I apologize for the long delay. I won't pretend differently than that I just lost heart for some time.
The rolling clusterfuck that is my country's descent into stupid white Christopathic fascism simply got too much for me to ignore but too hopeless for me to talk about.
It seemed to be louche to be discussing a horrific event of more than a century ago when the horrific events were and are happening here, now, all around me. I still haven't really changed my opinion on that; like hanging, ongoing Naziism concentrates the mind wonderfully. I'm still hanging on in a state of barely suppressed rage, wanting like Caligula (as I've said repeatedly) that all these scum, from Trump through Miller, Hegseth, Bondi, Bannon, Johnson...all the way down to the grotesque freaks like Ernst and Greene...had one throat, the better to slit it.
And for Fucking Trump? That's the pisser. Jim Wright nails it hard here:
That said. there's only so much I can do without access to heavy weaponry, so at some point I might as well get back to the events of August 1914.
So...where'd we leave off?
Back in May we took a short diversion into the question of "How much did signals intelligence play into the events of the first month of World War 1 in the West?" to discover that there seems to be no definitive answer, at least not the way history understands it. In the East, yes: German radio intercepts were critical to the crushing victory at Tannenberg.
In the West? Maybe, sorta, kind of, tangled up with the other intelligence sources.
Earlier in that month we'd looked at the opening tactical moves, from the first engagements to roughly the third week of August. That meant three very different things in different parts of the front:
- In Belgium, the reduction of the fortresses of Liege (and to a lesser extent, Namur), and the beginning of the German "right wing sweep" predicated in the Schlieffen Plan,
- In Alsace and Lorraine, a back-and-forth struggle; a French offensive per Plan XVII, an unplanned (but effective) German counteroffensive - but one that contradicted the Spirit of Schlieffen by not letting the French jam their head into the mangle - and,
- In the center, through the Ardennes, the "curious case of the German in the nighttime"; that is, the French recon actions that suggested the opposite of the tactical reality and convinced GEN Joffre that an offensive into what he thought was a lightly-defended hinge would cut off and disrupt the German right wing.
We're going to talk about that a LOT, because it turned out to be pretty critical.
Before that we discussed mobilization and the opening moves in February,
Aerial reconnaissance assets back in November 2024,
Ground reconnaissance - mostly cavalry - back in September 2024,
Even further back, we discussed French war plans in August 2024 and German war plans in July,
And, first of all, the geopolitical setting of the whole nutroll a year ago.
Whew. I'm already exhausted just from recounting all that.
Okay, well, now we're up to date, let's break this post out.
First, we're going to use the same breakdown we've been using and discuss the Frontier in geographical areas, these:
I'm going to discuss two of these three in this post.
The Southeast - the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine - because it's relatively simple and straightforward tactically.
And the Center - the Belgian Ardennes - because while it's not simple, it's less complicated than the Northwest and the issues we're concentrating on (reconnaissance) are important, but somewhat subordinate to problems of doctrine and training in explaining the Allied failure there.
Regardless of the location, however, this and the following post, of all our reflections on the Frontiers, are perhaps the most essential.
As the title implies, this is where and when the critical engagements occurred. This was the critical time period in which the Allies lost the battle but could have lost the war and didn't. And the German Army won most of the battles but not decisively enough to win the larger war.
In the Southeast the "Battle of Lorraine" included several fights that have been described as separate engagements those were really a series of running fights along a fairly restricted corridor, beginning with the French offensive in the second week of August, then a German counteroffensive in the beginning of the third week, and a French defensive stand at the end of the week.
In the Center a series of closely physically- and temporally-spaced engagements now collectively termed the "Battle of the Ardennes" began sometime between 20 AUG and 21 AUG, and were effectively over except for French withdrawal and (fairly leisurely) German pursuit by 23 AUG.
In the Northwest the fights were more geographically distinct, and have been divided into the "Battle of Charleroi" between the French 5eme Armee and the German 2.Feldarmee and 3.Feldarmee that began with cavalry encounters on 20 AUG and was ended by a relatively orderly French withdrawal on 23 AUG, and the "Battle of Mons" between the British BEF and 1.Feldarmee which began with skirmishing on 21 AUG, flared to formed cavalry unit contact on 22 AUG, even further to full infantry and artillery assault on 23 AUG, and ended with British retreat in the early morning of 24 AUG.
