We're up to the third part of our series on the August 1914 "Battle of the Frontiers". Part 1 (Origins of the 1914 Crises) is here, Part 2 (German War Plans) is here.
Now we're going to look at the "other side of the hill", the evolution of the French operational planning that culminated in the actions the French Army performed in the opening moves of World War 1.
However...
In France, perhaps more than any of the other Powers, political considerations affected the military preparations for what would become The Great War. So before we talk about soldiers and operations, we have to talk about...
France Between The Wars: Revolution and Counterrevolution
19th Century France was, like many nations, rife with factions large and small. Unlike many nations, however, those factions had gone to war in France, beginning - at least, in open battle - in 1789.
The events of the Revolution made political opponents into mortal enemies.
For over the next century the accusation of treason to the nation because of allegiance to faction, whether "conservative" (which in post-Revolutionary France largely meant either royalist or Catholic or, most likely, both) or "radical" (ranging from bourgeois Republican through socialist to, after the mid-century, communist).
These factions could make truce for a time, and when national (or international) events were fairly placid. In times of crisis, however, or where certain matters were concerned, that truce was shaky at best and fragile to broken at worst.
The French political Right had the grievance of the original Red Terror of the 18th Century to nurture. For the Left, it was the events of La Semaine Sanglante, "Bloody Week", of May 1871.
The Wikipedia entry for "Paris Commune" does fairly decent work summarizing the events, but the tl:dr is that after the defeat at Sedan destroyed the legitimacy of the Second Empire, and the German siege of Paris that followed in the late autumn of 1870 and winter of 1871 shredded the remaining political standing of the middle- and upper-class French who had supported the Empire, many of the citizens of Paris, and the citizen-soldiers of the Garde Nationale, had had their bellyful of empires, emperors, priests, and princes.
They rebelled, and set up their own Republic in the winter and early spring of 1871.
Which lasted all of nine weeks or so, from March to May, 1871, until the regular Army broke through the Communard defenses and took the city by storm.
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| (This is what a real barricade looks like, BTW) |
It made for a great book (and a Tony Award-winning musical)...
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| (This looks more sexy on stage, though, so.) |
...but the vicious legacy of the Red-on-White butchery of 1789 was now countered by the White-on-Red massacres of 1871.
The two factions were, if anything, more implacable than ever.
Why Are We Talking About This #$%&!!#! Political Stuff?
Because in France between 1870 and 1914 the Army was the rope in a political tug-of-war.
Most specifically, the Army as a political objective of the factions; as a standing force of regular soldiers versus "the nation in arms", the volunteers and reservists.
To grossly simplify, the Regular Army was "right"; conservative, often Catholic, even royalist. Regular officers were unsurprisingly politically conservative, regular soldiers could be counted on - as they had in May 1871 - to fire on anyone they were told to shoot.
A large regular Army was, therefore, considered by almost all French political factions, to be an instrument of "conservative" power.
The "not-regulars"; everyone from reservists to civilians who, in Republican mythos, would stream to the tricolor when La Patrie was En Danger, were not. They would be at heart civilian and as such more sympathetic to, and protective of, the political "left", as the National Guard had been to the Paris Commune.
The general idea was that the longer the regular officers had their dickbeaters on Jacques the more likely he was to be willing to shoot Cosette and Marius.
So the political left wanted a small regular Army and a short active-duty stint for the reserves. The political right wanted a bigger standing force and a longer active term.
The two main factions pulled the Army rope this way and that depending on their power in government and the dangers from abroad, and that's our next stop.
French Military Planning and Technical Development, 1871-1891
Obviously the first order of business for Third Republic France was to get the goddamn Boche out of the picture.
The five billion franc indemnity imposed by the Treaty of Frankfurt that ended the Franco-Prussian War was paid off ahead of schedule. The Army was reorganized and reconstituted, with the obvious end of being prepared for the rematch.
The "conservative" service obligation - five years with the regular army - remained in place after 1872 as part of this rebuilding.
The first decade after Sedan were dominated by a defensive posture. The Sere de Rivieres forts formed the basis of French military planning. This included a big program of railway construction; one of the big shortcomings of the Second Empire's "Systeme D" haphazard military "planning" had been the primitive infrastructure of metropolitan France.
