Historical maps probably helped cause World War I
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That actually would be a much better analogy to Cannae. Enticing them to break your center, not realizing until they're surrounded that the victory they've charged into is actually an epic defeat.
I still don't understand why they'd assume French generals would do that, though. It really assumes a hopeless level of ineptitude on their part for it to work. Seems obvious to me they're better off stalling till Russians are mobilized, no matter how enticing the bait is.
In his defense, the Britannica entry does mention it. https://www.britannica.com/event/Schlieffen-Plan In your defense, you are right.
The Germans were able to advance to the doorstep of Paris. They continuously tried to engage the Entente in a decisive battle (from the Frontier all the way to the Marne). They were unable to do so because the Entente refused to be engaged that way, and because the Entente had superior strategic/operational mobility (they were retreating onto their own logistics and infrastructure (railroads)). At the Marne (Paris), Germany was at or near it's logistical limits. Germany also transferred 200,000 troops to the Eastern front.
The Battle of the Marne itself was not "Germany face tanks into prepared defensive positions and is stopped cold by Entente machine guns and fortifications". The battle was a retreating Entente force, bolstered by re-inforcements, turning around and attacking into the pursuing Germans.
The "Schlieffen Plan" failed before the whole 'static warfare' thing started. In fact, it was the failure of the plan that induced the conditions for the race to the sea, and the whole western front shitshow.
The "Schlieffen Plan" failed because Germany outran it's logistics, because Germany panicked when Russia mobilized faster than anticipated and transferred over a sizeable body of men, because France was able to use it's position (retreating onto its infrastructure) effectively (and they weren't dumb enough to try to engage the Germans at every opportunity), and I'm sure for many other reasons as well. Machine guns may play a part, but I think it's overly reductive to claim that "machine guns - defensive warfare" made the plan impossible.
To add to the debate about Cannae: Talking strategy is talking about abstract principles. The abstract patterns are here "frontal assault" vs. "flank movement" with the aim of encirclement. This is the only relevant and quite vage analogy of the Schlieffen plan and Cannae. However, the Schlieffen plan as it was adopted (and modified) by the German army was a plan of an assault with a very strong and fast right wing, but at Cannae, the battle began with a frontal attack by both armies, with Hannibal subsequently having his centre retreat and later advancing both flanks and finally his cavalry into the back of the Romans to complete the encirclement. So the analogy between Cannae and the so-called Schlieffen plan is not very far-reaching.
If we are looking for a better analogy to Cannae, the German invasion of the Low Countries and France in May 1940 comes surprisingly close. Here the advancing Belgian, English and French armies failed to cover their right flank sufficiently. A hazardous, rapid German tank advance on this flank cut them off from possible lines of retreat and threatened to envelop them from behind. Only the beach at Dunkirk remained as a way of escape for some.
The German plan of May 1940 has been described by some historians such as Antony Beevor as a variant of the Schlieffen plan. Beevor writes in "The Second World War" (2012): "Manstein's [the author of the plan] left-hook Sichelschnitt was thus a reversal of the version of the right-hook Schlieffen plan attempted 1914, which the French now expected them to try a second-time." (p. 97) -- In other words: The French expected another attempt like 1914, they operated accordingly, for that very reason walked into a trap and were defeated by an exactly opposite flanking manoeuvre.
But yeah, Cannae did (and still does) exert a big influence on military planners.
As others have pointed out, Schlieffen depended on massive luck and adherence to The Plan, neither of which obtained. It was not machine guns that made it fail.
Different times than we live in, for sure.
It was however the logical way to attack France from Germany given the geography. WWII generals, who weren't as obsessed with Cannae as Schlieffen, but were well aware the "Schlieffen Plan" was a failure, took the same route with better mobility and logistics and succeeded.
They pulled a switcheroo on the allies in WWII and attacked through the Ardennes. The French & English forces rushing to counter Schlieffen II instead found themselves cut off in Belgium.
