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A strong start for a serious AAR. I hope you can maintain this level of writing Kurt.
On the Belgium thingy: Britain had a treaty in place to guarantee the independence of Belgium ever since it gained its independence from the Netherlands. The main reason for this was to deny Belgium, its ports and its industrial capacity to any potential adversaries on the continent (Prussia and France), as the whole British foreign policy was aimed at maintaining the balance of power in the world (meaning the Brits could just sit back and be superiour).
Giving up on Belgium would seriously damage British presige (not backing up a rock solid guarantee) and fatally disturb the balance of power in Europe.
On the Belgium thingy: Britain had a treaty in place to guarantee the independence of Belgium ever since it gained its independence from the Netherlands. The main reason for this was to deny Belgium, its ports and its industrial capacity to any potential adversaries on the continent (Prussia and France), as the whole British foreign policy was aimed at maintaining the balance of power in the world (meaning the Brits could just sit back and be superiour).
Giving up on Belgium would seriously damage British presige (not backing up a rock solid guarantee) and fatally disturb the balance of power in Europe.
Are you sure? Clearly Germany didn't think the 'rock solid guarantee' was worth the (very old) paper it was written on, if they had things would have turned out very differently.
Indeed if the guarantee was that important then maybe Lord Grey should have mentioned it a bit earlier. That said he wasn't the world's brightest so perhaps he just buggered up, if so it's probably got to be up there as one of the biggest single mistakes in world history.
The guarantee to Belgium was important, as it was the official reason for going to war AFAIK. I still think the prospect of giving the Kaiser an inch and noticing him taking a mile didn't sound too appealing to London. I'm almost sure the Germans would have restored Belgium independence, but 'war reparations' in the form of pieces of the Belgian Congo and shipments of Cockerill steel would have strenghtened ze Germans more than the Brits would have liked IMO.
As for poor Lord Grey, his German counterparts weren't known for being too bright either. Chancellor Von Bülow once mistook a subtle British proposal for a future alliance for British weakness and tried to bully them into an official alliance, thinking Britain would never allign with France and Russia. The rest is history.
Sounds like the turn of the century had cabinet's full of idiots I suppose.
So according to what you said, UK entered the war on the side of the Entente because of Germany's invasion of Belgium, then did Germany ever consider it before even going to war, could they have gone the alternate path (and probably taken more casualties?
So according to what you said, UK entered the war on the side of the Entente because of Germany's invasion of Belgium, then did Germany ever consider it before even going to war, could they have gone the alternate path (and probably taken more casualties?
Not bloody likely. The French didn't want a repeat of 1871, so that border was watched and fortified to the point that the fortifications were supposed to be a guarantee of peace by themselves, because only a madman would attack across that frontier. The entire idea was that they'd be in Paris and sitting at a conference table before anyone had a chance to intervene. And, if the Belgian frontier had been a big enough logistic pipeline, and if men could fight like machines until replaced, they might have. It was supposed to be another coup de main move like the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars. Unfortunately, the Schlieffen Plan ignores pesky things like the number of trains that Germany could shove through Belgium in peacetime, let alone after the lines had been torn up by war, and that men need rest. After that, the war turned into a race for the coast, where there was still an open flank, and the arrival of the BEF pretty much sealed that flank.
Good point, long story short. The French Fortifications were so tight that the only way they could bypass them would have to be to get to Belgium, guess France was expecting British support I think.
Could the Schlieffen Plan really have worked the way the Germans designed it to? Or was it one big wishful thought?
There's a school of thought that says the Schlieffen Plan wasn't actually a plan, but back-of-the-envelope thinking by Alfried von Schlieffen, never finalized in his lifetime and poorly understood afterwards by Moltke Jr. So as written, no, it could never have worked, especially on the premise that it wasn't finished when Moltke made his changes and got rid of the "swinging door" in Alsace-Lorraine.
At least one historial (forgot his name unfortunately) claimed the Schlieffen plan would have been succesful if Von Moltke Jr's nerves would have been a bit stronger. He pulled divisions from the crucial right wing through Belgium to reinforce his battered left flank in Alsace-Lorraine. Later he moved troops from the Western front to the East to halt the Russian invasion of Eastern Prussia. Both moves proved to be unneccesary, as the French where forced to pull back out of Alsace-Lorraine and the Russians where beaten by Ludendorff and Hindenburg at Tannenberg before the reinforcements from the West arrived.
Germany didn't think Belgium would fight. After that, it was a list of toadies convincing themselves that Britain wouldn't fight over Belgium (i.e. over a principled excuse).
Razgriz 2K9 said:
The Kaiser actually called a meeting and suggested wrenching Germany's war plan around to fight Russia first and not invade Belgium when it became clear that Britain might use Belgium as an excuse to defend France. Moltke protested that it was impossible to undo the mobilization schedule and change it so drastically. The Kaiser acquiesced.
