Preparations for War, 1905-14

So my name is Dr Rob Johnson,

and I am the director of a research programme

at Oxford University called The Changing Character of War.

And what I'd like to do in this first session is to talk a

little bit about the war plans of the great powers in the First World War

and why it was that none of them quite worked out the way they should have done.

I think what we ought to do is start

with the famous controversy of the German war plan,

the so called Chef in plan

and a few years ago. As far as current research is concerned,

we learned that the sheriff in plan was more of a myth than a reality.

Historian Terrence Zuba discovered that, far from being a secret clandestine

scheme of operations,

the sleeping plan was something that can potentially fun

in 95 but actually shared with his two nieces.

It was in the public domain,

and surely it would be rather odd for a military plan to be shared so widely

as he looked further into the research.

What he found was that there was in fact,

a completely different scheme of operations for the Germans

should they ever find themselves confronted by World War.

The idea was, first of all,

that the Germans knew that they were confronted by a threat on two fronts.

On the western flank there was France,

and on the east was Russia.

Both these countries had vast reserves of military material and manpower,

and both could, if they coordinated with each other, crush the German armed forces.

So Germany faced an existential threat.

The particular problem,

I think the Germans think thought they faced was that these two countries

were allied with each other in 18 94.

And there was a very real sense that if they

didn't mobilise in Germany faster than France and Russia,

they would almost certainly be crushed.

They therefore developed a scheme where they could

somehow hold back one army on one flank

and then smash the other

through various different intelligence reports.

The Germans worked out that Russia would mobilise relatively slowly,

perhaps over a period of 6 to 12 weeks,

whereas France can potentially mobilise in three weeks.

The German army therefore placed a huge amount of effort

into trying to mobilise their army In just 24 hours.

They would have their soldiers in the field

and marching on their enemies very quickly.

Indeed,

to do this,

they drew up schemes of mobilisation that

relied on railway timetables and pre deployed

depots of ammunition and food and supply.

All this was a testament to the fact that Germans are very efficient,

but also it led to one unfortunate consequence,

which was that Should this machinery ever be put into action,

it left the decision makers of Germany with only 24 hours

to make a decision to go to war or to hold back from a conflict.

What was worse,

the German armed forces was that during the course of the early 20th century,

it became clear that Russia

and France could mobilise more quickly than they had estimated

canvas life in a very well respected Prussian officer came

up with a scheme whereby there would be a gigantic,

concentric enveloping manoeuvre

against France, which would smash them out of the war.

Within that first three weeks of fighting,

then the German armed forces would turn to the east.

But actually what Zuba and others discovered was this wasn't the case.

The actual German plan showed

that the German armed forces would have to confront Russia,

the bigger partner of the Franco Russian alliance,

in a major battle across the frontiers,

and that a holding action would take place against the French.

If there was going to any success against the French,

they would try their best to replicate the success they

have achieved in the War of 18 70 17 1,

where the German armed forces essentially enveloped at a local operational level,

each individual French armies.

So when the Germans felt that they were confronted by the

real threat of a war between about 1912 and 1914,

these plans were finessed further and further.

The German plan for thrusting against Russia was known as General Abdul Reza uh,

and it was the plan that was going to be implemented.

However,

the German general who took over the war planning process helmet von Moltke,

the younger,

um realised that actually, um,

France did indeed need to be knocked out of the war quickly,

and so he changed the plan.

And so what the Germans actually began to implement ironically, in 1914,

when the first World War broke out, was actually the very public plan.

The one that everyone pretty much knew about the so called Schlichtmann plan

that had been devised in 1985.

So historians have had a great deal of difficulty working out

exactly which plans the Germans were going to use and why.

But we should just examine another feature,

though that's deeper down in this German set of calculations.

One involves the German navy.

It seems that Kaiser Wilhelm, the second

the German emperor,

had considered that the real threats to his country

came not from individual armies of France and Russia,

but from the possibility

that his country would be encircled a so called increases politics and

encirclement policy by Russia by France but also by Britain and Britain.