Rolling artillery barrages would send the front-line machinegunners hiding in the trenches. The wave of attackers behind the artillery barrage, when moving quickly had a very good chance of capturing the front line of trenches.
The problem that they would face is that rail-deployed reinforcements on the defender side would pour in as a counter-attack... And those recently-captured front-line trenches were, by design, indefensible from an attack from the rear.
So you'd get lots of bloody attacks, with horrific loss of life, where all the territorial gains made in them would be lost in an equally bloody counter-attack. As a net result, the front is frozen, despite both sides taking turns attacking (And making brief territorial gains, that are immediately reversed).
Artillery and railroads, not machineguns seem to be the major influences, there.
... but reality went another way and now the west is sending in cruise missiles tanks and cluster artillery.
Yet another parallel with what's happening in Ukraine right now. Both Russia (and some in NATO) I think expected this to end in days with an ugly military defeat, capture of the capital, and then years of guerilla and political battles.
We appear to be at a similar juncture as WWI in geopolitics and military organization/technology, where the relative capabilities of various forces are not well understood.
(And similar to WWI this seems to be primarily about imperial economics, within which smaller nations get caught up as battle sites and pawns and the issue of the self-determination of smaller ethnic nation states becomes one of the defining issues. At least that's how Lenin and others analyzed WWI, and it's notable that Putin went out of his way to namecheck and attack Lenin in particular at the start of the conflict...)
Coffee brainfarts, sorry. :-)
> specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German generals were obsessed with the battle,
So not just the German generals specifically Schlieffen. The Schlieffen plan developed by it's namesake general was the governing document for the German plan of battle at the beginning of WW1. Schlieffen spent his entire life trying to figure out the plan that would eventually be his namesake, and he was also obsessed with Canne, so I could see an argument that was a contributing factor. If schlifen wasn't obsessed with the double envelopment he is less likely to send troops through Belgium and no Belgium means no UK involvement leading to a very different war.
> Going to war is first and foremost a political act
That is one of the fascinating things about WW1 is there are times where it seems as if forces more than men were dictating things. At one point after mobilization and but prior to the actual invasion of Belgium the Kaiser wanted to stop things as he believed a peace deal was reached and was told no, not only no but that such a thing was fundamentally impossible at that point because the military plans laid out by the generals many years ago had dictated so precisely how things had to happen that any change to the plans was close to impossible once they were set in motion. The same thing happened in the Russian side the Czar issued orders for mobilisation then stand down then mobilization again and then one general smashed his telephone so that it could not be rescinded. I think they is part of what made WW1 the war it was, it was one ran primarily by and for the generals (until the later years) with the political officials deferring all power and authority to them.
It has a little bit to do with it, I think, but only in two sense 1. It involved a decisive victory by envelopment which, completely unrelated to Cannae, Germany needed to avoid a two-front war. 2. It's just the go-to military general's example to refer to their own "masterpiece". aka. Schlieffen's Cannae.
I'll agree, though, that it would be equally relevant had Schlieffen called it, "Pulling my goalie to put an extra man on the ice".
The Schlieefen plan didn't exist.
> The Schlieffen memorandum of 1905, with its 1906 supplement, was not a plan. It was not operational. It did not go into details or issue orders
David Frmokin's Europe's Last Summer
Terence Zuber's Inventing the Schlieefen Plan shows that the "plan" was written in a memorandum at his retirement, which his daughter kept in her family photos (even in August 1914). The memorandum also involved 20 divisions which never existed - 48 corps should have attacked France instead of the actual 34...
The actual plan as described was a one front war against France... From Schlieefen's other writings were Germany at war with France and Russia, he suggested using interior rail lines to lure enemy forces inside, and then counteract by taking their supply lines (the move through Belgium and Northern France), quickly winning the war, which bears only the most superficial resemblance to the war as started.
Mark Humphries and John Maker have gone into more detail on where the actual war plan (as followed) came from, von Moltke's beliefs etc. Even e.g. Gross who has strongly debated Zuber about this agrees that there was no official plan as such, instead arguing that Schlieffen's influence, staff rides etc. planted the seeds of seeing potential victory through such an approach.
