Grey Tide in the East
An Alternative History of the First World War
by Andrew J. Heller
UK Edition
Copyright 2013 Andrew J Heller
Published by Strict Publishing International
Cover Design by Rachel Heller
Publisher’s Note
This UK edition has been produced by request specifically for readers in the UK and those elsewhere who prefer UK English spelling and phraseology rather than American English. A very few “Americanisms” have been left untouched, because to change them would have detracted from the author’s style of writing.
Other than spelling and phrasing, there are essentially no differences between this book and the American English edition “Gray Tide in the East”.
Foreword
On August 1, 1914 Germany struck the first blow of what would later be called the First World War by sending 750,000 troops flooding through the small neutral countries of Luxembourg and Belgium on the way to France. The invasion of Belgium had the immediate consequence of bringing the British Empire into the war against Germany, which would not have otherwise happened. In the longer term, Belgium led to the British blockade of Germany, and the German counter-blockade by the use of unrestricted submarine warfare (meaning that the submarines would sink any vessel, British or neutral in the waters around the British Isles). This in turn led the United States to join the coalition that finally defeated Germany in 1918, after more than 4 years of the bloodiest war in history.
The invasion of Belgium almost did not happen. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, had a shrewder political sense than did his advisors and generals. Fearing the invasion would bring about Great Britain's declaration of war against Germany and put Germany in the position of the aggressor in the opinion of the world, the Kaiser cancelled the invasion on his own authority, and urged his commanding general to scrap the entire war plan, and send the troops East, against France’s ally, Russia. The Chief of the General Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke persuaded the Kaiser to withdraw his stop order, and the invasion went ahead as planned.
But what if things had gone a little differently that day between the General and the Kaiser…?
It was the battering of drums I heard,
It was hunger, it was the hungry that cried
And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving,
Marching and marching in a tragic time
Below me on the asphalt, under the trees.
It was soldiers went marching over the rocks,
And still the birds came, came in watery flocks,
Because it was spring, and the birds had to come.
No doubt that soldiers had to be marching,
And that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.
Wallace Stevens
Dry Loaf
Chapter One: BERLIN, AUGUST 1, 1914
General Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke marched down the corridors of the Hohenzollern royal palace, looking neither to the left nor to the right. A Colonel followed, carrying his briefcase. One look at the General’s face, with its deeply furrowed brow, its mouth that turned downward in a thin line and droopy grey moustache, would be sufficient for any reasonably impartial observer to conclude that here was a man who took a serious view of life. Nor would this same observer be surprised to learn that General von Moltke was known to his subordinates on the German Imperial General Staff (behind his back, naturally) as der traurige Julius, which might be rendered into English as “Gloomy Gus”. In truth, the Chief of the General Staff was a pessimist by nature, and today’s events had done nothing to brighten his outlook.
Moltke had only that morning issued the orders that would set the Imperial war machine into motion, sending the right wing of the German Army sweeping across the fields of Belgium and on into northern France, beginning the march of three-quarters of a million men that would land a knockout punch on the left flank of the unsuspecting French Army.
In a few hours, elements of the 16th Division of the Fourth Army were scheduled to cross the border of Luxembourg to serve as the hinge for the main movement of the First, Second and Third Armies farther to the north. These three armies would deliver the key blow to the flank and rear of the French Army, a manoeuvre that would, if all went as planned, win the war in six weeks in a single titanic battle of annihilation.
The movements of the Imperial Army had been calculated on a precise schedule, but suddenly a wrench had been thrown into the gears at the worst possible moment, by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Emperor had halted the invasion, completely bypassing the Table of Organisation and disregarding the General Staff by sending an order directly to the commander of the 16th, telling him to stop until he received an order to proceed from the Kaiser himself. He had then summoned Moltke to the palace, no doubt to explain this new brainstorm, the latest and worst timed instance of Imperial meddling in military affairs.
The operational plan for the invasion of Belgium had not originated with Moltke. He had inherited it from his predecessor, Count Alfred von Schlieffen. Schlieffen developed his plan in 1905, after the Russo-Japanese War had exposed some of the glaring deficiencies in the corrupt and ineffectual Tsarist military establishment. Schleiffen’s approach was designed to take advantage of the Russian weaknesses revealed during the fighting against the Japanese in Siberia, particularly their slow rate of mobilisation and poor logistics.
By 1905, the opposing military alliance systems of the Dual Monarchies of Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Dual Entente of France and Russia had been in place for a decade. Ever since, all of these Great Powers had steadily built their armies and navies in preparation for a future great war, although no one knew when the next war would come, or why.
Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that the German General Staff had assumed that whenever the war finally came it would be fought on two fronts: against France in the West, and Russia in the East, two foes who presented very different strengths and weaknesses.