This process took time. Rail lines between the interior and the frontiers, including the fortress complexes of Verdun and Belfort, were constructed between 1870 and the mid- to late-1880s.
French infantry, which with the Fusil modèle 1866 "Chassepot" rifle had proved effective when well led in 1870, was still effective when well led and even moreso when the magazine-fed bolt-action M93 Fusil Modèle 1886 "Lebel" replaced the chassepot.
In the middle of this period the French left got the service obligation period reduced to three years in 1889
The French artillery, whose 18th Century muzzle-loading cannon had been brutally outclassed by the German Krupp steel breechloaders, received the first massive improvement in cannon since the système Gribeauval of 1765; the Matériel de 75 mm Mle 1897 or "French 75".
The key to the effectiveness of the "soixante-quinze" was simple; a hydraulic piston.
The biggest problem with artillery fire is just getting a damn round on target.
After all, you're anywhere from several thousand meters to several kilometers (the maximum range of the French 75mm is about 11 kilometers or so; maximum effective range about 8500 to 9500 meters) and you're hucking a round that has small individual manufacturing imperfections down a barrel with some unknown degree of wear using a propellant that may be slightly warmer or cooler, or more or less abundant than what's in the previous or the next round.
Then, under the pre-soixante-quinze rules, once you have, say, put that first round inside the target - good for you! - you have a big problem.
Your whole cannon - barrel, trail, wheels and all - has responded to the action of firing the round with the equal-and-opposite-reaction of "recoil"; the whole thing has jumped (or rolled) in the opposite direction of the round.
All that laborious alignment and positioning and leveling and aiming you did for the first round?
Shot to fucking hell and gone; now you have to manually push the thing back into what you hope is close to where it was, and then hope that the next round isn't too much heaver or lighter, its propellant not much warmer or colder, the shell not much less or more cylindrical, and the bore not much more badly worn, than the first round.
The "75" solved these problems by isolating the cannon barrel from the carriage on a sliding frame, and then added a piston - as shown above - to return the barrel to battery after each round. It didn't fix all the other little problems with things like barrel wear, round imperfections, and propellant variability...but those were small compared to having the fucking cannon leaping around like a fucking trout.
Suddenly French redlegs could count on - once they'd put a round on target; still a bit of work - quickly putting the next bunch of rounds on the same target.
You can see what a big deal that is.
This "quick-firing" artillery was military lightning in a bottle. All armies realized they needed one, and got to work developing one.
And, of course, there was also Hiram Maxim's nasty little 1884 invention...
To me here's the most interesting part of all this.
Today we tend to look at all these weapons - the magazine rifle, the machinegun, the recoil-buffered "quick-firing" cannon - combined with barbed wire and defensive entrenchments and see how they seem to make the trenches and defensive dominance of 1914-1918 that we think of when we think of "World War 1" inevitable.
At the time, though? A LOT of people, including a lot of military planners, saw them as offensive magic.
Moving quickly into position the artillery could lay down suppressive fire to cover the infantry move into firing position, where the volume of direct fire from bolt-action rifles and machineguns would tear open the enemy infantry lines for the final onset of bayonets.
So it's not too shocking that the French 1891 Plan XI proposed a counteroffensive into Germany after the initial German attack was stopped at the frontier forts.
From there geopolitics began to intrude as well.
1892 to 1904: Plan XII to Le vengeur and Tangier
In Part 1 we talked about the big continental-European realignment of the late 19th Century; the German failure to renew the "Reinsurance Treaty" and the subsequent Russian deal with France.
With the promise of all that Russian steamrollering in East Prussia the prospects for a French offensive to take back the 1871 losses seemed more favorable. The 1892 Plan XII proposed considering a quick strike into Germany first. The primary plan was still defense-counteroffensive...but the thought was there.
But.
There was another thought in there, too.
Remember how Schileffen was thinking of a scenic detour though Belgium in the 1890s?
The French war planners had kinda the same thought. Since the best way through a line of forts was around them, well...the rumors out of Germany got them thinking.
Between 1892 and the opening half-decade of the 20th Century French military thinking continued along the defense-first lines. I can't find much information, even down to the dates, for war plans XIII and XIV, other than the cursory observation that they "...remained defensive-offensive, French attacks being expected after the repulse of a German invasion." (per the Wikipedia piece for Plan XVII).
