Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 4b: Fly the Unfriendly Skies

Welcome back!

This is Part Five of our look at the opening campaign of what would become known as the "Western Front" of World War One; the so-called "Battle of the Frontiers" covering the opening campaign, from first shots fired on 1 AUG 1914 to the first day of the First Battle of the Marne, 5 SEP.

Remember that the hypothesis of our study is that among the, or possibly the - most critical elements of how the battles in August turned out was that either:
1) The two sides' plans - from tactical to operational and possibly even to the level of strategy - made some assumptions about their ability to gather intelligence once the shooting started that were wrong, and which meant that those plans miscarried because they were formed on incorrect assumptions.

Or...

2) That the tactical conditions had changed, far beyond the ability of even the cleverest 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?

Part One - the geopolitical and diplomatic run-up to war - is here, Part Two (German war planning) is here, and Part Three (French war planning) is here. Part Four, where we started looking at the actual means of reconnaissance and security in August 1914 - the infantry and cavalry scouts - is here.

Now we've come to the last of the "prequels" (he says, ignoring the groans of relief and exasperated sighs of impatience from the readership), a look at what was then a new, almost experimental, arm of the recon elements; the air elements.

Just as the ground recon troops broke down further into those who walked and those who rode, the air "forces" (and the armies of the time thought nothing like that of them!) can be broken down grossly into two major elements, which we'll begin by looking at the

Lighter-than-air Reconnaissance: It is...balloon!

Putting aside Leonardoesque fantasies the first actual use of "air assets" in combat was the brief period of the "compagnie d'aérostiers", the "Aerostatic Company", formed for the French revolutionary Army that would become the "Sambre et Meuse" in 1794.

I know little of the original military aviators outside what's available on the Internet, but those accounts suggest that the military value of the balloonists was widely dismissed by the French officer cadre of the time. 

Here's Marshal Soult on the original balloon flight over the Battle of Fleurus in 1794:

“I will not say anything about the balloon that we put up during the battle over the heads of the combatants, and this ridiculous innovation would not even deserve to be mentioned, if it hadn’t been made out to be something important. The truth is, this balloon was just plain embarrassing...At the beginning of the action, a general and an engineer entered the gondola to observe, it was said, the enemy movements…but at the height where we let them go up, the details escaped their view and everything was confused. We were no better informed, and no one paid any attention to it, neither the enemy nor ourselves.”

Tell us how you really feel, Jean-Dieu!

One serious limitation of the 18th Century military balloons were the lift methods.

The earliest balloons - the 1770s-1780s "Montgolfier Brothers" ones you've probably heard of - used heated air for lift. We've all seen the linear descendants, the "hot air balloons" beloved of romantic sunset floating excursions.

That works today because we have the propane bottle-and-burner tech to keep the air in the balloon hot. 

In the 18th Century the means to heat the lifting air ended once the gasbag left the ground. Up, until the air inside cooled, then down. One round trip per bonfire.

Militarily, that's fucking useless.

The early aeronauts figured out how to work around that fairly quickly; hydrogen.

Hydrogen 

The properties of this gas had been investigated in the 1670s by Robert Boyle (the "Boyle's law" guy?) and in the 1760s by Henry Cavendish. 

The bottom line on H2 is just what it says in the Wikipedia entry:

"It is the lightest element and, at standard conditions, is a gas of diatomic molecules with the formula H2...more commonly called hydrogen gas, molecular hydrogen or simply hydrogen. It is colorless, odorless, non-toxic, and highly combustible."

And there in bold you have both the aerial "good news" and "bad news" of hydrogen lighter-than-air flight.

Hydrogen is a lifting beast; it's great for making heavy things fly.

It's also flammable as all Hell, which tends to make those flying things first crispy, then (when the lifting envelope burns) dead at the end of the drop.

But in the 1790s it was the only real option.

FWIW, it was kind of a pain in the ass to start. The 18th Century form of hydrogen generator was a big chunk of metal and a big barrel or four of acid.

And I mean big...

Here's a description of the first hydrogen balloon ascension in 1783:

"Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers began filling the world's first hydrogen balloon on 23 August 1783, in the Place des Victoires, Paris. The balloon was comparatively small, a 35-cubic-metre sphere of rubberised silk (about 13 feet in diameter), and only capable of lifting about 9 kg. It was filled with hydrogen that had been made by pouring nearly a quarter of a tonne of sulphuric acid onto half a tonne of scrap iron."

That's a fucking lot of acid and a lot of metal.

Now assume you're the S-4, the logistics guy, for an 18th Century army where everything - food, fuel, ammo, tents, pots, ash-and-trash-and-all - moves by muscle power, human and animal.

Over roads that range from "not quite a bottomless mire but close" to "better but not really a "road" as you and I would think of it".

And now some flyboys want you to make transport appear for something like 1,500 pounds of nasty corrosive liquid and scrap metal.

So you can imagine how unless these junior birdmen were doing something pretty militarily awesome you might not be reeeeal excited about that.

So this strikes me as:
1) something that a "revolutionary" movement/government might come up with that was
2) something that a more pragmatic (military, since that's what the Empire was) government would abandon...

...which they did.

The little Wiki "history of military ballooning" article goes on to discuss the other 19th Century efforts. Those were mostly French, but included some Austrian and British excursions and, of course, the Union Army's "Balloon Corps". 

