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The argument laid out in this post and in the title around maps, specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German g

by TSiege 3y ago

The argument laid out in this post and in the title around maps, specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German generals were obsessed with the battle, but I don't see any evidence here that this caused the war. Going to war is first and foremost a political act even if it is followed by a military response. There's no mention of the complex politics of europe at the time with it's web of alliances, nor any talk of arch duke ferdinand. Sure German generals thought they could easily win the war following the teachings of Cannae, but they no more caused the war than the US military did with the invasion of Iraq

jprete 3y ago
I'm not an expert, but I think for World War I the military strategy questions - and in particular the misconceptions - were very relevant to the decision to go to war. My understanding is that the various combatant powers believed that the war would be quick and decisive in the way that prior wars had been; none expected or prepared for a four-year slog of trench warfare, defensive supremacy, or total depletion of whole demographics of the population. I've read that the American Civil War pioneered many of the technologies and strategies used in World War I, and if European military strategists had paid attention they would have had a better idea of what they were in for.
- benbreen 3y ago
  Author here - yes, this is what I was getting at. The false promise of a rapid victory over the French via encirclement from the right flank (in the style of Hannibal) really was a major factor in justifying the risks of war for the German General Staff. And because Schlieffen was preoccupied with the idea that an ancient battle could be a model for that approach, it distracted from the now-obvious technological changes of the period (machine guns=defensive warfare) that made the approach impossible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan
  - gustavus 3y ago
    I'd argue against Schlieffen wanting to recreate the battle of Canne, and say that was much more the result of Moltke giving the Crown Prince permission to advance. After all the original Schlieffen plan was to have the Alsace region slowly retreat and give ground enticing the French further in, whereas the right flank that was to wheel through Belgium and strike at Paris was to do all the work. If anyone was going trying to recreate Canne I would argue it was Moltke, as he was the one that allowed the left flank to start moving forward.
    - jakderrida 3y ago
      > After all the original Schlieffen plan was to have the Alsace region slowly retreat and give ground enticing the French further in That actually would be a much better analogy to Cannae. Enticing them to break your center, not realizing until they're surrounded that the victory they've charged into is actually an epic defeat. I still don't understand why they'd assume French generals would do that, though. It really assumes a hopeless level of ineptitude on their part for it to work. Seems obvious to me they're better off stalling till Russians are mobilized, no matter how enticing the bait is.
  - TSiege 3y ago
    If that's the case you're trying to present, your article should be clearer about that. That wikipedia entry also doesn't seem to bolster your case. It doesn't even mention the battle of Cannae, but it does talk extensively about the importance of capturing the Belgian rail network for the German logistics in fighting France
    - jakderrida 3y ago
      >That wikipedia entry also doesn't seem to bolster your case. It doesn't even mention the battle of Cannae In his defense, the Britannica entry does mention it. https://www.britannica.com/event/Schlieffen-Plan https://www.britannica.com/event/Schlieffen-Plan In your defense, you are right.
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
- TSiege 3y ago
  This is basically true of most wars. The war in Iraq was supposed to be quick and decisive. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rumsfeld-it-would-be-a-short-war/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rumsfeld-it-would-be-a-short-wa...
  - Miraste 3y ago
    The war in Iraq was quick and decisive. The occupation afterwards was a mess in every way possible, but the organized war between states went exactly as planned.
    - TSiege 3y ago
      The Iraq War ended in 2011. The initial invasion that toppled Sadam was quick
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Absolutely, and so different from Ukraine, where I think pundits expected an Iraq-like situation. Initial rapid capture followed by years of instability. American advisors at the beginning looked like they were interested in mainly supplying Ukraine with guerilla warfare tools, etc. expecting that kind of situation. ... but reality went another way and now the west is sending in cruise missiles tanks and cluster artillery.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  "none expected or prepared for a four-year slog of trench warfare" Yet another parallel with what's happening in Ukraine right now. Both Russia (and some in NATO) I think expected this to end in days with an ugly military defeat, capture of the capital, and then years of guerilla and political battles. We appear to be at a similar juncture as WWI in geopolitics and military organization/technology, where the relative capabilities of various forces are not well understood. (And similar to WWI this seems to be primarily about imperial economics, within which smaller nations get caught up as battle sites and pawns and the issue of the self-determination of smaller ethnic nation states becomes one of the defining issues. At least that's how Lenin and others analyzed WWI, and it's notable that Putin went out of his way to namecheck and attack Lenin in particular at the start of the conflict...) Coffee brainfarts, sorry. :-)
  - pests 3y ago
    Both Russia and who?
- soperj 3y ago
  The american civil war was a full 50 years before WWI.
  - bjourne 3y ago
    Yeah, but during the later stages of the American Civil war, machine guns mowed downs entire cavalry regiments. Many European officers didn't realize that made cavalry shocks useless and thus rapid advances would not be possible. Only infantry advances were possible and only under slower moving artillery cover. That made shock tactics mostly impossible until mechanized warfare became a thing in world war ii.
    - soperj 3y ago
      The germans used Calvary units in WW2 as part of of the blitzkrieg.
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      Franco-Prussian happened after the civil war and had a much bigger influence.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      I’m assuming you mean Gatling guns, since machine guns hadn’t been invented yet. Out of curiosity, do you have an example of an “entire cavalry regiment” being destroyed by Gatling guns in the Civil War?
      - bjourne 3y ago
        You are right and I misremembered. I think mowing down "entire cavalry regiments" is something I read about the Second Boer war where indeed British cavalry charged against Boers equipped with machine guns with disastrous results, whether "entire cavalry regiments" is an exaggeration or not. However, I would say that already by the time of the American civil war traditional cavalry tactics had been proven to be ineffective. American generals learned their lessons and changed their use of cavalry during the war. European generals did not and continued to emphasize the use of sabres and lances. Thus, the early stages of the First world war featured some cavalry charges which ended in blood baths for the charging side.
gustavus 3y ago
So a couple of points of clarifications > specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German generals were obsessed with the battle, So not just the German generals specifically Schlieffen. The Schlieffen plan developed by it's namesake general was the governing document for the German plan of battle at the beginning of WW1. Schlieffen spent his entire life trying to figure out the plan that would eventually be his namesake, and he was also obsessed with Canne, so I could see an argument that was a contributing factor. If schlifen wasn't obsessed with the double envelopment he is less likely to send troops through Belgium and no Belgium means no UK involvement leading to a very different war. > Going to war is first and foremost a political act That is one of the fascinating things about WW1 is there are times where it seems as if forces more than men were dictating things. At one point after mobilization and but prior to the actual invasion of Belgium the Kaiser wanted to stop things as he believed a peace deal was reached and was told no, not only no but that such a thing was fundamentally impossible at that point because the military plans laid out by the generals many years ago had dictated so precisely how things had to happen that any change to the plans was close to impossible once they were set in motion. The same thing happened in the Russian side the Czar issued orders for mobilisation then stand down then mobilization again and then one general smashed his telephone so that it could not be rescinded. I think they is part of what made WW1 the war it was, it was one ran primarily by and for the generals (until the later years) with the political officials deferring all power and authority to them.
- TSiege 3y ago
  From what I've been able to find, the importance of invading Belgium had more to do with capturing it's rail network for logistics, than recreating the battle of cannae
  - gustavus 3y ago
    I'd argue against that interpretation, the importance of invading Belgium had more to do with avoiding the French line of fortresses and hoping that the Belgians would just roll over than capturing rail networks that they wouldn't be able to use without a protracted war, which they had no anticipation of as they expected to be marching into Paris 900 hours after mobilization was declared.
leroy_masochist 3y ago
I agree with this assessment; the words "probably helped" are doing a lot of work here. Maybe a better way to put it would be, "probably were a factor in the timing of WWI". The German general staff was indeed very focused on the operational art of war and their working assumptions at the time of the war's outset (i.e., that they had an edge over the French via the Schlieffen plan) were certainly factors in Germany's overall calculus....maybe one of the proximate causeS, but not the underlying cause, which was the cumulative history of intense great power competition in the decades leading up to 1914.
Miraste 3y ago
The German military prior to WWI had far, far more political power than the US military in 2003. Voltaire's famous line "Where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state" didn't change in the intervening centuries, except that they acquired a whole empire in the meantime.
User23 3y ago
> Going to war is first and foremost a political act even if it is followed by a military response. Yeah I think we can safely assume that the German general staff were familiar with Clausewitz.

