circumstances to march around Paris. Taking on Holland, he recognized, would absorb considerable strength better deployed against Germany’s real enemies. Moreover, Moltke knew his plan was already a high-risk enterprise; he wanted insurance and hoped that if the initial offensive failed and static war developed, a neutral Holland might act as a ‘wind pipe’, through which the blockaded Reich could funnel goods and raw materials.9

  Moltke’s decision to allocate more troops than Schlieffen had planned to the left wing, south-east of Metz, was in part a product of the same calculation. It helped to protect the Saar, an industrial region that would be crucial if the initial gamble failed, leading to a long war. More importantly, however, Moltke envisaged this wing’s sixteen divisions playing a significant, if subordinate role in the coming campaign. He foresaw correctly the likelihood of a limited French offensive into Lorraine and wanted his left wing to fix or, better still, draw in the enemy’s strength, which would then be counter-attacked from the flanks, enveloped and annihilated. The strong right wing, meanwhile, would not advance around Paris; it had neither the requisite men nor any need to do so. Instead, the wing’s task was remorselessly to push the rest of the French army, its numbers reduced by the commitment to its own offensive, to the south-east, bringing about a second, much larger encirclement. With the German left wing to its front and the right wing, after an anticlockwise concentric sweep through Belgium, attacking over the river Oise in its rear, the French army’s capitulation would be all but assured.10

  If Moltke’s plan in 1914 was somewhat better grounded in reality than its precursor, it was still reckless. To crush the French army, one of Europe’s most modern, best-equipped and largest armed forces, in less than a month and a half was a breathtakingly audacious and, as it turned out, foolhardy aspiration. How could the Chief of Staff possibly think that it could work? Moltke had no numerical advantage. Even with almost his entire force deployed in the west, seventy-three and a half German divisions still had to beat eighty French, six Belgian and six British divisions. His edge in armaments was slight. The single real advantage was in heavy artillery. The French could field only 308 heavy guns against the German army’s 848 and they had nothing to match its medium and heavy howitzers, weapons which thanks to their high angle of fire were to prove invaluable in trench warfare. The best German units outgunned their French counterparts. The twenty-three German active corps deployed in the west, formations of two divisions containing the youngest, fittest and most recently trained soldiers, were each supported by 160 artillery pieces (fifty-four 77mm field guns and eighteen 105mm howitzers per division and sixteen heavy 150mm howitzers per corps), between twenty-four and twenty-eight more than their French equivalents. However, the French partly compensated with superior field artillery: their superb Soixante-Quinze (‘75’), of which there were 4,780 in service, could outrange the 5,068 German 77mm guns and gave a higher rate of fire with a heavier shell.11 The French army had a slight lead in aerial technology. The Germans’ railway troops, engineers and other technical units were marginally better trained. Otherwise in materiel, there was little to separate the two enemies.12

  For Moltke, however, as for other contemporary military professionals, a war’s outcome was not reducible to big battalions or the size of gun calibres. There were, as he explained in 1911, far more important determinants of defeat and victory: ‘The number of military units is not by itself decisive in a war. Forces come to play that . . . lie in the realm not of mathematics but of morale. A whole nation’s ability to fight, its readiness for war, bravery, the will to make sacrifices, discipline, talent of its leadership, are to be valued more highly than mere numbers.’13 The Germany army’s real advantage, and the reason for Moltke’s readiness to put his faith in such an audacious plan, lay not in its materiel or technology but in the quality of its personnel: its upper leadership, officer corps and manpower. The Great General Staff, the army’s centre for operational planning, was Prussia’s characteristic contribution to what contemporaries praised as Europe’s five ‘perfect’ institutions; the others being the Roman Curia, Russian Ballet, French Opera and British Parliament. It had acquired its reputation as the architect of Prussia’s series of stunning victories in the 1860s, culminating with its triumph over France in 1870–71. The Great General Staff made two key contributions to the German army’s fighting effectiveness. First, it was responsible for formulating the annual mobilization and deployment plans; these tasks included drawing up the intricate railway schedules for troop transports, assigning concentration areas and developing operational strategy. It also identified weapons and manpower needs, and observed other forces, especially potential enemies. The Great General Staff owed its legendary efficiency in these tasks to a gruelling and highly competitive selection process and an institutional culture that prized intellectualism, technical mastery and a formidable work ethic. Its great defect, however, was its narrow vision: its distance from diplomacy, exclusive focus on operational excellence and obsession with detail were all reflected in the desperate risks run in Moltke’s campaign plan.14