I don't want to dig too deeply into the tactical minutiae of these engagements.
First, because as the first really "big" engagements of WW1 they've been covered to death. There's no point in my regurgitating Edmonds (1926) about Mons, or Zuber (2007) on Ardennes.
Second, because our initial thesis was that it's possible that reconnaissance inadequacies, or failures, played a large part in the Allied defeats along the frontiers. As I wrote in Part 1:
"Was this (the Allied defeat) 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?"
So that's what I'm going to focus on here; were there problems with the reconnaissance and, through it, intelligence - collection, interpretation, and/or dissemination - that led to problematic or fatal tactical, grand tactical, or even strategic errors by the Allied (or German) leadership?
Before we dive deep into these engagements, we should dispense with the least-most-critical of the Frontiers fights during this period, the "Battle of Lorraine".
The Crisis - Southeast (20-25 AUG)
The southeastern piece of Frontiers was actually several engagements: the Battle of Morhange-Sarrebourg (20-22 AUG), the Battle of the Trouée de Charmes (24-25 AUG), and the Battle of Rozelieures (25 AUG)
We talked about the French defeat at Morhange-Sarrebourg in Part 5b ("First Encounters"), noting that the German success and French failure had a lot to do with the respective success and failure of their respective air arms:
"Bowdon (2017) notes that poor weather and the press of retrograde displacements had limited air activity between 15 and 17 AUG, but that on 18 AUG a patrol from FFA 20 (the XIV.Armeekorps flying detachment) found an untenanted gap in the French FLOT. The 1er Armee was still attacking to the east towards Strassburg, while 2eme Armee had turned north to envelop Metz.
After a day to prepare the counterattack, now known as the "Battle of Morhange-Sarrebourg", kicked off on 20 AUG."
In what seems to have been a Frontiers meme, the Armee d'L'Air was unable to perform similarly successful flights over the Bavarian assembly areas to suss out the counteroffensive, so Rupprecht's landsers kicked ass and sent the French fantassins, those who survived, reeling back south and west.
To the gap between the fortress complexes of Toul to the northwest and Epinal to the southeast, where the unfortified gap of Trouée de Charmes provided a possible high-speed avenue of approach into the industrial heart of northeastern France.
As the linked Wiki article puts it succinctly:
"The French had suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Lorraine and retreated in disorder. Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the Chief of the General Staff of the German army had a difficult choice. The apparent collapse of the French Second Army (General Noël de Castelnau) made possible a breakthrough at the Trouée de Charmes (Charmes Gap) and the encirclement of all French troops in Lorraine and the Ardennes."
For once in August the French fliers seem to have gotten there first with the most; an air recon patrol spotted Rupprecht's troops pushing into the gap, and GEN Castelnau effectively used firepower and local maneuver to hammer the 6.Feldarmee.
The Bavarians weren't finished, mind; though it's outside the scope of this work, Rupprecht continued to slam his soldiers' heads against the defenses in Lorraine, culminating in the brutally indecisive Battle of Grand Couronné in September that helped blunt the German attempt to win the war with the Schlieffen coup de main. The linked article cites Herwig (2009) that:
"...in September, (6.Feldarmee) suffered 28,957 casualties, with 6,687 men killed, despite half the army being en route to Belgium; most lost in the fighting at the Grand Couronné. The (7.Feldarmee) suffered 31,887 casualties, of which 10,384 men killed.
The German army never calculated a definitive casualty list for the fighting in Alsace and Lorraine but the Bavarian official historian Karl Deuringer made a guess of 60 per cent casualties, of which 15 per cent were killed, in the fifty infantry brigades which fought in the region, which would amount to 66,000 casualties, 17,000 killed, which the Verlustliste (ten-day casualty reports) bore out."
After September the Lorraine front calcified and didn't move until 1918. So:
1) yes, there were some critical reconnaissance failures in the Southeast in August, notably the French failure to effectively use their cavalry and aerial recon elements to find the Bavarians massing for the counterattack of 20 AUG.
(If you wanted to be grudging you could include the 6.Feldarmee failure to figure out some weakness to pry open 2eme Armee's defenses in the Charmes Gap, for all that Bowdin (2017) goes out of his way to point out several minor recon successes by the Bavarian FFA 2b and 3b. But the reality was that the terrain didn't really allow for maneuver, and Moltke's orders to "relentlessly pursue" the supposedly-broken 2eme Armee didn't give Rupprecht the option of not at least trying a shove at the French defenses.)