Modern, industrialised France was a reasonably compact nation, with an extensive railroad system, a good road network and an efficient military organisation. She could be counted on to mobilise her army quickly - as quickly as Germany, in fact.
Russia, on the other hand, was an enormous, sprawling country, with fewer miles of railway than her ally (and far fewer in proportion to the area served), primitive roads, and a notoriously corrupt and incompetent military establishment. The Russian Army, moreover, had been thoroughly humiliated by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05. It was therefore reasonable for German planners to calculate that the Russians would be at least eight weeks behind both Germany and France in mobilising their forces after the war broke out.
The military geography of the East and West provided another stark contrast. Germany’s common border with France stretched from the thickly forested and nearly roadless Ardennes in the north, through the rugged Vosges Mountains down to the Swiss border. This terrain was unsuitable for the rapid movement of large armies, and the border was protected by a series of fortresses on the French side from Verdun to Belfort, fortifications built for the express purpose of meeting and repelling a German invasion. In this country, defenders would have all the advantages and attackers none. Progress there would be measured in metres rather than kilometres and the metres would be purchased with blood. Schlieffen, like his predecessors, concluded that attacking here would be folly, and he refused to consider it.
In the East, however, the rolling farm country of Russian Poland and the Ukraine offered plenty of scope for manoeuvring great masses of men, and even more for utilising Germany’s greatest advantage: its superb Krupp field artillery, the finest in the world. M
oreover, with such a vast country to defend, it would be relatively easy for the invaders to find weak points to break through the Russian lines, as they could not be strong everywhere, especially if they were as slow to mobilise their forces as expected.
Therefore, the obvious thing to do was to take advantage of Russia’s presumed inability to mobilise quickly by sending the mobile striking forces East, to knock the Tsar’s huge but disorganised armies (the so-called “Russian steamroller”) out of the war before they could become effective, or at least dislocate her mobilisation. Indeed, this had been the basis for the German war plans as prepared by the Imperial General Staff before 1905 when Schlieffen was appointed.
The new Chief rejected this approach. Russia might be slow, its army inefficient and its General Staff incompetent, but there were two factors that weighed against the possibility of a quick decision in the East.
One was the sheer size of the country. There were just too many kilometres of Russia, endless kilometres over which an invading army’s supplies had to be hauled by mule-drawn wagons over abysmal roads (where there were any roads at all), or on the inadequate rail network. As invaders had discovered over the centuries, campaigning in Russia was all too likely to become a logistical nightmare.
The second factor was the presence of the Russian General who had defeated some of the greatest military geniuses in European history, including Charles XII of Sweden and Bonaparte: General Winter. Schlieffen had not forgotten the fate of Napoleon’s Grande Armeé, which lost two-thirds of its men during the retreat from Russia in the terrible winter of 1812. Although all generals hoped to emulate Napoleon, Schlieffen had no desire to follow the great Corsican’s footsteps in that respect.
All things considered, it was clear to Schlieffen that France was the more dangerous foe and, paradoxically, the one who could be defeated more quickly. Since France was a comparatively small country, its armies would be concentrated in a relatively small area. They were sure to be in the north and east at the outset, in position to be enveloped and destroyed in a short, sharp campaign.
Schlieffen therefore proposed that the German Army put its muscle into an overpowering mobile striking force on the right wing, in the north, then launch it along the natural invasion route that had been used by invading armies marching to and from France for centuries: through the Low Countries, specifically Belgium. The weight of this invasion would pivot on Luxembourg and stretch across Belgium to the sea, so that the right wing would overlap the French left before it wheeled inward towards Paris. Schlieffen directed, “Let the last man on the right brush his sleeve in The Channel.”
He expected the French to commit the bulk of their forces to attack in Alsace and Lorraine along the Franco-German border, where they would be waylaid in the mountains and be unable to extricate themselves in time to meet the blow from the north that would land on their rear and crush them.
As a bonus, the great turning movement of the right wing would also result in the capture of Paris, or at least in isolating the city from the rest of the country. Since practically all the major lines of communication in France including the railways ran through the French capital, even if their field armies somehow escaped destruction from the initial blow, France would be virtually paralysed by this alone. Schlieffen predicted that the campaign to be over in six weeks, with the French Army either compelled to surrender en masse or to be so badly mangled as to be militarily negligible. After that, the bulk of the German divisions could be shipped back east to deal with the Russians who, he calculated, would still not be ready.