Nathan Madien said:
I think it would only have worked if Belgium stood down her army and assisted the German army with supplies and logistics on their way into France. Once King Albert decided to resist, the failure of the plan was inevitable.
The big question in this sort of scenario is: "Would the French quit after losing Paris?" This isn't 1871 anymore...the German's would still be facing an not fully defeated and fully mobilized French army (Joffre's plan envisaged falling back past Paris to the Seine).
Looking forward to the carnage and political dealings of increasingly desperate heads of state. Here's hoping Wilson is particularly mule headed!
Just because something is made the official reason for going to war, it does not mean that it is the real reason or even that it is a good reason for doing so.
The German High Command had informed the government in 1914 that there was no guarantee the Schlieffen plan would succeed but they also said that if the Germans waited another year, the French military reforms (begun in 1912) would ensure that the plan had no hope of success. It was decided to move before it was too late.
The German High Command had informed the government in 1914 that there was no guarantee the Schlieffen plan would succeed but they also said that if the Germans waited another year, the French military reforms (begun in 1912) would ensure that the plan had no hope of success. It was decided to move before it was too late.
IMO even losing France, the French army and government would still fight on, maybe with even more determination as their country's capital is currently under enemy control. Nationalism was on the rise before WWI so with a German occupied Paris, that French Nationalism would increase tenfold.
EDIT: Again, an excellent update and what's with the sausages in the last image?
@Enewald: Well... Peti loves beds. To sleep, to eat, to muse about how many pizzas he may eat in a day, in a week...
@Karaiskandar: Soon, very soon.
@Davout. Britain couldn't allow Germany to win the supremacy over Europe. But that was not a compelling argument to win the popular whim was not to gave her the "moral superiority" that claiming to go to war for "little gallant Belgium". That was just a entirely different matter.
@El Pip: I can. Essentially, Britain's eternal and perpetual interest have lain in preventing any European state from becoming too powerful and to dominate the continent. If that happened, Britain's economic interests would be threatened. If Germany had won the Great War, Britain would have find herself without continental allies and very vulnerable to attack. It was just a question of status quo. When Spain was the threat, England supported France. When Louix XIV was the fiend, Britain allied with Austria. Sir Humphrey Appleby comes to my mind, here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXH3-A8zMI
@VILenin: I'm afraid I'm going to follow a bit his steps. Not to the Tower, mehopes... :rofl:
@Nathan Madien: Car kills, you know... I prefer the "small mistakes lead to big buggers".
@Davout: The French AI won't be as crazy and, sigh, I won't allow to do that. To go mad we have Tokio.
@Nathan Madien: From going, as good old Darling would say, "gone totally tonto" to become a sudden unreal incarnation of Attila the Hun.
@FlyingDutchie: Peti will help.
@Razgriz 2K9: Indeed. After all, we are talking about the war that began because, as Blackadder said, "in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and theGermans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. " Of course, it was bollocks.
An alternate path... Well, to focuse on the Eastern front and let the French bleed themselves white, for instace.
@c0d5579: Methinks that Schlieffen forgot Clausewitz's dictum: "No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy".
@Razgriz: Or to allow them to come after the German trenches. The French Plan XVIII was dumbest than Schlieffen's
@soulking: The "clever" pun of "The Punch" to show the aggressor as a vile Hun.
Update incoming...
@Karaiskandar: Soon, very soon.
@Davout. Britain couldn't allow Germany to win the supremacy over Europe. But that was not a compelling argument to win the popular whim was not to gave her the "moral superiority" that claiming to go to war for "little gallant Belgium". That was just a entirely different matter.
@El Pip: I can. Essentially, Britain's eternal and perpetual interest have lain in preventing any European state from becoming too powerful and to dominate the continent. If that happened, Britain's economic interests would be threatened. If Germany had won the Great War, Britain would have find herself without continental allies and very vulnerable to attack. It was just a question of status quo. When Spain was the threat, England supported France. When Louix XIV was the fiend, Britain allied with Austria. Sir Humphrey Appleby comes to my mind, here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXH3-A8zMI
@VILenin:
I'm afraid I'm going to follow a bit his steps. Not to the Tower, mehopes... :rofl:@Nathan Madien: Car kills, you know... I prefer the "small mistakes lead to big buggers".
@Davout: The French AI won't be as crazy and, sigh, I won't allow to do that. To go mad we have Tokio.
@Nathan Madien: From going, as good old Darling would say, "gone totally tonto" to become a sudden unreal incarnation of Attila the Hun.
@FlyingDutchie: Peti will help.
@Razgriz 2K9: Indeed. After all, we are talking about the war that began because, as Blackadder said, "in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and theGermans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. " Of course, it was bollocks.
An alternate path... Well, to focuse on the Eastern front and let the French bleed themselves white, for instace.