I do have a bit more information on Plan XIV which we'll discuss after talking about what I know about the enormous event that exploded France in 1894; l'affaire Dreyfus.
1894 Interlude - L'affaire Dreyfus
It's hard to describe how badly this mess tore up France.
There's a perfectly good article on the Affair up at the Holocaust Museum site, that notes that the conviction, appeal, and controversy surrounding a Jewish officer...
"...made a powerful impression in France, dividing the country into two camps. The anti-Dreyfusards, comprised of the Catholic Church, the military, and the right wing, clung to the original verdict and exploited antisemitism. They feared that a reversal would lead to a weakening of the military establishment. They were opposed by the Dreyfusards, an alliance of moderate Republicans, Radicals, and Socialists...(who) felt the case had become a test of France's ability to protect truth, justice, and the basic elements of the Rights of Man against the forces of extreme nationalism, antisemitism, and the excessive involvement of the Church in state affairs."This battle forms the background for the next two decades, and has echoes that continue down to this day, including that the grotesque antisemitism exposed by the Affair - that a thoroughly assimilated Jewish officer could be railroaded on clearly faked "evidence" - helped convince the European Zionists such as Hertzl that there was no safety or security in assimilation.
For France, it was just another coal on the fire of the Left-Right Culture War.
1904-1905: The Invisible Man and the Invisible War
Okay, so. From here to 1914 I got a lot of ideas out of David Herrmann's 1996 The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War. It's a useful secondary source, and well worth tracking down. I'll try and give you the gist in outline form.
Between 1904 and 1905:
A German (presumably an officer - he identified himself as a General Staff colonel - but still known only by his pseudonym le Vengeur) met with a French intelligence officer in Liege and sold him the entire 1904 Aufmarsch which included the proposed German violation of Belgian neutrality...
...and...
...the German foreign office staged a confrontation over French activities in Morocco.
These both turned out to be bad news for France.
First, although the Deuxeme Bureau - French military intelligence - considered the Vengeur information valid the French higher generally discounted, or at least failed to take seriously, the purchased Aufmarsch for the following decade.
When you read the tale the supposed German informant did appear ridiculous, turning up in Liege with his face wrapped in bandage and only his mustache poking out.
But French intelligence had already noted the work the German Eisenbahnbautruppen - their railway units - had put in to extend the German rail system to the Belgian border as well as massive detraining platforms and billeting constructed near the new railheads.
So nothing was done to incorporate this information into French war planning until...wait. We'll get there.
Second, the situation along the border drove home French weakness.
Russia was tied down; losing war in Manchuria and revolution in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Britain had no way of providing anything but naval support and, as French prime minister Rouvier is attributed as noting "...that English ships have no wheels".
On the frontier the German Army looked like a load, in numbers alone.
Herrmann (1996) says:
"The General Staff in Paris had abandoned the idea of forming reserve corps and incorporating reserve divisions into the main fighting forces when they designed their 1898 mobilization...Plan XIV...and Plan XV of 1903 grouped them well to the rear...The result was a dramatic numerical advantage for Germany, Twenty-one French corps would face the equivalent of thirty-six German."
So the French changed things up a bit and not in a good way.
1906: Plan XIV and Who The Hell Are Doing All This Stuff
Before we talk about the changes incorporated in the 1906 war plan, let's look briefly at the French officers doing all this planning, because the French higher organization was kind of weird in a "you're not helping" sort of way.
If Bread is the Staff of Life, What is the Life of The Staff?
One Long Loaf.
Technically the most senior French military position was the Minister of War (Ministre de la guerre). This guy was normally a very senior officer, but also tended to get replaced like a pair of boots. Here's the Wikipedia page for the period we're looking at, from about 1900 to 1911:
The bottom line is that these guys were there pretty often to just sign the goddamn form, sir.
The real power lay in two other guys.
While the Minister of War was the notional president of the Conseil supérieur de la guerre, the "Supreme War Council" the officer who really ran the 99.9% of the daily CSG business was the vice-president, whose position was formalized as the Boss of CSG in 1903.