  Second, t
he Great General Staff instilled in its officers, and through them the German army, a shared understanding of battle which made possible an enviable unity of action that other forces found difficult to emulate. The Chief of the General Staff trained his officers personally, inculcating through staff rides and tactical-strategic exercises a set of basic principles of how to behave in different combat situations. While 113 General Staff officers worked in the planning and analytical departments in Berlin, more than double this number were posted to divisional and corps staff. This small group of elite officers used their key positions to spread the doctrine throughout the army. The German military’s infamous and highly effective Auftragstaktik, or ‘mission tactics’, was built upon this system: senior commanders, confident that their officers would behave similarly in any given tactical situations, could simply set operational goals. Their subordinates, better placed to judge conditions on the ground, would through their shared training naturally coordinate in choosing the tactics to fulfil their missions.15

  The German officer corps considered itself the guarantor and repository of the army’s ‘spirit’, the moral and psychological quality revered by early twentieth-century militaries. Numbering 33,036 professional and 40,000 reserve officers at war’s outbreak, its values were influenced less by its technocratic General Staff elite than an older, aristocratic martial culture. The nobility accounted for nearly a third of professional officers and predominated in its upper ranks, where a little over half of men from colonel (Oberst) to general came from the traditional warrior caste. The bourgeoisie supplied the remainder of active officers as well as almost all the reserve officers. High educational barriers and, for prospective reserve officers, the need to pay for a year of training, shut out the proletariat.16 Curious to modern eyes, the army’s leadership was utterly convinced that this social exclusivity was indispensable in its ability to carry out its martial function. The corps wanted men who through upbringing and education had internalized the code of honour that it embraced, would conform to its high moral expectations and would offer unfailing loyalty to the monarch, to whom it owed fealty. Wilhelmine officers pointed to the French corps, which recruited over half of its men from the ranks, as a warning of the dangers of surrendering to more socially progressive fads. They regarded it with some justice as politicized, divided and demoralized, and doubted that its moral authority would suffice to hold men to discipline under the immense strains of combat.17

  The German corps’ aristocratic conception of leadership, although in part a matter of snobbery, did indeed contribute in two ways to its performance. First, it promoted a conscientious paternalism. The corps insisted that ‘never resting care for the welfare of his men is the good and rewarding privilege of the officer’.18 Upper-class officers were thought best suited for this responsibility because they had been taught from an early age the precepts of noblesse oblige, the aristocratic doctrine that privilege carried with it responsibility to social inferiors. While this assumption was not always borne out, as Socialists’ peacetime complaints about officers’ mishandling of men testify, in 1914 and 1915 this model of command worked well in oiling inter-rank relations, protecting troops from hardship and increasing their resilience.19 Second, men who possessed a strong code of personal honour, and were prepared in peace to duel to defend it, were believed to be more ready to lay down their lives to defend the honour of their corps, regiment, Kaiser and Fatherland. Officership was conceived less as a management role than as a moral and didactic calling: ‘The officer is the model of his men; his example pulls them forward with him.’ ‘Strength of character’ and ‘moral seriousness’, qualities cultivated in German cadet institutes and Gymnasien no less assiduously than in British public schools, were essential if officers were to win their men’s respect and provide the inspirational examples of courage and self-sacrifice necessary to lead them forward across the fire-swept battlefield.20 The German officer corps’ death rate suggests that it vindicated these expectations during the war. Whereas 13.3 per cent of German soldiers were killed, 15.7 per cent of reserve officers and a horrifying 24.7 per cent of professional officers died in the course of duty.21

