Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 1: How Did We Get Here?

This entry is a bit unusual in the "Battles" series, so let me take a moment to discuss my intentions.

The Beginnings:

The origins of this series go back over a decade, to the 2009 piece on the 1914 First Battle of the Marne. 

In the course of researching and writing that article my attention was drawn to the tactical issues that arose from both combatants' mis- (or lack of) understanding of their opponents. A lot of the "whys" of the Marne ran directly from the failure of strategic and/or tactical reconnaissance.

To make a long story short (and for the long story the linked Marne piece is worth a look) German operational success required knowing where the left end of the Entente' line ended (in order to envelop it), while the Entente' needed to prevent that and to figure out where and what the German right wing was doing.

Neither side really accomplished either of their reconnaissance or security objectives, and the result was the chaotic collision that we call the Marne.

The question that I kept coming back to was...why not?

Was the problem baked into the larger operational or even the strategic planning? 

Was this the result of both sides' failure to anticipate the tactical "facts on the ground" affecting reconnaissance and making plans that assumed conditions that no longer existed?

Or was it technical, the conditions themselves, that had changed beyond the ability of clever plans to account for them? Was the problem that the older means and methods of reconnaissance - horse cavalry and light infantry - and security were just no longer effective in the tactical environment of 1914, and the new techniques - air reconnaissance - un- or under-developed to the point where the commanders didn't receive (or were unable to process) the intelligence?

Those questions just hung out there, unanswered.

The Sequelae:

So for the following years I kind of kept this curiosity in the vest pocket, as it were. Both because I had other engagements I wanted to explore, and because it seemed like a massive and difficult task to research and write.

Slowly, though, I worked through the other "battles" pieces, to the point where I'm down to a mix of the "sort of peripheral interest topics" - that is, stuff I'm only vaguely interested in discussing, like Manzikert (important historically, fairly boring tactically) or Sekigara (important historically, more about treachery and clan rivalries that actual fighting) - or stuff like this, difficult and time-consuming.

I'm retired now, so the "time" component is kind of peripheral. I have the time if I want to use it for this.

And the difficulty?

Well...I decided to go ahead and tackle it, with the understanding that if I try and write this as a single one-off post it would be insane; I'd be writing it and you'd be reading it during the heat-death of the Universe.

So.

The Plan:

I laid this out in the last post. It's to:

Focus is on the reconnaissance and security aspects of the battle(s); specifically,
1) What were the requirements for intelligence, from tactical up to strategic intelligence, (that is, reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance) for the opposing sides plans to succeed. Or in simple terms, what did each commander need to know about his opponent (and need to deny his opponent knowledge of) to achieve their operational objectives?,
1a) Which implies at least a brief discussion of the opposing plans and objectives,
2) What resources were available to the commanders to perform these recon and counter-recon tasks?
3) What recon/counter-recon operations were planned to use those assets in ways to accomplish those tasks, and
4) How well did the opposing organizations and commanders at crafting those plans, and carrying them out?

I'm still working up a frame for this. My guess is that it will include:
1a) a post on the general conditions leading up to August 1914
1b) a post on the German Army and the Revised Schlieffen Plan
1c) a post on the French Army and Plan XVII

2) a post on the recon elements of the opposing forces; cavalry and air assets - number, composition, organization, training and doctrine

3) a post on the opening days of the war - from 1 AUG 1914 to about 21 AUG and the performance of the recon/counter-recon elements during the opening phases

4) a post on the actions on the central portions of the front (Battle of the Ardennes), 21-23 AUG

5) a post on the actions to the west (Mons/ Charleroi) during 21-23 AUG, and

6) a post on "The Great Retreat" and the lead-in to First Marne, 24 AUG-5 SEP.

This is Post 1a, then - taking us up to the plans of the opposing forces that kicked off in August 1914.

So...How DID We Get Here?

The Marne post is a good place to start as a tl:dr version of the lead-up to 1914. The diplomatic and political backstory pretty much comes down to:

1. For a huge portion of the late Medieval and early Modern periods France was the major continental European Great Power. The reasons - political, demographic, economic, and military - were many and varied, but the result was that if there was something going on in the European heartland France usually had a finger (or an arm, or it's whole ass) in it.

2) To the east of the Rhine France's monkey business typically ran into one or more of the German states; Austria first, in the 17th Century, then Austria and Prussia in the 18th, then Prussia in the bulk of the 19th.

3) By the late 19th Century France was the bogeyman and rival of the rising German power of Prussia. Otto Bismarck, the architect of German (as opposed to Prussian) nationhood, used that to herd the cats of the multifarious German statelets into a "German Empire" 

4) This process led to war in 1870, and the resulting French debacle - which we discussed back in 2012 with the Battle of Sedan - and punitive diplomatic settlement of the Treaty of Frankfurt left Germany strutting as the Great Power of mittelEuropa and France stuffed with angry, bitter French itching for revenge.

5) This anger produced a series of French diplomatic maneuvers that forged new connections (with imperial Russia) and broke down old enmities (with Great Britain) that shifted the balance of European power and intensified the dangers of a general European war.

6) While the British were largely driven into the Entente by German naval ambitions (Bob Massie's 1991 work Dreadnought is essential for this) the autocratic imperial Russian government was willing to align with egalitarian republican France for several reasons, not all of them military. 