The hydrogen generation problem appears to have been largely solved by the 1860 and '70s, but the military problems inherent in a balloon - either tethered (and immobile) or free-floating (so whichever way the winds blew) - and its relatively high logistical "tail" meant that the tactical use of balloons was largely confined to single engagements at a relatively static battlefield.

The "balloon problem" was waiting to be solved by this thing:

Lighter-than-air Reconnaissance: Das Luftschiff!

The thing the balloon needed to be of military value was a way to get where it was tactically useful, stay there as long as needed, adjust position and height to see what its crew needed to see, and get to where that information could be passed to the maneuver (and fire support) element commander(s).

That meant, effectively, an internal combustion engine.

Oh, there was a sort of mid-19th-Century contraption (the "Giffard Airship") that had a steam engine that, in the words of the linked article "...was not sufficiently powerful to allow Giffard to fly against the wind to make a return journey."

Yeah, that's fucking useless, too.

So it was not until almost the end of the 19th Century that the same powerplant innovation that (as we'll discuss) pushed heavier-than-air flight from gliders to "airplanes" pushed the gasbags over into a militarily-useful form; the "airship".

In the last decade of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th Century several militaries experimented with these aircraft, including the United States, whose interest is outside the scope of this piece. 

Of our combatants...

Belgium: had no domestic airship production facility. Three French airships were purchased in the early Teens of which at least one, Belgique III, appears to have been in commission in August 1914. The Belgian Air Force has a nice little page discussing the airships, including the mysterious Ville de Bruxelles. 

Ville de Bruxelles

The Belgian airship(s) appears to have been actively scouting in August 1914 out of a suburb of Antwerp; when Antwerp fell the Belgique III is reported to have been broken down, moved to France, and there used along the (presumably) Channel coast.

The linked page above says of Ville de Bruxelles that "(t)he exact use of this machine for military purposes remains shrouded in mystery but fact is that it surfaces in several military reports."

So...something? Who knows...

France: the first French airships were inspired by the work of a Brazilian aeronautical engineer, Albert Santos-Dumont, who arrived in France in the late 1890s. By the 1900s a private firm, Lebaudy Frères, was building "semi-rigid" airships. 

The French Army commissioned several, but by 1914 had lost much interest in them, as we'll discuss in a bit, but is at least partially explained in this list of the fates of the "Lebaudy Airships". 

Even when operational the French designs were typically "semi- or "non-rigid" - meaing that the lifting envelope was a single unreinforced gasbag - and generally smaller and less capable than their German opposite numbers. We'd call them "blimps".

However at least six  or seven were in commission on 1 AUG 1914. "Rod Filan" at The Aerodrome Forum website translated the following information "...from the original French of "Le Mensonge du 2 Août 1914." L'agression allemande. pp. 356, 357". 

I found additional information at this website run by "Global Security" as well as a very informative (if a bit mysterious) site going by "Another Field":

Rod Filan at The Aerodrome begins by reporting; "...here is the exact state of (French) aeronautical resources on the date of August 1: France had only 7 airships."

1. L' Adjudant Reau (based in Verdun, said to have sortied at least once, first on 4 AUG; the Global Security site reports this airship was out of action by 8 AUG. The "Another Field" site amplifies the Reau's problems:

"The flight of Adjudant Réau was a dismal failure. The airship’s aft engine stopped after an hour and forty-five minutes and could not be repaired in flight, forcing the mission to be aborted. This is the third successive failure for Adjudant Réau: missions on 6 August and 8 August also had to be abandoned when the airship simply could not gain altitude."

That would explain things after 8 AUG, yep).

2. L'Adjudant Vincenot (based in Toul. Sortied 8 AUG. "Another Field" reports she and her crew...

"...departed her base at Toul late in the evening of 8 August on a successful 180-km reconnaissance flight over Dieuze, Château-Salin, and Bénestroff. She returned yesterday morning (10 AUG). The mission was generally successful, and the airship took only light damage from German fire: around ten hits."

So did "something" recon-adjacent, tho not sure how useful.)

3. Fleurus (based in Verdun. "operational" 9 AUG, and sortied (probably) 10 AUG, to:

"...attack the German railway station at Konz. The airship successfully reached her target last night and dropped four 155-mm (6-inch) artillery shells. However, damage to the railway was negligible, and so although Fleurus reached the target and returned safely home, the mission cannot be considered a success."

...per Another Field)

4. Éclaireur Conté (based in Belfort (or possibly Epinal as reported in "Another Field". Sortied first 9 or 10 AUG. "Another Field" says this mission...

"...came to an abrupt halt when brought down by fire from French troops. Mistaking the airship for a German machine, they scored 1,300 hits on her within ten minutes of her appearing over French lines.  The crew returned Éclaireur Conté to base only with enormous difficulty and she is no longer airworthy." 

...sucks to be them, eh? Global Security says this hard-luck gasbag was shot down again, and repaired again.)

5. Montgolfier (based in Maubeuge. Reported as prepared to sortie over Namur 10 AUG but no further detail. Global Security says "no info?")
6. Dupuy de Lôme (based in Maubeuge, not in commission until 18 AUG; "Global Security" reports it was shot down by French troops 24 AUG, so in action six days - tho fairly critical days.)
7. Tissandier (based in Toul. Filan's reporting suggests a first sortie 12 OCT, but Global Security says "not used in WW1", so while it's hard to say what this craft did it did nothing on the Frontier in August or September.).