  The German army’s other ranks were also confidently regarded as a match for those of its enemies. The force’s backbone was its 107,794 professional non-commissioned officers.22 These men were highly capable, the most senior among them carrying out tasks which in other forces were the responsibility of subalterns. The German army had, thanks to its relatively generous conditions of service, been able to retain eighteen to twenty career NCOs in each of its peacetime companies, more than double those of French companies and ten times those in Russian companies. Their fund of experience proved invaluable in war, permitting the devolution of command responsibilities.23 The army’s conscripts, who in peace served for two years, were also thought to be better than those fielded by the French. Germany, with a youthful population totalling 67 million, drafted between 51 and 53 per cent of each male year group to maintain an army of 800,000 men in the last years of peace. Its recruiters could pick their manpower discriminatingly. France, with a population of 39 million, had to conscript 83 per cent to keep up, and so accepted all but the lame or seriously ill. Its inferior demography, with a relatively low birth rate which ensured that its population size continued to fall behind, was frequently cited in Social Darwinist terms as evidence that the Republic had passed the high point of its development. Militarily, this demography was understood to be significant not only because of its effect on the overall fitness of the French army’s recruits but also because it left the force with only a small pool of reserves. Conscious of the extreme risks of their campaign plan, German military commanders could comfort themselves with the thought that even if it failed, France could not sustain a long war.24

  German troops’ morale, discipline and training were also believed superior to those of their French counterparts. Conservative Prussian officers tended to misinterpret French republican ideals as undermining rather than, as proved during the war, forming the basis of French conscripts’ loyalty and obedience.25 Racial stereotypes too informed their assessments. Moltke hoped that the ‘nervous’ character of the Gallic race would contribute to a quick collapse of morale in defeat.26 The Kaiser’s officers were on safer ground in their confident estimations of their own soldiers. The army enjoyed immense social prestige in Germany. Particularly in the countryside, from which it had drawn a disproportionate number of recruits in peacetime, the two-year period of military service was widely seen as a rite of passage to manhood. In the cities, the army was, despite its officers’ hostility towards Social Democracy, a force for national integration. Many workers welcomed the break from industrial life’s monotony offered by peacetime conscription. They made well-disciplined soldiers and during the war proved better prepared than rural folk to master technical weaponry such as machine guns.27 The German army provided a thorough course of training for these men. Its facilities were unrivalled: France simply had nothing to compare with the Reich’s twenty-six manoeuvre grounds of at least 5,625 hectares each.28 The doctrine taught was generally sensible too, although not flawless. Crucially, the Prussian drill regulations of 1906, unlike those issued in the French army in 1913, recognized the need to gain fire superiority before any attack. The importance of cooperation between the infantry and artillery was acknowledged, even if its difficulties were not fully understood. However, the army remained conservative in its attitude towards the open tactical formations that were necessary to minimize the effect of fire but were difficult to control. Loose skirmisher lines were favoured in the attack, but officers were encouraged to deploy late and as a result in 1914 German soldiers were caught in dense tactical formations and suffered heavy casualties. The army’s training was nonetheless sufficiently good to enable it successfully to field thirty-one reserve divisions, composed of men who had completed their peacetime training up to a decade earlier. While the German army had not found a solution for the age’s key dilemma
of how to move forward under lethal modern firepower, its training was sufficiently grounded in the new reality to produce an impressive battlefield performance in 1914.29

  The Austro-Hungarian army’s task in a European war was at first glance straightforward: during the six weeks in which its ally defeated France, it was to bear the main burden of holding the Russians in the east. However, Conrad, unlike Moltke, could not simply plan for one major conflict. The predators that surrounded the Empire could plausibly attack in a number of combinations, and so unlike their German allies, with their obsessive focus on one single scheme, the Austro-Hungarians had stacks of war plans. There were plans for conflict with Russia (War Case ‘R’), in the Balkans (War Case ‘B’) and, although formally an ally, with Italy (War Case ‘I’). The army also prepared to deploy against combinations of these enemies and, a case considered hopeless even by the optimists in the Habsburg General Staff, against all three in alliance.30 In order to meet all eventualities, Conrad divided his operational force into three groups. A-Echelon, the strongest group with nine corps containing twenty-seven of the army’s forty-eight infantry divisions, was intended to provide protection against Russia. The Balkan Minimal Group of three corps (with nine divisions) had the task of defending against Serbia and Montenegro. Finally, there was a swing group, B-Echelon, which comprised twelve divisions that could be sent wherever needed. The circumstances of July 1914 presented two possibilities for this echelon. Habsburg leaders had to decide whether they faced ‘War Case B’, a conflict solely against Serbia, or whether Russia would intervene, bringing about ‘War Case B+R’. In the former case, B-Echelon was to be sent to the southern border for an offensive. In the latter, it would urgently be required in Galicia, where, with the units of A-Echelon, it would take part in an attack intended to disrupt the Tsarist Empire’s mobilization.