2) no, those failures weren't decisive. They cost lives, so awful in that. But the tactical reality of the Lorraine topography is that neither the French (before Morhange) or the Germans (before Couronné) could have broken through into the open country behind the trench lines, no matter how good the reconnaissance.
So we'll leave them to dig in for a four-year stay and turn to a more essential area.
The Crisis - Center (20-24 AUG)
The Sources: I want to specify that the vast bulk of this section is drawn from three sources:
Steg, J-M. (2022) Death in the Ardennes: 22nd August 1914: France's Deadliest Day, University of Buckingham Press, 256 pp.
Zuber, T. (2007) The Battle of the Frontiers Ardennes 1914, The History Press, 313 pp.
and the Bowen (2017) work on German aviation cited earlier.
Movement to Contact (20-21 AUG)
Zuber (2007) describes the region as follows:
"The triangle of the Ardennes forest extends like an arrowhead with its base in Germany into southern Belgium and France. The Ardennes is thinly populated...does not favor operational maneuver...(t)he road net is not well developed and the forests and underbrush are thick...
The nature of the terrain made the operational problem for both armies extremely complex. The terrain...rewarded good reconnaissance, march discipline, effective staff work, and initiative. The terrain mercilessly punished deficiencies in all of these areas."
As we noted in Part 5b, the French strategic reconnaissance work in August, including the anabasis of Sordet's cavalry corps, was misleading to GQG not just because of the difficult terrain but because the main body of the German feldarmee in the Ardennes hadn't yet advanced into the southwestern Belgian forests. The French fliers and horsemen didn't find anyone there because they just weren't there yet.
But when the French horsemen and aviators didn't find anyone in the woods it led GQG to the assumption that there wasn't anyone there at all.
Which was dead wrong.
Here's Zuber (2007):
"Joffre believed that the German army was divided into two masses, one in Lorraine, the second...on both sides of the Meuse...(and) the Germans had left few forces in the Ardennes."
The plan was for the 3eme and 4eme Armee to strike north:
"...towards Arlon-Neufchateau...to push the opposing German forces into the angle formed by the Meuse...and the Ourthe. The attack...would catch the left flank of the German main attack (that is, 1. and 2.Feldarmee making the big Schlieffen sweep)...and roll it up...".
The French movement orders went out 20 and 21 AUG; 4eme Armee led off on the left towards Neufchateau, with 3eme Armee refused in echelon on the right towards Arlon, with each army's corps echeloned similarly, refused to the right.
First contact came on 20 AUG, when the two 4eme Armee cavalry divisions ran into German infantry divisions near Neufchateau and, as Zuber (2007) sums up concisely, "...were thrown back 15km, without being able to advance..."
This was the beginning of a theme. Zuber (2007) is full of comments about the problems of the French cavalry such as:
"On the left (of 4eme Army) the two cavalry divisions were unable to cross the Our (river) due to enemy security detachments..."
"7 DC (division d'cavalrie) was on the far right flank (of 3eme Armee) where it could contribute nothing to the 3rd Army reconnaissance effort."
And his damning conclusion of the overall cavalry battle was:
"The anonymous author of the FAR (German field artillery regiment) 25 regimental history said that the French cavalry simply would not fight. From the smallest patrol up to the level of cavalry corps, the French cavalry avoided combat and when it unexpectedly did meet German forces...the French cavalry withdrew. The German cavalry was able to screen the movement of its own forces, while on 21 and 22 August provided accurate information concerning the French advance."
Okay, now. Keep in mind, Terence Zuber has a very one-sided opinion of the tactical competence of the opposing armies. Germans good, French bad. He needs to be seen as a partisan of the Imperial forces, horse, foot, and artillery.
That said...the records do show that the German troops' operational art was better than their French counterparts, and that presumably included their divisional cavalry and the HKK/Feldarmee-level horse soldiers.
Meeting Engagements (22 AUG)
Even had the forested hills of the Ardennes been transparent from the sky in the air both sides were struggling with the late August weather over Belgium and Luxembourg.