We'll go into this in depth in a bit, but it appears that the French Army had an active airship reconnaissance program in August; what we don't know is how effective it was in the air. We do know how much effect it had on the ground, though. 

We'll get there.

Britain: The British were well behind both France and Germany; the first British military airship, Nulli Secundus, wasn't flight-tested until 1907. So far as I can tell the British Army experimented with airships from the Oughts until close to the outbreak of the war, but by 1914 the only British airships were operated by the Royal Navy for various sea duties.

No British airships were over Belgium and France in August.

Lighter-than-air: The Entente 

So here's what the three "allies" could float off the ground in 1 AUG 1914:
Belgium: 1 (probably 2) airship(s),
France: 4 airships, probably rising to five by 18 AUG but back to four on 24 AUG,
Britain: none

So somewhere between five to seven airships, all of which were relatively small, slow, and used largely for reconnaissance, though the effectiveness of those operations seem questionable.

Now, however, we come to the boss airship operator,

Germany.

Let's face it; when you think "airship" or "dirigible" you probably immediately think "zeppelin". 

The rigid airship designed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin has become the default image of "airship"; as I mentioned, the semi- or non-rigid types like the French, British, and Belgian airships we've looked at until now we think of today as "blimps".

Even the German airships themselves get caught up in this; another German company built rigid airships but nobody outside pure pedants called them "Schütte-Lanz". 

They were called "zeppelins".

The aircraft were defined by a fabric-shrouded metal frame containing multiple "gasbags". Engines and command and control mechanisms were located in separate gondolas or nacelles.

On 1 AUG the German Army had ten operational Army airships (the Navy had one which was not deployed to the ground campaign), but of those only six appear to have served in the West. Let's look at them first and then discuss German airship doctrine and operations.

A Note on Organization and Nomenclature:

All Army airships were treated as a "strategic" asset and were directly under the flagpole, assigned somewhere in Imperial Headquarters. However, I can't find exactly where and who was/were supposed to be directing the gasbags. 

I'm guessing that it would have been unlikely to have been all the way at the top (the "Große Hauptquartier", which was the 1914 equivalent of the Joint Chiefs plus the Emperor) but rather somewhere in the "Oberste Heeresleitung", OHL, the "Supreme Army Command".

The most likely subsection within the OHL seems to be either the Operations section or Intelligence (Nachrichtenabteilung) but as noted, I'm not sure which.

The designations of the airships themselves included the manufacturer's designation (for Luftschiffbau Zeppelin-built aircraft this was "LZ" (for Luftschiff Zeppelin) followed by a number, and the Army designation, which changed over time; in August the Army renumbered their airships as "Z" followed by a Roman numeral. So, for instance, the Zeppelin LZ 12 was Army zeppelin Z III when it was decommissioned 1 AUG 1914. Later in the war this stopped, and the Army retained the "LZ" numbers.

The best information I have for the German airships over the Frontiers comes from this list attached to this Wikipedia page. The Zeppelin History site has a database too, but it's pretty bare-bones.

The Western Front Zeppelins:

1. LZ 13 (LZ 13) G-class zeppelin in civilian service from 1912. Commandeered by the Navy in 1913 and then transferred to Army service in 1914. One of the two exceptions to the re-naming convention due to the earlier civilian service. Described in the Wiki list as "...used for reconnaissance missions over the Baltic Sea and bombing missions over France."

2. LZ 17 (LZ 17) H-Class zeppelin commandeered from civilian service by the Army in 1914. I can't find any record of what this airship did for nearly a month, but after more than three weeks of war the Wiki article says it "...took part in several raids against Antwerp" on 25/26 AUG. It quickly became clear that the airship "...was not suitable for warfare on the western front...". There's a more complete account in this webpage, but it's in German.

3. LZ 21 (Z VI) K-Class zeppelin purpose-built for Army service in 1913. This airship opened the zeppelin-bombing campaigns of WW2 by attacking the Belgian fortress city of Liege on 6 AUG. Supposedly the payload of artillery rounds killed nine or ten civilians, suggesting the bombing wasn't particularly effective in a military sense, and ground fire holed enough lift cells that Z VI crash-landed on Schneeberg Hill between Cologne and Bonn that day, a complete writeoff.

4. LZ 22 (Z VII) L-Class zeppelin purpose-built for Army service in 1914. Appears to have flown at least one reconnaissance mission in the southeastern portion of the front, where on 21 AUG it "...was sent to find the retreating French Army around the Vosges mountains in Alsace, and drop bombs on the camps. After passing through clouds Z VII found itself right above the main army, whose small-arms fire penetrated many gas cells. Leaking heavily, the crew force-landed the airship near St. Quirin, Lorraine." (Wikipedia). Also a writeoff.

5. LZ 23 (Z VIII) L-Class zeppelin purpose-built for Army service in 1914. Was engaged on the same mission as Z VII on 21 AUG and suffered the same fate: "...engaged the French army while at an altitude of a few hundred feet...made a forced landing in no man's land near Bandonvilliers." (Wiki). The wreck was taken and some of the crew captured by the French Army.