Besides The Guns of August which I just finished last month.
The second deals with prewar military strategy, showing that European militaries expected trench warfare and ineffective offensive, until the Ruso-Japanese war, which made them switch gears, believing a strong offensive and bayonets could overcome machine guns.
One interesting point is bayonet designs in the 1870s and 1880s were wide, meant to be used for digging, entrenching. But by the 1910s, they were suddenly long and thin to give soldiers "more reach" akin to spears!
> one general smashed his telephone so that it could not be rescinded
Seems like your "forces more than men" are actually just "more men."
Arguably, though, you're describing ideology or mythos, eg "Der tag!"[0]
0. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anecdotes-from-the-arch...
The war is replete with similar examples, and sure we can call it mythos or ideology or something like that, but it is clear there were times in the war that even had the generals and the populace wanted things to be different it was near impossible to change and men continued thrown into the meat grinder.
Yeah I think we can safely assume that the German general staff were familiar with Clausewitz.
Schlieffen plan had the same aim but shifted northward to deal with the fact that after the annexations of 1871 any offensive through the south (now guarded by the Vosges) was unlikely to be successful.
But to lean completely on Tuchman to characterize the military planning of the Germans is completely negligent. Simply saying that it's imperfect scholarship does not excuse you from lifting your main thesis straight from the book.
It's clear that Schlieffen drew on Cannae as a model, but the argument presented in this article is just... missing a lot of stuff?
First, the Tuchman quote: "Under Schlieffen, envelopment became the fetish and frontal attack the anathema of the German General Staff.". I don't think this is a fair characterization ('fetish'). Why WOULD Germany -want- to perform frontal attacks when envelopment was an option? In nearly all scenarios, envelopment is strictly better than frontal attack when possible! And the Germans were hardly afraid of frontal assaults even at the start of WW1. They straight up face-tanked the Belgium fortresses!
And beyond Cannae, the Germans had plenty of recent military history where envelopment/flanking carried the day. In the Austro-Prussian War at the Battle of Koniggratz (arguably one of the major stepping stones to the foundation of the German Empire), an operational flanking maneuver carried the day. In the Franco-Prussian war (the actual founding war of the German Empire), the Battle of Sedan was a battle of encirclement (the Prussians basically totally enveloped the French).
Perhaps Cannae was the archetype they were chasing, but they also had recent (and nationally significant) examples to draw on. They were not 'just' chasing a 2000 year old mirage - they were trying to live up to their own recent traditions and history.
So when the author says, "Doubt never seemed to enter the minds of these military strategists of pre-war Germany. It did not seem to trouble them, for instance, that they were drawing world-changing lessons from a map of a battle of two thousand years earlier about which surprisingly little is known" - well, I'd argue that they weren't troubled because they weren't drawing world changing lessons from 2000 years ago. They were drawing world-changing lessons from recent world-changing events (they UNIFIED GERMANY! They MADE the GERMAN EMPIRE!) that their parents and grandparents just partook in.
If there was a battle that the German high command was obsessed with, it was Austerlitz, where Napoleon showed how maneuver and control of his armies could decimate larger forces. That's, well, the reason the German general staff came into existence - analysis of Napoleon's victories and style of leadership showed that just amassing troops wasn't enough, here had to be a plan, and an operational art of war, beyond mere tactics.
Many studies, even the very first war games, were done by the German high command, using exquisitely drawn maps (again, one of the things they learned from the preceding wars, actually knowing what terrain you're on, and where you are kind of matters a great deal) looking at the battles of the Napoleonic wars, and the power of maneuver over fires.
The issue comes, not from machine guns, but from the absolutely devasting power of artillery, which turns nearly maneuvering blocks of infantry into, well, horrible casualties. Generals on both sides of the war looked for that one crushing engagement, that one sweep where they could break the enemy morale and carry the day. Of course they looked to Cannae, and spoke of victory to match it, it's one of the great battles and is taught for a reason. However, I think it's a mistake to look at the speeches and letters extolling a battle from 2000 years ago while ignoring entirely the world changing war that happened in their nation's recent memory, the one they literally wrote the book about.
