Since the death of his young wife shortly after their marriage, Schlieffen devoted every waking hour to refining his plans to defend Germany against a converging attack by two allied enemies on both eastern and western fronts. In the 1880s, he commenced a series of posts with the Great General staff, serving successive assignments in that esteemed body's quartermaster, war planning, historical and education sections. It was while in the historical section that the seed of his Battle of Encirclement and Annihilation was planted.
The great trailblazer of modern scientific military history, Hans Delbruck, had published the first installment of his History of the Art of War Within the Framework of Political History in 1891, just as Schlieffen had commenced service with that arm. The Antiquity volume contained a penetrating investigation of Hannibal's triumph over Varro at Cannae in B.C. 216. The key features -- the feigned withdrawal of the infantry masses in the center, luring the rushing Roman main body forward into the concealed waiting cavalry wings that rapidly surrounded the densely packed and immobilized legionaries on both flanks -- were unfolded to the bookish Schlieffen just at the hour when he was hardpressed to find a way out of Germany's evolving two-front trap.
Schlieffen was haunted by this bombshell from Delbruck: the notion of the battle of annihilation. At a time when military history was being mined for models applicable to contemporary combat, Schlieffen had become proficient at unearthing strategic nuggets from historic battlefields. When he read master historian Hans Delbrueck's description of Hannibal's double envelopment of Roman forces at Cannae, he discovered the ideal illustration of his key to winning warfare. He continued to weave his strategic thread though more up-to-date illustrations such as the battles of Frederick the Great, Napoleon and the elder Moltke, 1866-1871. These lesson plans were bound up in a posthumously published series of lectures, known as the Cannae Studies.
First published in 1913, the year after Schlieffen's death, as Selected Writings, there were numerous abridged editions after the Great War, focusing on the Cannae concept as defined through Schlieffen's historical pieces. The United States Army's officer training establishments became interested in Schlieffen's teachings in the late 1920s, prompting an American edition translated under the auspices of The Command and General Staff School Press at Fort Leavenworth in 1931 and an abridged version in 1936. Walter Bedell Smith has remarked on the influence of Schlieffen's concept on the U.S. Army training and doctrinal centers in the 1930s to the effect that Eisenhower's predilection for a war of maneuver was directly traceable to the American adoption of the Schlieffen ideal.
The grand envelopment, preferably a double pincers, was seen as a way to surmount the disheartening defensive strength of the immense national armies. These mass armies were springing up all over Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, supplied with rapid-firing artillery and machine guns spliced into interlocking field fortifications. Schlieffen had anticipated that the density of front and virtual border-to-border extension of the new armies of millions would nullify maneuver strategies once the opposing nations were fully mobilized. The command and control component was equally critical to piercing the defended zone in this era of vastly extended fronts.
The antidote proposed by Schlieffen was to fuse mobilization, deployment and operational directives into one comprehensive grand maneuver that would utilize the efficiency of recent innovations in communications and transportation technologies. The internal combustion engine had become a factor within a few years after the turn of the century; Schlieffen was aware of the potential of this novelty, albeit principally as a means of liaison between the director of operations and his field commanders. He introduced mobile heavy artillery in order to level the formidable French and Belgian, frontier bastions. Schlieffen also was instrumental in the German army's employment of aircraft as a means of reconnaissance as well as command & control. He adapted the signal corps to the demands of the expanded battlefield. Those who accuse him of failing to take into account the spiralling developments in military technology are quite mistaken.
In 1866 and 1870, the existing railheads were considered to set the limits of troop and supply movement by train; from that point on, the pace of front-line replenishment was confined to the crawl of primitive wagon caravans. Not only did Schlieffen cause the extension of the German rail net to forward marshalling yards adjoining the intended crossing points, but he incorporated the heretofore civilian rail fabrication and repair industry into the invading force proper.
This was achieved by establishing a railway engineer branch to facilitate conversion and repair of captured railways so as to allow the enveloping sweep to proceed without interruption. In order to surmount the command and control obstacles, Schlieffen inaugurated thorough map maneuvers and staff rides that emphasized the execution of a complex series of optional command sequences, making sure that even the youngest and most junior of his fledgling corps and army commanders would gain experience in the maneuver of large bodies of troops under rapidly changing and obscure conditions.
One telling criticism levelled at Schlieffen, is his allowing Kaiser Wilhelm to lead a corps or army in the annual maneuvers, and to make certain that the Kaiser "won" his engagement. Whether he was simply flattering the supreme warlord in order to achieve his desired 1,000,000-man force or was intimidated, the practice does not reflect favorably upon the chief of staff nor on the credibility of these particular maneuvers as war planning vehicles.
Schlieffen's conception of the modern command post envisioned a central communications hub where the commander in chief would receive reports from and issue orders to his far-flung, rapidly advancing division commanders through telephone and telegraph, sending out dispatch riders via automobile when necessary.
As noted, it is beyond the scope of this discussion to describe or defend the indecisive result of the ultimate trial by fire of Schlieffen's Hail Mary. One should bear in mind, however, that Schlieffen was more interested in finding a way to unhinge the enemy command structure and to severely restrict their options than in executing a single "decisive battle" in the sense of the original Cannae. He was trying to extend the Cannae battle's tactical principle to the level of grand strategy. Unfortunately, the military planners of Wilhelmine Germany were isolated from the striped pants cadre. Schlieffen was thus unable to coordinate his war-winning recipe with the foreign policy operatives who, in the end, should have been prepared to brandish his operational achievement at the bargaining table.
Prevailinq or Persisting? The Integrated Palette
The most often cited source of the notion of the decisive battle is, unsurprisingly, the masterwork Vom Kriege by Baron Carl von Clausewitz, Schlieffen's exemplar and mentor. The maestro of war studies has been very selectively (and innacurately) quoted by, inter alia, Sir Basil Liddell Hart and John Keegan, to say that the objective in war is to achieve conclusive results in a single engagement. Without rehashing the debate over English language misinterpretations of Clausewitz (see Christopher Bassford's review, Clausewitz in English, Oxford University Press, 1994 for a perceptive critique), it should be noted that Clausewitz never emphasized decisive battle as the culminating point of the war. He merely suggested that a series of battles should be seen as building blocks in achieving the grand aims of political strategy, agreed upon before the war commences. In fact, his subtle arguments for the integration of military operational planning with the cabinet-level grand strategical goals to be consummated both on and off the battlefield have been ignored by his English-speaking detractors.
President Clinton's false starts, disavowals, and reversals in executing his so-called Bosnian policy -- in fairness, as much a product of NATO and the United Nations' identity crises -- has revived the archaic debate in a new setting. It again shows the fallacy of false faith in the power of decisive combat engagements as a substitute for (rather than a compliment to) in depth long-range planning, stamina in the face of a lingering crisis, and cultural insight. Bearing in mind von Clausewitz's holistic approach to the components of military force, of which battle is but a node on the spectrum, a history of warfare in the 1990s is unlikely to be titled "Decisive Battles of the Late Twentieth Century". Swift success in battle is no longer exalted as the solitary "reward" for military preparedness; it makes for fascinating history, but ready to-use victory is not a pillar of policy.
- I will send foreigners to Babylon to winnow her and devastate her land; they will oppose her on every side in the day of her disaster. Let not the archer string his bow; nor let him put on his armor. Do not spare her young men. Completely destroy her army. They will fall down slain in Babylon, fatally wounded in her streets.
More Decisive Battle
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Decisive Battle: Introduction
Decisive Battle: Mission Creep: Armies Or Gendarmes?
Decisive Battle: Mining History for Validation
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© Copyright 1996 by David W. Tschanz.
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