The "Another Field" website provides a bit more detail on the day Z VIII had:

"As she set out on her mission, she was first fired upon by German troops, who scored many hits with small arms and at least one artillery shell. Despite the damage and gas leaks, commander Hauptmann Konrad Andrée decided to proceed with the mission. Ironically, when the airship did finally locate the French, the French army below did not fire on the Zeppelin, believing it to be a French craft until it started dropping shells.

By now, Z VIII was below 400 metres (1,300 ft ) and no longer able to gain height. Consequently, she was heavily damaged by return fire from the 75-mm guns of the 65ème régiment d’infanterie territorial. Pursued by French cavalry and out of control, she began to drift and eventually crashed near Bandonvilliers. The crew attempted to burn the airship to avoid it falling into French hands, but were unsuccessful. They then engaged the French in a brief firefight on the ground before escaping into the nearby forest. Fourteen of the crew were able to rejoin German forces, and four were captured by the French. Sections of the wreckage were taken to Paris and displayed as trophies of war."

 What a shitty day!

6. LZ 25 (Z IX) M-Class zeppelin purpose-built for Army service in 1914. Reported to have been "...(u)sed for reconnaissance and bombing missions in northern France; on 25 August 1914 nine bombs dropped on Antwerp..." (Wiki). Z IX was destroyed in an October bombing raid.

Just to give you a sense of the range of zeppelin design, here's the specs for the 1912 H-Class zeppelins like Z IV and LZ-17:

General -
Crew: 20
Length overall: 158 m (518 ft 4 in)
Useful lift: 26,100 kg (57,500 lb)
Powerplant: 3 × Maybach B-Y 6-cyl water-cooled in-line piston engines, 123 kW (165 hp) each

Performance -
Maximum speed: 76.32 km/h (47.42 mph, 41.21 kn)
Range: 2,300 km (1,400 mi, 1,200 nmi) maximum

Armament -
Guns: 3 x Parabellum MG 14 machineguns (front and rear of control cabin, rear dorsal position)

Payload: Up to 3,600 kg (7,900 lb); in 1914 aerial bombs were in the future; airships, when they carried air-to-ground munitions used large (150mm) artillery rounds.

Here's the 1914 L-Class:

General -
Crew: 18
Length overall: 156 m (511 ft 10 in)
Useful lift: 25,700 kg (56,700 lb) typical gross lift
Powerplant: 3 × Maybach CX 6-cylinder water-cooled in-line piston engines, 130 kW (180 hp) each

Performance -
Maximum speed: 72 km/h (45 mph, 39 kn)
Range: 1,900 km (1,200 mi, 1,000 nmi)

Armament -
Guns: 4 to 5 x Parabellum MG 15 machineguns (control cab (1 or 2), dorsal forward (2 to 3), dorsal aft (1)

Payload: By later in the war, typically 5 x 50 kg (110 lb) high explosive bombs and 20 x 3 kg (7 lb) incendiary bombs.

So there's the German side of the airship shed.

So...what did all these airship operations look like in August 1914? Lighter-than-air Conclusions:

Well...after a longish look the airship war doesn't look like much.

The Belgian airships appear to have been pretty useless. Given how overwhelmed the Belgian Army was in general whatever recon work that the Bruxelles and Belgique did - if anything - was unlikely to have had much of any effects.

It's kinda hard to pin down exactly what the French and German airship operations were supposed to be doing were in the early phase of the war.

I don't have a log of sorties or anything similar; there's probably something covering the Germsn operations in the Richard Duiven Collection, but that's 1,600 miles away in the University of Texas library in Dallas, which is kind of impractical for me to access.

But what seems to have gone on was a mishmash of tactical operations and a lack of recorded strategic ones.

At least some of the airship sorties by both sides were intended to find enemy troop movements; L'Adjudant Vincenot for sure, LZ 13 and Z IX by report, Z VII, Z VIII for certain (and unfortunate for them).

But these look purely local and are interspersed with what seems like kind of pointless tactical bombing; Z VI over Liege, LZ 17 and Z IX over Antwerp, Fleurus over Kohn.

There doesn't seem to have been - on either side - any sort of organization for tasking these airships or employing them in systematic ways; assigning sectors to patrol, using the airship strengths - extended range and the ability to carry radio equipment that was impossible for heavier-than-air craft and impractical for ground forces - to perform deep, strategic reconnaissance missions that no other systems or troop types could.

Which isn't shocking; this was the first "air war", after all, and everyone was trying to figure things out on the fly, so to speak.

But what does seem pretty sketchy is that both the French and German airships seem to have been used in ways that maximized their tactical weaknesses; their slow speed and the low operational ceiling needed for low-level observation and ground attack made them appallingly likely to be shot down. 

Look back up at the lists; two of the six operational French airships were destroyed by friendly fire, three of the six German were blown out of the sky, plus LZ 17 that had to be sent to the less-lethal Eastern Front.

That's pretty brutal; 50% casualties? Damn.

So between the doctrinal chaos, poor operational use, and the overall technical issues the lighter-than-air element of aerial reconnaissance appears to have been a small, and ineffective, element in the Battle of the Frontiers.

Heavier-than-air Reconnaissance: Up in the air, junior birdmen!

With the airships kind of doing not much of anything, that left the skies to the guys in the flying machines; the Aéronautique Militaire of France, the Royal Flying Corps of Great Britain, the Aviation Militaire Belge/Belgische militaire luchtvaart of Belgium, and the Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches of Imperial Germany.