Now, with Schengen in full effect all over Europe crossing a border is something that usually involves seeing some buildings without a purpose in the middle of a highway. The only time I have been stopped inside the Schengen area for document checks was during the COVID era and it felt pretty weird not to be able to just go from Amsterdam to Riga without such checks.
Borders exist for the sake of the common good, in a way that's analogous to private property, which also exists for the sake of the common good. I realize this must be a strange notion for those of us raised in a culture that's been shot through with liberalism and liberal/radically individualist ideas (I have here in mind the philosophical stance, not liberal institutions), where private property is understood as prior to the common good and where the common good is conceived as something that's grudgingly ceded from private property. But traditionally, the common good was taken to be prior to private property, and private property to be something the exists for the sake of the common good because it enables human flourishing. (Incidentally, this understanding resolves ethical problems concerning the use of what would otherwise be taken to be private property during times of crisis, such as whether the taking of food from a privately owned stockpile, by starving people, during a famine would constitute theft.)
Now, how particular borders are enforced or respected or treated is a matter of prudential political judgement. Schengen is not borderless. It is itself defined by a border that is enforced by Frontex! It is precisely the Schengen border that enables free movement within Schengen. Member states have determined that free movement between them and them only is for the common good of these member states. Furthermore, just because free movement is now possible doesn't mean borders have ceased to exist. Administrative borders still exist because they circumscribe legal jurisdictions, and these may or may not coincide with ethnic boundaries or cultural regions. States have simply become more permissive about enforcing movement because of their membership in Schengen. But if a crisis were to occur, such as a flood of migrants that threatens the good of a nation's population, you can be sure that member states would control the flow of people over their borders again, if only temporarily, to contain the crisis and protect the common good of the population. Protecting the common good is, after all, the job of the state.
Even today, official US govn topo maps are constantly rectified and reprinted as new surveys and aerials are taken into account and we realize errors were made. You can actually explore the differences in the reprints via https://pastmaps.com/explore if you're curious about it (for full transparency, Pastmaps is my own project)
>> There’s something beguiling about the thought that a simple arrangement of lines might explain the world — like seeing human history as an enormous game of Civilization 6. But of course, that’s also the problem with using maps as a way of understanding history. If you’re not careful, they go from being helpful tools to misleading simplifications.
To which I think the blog post makes an interesting argument.
I've always thought about maps from a Tufte perspective:
(1) They are abstractions from reality. (2) Consequently, they simplify and omit select details. (3) Consequently, they are created with an inherent and specific purpose in mind: details necessary for that purpose are included, those unneeded are omitted.(4) Ergo, we must be careful to understand a map's original purpose and ask whether its abstractions are likely to remain valid if we choose to employ it for another.
F.ex. the tactical drawing of Cannae's double envelopment likely doesn't generalize to the strategic realm
Pakistani and Indian maps of Jammu and Kashmir and the Siachen. "thence north to the glaciers"
Also, oftentimes creators of models do not know what details are necessary for a model’s purpose, and may omit ones they aren’t aware of.
F.ex. the "German Claims in Africa according to Professor Delbruck" map appears to originate in a British publication [0], in the context of a "German aims in Africa" section [1]...
>> [Beginning with] "It might be thought that even the rapacity of Prussia could hardly fail to be satisfied with such wholesale spoliation of territory such as this, but the foregoing [European territorial] terms by no means exhaust the demands which are to be made of the striken foe."
>> "The idea that at the end of the war Germany would make enormous acquisitions in Africa was just as popularly believed and lingered just as tenaciously in the Teuton mind as the delusions with regards to the European settlement. As late as the Summer of 1917 the well-known German historian, Professor Delbruck, gives the following interesting account of German's aims in this directions [... Prof Delbruck's quote...] [...] I have therefore reduced it to map form in order that a comparison may be made between these two pathetic tributes to the tenacity of German hopes (See Map 13)."
