Why did the Schlieffen Plan fail?

Don't forget the colonial troops and Americans.

Tommy Atkins

>giving any credit what so ever to the british
wew lad you do know what board your on?

It is a historical fact that the British defenders at Mons delayed the german army attacking it, which opened up a gap allowing Lozenges 5th army to advance through at the marne.

Bavarians attacking before reinforcements arived ruined a very potential suprise breakthrough

Explain.

Just stopping by to say that this map is inaccurate as to the location of Paris, which is further South. The spot on this map labelled Paris is actually closer to Amiens or Beauvais.

>Schlieffen Plan

What Germans execute was NOT the Schlieffen Plan, but more like Moltke's desperate attempt to make the Schlieffen Plan workable.

The real Schlieffen Plan was based on literal magic, because its assumptions were impossible.

And the Africans

Because the French stopped the German advance at the First Marne and held the line after that
Then in late 1916 the British arrived, relieving the French of some pressure and in 1917 the Americans came, sealing the German defeat

The Germans weren't really expecting much resistance from the Belgians, who instead managed to sever many of the supply links/railways which the plan relied on, while putting up a decent military resistance (all things considered) at the same time.
The plan really didn't have any back-up ideas, so generals had to improvise more and more the longer that the Belgians stalled them.

It has to be mentioned that the belgians did not only stal the Germans their army remained intact and kept on fighting throughout the war. The only time belgium matter in world history.

Someone knows what he's talking about. Also the Belgians put up a pretty good resistance which threw off Germany's timeframe

Germany should've pushed the frontline (France) when they unexpectedly broke through. The massive flank could just continue to move with them and join in as a unified front.

No units should've been send to the East until France had been taken.

Any links about this? Merely curious

Tanks weren't invented yet

>Because the Bavarians fighting in the south fucked up purely out of pride, by not retreating into Germany to trap the French afterwards, as was planned.
But they did retreat initially, severely crippling the French during that retreat, so they thought thought they could annihilate them if they counterattacked, which they did, and they did BTFO the French during this attack, it just ultimately failed to break through, but overall the operation was a great success.

Belgium was way more tedious than predicted and then they made several major mistakes at the battle of the Marne that allowed the French to halt the German advance. Whether France would have collapsed had the Germans not made those mistakes, and whether it was possible for the Germans to not make those mistakes is another question.
Contrary to internet memes, German officers had a tradition of commanders ignoring orders and acting independently, even intentionally cutting communication lines to high command if they thought their own tactic superior. They did that in both World Wars and it worked out well most of the time, but this is arguable a case where it might have been a detriment.

That's another issue, the high command panicked and made the wrong call, but had the Russians been led competently and broken through the East Prussian German defenses you wouldn't say it was a huge mistake to relocate the troops. Hindsight is 20/20.

Planners hadn't anticipated the static nature of the conflict, previous wars were fought with similar tech and strategy and remained relatively mobile.

It's more that nobody bothered to study the American Civil War and translate the lessons into the European context of giant professional militaries.

Weren't the lessons of the American Civil War "burn everything with your superior resources and numbers" and "starve people then force them into a grinder they can't win"?

I mean, even if everything went according to plan and the Germans could have advanced rapidly, wouldn't that have just greatly overextended their supply lines? There were other times during the war when one side would make a breakthrough, but then the thrust would quickly lose momentum as communication and supply lines became stretched and the attack slowly became bogged down.

German Army dicked around too much in Belgium.

Instead of letting reinforcements occupy and pacifiy Belgium. The Advancing forces decided to stop and deal with partisans and do some mild looting.

I mean the American civil war wasn't really a big deal militarily. the U.S wasn't one of the big boys on the world stage and lessons that could be learned in the Civil War were more likely and better learned in and after the Franco-Prussian war.

There was not much to be learnt from the civil war that couldn't have been learnt from the Franco-Prussian War, Crimea or the Boer War. The US at the time was pretty far behind Europe in terms of military doctrine.

The BEF was probably less than 100,000 men at the time, significant but still nothing to panic over even if the British get involved if the plan goes as planned

If the south draws the French in, and if the Germans hold out and take Paris during the Great Retreat, they could probably negotiate a quick end to the war

The biggest issue is that no side really had a victory condition. The Germans can't have seriously been planning on annexing all of France without a serious fight, they should have just focused supporting AH to finish off Serbia and then go for peace as quick as possible alongside some nice territory

>The Germans can't have seriously been planning on annexing all of France without a serious fight
They didn't have any war goals when the war started, the annexations of Flanders and what have you were improvised. I'm sure they would have been contend with France agreeing to political concessions of some sort and probably dismantling border fortifications or something. Then they'd have genocided the Slavic subhumans and built a Germanic Empire in the dark woods of the East.