From 1900 to 1906 it was this guy: Henri Joseph Brugère.
Brugere was a gunner, with war service in 1870. He was mentioned in dispatches in December 1870 for "...enlevé une pièce prussienne sous le feu de l'ennemi.", that is, for capturing a Prussian cannon under enemy fire as a captain in the 15th Artillery.
(Intriguingly, the Wikipedia app translates the phrase une pièce prussienne sous le feu as "a Prussian coin under fire" which had me scratching my head until I switched it back to the original French and the word pièce made sense as "artillery piece".)
Brugere comes across like kind of a hardhead in the historical accounts, but I don't know much else about him other than the role he's described as playing in Herrmann (1996) and what I can get from his French Wikipedia page.
We'll talk about that a bit more after we look at his opposite number in 1905 was the Chef d'État-Major Général de l'Armée - the Chief of the General Staff.
This position was a relative latecomer, set up only in 1871. In 1888 the Chief was pushed into the CSG as a sort of quasi-advisor (he wasn't an official member of the Council) in particular as the director of war plans.
The particular Chief we're looking at is this character; General de division Jean Michel Toussaint Pendézec.
If I don't know much about Brugere I know next to nothing about Pendezec. There's one of those genealogy pages about him that has him being commissioned out of St. Cyr in 1863 (so presumably a very junior officer in 1870) but it adds that he was "Promotion Du Mexique", suggesting that he might have been involved in the Maximilian fiasco there in the late 1860s.
Then nothing until his promotion to two-star general in 1900 and then Chief of Staff in 1903.
So we have our players in place, and, as the Wiki entry notes for the CSG, the organizational chart was practically designed for power struggles between the Vice-president and the Chief.
Ready? Here we go.
1905: War Plans in the (1905 Moroccan) Crisis
Just like the headline, this section is taken practically intact from Herrmann (1996). I'll try to summarize.
Herrmann (1996) says without demur: "The French general staff's Plan XV provided for the deployment of the whole army on the...Franco-German frontier between Verdun and Belfort. The...difficulty was that Plan XV was wrong about where the enemy would attack."
Here's the accompanying map:
Herrmann (1996) notes that "(t)he only French troops deployed north of Verdun in the Plan XV dispositions were four cavalry divisions."
He goes on to add that Pendezec was stressed about this. Noting the Vengeur intel, the rail and barrack construction, he supported what Herrmann (1996) says was "The operations office (of the General Staff) proposed that Plan XV be modified to deploy some forces further north..."
Supposedly Brugere shot this down, because
1) German mobilization would be too slow to get enough troops to the frontiers, anyway, and
2) the Germans wouldn't use their reserves as forward maneuver units, and
3) he refused to believe the Germans would violate Belgian neutrality so brutally.
Meanwhile in Paris the political Left was pissed off with the outcome of the Morocco Crisis, with the Army's desuetude as revealed in several publications of military issues (particularly a highly negative assessment of the couverture (fortress) units along the eastern border), and with the Right as usual.
The result was a change to the service regulations that reduced the regular army term to two years:
"The Military Law of 1905 has to be highlighted as it established a short but universal service. In the barracks, on the officer’s desk, it meant more diversified recruits with less time to acculturate them with patriotic or sacrificial values, not to speak of tactical skills." (1914-1918 Online, 2014)
And this is supposedly where things stood until March 1906.
1906: Plan XVa?
There's a major divergence in the source materials for the 1906 "revision" of Plan XV.
Herrmann (1996) dismisses it as purely trivial: "The revision of Plan XV...merely redeployed a single army corps to the north of Verdun, spread along the line of the Meuse."
He does note that the 1905 Crisis had prompted the French and British militaries to begin actual discussions for deployment of a British army to France.
The Wikipedia entry for Plan XVII, though, says this revision was significant:
"Using this windfall (the Vengeur intelligence) and other sources of information, the French adapted Plan XV of 1906, to be ready for a German invasion of Belgium and later plans contained increases in the forces to be assembled to the north and north-east of Verdun."
I'm not sure I buy that, and here's why.
For one, General Brugere was still Vice-president of the CSG, and he was bone-deep against it.
For another, the next big fight over Plan XVI - which we'll discuss immediately below - was all about this issue, suggesting that the previous Plan hadn't settled it or really done much about it.