So the map that we're looking at is a British graphical depiction of something a German military historian said, provided in the context of demonstrating that German colonial claims in Africa are over-optimistic and -broad with regard to their military performance by the end of WWI.
And yet the intent behind the creation of that map is largely lost by viewers.
The blog post captions it as "Putative German claims in Africa amounted to nearly half the continent" which is more or less accurate, albeit leaving out the fact that the map is apparently a British creation.
The British component possibly affected the precise boundaries as drawn, as well as the decision to make British and German colors similar, so as to decrease the obviousness of British colonies and emphasize the monolithic nature of desired German African colonies.
[0] Maps 12 and 13 from "The British Dominions Year Book 1918" https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/history_dominion...
[1] "The British Dominions Year Book 1918" https://books.google.com/books?id=wiI0AAAAMAAJ&vq=africa&pg=...
Historically, and to a point up to this day, territorial claims are a power play. Either you're powerful enough to enforce them (through possession, defence, threats) or you are not. And the justification to seeking territory is of course to increase power and resources.
>A 2018 viral article by the data journalist Nikhil Sonad in Quartz first put this idea on the world’s radar
It was common knowledge for decades. At least among linguists.
- Alfred von Schlieffen, chief military planner for the German Empire during a crucial period (1891-1906), was obsessed with the battle of Cannae.
- A Cannae-style battle seemed impossible in the east, as the Russians had plenty of space to fall back and had done so during Napoleon's time.
- So Schlieffen focused all German planning on a decisive blow in the west. The Germans would encircle the French army and annihilate it Cannae-style.
- When, in August 1914, the Kaiser wanted to mobilize solely against Russia, the generals told him it was impossible to do so and they had to attack France instead.
- Schlieffen's Cannae-inspired plan had the further consequence of flanking the French through Belgium. This drew in Britain and made it a world war.
This “idea” was on wikipedia since at least 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Etymology_of_tea&...
They argue (unconvincingly) that the map of the battle of Cannae caused it.
- cannae is a famous historical battle
- the map of the battle was drawn sixty years after the battle
- a german military leader studied the battle
- germany was in ww1- Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen is obssesed with the battle of Canne
- Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen's entire life's work is to figure out how to beat France and Russia.
- Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen writes a plan which becomes the sacred text of how the German army is to conduct a two front war against France and Russia. One of the critical parts of that plan is marching a truly massive German army through neutral Belgium.
- When France Germany and Russia go to war Germany following the Schlieffen plan marches through Belgium triggering UK involvement in the war.
Ergo if Schliffen isn't so obbssesed with Canne it doesn't end up being reflected in the Schliffen plan, if a double envelopment isn't the end goal of the Schliffen plan it's possible they don't go through Belgium, thus not triggering UK involvement and thus we have a very different war occurring.
I don't agree but the theory is more plausible when you understand a lot of the details.
> - When France Germany and Russia go to war Germany following the Schlieffen plan marches through Belgium triggering UK involvement in the war.
Neither of these points are true. Schlieffen produced several different war plans for different potential scenarios and in WW1 Germany wound up following a very heavily modified version of one of those plans. While Britain officially gave the violation of Belgian neutrality as its reason for entering the war, and it certainly swayed public opinion in favor of the conflict, they had signed a treaty with France in 1911 pledging military support in the event of a German invasion regardless; and more generally had been in an increasingly antagonistic relationship with Germany for years.
Perhaps had Schlieffen not been so obsessed with Cannae he would have made different recomendations, but the fact is that the rest of the German general staff generally agreed with the logic behind those recomendations. Then when their plans were put into action, they were largely vindicated as the invasion through Belgium did allow Germany to gain a massive advantage in the opening weeks of the war and sieze territory from which it would take years and millions of men to dislodge them. Indeed the main issue was that the plan assumed Russia would be slow to mobilize, giving the German army time to defeat France before they would have to reposition forces to the eastern front, but to everyone's surprise Russia instead mobilized quickly. A generation later, when the men who were boots on the ground at the time now led the German military, and had decades to study the previous conflict, they decided on attempting a plan that was broadly similar and again had great initial success.