Had the world's largest navy had the ability, if necessary, to block a German ports,

and that if the British, the French and the Russians began to operate together,

this would

encircle and crush the economy of Germany and make it simply an unviable country.

And the more that Germany became

an economic success,

the more that Kaiser Wilhelm feared that this in crisis politics,

there's encirclement policy will be implemented.

So imagine.

Imagine his concern when France,

Britain made an agreement the so called Anton Corneal in 1984

and when Britain established its own agreement with Russia in 19 oh,

seven so called Anglo Russian Convention.

And if you add that to the Franco Russian

alliance of 18 90 for Germany's fears were realised.

The chancellor of Germany, von Bulow,

argued in 1911 that actually German policy was going to have to

break out from this encirclement, and this might actually necessitate a war,

a war of national defence, but a war nevertheless.

In 1912,

when Britain responded somewhat aggressively and in a pecan way to

a German attempts to establish more influence across the Middle East.

The concern in the German armed forces was between the

German navy that they would have to come a reckoning

with the British and that they would have to fight

a major sea battle to break the Royal navy,

perhaps the North Sea.

German officers of both naval and military

background began to toast in evenings over dinner

dare tark the day when that war would come.

But here there is another controversy.

The some historians have argued over the years that Germany

had a very real and very evident war guilt.

It was ultimately responsible for the outbreak of the First World War

because of Kaiser Wilhelm's aggressive policies of trying to break in circles,

considering war

and because his war plans would involve naturally a

war with France and Russia and ultimately with Britain.

Because each of those countries were empires,

that would mean it was a global war from the outset.

On the other hand, there are other historians, like Professor Sir Hugh Strawn,

who argues that this was actually a mistake, that Germany had not intended.

A major European war indeed, a world war,

that the real antagonist was Austria Hungary.

Now, to understand that and their war plans,

we have to go down to the Balkans to Southeast Europe

and understand that the Austro Hungarian Empire was a multi national,

multi ethnic empire held together only really by the monarchy itself

and increasing flavours of nationalism and aspiration by Czechs,

Slovenes by Hungarian Serbians.

People within

the Austro Hungarian Empire was threatening to burst apart this ancient

regime that can trace its history back into the Middle Ages.

To overcome this problem of internal nationalist unrest,

the Austrians began to consider that they might have to

suppress all local regional threats.

And the most important regional threat to them

was the fact that the Balkans the the region

which has been under Ottoman domination throughout the early

modern period and throughout the early 19th century.

By the end of the 19th century,

the Balkans were breaking free of the

Ottoman Empire and forming independent nation states,

particularly Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece

and so on.

And this, uh, the existence of these new nation states

seem to attract attention of a lot

of nationalist minorities within the Austrian empire.

The Austrians considered

that in the future they would have to crush these entities in order to survive,

and they then become essentially the real aggressors of 1914.

We should also consider that the war plans of other countries.

Russia has also been considered by Houston and others

as a major protagonists and causing the war.

They had been defeated in a war in the Far East against Japan in 1984

1985 that experienced a major internal rebellion.

They had been humiliated, uh,

in 19 oh eight for failing to stand

up against Austrian aggression against the Balkan countries.

Uh, particularly Serbia,

and the Russians felt that they needed to demonstrate their military prowess.

Otherwise,

there would be another revolution in that country which

would probably bring down the entire czarist regime.

So they, too, had a motive for asserting themselves internationally.

They're real war.

Aim was to seize the Straits of

Constantinople and to achieve themselves national security.

France was an ally.

It felt it needed to recover territory lost on the German frontier,

so their plan was primarily defensive.

But they could see the need for having a sort of set of war aims.

The national interest that they could achieve against Germany, the future

and Britain. Britain was the odd one out.

Britain was one of the few countries in 1914 that still wanted peace.

Each of the war plans,

in the end, were not fulfilled because each cancel that the other.

And in the next session we'll look at why the war became a stalemate in 1914