The schleiffen plan failed because the ruler of Belgium put out a last ditch decree, that all of the infrastructure e.g roads and railway lines should be destroyed, this seriously ruined the German supply lines.

...

For Navies it was, but they took some of the wrong lessons from Monitor v Merrimack and thought rams would actually be useful for a bit.

Because Germany couldn't fight a two front war yet despite this realization by Bismark decades earlier Germany fucked up twice by doing it.

Because the french african troops were superior compared to the shitty ethnic germans

The Russo Japanese conflicts would have been a better study for those predicting future conflicts.

France put up stronger defenses and the casualties coming back started to get Von Maltka or whatever a little worried which is why he veered away from Paris at the last second

Also if any of you guys can help me look up this event in early WW1 thousands of young German troops were sent off to the front lines wearing flowers on their uniform and they got totally wiped out, a memorial was put up on the site but I cant find the event anywhere

not fast enough

The Kindermord, First Battle of Ypres

The memorial I believe is part of the Langemarck German cemetary in Belgium

They did. Blitzkrieg is what surprised them while the french were expecting another war fought in the trenches

lost time in belgium
weakened the flanks which needed supporting (pulled troops eastwards mostly)
MAJOR supply problems - even had marne not happened the advance would have stalled or slowed down, entire divisions were running out of ammo
communication problems
stiff resistance by the french
already it was pretty much doomed but then the mistakes at marne sealed it

there was nothing particularly static about the early war phase concerning the schileffen plan

there was little to learn from the american civil war - and most of what little there was would have been already learned by the europeans in the same timeframe, AND expanded upon in further conflicts much closer in nature to ww1 (aus-prus, crimea, jap-rus)

> old habits die hard

>German officers had a tradition of commanders ignoring orders and acting independently,

No they didn't.

They had a tradition of using and encouraging command initiative to exploit opportunities and take advantage of the situation on the ground as it happened. They were among the first to use what we call today the "commanders intent", which is a simple statement of the goal of the commander, and they gave their commanders a lot of leeway to meet that intent within the confines of a generalized order.

That's vastly different from "ignoring orders".

B-brave lil Belgium

>young indiania jones

Based
youtube.com/watch?v=-lSLWnfCP6M

Because Schlieffen died.

yes, germany thought they could sweep through france and then go back and eat russia, but russia mobilized and was preparing their troops too soon for this to happen. this meant germany couldn't send all their troops to the western front. the worst part of all, no one expected the trench bullshit to ever happen. in fact, they thought the new technology would make war more fast paced.

the only best scenario was for italy (with a promise of giving back italian land) and ottomans to join the war, and certainly not invading belgium. germany would not face a blockade by british, with that alone they would have won.

Interestingly, the Prussian conception of obedience, which is to contrast blind obedience (blinder Gehorsam) or cadaver obedience (Kadavergehorsam) with thinking obedience (denkender Gehorsam) was so influential that it even impacted their legal tradition (Freirechtsschule of Philipp Heck).

>and certainly not invading belgium. germany would not face a blockade by british, with that alone they would have won.

t. someone who learned meme history
Belgium was an excuse, Britain was part of the Triple Entente and would've joined France anyway

>Triple Entente
Now you're memeing. The Triple Entente was not an alliance like that between France and Russia or between Germany and Austria-Hungary. The accords of 1904 with France and 1907 with Russia were just colonial arrangements, there was no alliance that said anything about military aid.

hahahahahahaahaahahahahaahabaa fucking idiot they fucked outta the triple entente right after france went to war with germany. only reason they went to war was to defend the memeland of belgium to secure their power in the trade routes from the Atlantic to the east parts of europe

Pissing off the British with a naval buildup leading to them entering the war when Belgium was attacked. This move gave the French a solid military ally and emboldened the Belgians to fight and even go so far as to wreck their own infrastructure to slow the advance.

If Germany had better relations with Britain, they could have stood together to convince Belgium to allow military access or at least surrender quickly. With secure supply lines, the odds of success go way up.