Let's take them in order of overall strength, starting with

Belgium

The "Belgian Wings" site has a nice rundown of the equipment the Belgian air arm fought with in August. 

So far as I can make out, the Aviation Militaire Belge/Belgische militaire luchtvaart (let's call it the AMB for simplicity...) had:

10 x JERO-Farman type Militaire 1914 or F.23 bis two-seater biplanes (that's the photo above); one is reported to have been destroyed in a crash in July, so maybe only 9 by 4 AUG.

6 x JERO-Farman type Militaire 1913 (also called F.XVI (F.16 or HF 16), similar to the F.23. Eight were delivered in 1913; at least two of which were out of action by 4 AUG.

These aircraft were organized into two (initially) rising to four squadrons ("escadrilles") of something like 6 aircraft each (the personnel strength is reported as five pilots, six observers, and an officer commanding (who'd likely have been the sixth pilot).

The small AMB added a fifth Escadrilles de monoplanes composed of three Bleriot XI machines...

...flown by civilian volunteers.

So a total of about 20-odd aircraft in five escadrilles. They had some unknown number of ground support crew - let's figure maybe 20 or so, three guys per airplane, and each squadron had a truck, plus one for the AMB so five trucks.

Pretty skimpy for an airforce.

Which reminds us; it's good to keep in mind how close these guys - all these 1914 fliers; Belgian, French, British, and German - were to the Wright Flyer...

...of 1903 compared to the airplanes, pilots, observers, and air forces of only four years later like the Fokker D.VIII below.

Like all the August aircraft the Belgian machines were unarmed (although it didn't take long for the fliers to start lugging pistols or rifles along; someone in a Belgian aircrew - presumably the observer - shot a German pilot with a rifle in late September that the dying German then force-landed or crashed...the world's first air combat loss) and intended purely for scouting. 

They were fragile and slow; here's the JERO-Farman F.23 bis specifications:

General -
Crew: 2 (pilot and observer)
Length overall: 8.06 m (26 ft 5 in)
Wingspan: 13.65 m (44 ft 9 in)
Powerplant: 1 × Gnome Lambda 7-cylinder air-cooled rotary piston engine, 60 kW (80 hp)

Performance -
Maximum speed: 165 km/h (103 mph, 89 kn)
Range: 315 km (196 mi, 170 nmi)
Endurance: 3 hours
Service ceiling: 1,050 m (3,440 ft)

Armament -
1914: none
by 1915: Guns: 1 × machine gun on flexible mount for observer
Bombs: small load of 75 mm (3.0 in) bombs.

Heavier-than-air (Belgium): Organization and Operations 

We're going to do this here, but the "air operations" part applies to all the combatants of 1914, so take that as a heads-up.

The Belgian air-ground coordination and organization above escadrille levels is kind of opaque. The Wiki entry for the Belgian Army order of battle says this about aviation:

"In 1913, the Belgian government created the Company of Aviators (Compagnie des Aviateurs), the antecedent of the Belgian Air Force, just two years after the inauguration of the country's first airfield at Brasschaat in 1911. Attached to the fortresses, the company was equipped with a total of 16 Maurice Farman biplanes. The Belgian army also had had four observation balloons which, like the aircraft, were also attached to the fortresses, and two small airships."

Presumably by 1914 the fliers were no longer "attached to fortresses", although the first AMB air operation is reported to have been over Liege, so perhaps some connection still existed. 

What the Belgian Army order of battle does suggest is that the aviators were "Army assets"; there doesn't appear to be anything like the connection between air and maneuver forces that we'll see when we look at France and Germany. 

So my assumption is that the Belgian fliers' were technically assigned to the GQG - the top headshed - but directed to coordinate with whichever ground element was in or around their operational area. The alternative would be to report their observations directly to the Army HQ, which would then push the intel down to the troop unit command(s) in the air ops area.

That's...not ideal.

As we'll see, the big problems with 1914 air recon were 1) transmission, 2) timeliness, and 3) detail. 

Without radio commo - and the air-to-ground radio "problem" was never really solved in WW1; the sets were too bulky and too finicky for reliable aircraft use - the only ways that air observers could communicate with the ground in real time were 1) dropping little notes or 2) actually landing.

The former were naturally limited in transmission and detail. Writing up a detailed reconnaissance report in an open cockpit is damn near impossible. So, at best, assuming the crew could find (or knew) where the local maneuver unit command element was located, the "report" would consist of a container with a sheet of paper inside dropped over the command staff reading "enemy (infantry/cavalry/artillery) dug in (advancing/retreating) at (distance) to the (direction)".

A British "message streamer" of later in the war

Not entirely worthless, but pretty sketchy for the division CG to write his op orders.

Landing was even sketchier. Remember how fragile these aircraft were, and the lack of infastructure of 1914 Europe. No nice broad paved roads or parking lots to land on and takeoff from. 

Even the farm fields - as level as any piece of 1914 ground around - were not the vast expanses of modern mechanized farming. And obstacles like wire fences, hedges, or ditches, might very well be invisible from the air but lethal touching down.

But the alternative was losing timeliness; having to return to the aircraft's home airstrip and then send - probably by courier, since the airstrip "base" surely lacked a radio, too - a report either to the maneuver headquarters directly or, worse, to Army HQ. Assuming the recon report actually reached the right field headquarters it would be hours (at best) old.