@c0d5579: Methinks that Schlieffen forgot Clausewitz's dictum: "No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy".
@Razgriz: Or to allow them to come after the German trenches. The French Plan XVIII was dumbest than Schlieffen's
@soulking: The "clever" pun of "The Punch" to show the aggressor as a vile Hun.
Update incoming...
Chapter three: Preparing for war.
Before the beginning of the war, Britain mobilised herself when the Grand Fleet was assembled by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. He combined the First Fleet with elements of the Second and Third Fleets at the Royal Navy’s wartime base at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney islands, thus creating the Grand Fleet, on 2nd August 1914. Its role was to deter any German attack on the British Isles and to be ready for the eventual and inevitable clash with the German fleet in the North Sea. Thus the need to combine various components of the fleets in British home waters into one concentrated force. To command it both Churchill and Prince Louis of Battenberg (the First Sea Lord) agreed upon a name: Admiral Sir John Jellicoe.
Jellicoe had had had a long career in the Royal Navy. He was very professional, calm, ambitious and most importantly, cautious. He had contributed to design the HMS Dreadnought along with Admiral Fisher and seemed earmarked to reach the top echelons of the Navy. A disciple of Fisher, Jellicoe was at the Admiralty, serving as the Second Sea Lord. As Churchill began to mobilise the fleet, he ordered Jellicoe to Scapa Flow where he, eventually, became the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet. One his first actions was to made the battleship HMS Iron Duke his flagship. While the British public expected a crushing victory over the German navy, a kind of new Trafalgar. However, Jellicoe did not considered that this was reallistically possible. The losses that such a victory may cost would damage so much the Grand Fleet that she would be no longer capable to ensure that the high seas remained British. Churchill described Jellicoe later as 'the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon'.
John Jellicoe, Admiral of the Fleet
With a strenght of 18 battleships, 15 heavy and light cruisers and four destroyer flotillas - after the outdated and eldest battleships had been rellocated to the Channel and the Mediterranean Sea -, the Grand Fleet could be reinforced easily by the four heavy cruiseres of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron (Admiral Gough-Cathorpe), based at Rosyth and the Battlecruise Force, led by the redoutable Read Admiral Beatty and his six fast battlecruisers.
Asquith knew, however, that the Royal Navy was not going to be enough to win the war. As he had taken over the Secretary of State for War since the resignation of J.E.B. Seeley, he saw the was as an opportunity to rally patriotic opinion and to make use of one of the Empire’s heroes. This he appointed Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, to the War Office. A living symbol of the Victorian empire since his victory at Ondurman, Kitchener was also a formidable organiser with experience in the Sudan, Egypt, South Africa and India, where he had reorganised the Indian Army.
Kitchener managed to leave an appalled government behind when he predicted that the war would last at least three years and that Britain would require an army of three million soldiers with which to defeat Germany. To the politicians, who believed that the war would be short, as no country could bear the financial costs of a long war, those were awful news. Kitchener went on demanding that 100,000 men should be added to the army immediately, along with enough officers be made available for training Britain’s new army, composed of new recruits, who were joining amidst a wave of patriotic fervour at the outbreak of war. However, it would take time for these divisions to come of age. Kitchener's inmediate recruiting campaign for volunteer regular troops created 6 new divisions by the end of August, and was attracting 33,000 men per day in September, the so called Pals Batallions*.
The only land force that Britain could rely on was the British Expeditionary Force It was small and made up of the British Army’s pre-war professional regular soldiers. Thus, while conscripted armies of Europe numbered in the millions, the BEF was just 120,000 strong -Total British Army strenght in August 1914 was 247,342 regular troops (about 120,000 overseas), 224,223 reservists of all classes and 268,777 Territorials-, and an entire corps was to be left in the British Isles in case of a surprise attack by the Germans. However, the BEF was reckoned to be the most professional army in the world – ‘the best-trained, best-organised and best-equipped British Army that ever went forth to war’, as historians have claimed. The BEF’s hallmark was its quality, not quantity – most of its soldiers had experience in conflict on the North West Frontier Province or South Africa, whereas those in European armies were largely going into battle for the very first time.
The BEF was to be sent, in accordance with the 1911 Committee of Imperial Defence meeting, to France to form on the French Army’s left wing, to ‘dam the German flood’ as it was suspected that a large portion of the German army was going through Belgium, and that the BEF would be required to cooperate with the French Army to halt its advance, before going onto the offensive and helping the French Army to victory. If a German raid against Britain did no took place then III Corps would be despatched to the continent. along with forces from Canada’s regular army while Egypt will provide a staging point for the forces coming from Australia and New Zealand. The German colonies in Africa were to be attacked by the Britain’s existing forces garrisoned across the continent, reinforced by elements of the Indian Army if needed. The bulk of the Indian Army was to be sent to Egypt at first. In the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy would seek to work with the French Navy in maintaining Allied maritime supremacy, and aid their French allies should a decisive clash with the Austro-Hungarian fleet develop. The Navy was also to help in seeing Germany’s Pacific colonies occupied as rapidly as possible.