Which brings us to...
1909 Plan XVI
Okay, now we're really in the deep tules.
I'm going to quote the above Wiki entry for Plan XVII at length, because of it's importance:
"Plan XVI of March 1909, anticipated a German enveloping manoeuvre through Luxembourg and Belgium, after the findings of a 1908 analysis by General Henri de Lacroix, in which he dwelt on the German preference for enveloping manoeuvres and predicted that two German armies would march through eastern Belgium, around the northern flank of the French fortress zone, one to emerge from the Ardennes at Verdun and the other at Sedan. Lacroix wanted to improve the prospects of the usual defensive-offensive strategy by assembling a new Sixth Army near Châlons-sur-Marne, (now Châlons-en-Champagne), 80 km (50 mi) west of Verdun, easily to move towards Toul in the centre, Verdun on the left or to the vicinity of Sedan and Mézières behind the northern flank."
This agrees with the "1914-1918 Online" site which says:
"A defensive-offensive conduct of war was designed by concentrating, amidst an extended initial location of troops from north to south, a central “masse de manoeuvre” allowing the high command to counterattack whatever the enemy undertook (Plan XVI, 1909)"
Okay, now here's the thing, though. De Lacroix wasn't the Chief of Staff, the war plans guy, in 1909. He was in Brugere's spot; Vice-president of the CSG. The Chief at the time of March 1909 was a two-star by the name of Jean Brun, about whom I can find absolutely nothing.
Did de Lacroix ask Brun to work this up? And how do we know this? The source for the Wiki quote it a 2005 work by Robert Doughty: Pyrrhic victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War and I can't find any other source cited for this planning.
The Doughty work is fiendishly expensive; in excess of $30 even for the Kindle edition. I punted, picking up a copy of Doughty's essay in the 2010 collection War Planning 1914 (Thompson, ed.).
In his monograph on French planning - although not mentioning the plan number or Lacroix by name - Doughty says:
"With each new plan the French increased the number of forces north and northwest of Verdun. In 1908 they foresaw the Germans sending two armies around the flank of French fortifications and passing through Luxembourg and eastern Belgium. Because they did not know for sure where the Germans might strike...they...chose instead to create a powerful force for a counterattack...Sixth Army..."
Presumably this is the Clif's Notes version of the longer passage cited in the Wiki piece which is probably from the Doughty (2005) work.
So, okay. We've got the idea. Someone - probably Lacroix, or possibly Brun and Lacroix working together - was worried about the left flank and came up with a fix for that.
Herrmann (1996) has a very nice discussion (pages 59-146) on "Military Effectiveness and Modern Technology, 1906-1908" (Chapter 3) as well as the military innovations involved during "The Bosnia-Herzegovina Annexation Crisis and the Recovery of Russian Power, 1908-1911" (Chapter 4).
It's far too much to summarize here, but Herrman (1996) points out how non-lethal innovations, things like radio, telephone wire, motor vehicles, field kitchens, and aircraft, were a critical part of the military revolution that led to war.
And that brings us up to
1911: Plan XVI, Michel and Agadir
During the summer and into the autumn of 1911 French military plans and German geopolitics banked off each other like billiard balls.
The foreign policy piece was again set in Morocco, where French demicolonial activity drew German pressure...this time in the form of a German gunboat that turned up at the Moroccan port of Agadir.
The threat implicit in SMS Panther's two little four-inch popguns was that if France objected to the loss of western Morocco it would face the rest of Germany's armed force.
The threat didn't work; the German foreign ministry had counted on the sort of Russian incapacity and British indifference that had forced France to back down in 1905. When the Entente didn't fold, the Germans had to or risk a general war that the Army wasn't ready to fight.
As Herrmann (1996) puts it:
"Berlin was outvoted diplomatically and could not menace its opponents with war as in 1905 and 1909 because for the first time this would have entailed the risk of a conflict with France, Britain, and Russia all together...which deprived Berlin of the military ascendancy it had grown accustomed to exploiting."
That got Germany scrambling to find ways of reasserting that ascendancy.
Meanwhile, the French military planning was also going through some big changes, largely driven by this guy, appointed head of the CSG in January, Général Victor-Constant Michel.