Bottom line; there wasn't a great answer to the "air recon" problem; that there were any, and that the fliers did have impacts on the ground maneuvers - and they did -is pretty outstanding.

Belgian air operations: Summary

I'm sure the AMB did what it could, but it was up against a German invasion so over powering that it forced the entire Belgian Army, including its aviators, out of all but a tiny corner of Belgian skies. 

So I'm not sure what, if anything, the AMB air reconnaissance missions accomplished; like the Belgian airships, there were just too many Germans and the Germans were better armed and organized. 

Knowing where the moving van is doesn't make standing in front of it any more profitable.

Next up:

Britain:

The Royal Flying Corps - RFC - was operational in France on or about13 AUG. The force that deployed consisted of four squadrons:

#2 Squadron; about 12 x B.E.2a two-seat biplanes (that's the photo above), 19 officers, 2 warrant officers, 21 sergeants and 111 rank and file, 7 light aircraft tenders, 6 heavy aircraft tenders, 4 repair lorries, 3 shed lorries, 4 reserve equipment lorries, 6 trailers and 6 motor cycles, 30cwt lorries for transporting equipment and supplies, which included 131 pistols, 23 whistles, 65 bars of yellow soap and 192 signal rockets (hat tip to the invaluable "RFC" website for the list...)

#3 Squadron: a mix of about 12 x B.E.2a and Farman F.20 two-seater biplanes and Bleriot XI monoplanes. Personnel and equipment as #2 Squadron.

#4 Squadron: as #2 Squadron.

#5 Squadron: a mix of about 9 x B.E2a and Farman F.20 and 3 x Avro 504 (that's the color photo below) two-seater biplanes. Personnel and equipment as #2 Squadron.

Aircraft Park "...a complement of spare aircraft and mechanics to undertake major repairs. The Park was to have 5 non-flying officers and 6 flying officers, 2 light tenders, 8 heavy tenders, 2 repair lorries 4 motor cycles and 2 reserve equipment lorries." (RFC website).

Assorted bits and pieces included an R.E.1 experimental two-seater biplane, two F.E.8 two-seater biplanes, and a Bleriot "Parasol" monoplane.

So a total of about 80 to 88 aircraft - 40-48 x  B.E.2a, 22 x  Farman F.20, 11 x  Bleriot XI, 3 x Avro 504 and four or five odds and sods - about 80 officers, 4 warrant officers, 85 NCOs, 450 other ranks with the assorted vehicles and equipment needed to sustain flight operations.

Britain: Organization and Operations.

With the RFC, we know where the fliers fit in the BEF organizational chart. Here:

The British fliers were directly under the flagpole, assigned to the Expeditionary Force General Headquarters. They were, as the chart says, "Army troops"

What I don't know is exactly how they operated there. The RFC in France was commanded by a one-star (brigadier general), so technically separated by three levels of command from the general officer commanding, Field Marshal Sir John French. 

So in theory it's possible that the individual aircraft reports went through their squadron (operations? intelligence?) officers up to the one of the general staff boffins, "GSO 1 (Operations) or "(Intelligence)" and from there bsck out to the troop units.

But.

Several major Army-troops unit commanders reported directly to the CG, including the Army engineer and artillery bosses. So I can see how the BEF might have stovepiped air recon intel directly to the CG's map table.

We'll come back to this, as well as talk about the RFC operations, after we look at the other two, the "big" aerial forces of August 1914.

France

 

So the Wikipedia post says that the Aéronautique Militaire contained 132 aircraft in 21 escadrilles. That works out to about 6.28 aircraft per squadron, which seems kinda hard on the guys who have to try and fly the 0.28 of an airplane.

I think those airplane and squadron numbers are wrong.

Another Wiki piece, on the 1914 French order of battle, breaks down the flying units and comes up with 23 squadrons.

And I think if we look back at the Belgians - who probably took not just their airplanes but their squadron MTO&E from their French neighbors - you get that a 1914 French escadrille was probably set up as 12 pilots and observers (for the two-seat aircraft) and six aircraft (or six pilots for the single-seaters). 

So 23 x 6 = 132, which I think is where the aircraft number comes from. 

But the breakdown numbers are different, and, I think, more probable.

Figure ground support staff about half the strength of the 12-airplane RFC squadron gives you about 50-60 troops and the usual trucks, whistles, bar soap (and wine, no doubt...) per escadrille.

Now...the problem we have is that France and Germany have big aircraft industries (by 1914 standards, anyway). And the "early industrial period" nature of airplane manufacturing at the time meant that it wasn't either "Boeing or Airbus". A gajillion little mom-and-pop-and-Maurice-Farman outfits were building airplanes that could and would be used for war, so here we go:

French aircraft:

The Farman F.20 was a big seller in 1914. The following units are listed as flying that aircraft type: Escadrilles HF 1, HF 7, HF 13, and HF 19. So let's call it 24 x Farman F.20s in four squadrons. 

An earlier Farman two-seater biplane type, the MF.11 "Shorthorn", was operated by Escadrilles MF 2, MF 5, MF 8, MF 16, and MF 20; 30 x Farman MF.11's in five squadrons. That's the MF.11 above.

The Caudron G.3 single-seat biplane is listed as operated by Escadrille C 11, so 6 x G.3 biplanes in a single squadron.