France had a peacetime army in August 1914 that comprised 47 divisions (777,200 French and 46,000 colonial troops) in 21 regional corps, with attached calvary and field artillery. Separate overseas forces, generally comprising about 60% native troops, were stationed in North Africa, Indochina and Madagascar (110,000 men). By August 1914 further 2.9 million men had been mobilized.
Since 1870 an attacking doctrine (élan or offensive à l'outrance) completely dominated tactics developments to 1914, with the stress laid on the psychological effects on oponents of rapid cavalry charges and fearless infantry assaults. This was to mean that machine guns, heavy artillery and tools of trench warfare were neglected, as they were not considered important in the context of offensive field opertions. Field artillery, based on the excellent medium Soixante-Quince (75 mm) gun, was deployed in small mobile batteries intended for rapid accompaniment of attacking infantry rather than thorough reduction of hostile positions. Doomed with hindshight, faith in spirt over firepower had many important advocates in other Europeans armies, and remained an important influence in French military thinking as late as 1917.
The German Army was recognized as the most efficient land force in the world. It incorporated the ground and air forces of all the German states, although the kingdom of Bavaria maintained an autonomous military administration. The peacetime German Army comprised 50 divisions (700,000 men), with attached cavalry regiments and other support forces. Within a week of mobilization some 3.8 million men were under arms.
The militaristic culture associated with Prussia contributed a caste of senior officers headed by the kaiser as C-in-C. Planning an operational control was conducted by the General Staff (OHL) under the Army chief of staff, who was effective C-in-C of the field armies but dependent on approval from the crown for all major decisions. No army was more efficiently mobilized, effectively manoeuvered or meticulously prepared for every tactical and supply eventuality.
A group of German infantry in full marching order in 1914.
In terms of sheer size, the armies of the Imperial Russia were regarded as a potentially unbeatable force in 1914. The Empire's estimated manpower resource included more than 25 million men of combate age by 1912. However, its main area of vulnerability was its slow mobilization capacity. Modernization was hampered by a determined clique gathered around C-in-C Gran Duke Nikolai, ensuring concentration of resources on isolated fortresses and a bloated cavalry arm.
Despite of the reforms that took place after the defeat of 1905, there was still a shortage of competent officers and a serious lack of NCOs willing to perform long service underr often brutal conditions. The mediocrity of the high command reflected a desperate shortage of young ,vigorous or factionally intained generals. Worse still, the poor roads and railways of the Empire were barely capable of fulfilling peactime requirements of the Army. By August 1914 the army comprised 37 cavalry and 74 infantry divisions. Artillery relied on obsolete, clumsy fortress weapons, but some 1910-pattern light howitzers were produced under license from France. Medium and field artillery were equipped with old Krupp 90 mm guns, but the more modern 76.2 mm model was also used.
*Pals Batallions: Popular term used to describe British Army units composed of volunteers who shared close civilian ties. Batallions of "pals" or "chums" -connected through schools, villages, sports clubs or places of work- enlisted together from all classes of British society, even after the Military Service Act introduced concription in Great Britain in 1916. Pal's Batallions were often encouraged to join in mass by guarantees of postwar employment and economic aid from employers or unions. Out of nearly 1000 battalions raised during the first two years of the war, over two thirds were locally-raised Pals battalions. The policy of drawing recruits from amongst a local population ensured that, when the Pals battalions suffered casualties, individual towns, villages, neighbourhoods, and communities back in Britain were to suffer disproportionate losses
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Poor Krupp, equipped everyone for the war except the French.
When was the last time Prussians lost a fight? Jena-Auerstadt? Blüchers campaigns into France?
When was the last time Prussians lost a fight? Jena-Auerstadt? Blüchers campaigns into France?
That was Von Moltke the Elders dictum, even if Clausewitz would have approved of it. Sorry for the nitpick, but Clausewitz just features heavily in my thesis.
Now ontopic: looks like Britain will still suffer of the curse of the dreadnought. They are so expensive and such powerful symbols that you just can't risk losing one in battle...
Didn't every nation suffer from that to a certain extent though?
More to the point, as has been mentioned the Royal Navy didn't need to risk a big naval battle, they already had control of the oceans (or will once the raiders have been tided up) so why look for a battle where victory will give nothing and defeat be a disaster?
Germany had no such excuse, a sunk High Seas Fleet will make sod all difference on the Western Front but a victory would break, or at least severely weaken, the blockade. I would suggest therefore that Germany had a much worse dreadnought curse, starting with their foolish decision to build any in the first place.