Fog and heat haze when the skies were relatively clear, thunderstorms when it wasn't. Steg (2022) says that "...heavy rains had blanketed the entire region the previous day (21 AUG)...and the thick fog on the morning of 22 August would only clear by around noon..."
On the ground, however, the German commanders had a much better picture than the French commanders, and were using that, as well as their more flexible command and control ("Aufstragstaktik") setup, to gain the advantage.
As we noted, we've been repeatedly told that the French cavalry were unable, or unwilling, to fight for intelligence, while the German horsemen somehow - better training, better leadership, better something - seem to have been sending intelligence up the channels.
Worse, the French staff work was slow - many times the day's orders were not issued until well after midnight - and sloppy. Units were misinformed, or marched and countermarched pointlessly. Intelligence was not collected, or if collected, neither analyzed nor disseminated.
Steg (2022) tells the story of one such cavalry unit attached to the French "Colonial Corps" on 22 AUG, quoting the Corps chief of staff as observing that:
"The three squadrons of the Sixth Dragoons marched a few hundred meters ahead of us. These poor dragoons, who had been assigned to us only the previous night, had arrived dog-tired and without maps. We were...surprised at seeing them take the wrong turn at every intersection."
With this sort of clusterfuck in progress it's hardly surprising that the French went into the meeting engagements in the Ardennes already behind the power curve.
Once the maneuver units actually got within rifle range things only got worse.
All the accounts emphasize that their training and doctrine made the German infantry and artillery quicker to react, and more flexible in their tactical employment. German infantry units used the terrain better - French infantry tended to rush forward, German used the ground to place fire on target and maneuver effectively - and the German artillery was better at coordinating fire with their infantry as well as getting trails down, more quickly, and in better overwatching positions.
The French commanders from companies up to corps tended to flail tactically under fire. While individually courageous, the French officers seemed to have a difficult time adjusting to unforeseen tactical problems.
Steg (2022) describes one of these, when the Colonial Corps infantry first encountered dug-in German infantry in hasty defense:
"It is this defensive line...that the soldiers of the 1st Colonial Infantry Regiment's second battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Vitard, will be the first to encounter."
The battalion goes forward and is shot flat by German rifle and machine gun fire. The first runners return to inform their battalion commander of this, whereupon...
"...the French commander's reaction is identical to the one that will be seen at the various Ardennes battle sites whenever enemy opposition makes its presence known; he calls for an immediate reinforced attack."
The typical explanation for this is supposed to be the pre-war adherence to a sort of all-in manic bayonet charge, the "Attaque à outrance", and the explanation has been fossilized as conventional wisdom about the French infantry of 1914.
While there does seem to have been something of this sort spread throughout the European armies of 1914, it seems to me that as much as a reflexive lunge towards the enemy the problem with the French commanders seems to have been a combination of a failure (or absence) of doctrine, and an unwillingness to try and take time to think.
LTC Vitard and his peers seem to have had little or no experience at solving tactical problems using their heads as opposed to hands and feet. They had no doctrine, and little training, to guide them to alternatives, and no inclination to try and figure one out.
That might well be where the advantage of Aufstragstaktik came in; German subordinate commanders had to figure out the how, where, and when for themselves. They'd been given only the what and why. The rest was up to them to figure out.
Their French counterparts were handed explicit orders, and when their German enemy didn't oblige them? They seem to have had trouble coming up with non-suicidal alternatives.
The same problems hammered the 3eme and 4eme Armee troops throughout the Ardennes. Poor or absent reconnaissance left the French leadership ignorant of their enemies until the German 4. and 5.Feldarmee tore into them; many French units were so clueless that the German attacks caught them in march order.
Once under fire French tactical doctrine proved flawed, and French command and control inadequate, compared to their German opponents.
The result was a bloody nightmare; 27,000 French soldiers were killed in a single day, 22 AUG, the highest death toll of the entire war.
The Great Retreat Begins (23-24AUG)
By the end of 23 AUG both French armies had been forced back to their start lines, the opportunity to unhinge the big German right wing sweep lost.
We've talked about the stand of 2eme Armee at Grand Couronné. There was no such doorstop in the Ardennes. What prevented the defeat in the Ardennes from becoming a strategic disaster was not so much French resolution as the pace of 20th Century operations overwhelming the German General Staff.