It's possible that Germany employs a totally different strategy in WW1 if Schlieffen isn't obsessed with Cannae, but there's no real evidence that they would.
The causes of WWI are complex, but the simplest summary is that the great powers of Europe reached a point where a war between any two of them would necessitate a war between all of them. To argue that Schlieffen contributed to WWI, you need to first argue that Schlieffen is the only thing that makes the German military believe it can win a two front war (which I think reverses cause and effect), and also argue that a German military believing that a two-front war is unwinnable would have caused the German government to work assiduously to keep war from breaking out (which I find unbelievable, given the tenor of Wilhelm's foreign policy).
In the actual event, Belgium doesn't play a major role in Britain's entry into the war (it's an easier sell than "diplomatic reasons we haven't exactly been telling you about" though, which is why it's played up so heavily). But look at a topographic map of Europe, and you'll realize that the easiest route from Germany to France is to go through northern Belgium [1], avoiding the more difficult terrain of eastern France. Even absent the specific Schlieffen plan, it's likely that German war plans would involve going through Belgium anyways, especially if your goal is as rapid a capture of Paris as possible.
If you look at the history of German war plans against France, essentially every modification is about pulling yet more troops from the invasion through Belgium to other sectors of the war, whether it be somewhere on the Eastern Front, or the direct border with France. This is really at odds with the mythologization of the Schlieffen plan, and I suspect that some of that myth-making comes from the apparent near-success of the German advance on Paris. People can look at how close it came to Paris and think that, had only Moltke not diverted yet another division of troops elsewhere, the Germans could have made it. Ignoring the fact that it failed because German logistics was literally keeling over dead [2], and pushing any more Germans into that army would have broken the logistics system faster.
[1] Incidentally, probably the biggest blow to the "original" Schlieffen plan (the actual war plans change considerably over time) is removing the plan to also march through the Dutch province of Limbourg, which now requires the entire Germany army to squeeze through a 12 mile gap near Liège.
[2] This of course referring to horse-drawn wagons, with the horses dying from overwork.
If on these maps Africa, India and Americas would look larger, of course they will be super eager to start WWI and get their piece of now-visibly-even-bigger pie.
The Reds were all about maneuver warfare in Russian Civil War and kept dreaming of it throughout the Cold War. A number of double envelopments has happened in the Ukraine war.
When you're economically weaker the war of annihilation is your only bet.
So failed look at archaic miss transliterations, kind of reminiscent of the entire theme of the article. The example map being built on an argument from a bad assumption (a historical error as a pretext for argument).
Perfect irony.
I do not know if the article author/cartographer ever studied linguistics or phonetics, but this is the main takeaway from the map for me, a linguist, the pattern is the message, not the somewhat imprecise data points.
As was common for Chinese romanization systems from before the 20th century, it used 't' for unaspirated /t/ (which we would use use 'd' for today in systems like Pinyin for Mandarin or Peng'im for Teochew), and used 'th' for aspirated /tʰ/ (which we sould use 't' for today in systems like Pinyin or Peng'im).
This isn't an archaic miss transliteration, it's just an alternative transliteration strategy. In many languages that primarily use the latin alphabet, the phonemes associated with 't' and 'd' are /t/ and /d/, primarily distinguished by voice instead of aspiration (where aspiration is allophonic), so it's logical that the creators of earlier romanization systems focused on preserving that voice distinction, even if it's less common today for a variety of reasons.
May have influenced German overconfidence and some of their tactics.
I took note: Brazil is absent from the map, which doesn't show the Americas.
To this day, people still believe things on the internet...
/joke
They are obsessed with old maps.
A few months ago Putin flaunted a map from the 1700s without Ukraine as proof as that Ukraine has always belonged to Russia and that "Russians" live in all regions of Ukraine (beyond Crimea and Donbas).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Sta...