The Dorand DO.1 was the Sturmovik of it's day; the Wiki entry says that the crew was "... protected from small arms fire by 90 kg (200 lb) armour plates."

As you can imagine, given the tiny engine the DO.1 mounted, like all these early airplanes, adding 200 pounds of metal made a slow machine. The escadrilles reportedly equipped with them (DO 4, DO 6, and DO 22) are reported to have turned them in as soon as possible, but for August 1914, 18 x Dorand DO.1s.

(Worth noting that the Wiki entry for this aircraft lists three different squadrons for the Dorand; DO 14, DO 22, and says that the Voison squadron V 14 also operated several DO.1s. I'm not sure how to resolve this; the Wiki piece appears well researched and I have no way to field-check the squadron lists at the "order of battle" site. We'll just have to leave this out there...)

The two-seater REP Type N monoplane was operated by Escadrilles REP 15 and REP 27; so 12 x REP N's in two squadrons.

Voison type-L two-seater biplanes (that's the contraption tipping backwards in the photo at the head of this section) was operated by three squadrons; Escadrilles V 14, V 21, and V 24; so 18 x Voisons

Four squadrons operated Bleriot XI single-seat monoplanes; Escadrilles BL 3, BL9, BL 10, and BL 14; 24 x Bleriot types total.

Morane-Saulnier made two types of single-seater monoplane models in 1914, and either the Morane-Saulnier G and H types are reported to have been operated by Escadrille MS 17.

One final single-squadron aircraft, the Nieuport VI, a single-seat monoplane, was operated by Escadrille N 12.

So we're looking at 30 x MF.11, 24 x Farman F.20 and Bleriot XI, 18 x Voison L-type, Dorand DO-1s, 12 x REP N-types, and 6 x Nieuport VI and Caudron G.3 (for a total of 138, so either not all the squadrons were full strength or the overall number aircraft reported is wrong), about 200-250 officers and something like 1,200-2,000 troops with the assorted trucks, whistles, bar soap, etc.

France: Organization and Operations

We're going to see a big difference between the "minnows" - Belgium and Britain (and Britain is maybe more like herring or something, but still...) - and the "whales", France and Germany.

Because when we talked about the whole "air-to-ground-coordination/communication" thing?

The big land powers had clearly been thinking about that.

The "timeliness" problem - getting intelligence from the air to the ground and once there over the ground to where it was useful - had a simple and practical solution that the two smaller air powers either overlooked or considered unworkable; divvy up the air assets to the maneuver units rather than centralize them under the Army HQ flagpole.

We'll see how the Germans did this in a bit, but the French Army handed air reconnaissance out to the field armies. 

Here's what that looked like in print, from northwest to southeast:

France – Air Tasking 1 AUG 1914
5th Armee:
Six squadrons - DO 4, DO 6, C.11, N 12, REP 15, and V 24
4th Armee:
Two squadrons - V 14 and V 21
3rd Armee:
Five squadrons - MF 2, HF 7, HF 13, MF 16, and DO 22
2nd Armee:
Five squadrons - HF 1, MF 8, HF 19, MF 20, and MS 17
1st Armee:
Five squadrons - BL 3, BL 9, BL 10, BL 18, and MF 5

And on the map:

Makes pretty good sense. 5th Army with the open flank gets six squadrons; 4th, in reserve, gets only two, everyone else gets five. 

In Foch's place I might have robbed a couple more - say one squadron each - from 1st and 2nd Armies to strengthen 4th and 5th's recon program.

But the idea is there.

We'll get into the weeds on French air operations to the extent we can when we start to look at the ground campaign, but first let's look at the other side of the "forward edge of the battle area", at...

Germany

The German air service (what would come to be called the Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte in 1916 but on 1 AUG 1914 was still Die Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches - "the flying-troops of the German Empire" but let's call it "DFK" because the original German is a mouthful) was set up the same year at France's Aéronautique Militaire; 1910.

The German version of "military aviation" was spun up quickly - to match or counter the obvious French development of air power - and with a very German orderliness (the DFK was the only organization of the three major powers to have an intermediate levels of organization between the overall air command authority and the individual squadrons - called Abteilung in German - in the form of administrative "battalions" with internal "companies" of three to four squadrons each)

It also grew in size more rapidly than it's opponent; most of the standard references I can find state than on 1 AUG the two main opponents lined up across the Franco-German border like this:
France: about 130-140 aircraft in 23 squadrons of about 6 aircraft each,
Germany: a total of about 230 aircraft (of which about 50 were obsolete, so about 180 operational ) in 31 squadrons of 6 aircraft.

Don't forget that Germany also had to provide air reconnaissance for the eastern Army elements, so another five squadrons and 25 or 30 aircraft were posted there in August.

So here's a problem with all this.

Unlike the French, the Germana DFK didn't add a helpful tag to their squadron numbers, and I can't find a source (for a reasonable-to-a-hobby-historian-price, anyway) that breaks down who was flying which aircraft.

And Germany, like France, had a busy cottage-aircraft-industry. So there's a fair number of possibilities, and I'll just try and give you and idea of the general range of German aircraft that would have been employed for reconnaissance over the Frontiers.

German aircraft:

Perhaps the most iconic early-war machine was the Taube.