Zuber (2007) presents a little vignette of what that meant:
"...on the morning of 23 August IR (German infantry regiment) 155 began to dig in...No one knew anything concerning the situation...At 0900 an officer arrived from division HQ saying that the French were not going to attack and work on the trenches stopped.
The troops warmed themselves in the sun, and then moved to a bivouac at 1130 and the field kitchens arrives...bringing hot coffee. The troops cleaned their weapons and equipment and wrote letters home while patrols were sent to find the wounded and dead."
Obviously though the German attacks had succeeded in driving back or shattering the French offensive the campaign was far from over, and the also-obvious inference from that was that vigorous pursuit of the defeated French units was the next step in turning tactical into strategic and political victory. But the German higher seems to have struggled to figure that out.
Zuber (2007) again:
"French casualties had been three of four times higher than...the Germans. Nevertheless, German losses had been significant and these, as well as the exertions of hard marching, combat, and a night spent digging defensive positions, had worn down the German soldiers, who on 23 August were physically and mentally exhausted."
The casualties were a problem, yes. Neither side had been prepared for the scale, or the appalling lethality, of 20th Century industrial war.
But a cardinal principle of military planning is preparing for unforeseen problems, such as husbanding reserve units and adapting to combat results.
Both 4. and 5.Feldarmee had units that had seen little or no combat on 22 AUG, and the Army staff, or if not at feldarmee level then at the overall Army ("Oberste Heeresleitung" or OHL) level, should have been pushing the armeekorps commanders to pursue the French armies to destruction.
Instead:
"The corps and army HQ on both sides lost control of their units. Many of the German units could have pursued on 22 August but never received orders to do so. The situation was unclear to German leaders at division level and above, and they preferred "safety first'. When the extent of the French defeat became evident in late morning on 23 August the French were out of ranges and recovering from their defeat." (Zuber, 2007)
I think that's a bit harsh. The meeting engagements of 22 AUG were, literally, the opening shots of World War 1. Neither side knew what to expect, and both were more than a bit shocked at how sudden, violent, and lethal those engagements were.
Remember, too, that the aerial recon assets of both sides had been largely sidelined by weather, so the German armeekorps and feldarmee commanders had a lot of blank space behind the forward enemy units. For all they knew a whole 'nother French armee might be backing up the retreating units smashed on 22 AUG, and a disorganized pursuit through the Ardennes might in turn be smashed as the Bavarians' had been a Grand Couronne'.
The German commanders could certainly have done better.
But the French commanders show how much worse they could have done.
Conclusions, Lorraine and The Ardennes
I think we're seeing - for the first time - some answers to our questions about reconnaissance and the outcomes of the Frontiers.
I also think that the answers might not be as generally definitive as we'd like, and vary quite a bit over the geographical areas we've covered.
In Lorraine the German aerial reconnaissance picked out a critical French tactical error - the separation between 1ere and 2eme Armee - that was exploited by German counterattack at Morhange.
However this appears to be not a general technical or tactical issue - that is, it doesn't seem to have been something applicable to the conditions or doctrines of 1914 air recon - but a local success on the part of the Bavarian feldfligerabteilungen; the French Armee d' L'Air didn't match it by detecting the counterattack building up in the 6.Feldarmee assembly areas.
In the Ardennes the same sort of pattern seems to have reoccurred but on the ground.
The German divisional and HKK cavalry units seem to have both screened and collected intelligence fairly effectively, while the French cavalry at all levels appears to have performed both tasks very poorly.
This difference doesn't seem to be related to any sort of general or overarching conditions or planning, but (based on the accounts we have) on national differences in training, doctrine, and leadership.
So, remember, our thesis was that, if the issues affecting the success of the various war plans were related to reconnaissance and intelligence derived from reconnaissance, we would see some sort of generalized problem(s) resulting from a misfit between what the planners thought their recon elements could and would do and what they actually could and did.
But in both these geographical areas the problems seem to be related more to those national differences. The German fliers and cavalry just seem to have been better at flying, scouting, and screening, just as the German infantry and artillery seem to have been better at moving, shooting, and communicating, than their French counterparts.
But we still have one more geographical area to examine, and that one perhaps the biggest and best known of all the engagements that make up the Battle of the Frontiers, so...
Next: The Crisis Two, Electric Boogaloo - The Strong Right Wing
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