Count Alfred von Schlieffen was obsessed by his plan. It dominated his thoughts even on his deathbed, in 1913. His last words reputedly were, “Only make the right wing strong.” By the time Moltke was appointed Chief of the General Staff following Schlieffen’s retirement in 1906, his predecessor’s plan had become the military equivalent of the Gospel: sacred writ. It was no longer a plan; it was The Plan. Moltke approved of The Plan, as both brilliant and, like many other brilliant ideas, simple in conception. He tinkered with the details as the German Army expanded between 1905 and 1914, adding more men to the right wing and also adding strength to the left, but he did not alter the basic pattern.
Moltke assured anyone who asked him that The Plan was perfect, but he somehow could not rid himself of certain nagging doubts. It troubled him that the invasion route would go through Belgium, whose neutrality Germany had guaranteed in the Treaty of London in 1839. Moltke was not concerned about the small Belgian Army, which he dismissed as militarily negligible, but he was worried about Great Britain.
Britain, like France, Russia, Austria and Prussia (replaced by Germany in 1871), had guaranteed Belgium’s perpetual neutrality against any and all invaders. If Germany invaded Belgium, the English would probably enter the war on the side of the Franco-Russian alliance. Schlieffen had of course been aware of this when he formulated The Plan, but he discounted the ability of the small British Army, expected to be no more than two divisions at the outset, to have any important effect on the decisive opening campaign. By the time the British were able to raise an army of significant size, the French would be beaten and the war in the West would be over.
Moltke himself was not so sure. He believed that a modern, industrialised country like France, when fully mobilised for war, could be forced to surrender only after many months, perhaps even years of war. He was impressed by the ability of Russia to carry on the war against Japan in 1905, even after its fleets had been shattered and its armies were operating at the end of a 3,000-mile supply line. And Russia, he knew, was far from being industrialised to the degree that France was.
Moreover, if The Plan miscarried, not only would Germany have to face the army of another Great Power (for the English would surely raise a mass army if they entered the war), but would also suffer the effects of the inevitable blockade by the Royal Navy.
Schlieffen’s operational plan had been inspired by the victory of the Carthaginian general Hannibal at Cannae over the Romans, where 80,000 legionnaires had been slaughtered in a single day when the Carthaginians enveloped both the Roman flanks at once. Moltke was not always successful in silencing the little voice that reminded him Carthage had lost that war. On his bad days, he could hear the voice of his uncle, the great Field Marshal Moltke, warning, “No plan long survives contact with the enemy.”
But it was time to put all the whisperings of doubt behind him, Moltke told himself. The Plan was The Plan, with railway timetables worked out to the minute, intricate arrangements for movement of the great siege guns, and precise scheduling of the each and every element of the invasion, and it was too late to start having second thoughts. The Army was on its way, and The Plan would play itself out, for better or for worse.
Or it would, if the armchair generals could keep their hands off and let professional soldiers like himself deal with the war. But of course, amateur generals had to meddle, didn’t they? And they most especially had to meddle if the amateur in question was the All-Highest, by the grace of God, Emperor of the Second Reich, Wilhelm II Hohenzollern.
The Kaiser had telegraphed an order directly to General Georg Fuchs, commander of the 16th Division, completely disregarding the chain of command and overruling the General Staff without any prior consultation, ordering Fuchs not to cross the border until he received further orders from the Kaiser himself. He had then summoned Moltke to the palace, no doubt to lay out some harebrained scheme of his own design, tossing aside the years careful planning that had gone into the invasion. His actions threatened to throw the entire war plan into chaos unless his orders were reversed immediately.
The Kaiser was a man of many sudden inspirations, most of them ill considered. The General had almost no respect for either the Emperor’s judgment or his military abilities. He smiled sourly when he recalled what Count Alfred von Waldersee, a previous Chief of the General Staff, had told the Kaiser after the latter had commanded the “enemy” army in the annual manoeuvres back in
1891. Waldersee had crushed the Emperor’s forces decisively, and he evidently had wanted to put an end to the Kaiser’s military pretensions for good. At the post-mortem, the Chief of Staff said, “The plan had many traps, and your Majesty fell into every one of them.” Of course, Moltke recalled uneasily that Waldersee had been sacked by the Kaiser soon afterward.
He was ushered into Kaiser Wilhelm’s presence, followed by his aide Colonel Hentsch. In what had been a library, the Kaiser had set up a War Room, which included an enormous table covered by a map of both the Eastern and Western fronts, complete with little flags on stands indicating the positions of various military units. On the wall overlooking the map table was a full-length portrait of Frederick the Great in full battle array, looking sternly down on his descendant.
The General could see immediately that his sovereign was exultant. The Kaiser was clutching a sheet of blue paper. Since the Foreign Office typically used that type of paper for its official correspondence, Moltke guessed the blue sheet related news of some diplomatic development. (The Kaiser fancied himself to be as talented a diplomat as he was a general, and for once Moltke agreed with him).
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