A 1909 design (originally by the Austro-Hungarian Etrich company, but by 1914 produced by numerous German firms including Albatros, DFW, Aviatik, Gotha, and Rumpler) this two-seater monoplane was verging on obsolescence at the start of the war but was insanely numerous; this website claims that roughly half of all German military aircraft - so something like 120-125 - were Taubes.

The Taube was, as the graceful wings suggest, very gentle and stable in the air. If you look closely at them, though, the wings (which aren't, despite the appearance, supposed to be "bird" wings but were modeled after some sort of winged seed-pod like a maplecopter) suggest one big problem:

No control devices, no ailerons. Taubes turned, climbed, and dove using the original Wright Brothers-style "wing warping".

That made them stable but slow to turn and easy prey for faster, more nimble enemies, and they were relegated to training in less than a year.

The remaining half-or-so of the DFK aircraft included several "B.I/B.II"-type two-seater biplanes; they all look similar, and my suspicion is that there was a standard DFK spec for this type that, like the Taube, was built by numerous manufacturers. For example, here's a AEG B.II,

an LVG B.I

an Aviatik B.I

and an Albatros B.I:

Look a lot alike, eh?

Makes sense when you think "military equipment"; keep it simple. 

If a "two-seater biplane" is always the same two-seater biplane then your mechanic's toolkit works on the replacment machine you just received even though it was built in Johannisthal by Luftverkehrsgesellschaft m.b.H. while the airplane it replaced was built by Albatros Flugzeugwerke GmbH next door.

So something like 180-185 operational aircraft in 31 Feldflieger Abteilung (FFA) of 6 aircraft each. Presuming a nominal officer establishment of 12 to 14 suggests another 50-60 NCOs and enlisted ground staff with the usual couple of trucks, tents, cookpots, etc., so something like 2,000-2,500 all ranks.

This is just the Western Front field force; it leaves out the whole rest of the DFK, which included the training schools (Fliegerersatzabteilungen), "fortress flying detachments" (Festungfliegerabteilungen), the reserve air-park units (Armee-flug-park). The FFA are just the tip of the DFK propellor.

Germany: Organization and Operations

We've seen the Entente air coordination get further into the weeds as the air organizations got more bigger and more sophisticated; nothing below Army GHQ for Belgium and Britain, down to field Army HQ for France.

The DFK broke their coordination down one level further; to the corps - "Armeekorps" in German - level. Here's the breakout. "AK" is an active armeekorps, "RK" is a reserve corps, so "2AK" is II Armeekorps, "4 RK" is IV Reserve-Korps. Bavarian units are identified by a "B" or "(Bavarian)":

Germany – Air Tasking:
Total of 31 Feldflieger Abteilungen (including 3 Bavarian)

1st Feldarmee (total of 5 attached FFA)
Army: FFA 12
2AK: FFA 30
3AK: FFA 7
4AK: FFA 9
9AK: FFA 11
3RK: None
4RK: None

2nd Feldarmee (total of 4 FFA)
Army: FFA 23
Guard AK: FFA 1
Guard RK: None
7AK: FFA 18
10AK: FFA 21
7RK: None
10RK: None

3rd Feldarmee (total of 4 FFA)
Army: FFA 7
11AK: FFA 28
12AK: FFA 29
19AK: FFA 24
12RK: None

4th Feldarmee (total of 4FFA)
Army: FFA 6
6AK: FFA 13
8AK: FFA 10
18AK: FFA 27
7RK: None
18RK: None 

5th Feldarmee (total of 4 FFA)
Army: FFA 25
5AK: FFA 19
13AK: FFA 4
16AK: FFA 2
5RK: None
6RK: None 

6th Feldarmee (total of 4 FFA)
Army: FFA 6
21AK: None
1BAK: FFA 1 (Bavarian)
2BAK: FFA 2 (Bavarian)
3 BAK: FFA 3 (Bavarian)
1BRK: None

7th Feldarmee (total of 3 FFA)
Army: FFA 26
14AK: FFA 20
15AK: FFA 3
14RK: None

FYI, here's the Eastern Front units for comparison:

8th Feldarmee (total of 4/5 FFA)
Army: FFA 16
1AK: FFA 14
17AK: FFA 17
20AK: FFA 15
1RAK: None
East (unassigned?) – FFA 4

Everything I've read suggests that the DFK was well organized and cooperated effectively with the Imperial maneuver commanders in ways that the zeppelins either didn't or couldn't. 

Certainly the breakdown of air detachments to individual army corps - which often had tactical intelligence needs not shared by their field army as a whole, or the other corps in that army - suggests a higher level of German understanding of air reconnaissance intelligence collection, processing, and dissemination that any of their French or British opponents.

But there appears to be some real holes there, as we'll see.

At this point I think we've discussed all the precursors; the setting, the plans, the reconnaissance troops that had to execute those plans. All that remains is to set the plans in motion and, looking at the reconnaissance elements, try and see what happened along the frontier in the month of August.

That's for the next installment:

Next: Shots Fired!

Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 3: Plans, Plans, and More Plans

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.

(This is what a real barricade looks like, BTW)

It made for a great book (and a Tony Award-winning musical)...

(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:

Andre' is the graybeard with nearly four and a half years, down to poor Goiran's one-day-over-two-weeks. 

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.

2) That extended to battle tactics - particularly artillery-infantry coordination - and equipment - particularly heavy field artillery, where the lack of modern 120mm-and-larger field guns and over-reliance on the "soixante-quinze" were punitive.

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!