Schlieffen Plan

So there was a big, big, big debate about this, um, yeah, all the way up to the 1920s, you might say.

It's linked to things like the Schlieffen Plan as well.

How are you going to fight your way? Are you going to really hit the enemy hard? It's linked to things like France 1940.

I think it's very important.

The power of the defensive at that time period was so strong compared to the ability of the offensive defensively.

that no matter what you did, no matter what strategy you follow, the Schlieffen plan is always going to fail.

It's always going to end up in that sort of trench warfare with two sides just lobbing artillery at each other for the next four years.

Yeah, I mean, that's what happened, so we tend to assume it was inevitable, but the miracle of the man and all that, I mean, it...

The Germans had just done for, really, because they'd been fighting for so long with the background of a blockade.

But, you know, there are other parts of the Great War where, you know, Middle East and so on, where it wasn't French warfare, it wasn't deadlocking in the same sort of way.

Well, it's like the line I had written for the next upcoming one, like discussing the Schlieffen Plan.

It's like it wasn't tactics that the Germans needed.

The ridge south of Sedan mentioned above as captured by our 1st and 42nd Infantry Divisions in the closing days of the war was occupied in the Sedan battle of 1870 by German troops advancing in the same direction as ours in 1918.

However, then Sedan and the hills around it were occupied by the French instead of the Germans as in 1918.

General von Schlieffen planned to do the same thing in the coming war, but because of the size of the armies on a much larger scale.

However, as the French army more than covered the whole of the Franco-German frontier, the Germans would have to advance not only along the whole frontier instead of just the central route as in 1870, but along the southern route through Switzerland and the northern one through Belgium if they were going to turn both French flanks and bend them back until the whole French army was surrounded.

The French thus forced to surrender, the Germans would be free to turn practically their whole strength on Russia.

They had an initial plan to invade through the flat plains of central Belgium and the Netherlands.

The French and British anticipated that exact move, so they would have followed the same strategy that the Germans did in World War I, the Schlieffen Plan.

Uh, but by a stroke... [laughs] What? Have I said that wrong?

Yeah.

Schlieffen, yeah.

Yeah.

The Schlieffen Plan.

Fuck.

In its first engagement, the 90,000-man British Expeditionary Force, commanded by Field Marshal John French, had been forced to withdraw from Mons and was retreating south and west.

Five German armies were advancing across northern France in accordance with the Schlieffen Plan, intent on outflanking the French and British forces and seizing Paris in a matter of weeks.

There was, wrote one military observer, a very real danger of annihilation.

At dawn on August 22nd, the Gloucester Castle docked at Le Havre.

And, the way the war started, started as if the, in the way that the military planners had wanted it to start.

I left you last time with the Schlieffen Plan, and Schlieffen literally on his deathbed said that the last German soldier, his sleeve, should touch the Manche, the English Channel, and that in order to put France into a headlock, put Paris into a headlock like that, you should sweep this way through Belgium.

They'd eliminated the Netherlands as part of that invasion route, that would come in World War II, but they didn't need the Netherlands in this case, but they would march into neutral Belgium, neutral since 1831, knowing that this would bring the British into the war, because the British could Belgium, occupied by a potentially very hostile power.

And so, Germany is under pressure to win the war quickly.