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| 1909 |
The strategic planning of the Great Powers prior to 1914 has been a topic of continual fascination to historians for both military and non-military reasons. On the one hand, there has been the natural interest of the military writer in the operational, tactical and logistical contents of these plans and in the extent to which they anticipated the testing strategical conditions of the First World War itself. On the other hand, an equally intense concern has been shown by the student of politics in the broader, non-technical aspects of military planning: how far, for example, did the plans of the various General Staffs preempt their government's freedom of action and, to that extent, encroach upon the decision-making domain of the civilians? How far did they reflect the prevailing "unspoken assumptions" upon a country's foreign policy, the protection of national interests, and the nature of international relations and political morality? How far, indeed, were they actually responsible for the outbreak of that catastrophic conflict in the summer of 1914? It is precisely because this topic has always possessed both a military and a political aspect (frequently hard to disentangle) that it has attracted so large an amount of historical attention.
Paul M. Kennedy
Norwich, CT, 1978
From the Editor's Introduction to The War Plans of the Great Powers
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| 1914 |
Despite the experiences of the Second World War and all its global consequences, the First World War has never lost its place in the historical consciousness of the combatant nations, who still regard it as forming the deepest caesura in their recent history. When, therefore, the defeat of Germany in 1945 caused most of that government's past records to fall into the hands of the Allies, who soon made them free for scholarship, it was natural that historians should turn again to the question of Germany's aims and role in the origins of the First World War. . .
The First World War represents the high point of the age of imperialism, during which technical and economic developments led to increased rivalries between the European great powers, and also the United States and Japan. In particular, those nations conscious of having come 'too late' on to the world scene inevitably found themselves challenging the established countries and their overseas empires, and this in turn led to repeated fissures and reformations in the existing alliance systems and to a "destabilization" of the precarious European and global equilibrium, eventually culminating in a general war.
The populations of all those countries, influenced to a greater or lesser extent by social-Darwinistic assumptions, came to expect that in such a turbulent world a conflict was unavoidable and should, moreover, be prepared for. Such preparations, especially in the military and strategic domain, are [still important to study]. They show the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the technical aspects of warfare, but even more they reveal how the majority of states were obliged to refashion the organization of their military leadership by creating a permanent General Staff. The model which was cited on so many occasions, for example, in the British Army reforms and creation of an Imperial General Staff following the Boer War, was that of the immensely successful Prussian General Staff in the 1866-70 period—although, ironically enough, that "model" had lost a considerable amount of its effectiveness by 1911–12, that is, even before the First World War broke out. . .
The operations plans, which the respective general staffs had to prepare, could be more or less binding, more or less flexible (as certainly was true of the much-debated Schlieffen Plan), and could therefore restrict the freedom of action of the political decision makers or leave them relatively untouched. In most of the states concerned—Russia and Austria-Hungary were the exceptions—the political and military leaders also had to grapple with the question of how far the navy or the army was to be considered as the more decisive and thus more important arm: in the German case, for example, the fleet appeared to be the more prominent for some years, but after 1912–13 the army recovered its traditional primacy since it could be seen that the chief theatre in any future conflict was likely to be on land; whereas in England the army (British Expeditionary Force) and the new General Staff began to gain ground after 1905 and by August 1911 had achieved a position in the national strategy which displaced the navy, the more especially since the Admiralty's ideas about the deployment of the fleet were neither coherent nor convincing. This was, in the history of British strategy, a quite epoch-making change of course, even if not fully realized at the time.
Closely connected with these controversies was the problem of waging war in coalition with one's allies, for it was hardly likely that a nation would find itself fighting alone against two or more enemies in view of the formal (or sometimes only moral) bonds and obligations of the various alliance partners in pre-1914 Europe. The difficulties which arose here, it is clear, could not be satisfactorily solved by either of the alliance blocs before the war or at the outbreak of the conflict itself.
[There is a continuing debate over] the problem of "militarism," whether in the more general question of the militarization of a society, or in the specific area of the relationship between the political and military leadership in a state. If this ambiguity about the relations between statesmen and the military existed [with all the combatants], it nevertheless becomes clear that the different cultural, social and constitutional circumstances of the various states led to quite diverse consequences.
Whereas in France and Britain the political leadership retained its preponderance, despite the rising importance of the armed forces and their staffs, in Germany (and similarly in the fellow-empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary) the authority of the civilians was circumscribed both by the sheer weight of the military in social life and by the constitutional structure: for example, because the monarch was the de facto, and not merely the de jure, commander-in-chief; because the government was dependent upon him, and not upon Parliament; and because he possessed the power to decide over peace and war. What still remains questionable, however, is the notion. . . that there was so great a distinction between the political and military leaders of the Wilhelmine Reich: for there appears to me to have existed a co-operation between both elements in preparing for a conflict, and also in the decision for war, which was justified by their commonly expressed reference to the necessity of strengthening Germany's position in Europe and in the world. This was the unified aim of both and is not simply to be attributed to the military argument that "victory is still possible at present, in a few years' time it will have gone."
Fritz Fischer
Hamburg, December 1978
From the Forward of The War Plans of the Great Powers
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