Michel was even more convinced than de Lacroix that the Germans were going through central Belgium. His Wiki entry does a good job of summing up his proposed fix to Plan XVI, which in the summer of 1911 still 1) mobilized the bulk of the French Army behind the Verdun-Belfort fortress lines and 2) relegated the reserve units to the rear areas.
Worth noting that Michel was considered a "man of the Left"; he'd had significant experience training reservists and trusted them and as such attracted a lot of side-eye from the French Right.
So in July 1911 when he presented his (with, presumably, either the concurrence or at least benign indifference of Augustin Dubail, the Chief of Staff) proposals for the war plan revision...
"Michel...correctly predicted the main elements of the German Schlieffen Plan. He argued that the major German offensive would probably come through central Belgium...and proposed a new strategy to be called Plan XVII (this is an error in the Wiki entry; the July 1911 meeting proposed to amend Plan XVI).
Michel's plan called for...770,000 men in two "Mass of Maneuver" formations along the Belgian border, backed by a reserve of 220,000 men centered around Paris. The third Mass of Maneuver, of 300,000 men, would be along the German border. In order to field an army of that size, French reserve units would need to be integrated with the active army immediately on mobilization."
...the conservative faction in the CSG (which included the Minister of War, Adolphe-Marie Messimy) haaaaated it.
One innovative part of the Michel proposal was to brigade reserve units one-to-one with the regulars. These "demi-brigades" would, ideally, train together in peacetime to fight together in war.
Messimy and the conservatives - the whole War Council, in fact - hated that, too. So much so that Messimy responded swiftly and dramatically before the end of July.
First, he fired Michel.
Then he completely reorganized the top of the French Army MTO&E.
The positions of "vice-president of the CSG" and "Chief of the Army General Staff" were merged; now one guy would be both, responsible for both technical and tactical Army management and strategic Army planning.
The then-Chief of Staff (Dubail) was eased into a "Chief of the Army Staff" position as the #2 guy.
This made a lot of sense, regardless of the strategic planning issues. The power struggle between the two positions was not helpful for long- or even short-range planning.
Messimy tapped this guy to be the new boss of the Army; Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre.
Joffre and the road to Plan XVII
Joffre is a whole story in himself, but to keep things manageable the most salient pieces of him are that he was bright, egotistical, supremely self-confident, and - most importantly - unconvinced that he needed buy-ins from subordinates (or permission from his superiors) to get his missions accomplished.
He was also one of those annoyingly-common professional-officer-in-a-popular-republic types who had already concluded that his biggest problem was nosy political bodies butting into his military business. As Doughty (2010) says: "...he (Joffre) decided not to inform his political superiors or the army commanders who would conduct the operation (of his war plan). He wanted no interference..."
Instead, Joffre started re-writing Plan XVI in the summer of 1911, but decided that he needed a full-on new plan. This, which became Plan XVII, was prepared through 1912 and 1913 before being issued in February 1914 and finalized in May.
The basic outline of the final version included:
1) Primary concentration of forces behind the line of fortifications in the northeast; four armies (First, Second, Third, and Fifth) along the German and Luxembourg frontiers with a fifth (Fourth Army) in reserve behind the front four,
2) Fifth Army "occupied a broad front stretching across the Luxembourg-Belguim frontier and extending west beyond Mezieres to Hirson" (Doughty, 2010),
3) Grouped reserve units into four three-division-strong "Reserve Division Groups" - effectively corps without the corps assets - and parked one at each end of the forward units (one south of the southeasternmost army (First), the other northwest of Fifth Army) and the other two behind the fortress line menage.
4) A classified "annex" included a contingency for the British forces - without presuming their presence as a given - to fall in to the northwest of Mezieres left of Fifth Army.
In concept it looked like this:
The idea was that this mobilization plan would provide enough strength to attack either southeast of Metz (into Germany) or northwest (into Luxembourg and Belgium) depending on the German deployment.
Third and Fourth Armies were particularly critical to Joffre's scheme of defeating a possible German "right hook" - whether it was a "short hook" into Luxembourg and southeastern Belgium or a "big hook" across the Meuse into central or eastern Belgium - by attacking the "hinge" around Neufchateau and Charleroi.