Russian industrialization had been heavily bankrolled by German investment, which had fallen away as German industry, much of it military, absorbed more and more Reichsmarks. Thrifty France had francs to replace those marks.

As part of his diplomatic planning to keep Germany secure Bismarck had doped up something called the "Reinsurance Treaty" with the Russians (needed after problems between Russia and Germany's ally Austria-Hungary over fuckery in the Balkans had broken up the earlier German-Austrian-Russian Dreikaiserbund). 

The treaty - which was kept secret from both the publics and the national legislatures - promised that the two Powers would stay neutral if the other got into a Great Power war (sorta - it was void if Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary). Still; it secured much of Russia's western borders and kept the two from giving each other the constant side-eye.

When German Emperor Wilhelm II shitcanned Bismarck in 1888 Bismarck's successors didn't bother to renew the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890. This opened up a can of military and diplomatic worms that the Russians dealt with by looking to France for support, especially as things with Austria-Hungary in the Balkans got ever sketchier.

So as the 20th Century opened Europe had congealed into two major Power axes; one around France and Russia along with Britain - the "Triple Entente" - and the other around Germany and Austria-Hungary along with the Ottomans and notionally Italy, notionally the "Triple Alliance" but commonly termed the "Central Powers".

To me the oddest part of the run-up to war was the German attachment to the ramshackle Hapsburg empire. The German ambassador to Vienna summed up the problem: "...is it worth it to attach ourselves...to this state which is almost falling apart and...continue the exhausting work of pulling it along with us..?"

Because the two couldn't have been more unlike; powerful, efficient, militarized Germany, and struggling, haphazard, obsolescent Austria-Hungary. Why did the German government cling to the Austr0-Hungarians?

Strange Bedfellows

The problems with Austria-Hungary as an ally were;
1) It was a mess politically, a patchwork of ethnicity and polities pasted together by Hapsburg dynastic rule, militarily suspect - its army was likewise divided by language and ethnic incomprehension - and the product of generations of defeats by, most recently, the Germans themselves. The government in Vienna was antiquated and inefficient. But...
2) ...the Royal and Imperial ('konigliche und kaiserliche", usually abbreviated as "k.u.k.") regime in Vienna brought with it an ugly quilt of old quarrels and hostilities; with the small states of the Balkans, with Italy (much of which had been Austrian before unification), with the Ottomans, and with Russia.

The single biggest problem was that the k.u.k. was a 15th Century answer to the question of "how should a state be defined?". 

In 1450 saying "By the ruling house" would have been accepted by the ruled - Hungarians and Croats and Slovaks and Poles regardless of from where that house arose, so for the k.u.k. congeries to exist because it had been a Hapsburg county or dukedom or electorship or bishopric for centuries was generally jake with the locals.

In 1914? No. Nationalism had been rising throughout the 19th Century, Czechs wanted to be Czech, Poles Polish, Bosniaks Bosnian, Hungarians Hungarian. The consensus that had kept the Royal and Imperial domains together was fraying.

So why did many German authorities - the Emperor, ministers, diplomats, politicians - persist in trying their rising power to the falling one?

I get the sense that it was mostly a "what we can get" rather than "the best we can get" sort of settling. Here's Tschirschky, the German ambassador from abive, continuing: "But I cannot see any other constellation that could replace the still-existing advantages in an alliance with the Central European power." 

The problem with that was that the Austrians were not truly a particularly advantageous power and definitely not a controllable one. Germany's prewar Chancellor von Bülow said later that the crucial part of the alliance for Germany was: "...letting Austria drag us, against our will, into a world war." 

Which, of course, it did.

Why?

As I've discussed repeatedly, the reasons for the decisions and acts that led to war are so complex and multivariate as to provide material for decades of academic study and volumes of popular prose, as far beyond the scope of this essay. Ambition, distraction, uglification...hubris, mistakes, fear, anger...and that is as nations, peoples, and governments, leaving out the influence of individual character.

But to me the single biggest factor was the failure - on all sides but particularly in Austria-Hungary - to recognize the changes in warfare that had been going on over the preceding century.

The industrialization and mechanization of combat, and the vastly inflated human and material needs that would demand, had made the artisanal warfare of the 19th Century as quaint and useless as a wooden gearbox inside a cuckoo clock. 

All the major combatants underestimated the effects both on their tactics and strategies as well as their economies, but none so disastrously as Austria-Hungary.

The initial confrontation between Serbia and Austria surely looked to the k.u.k hierarchy like the same old damn thing in the Balkans they'd been doing like, well, forever.

But.

When Russia mobilized in support of Serbia - indeed, the very likelihood that Russia would mobilize - that should have given pause to the Austrians. 

A war with Serbia was one thing (albeit one that went shockingly poorly for Austria, a reminder of how badly the k.u.k Generalstab had prepared for the war...), a war with Russia and, by implication, a general European war, was very, very much another.

The Austrians didn't get that. So, regardless of the danger, the combination of treaty obligations, political calculation, "national honor", error, and miscalculation, brought the major combatants to the start line on 1 AUG 1914, and from there across it into war.

And that's where we're going next; into the war plans of the three nations that were going to collide along the Franco-Belgian borders with Germany, beginning with the German scheme we know as the Schlieffen Plan.

Next: Keep the Right Wing Strong.