(It's worth noting that in 1912 Joffre floated the idea of preemptively moving into Belgium to head off the German right wing sweep and his War Minister shot it down hard. The risk of losing British cooperation that would incur was too high.)
Obviously the critical part of the critical part of Third and Fourth Armies maneuver was knowing 1) where that "hinge" was and 2) what Germans would be there to be attacked.
1914: How's All That Planning Working Out For Ya, France?
So. To sum up.
Conventional wisdom on "World War 1" is typically that the deployments and operations that were actuated by Plan XVII - principally the weighted-up right wing (three of the five armies plus three-fourths of the "reserve groups") and the attacks into Germany southeast of Metz - were the "fatal flaw" that were largely responsible for the disastrous August of 1914.
And, yes; these were neither well-thought-out nor successful...but to me the reasons for failure seem primarily tactical rather than strategic.
The second and related "failure point" is usually pointed at the hanging French/British left flank, the failure to anticipate (despite numerous intelligence warnings) the big Schlieffen right-wing hook through Belgium.
That, too, was not ideal...had that big hook 1) been logistically and time-and-space-do-able as planned, which most careful analyses (van Crevelt, represent!) suggest it was not, and 2) actually happened as planned, which it didn't.
I don't see it. Yes, the hanging flank was still there, like a boxer's dropped right hand, but the big left hook didn't land.
To me the biggest and most critical failure was in the Ardennes, the strike at the "hinge" by Third and Fourth Armies.
Had that been effective it offered a real opportunity to dislocate the German invasion, isolating the German First and Second Armies from their lines of communication and supply and offering defeat of them in detail.
So I don't see Plan XVII itself as a flaming disaster.
Good? No.
But it wasn't the primary cause of the defeats in August. It was flawed, it wasn't particularly clever or promising...but not that much worse than flaws in the German Aufmarsch it opposed.
So...Why DID Things Go All To Hell in August?
Doughty (2010) has a good rundown of the technical and tactical issues with French war planning (specifically Joffre's work as Chief of Staff) that helped set up the defeats of The Frontiers;
1) The French Army command, control, communication, and information (C3I) setup was particularly unsuited for the tactical conditions of 1914. We'll get into this in more detail, but the bottom line is that the way the French Army - from GQG, the highest headquarters, down to the company and platoon level - did their intel collection and dissemination, and subsequent operational planning and order-issue, was badly outdated and ineffective.
Another issue was human. The "conservatives" were right on one point; the French reserve training was insufficient, the training areas undersized or unavailable, and as a result the reserve units lacked the capability to get up to combat speed as quickly as the German Ersatz corps.
Aother human problem was the lack of trained noncommissioned officers. Even a return to a three-year active service commitment in 1913 didn't materially change that; instead it added a slug of noobs to already-under-led French infantry units. "A German infantry company normally possessed eighteen to twenty long-service noncommissioned officers in peacetime; a French company had only eight or nine, besides some recruits promoted in their second year..." (Herrmann 1996)
3) Perhaps beyond the scope of "plans" itself but viciously punitive over the course of the war to come was the failure of imagination that overlooked the problems cascading from the loss of the iron ore and coalfield industrial regions of northeastern France. The Wikipedia entry for the occupied portions of France notes that: "...the occupied zone included some of the most industrialized parts of France: 64 percent of France's pig-iron production, 24 percent of its steel manufacturing and 40 percent of the total coal mining capacity was located in the zone, representing a major setback for the French industry."
So What You're Saying Is That France Had Ninety-nine Problems and Plan XVII was Only One?
Yes.
I'm not saying that the war plan - or the development of the plan - wasn't a problem that led to French defeats along the frontiers in August.
It just wasn't THE problem.
And of the other-than-planning problems of the Frontiers fights the single biggest failure was in the operations around what has become known as the Battle of the Ardennes between 21 and 23 AUG 1914.
And of that failure the failure of the French reconnaissance and security forces to figure out who was where doing what, and their German opposite numbers who succeeded, well...that's where we're headed.
But before we get there, we need to look at those forces, the people on the ground and in the air, who were tasked with finding out what their enemies were up to, and denying those enemies the same knowledge of their own people.
Next: Scouts Out!
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