by TSiege 3y ago

jprete 3y ago

I'm not an expert, but I think for World War I the military strategy questions - and in particular the misconceptions - were very relevant to the decision to go to war. My understanding is that the various combatant powers believed that the war would be quick and decisive in the way that prior wars had been; none expected or prepared for a four-year slog of trench warfare, defensive supremacy, or total depletion of whole demographics of the population. I've read that the American Civil War pioneered many of the technologies and strategies used in World War I, and if European military strategists had paid attention they would have had a better idea of what they were in for.

benbreen 3y ago
Author here - yes, this is what I was getting at. The false promise of a rapid victory over the French via encirclement from the right flank (in the style of Hannibal) really was a major factor in justifying the risks of war for the German General Staff. And because Schlieffen was preoccupied with the idea that an ancient battle could be a model for that approach, it distracted from the now-obvious technological changes of the period (machine guns=defensive warfare) that made the approach impossible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan
- gustavus 3y ago
  I'd argue against Schlieffen wanting to recreate the battle of Canne, and say that was much more the result of Moltke giving the Crown Prince permission to advance. After all the original Schlieffen plan was to have the Alsace region slowly retreat and give ground enticing the French further in, whereas the right flank that was to wheel through Belgium and strike at Paris was to do all the work. If anyone was going trying to recreate Canne I would argue it was Moltke, as he was the one that allowed the left flank to start moving forward.
  - jakderrida 3y ago
    > After all the original Schlieffen plan was to have the Alsace region slowly retreat and give ground enticing the French further in That actually would be a much better analogy to Cannae. Enticing them to break your center, not realizing until they're surrounded that the victory they've charged into is actually an epic defeat. I still don't understand why they'd assume French generals would do that, though. It really assumes a hopeless level of ineptitude on their part for it to work. Seems obvious to me they're better off stalling till Russians are mobilized, no matter how enticing the bait is.
- TSiege 3y ago
  If that's the case you're trying to present, your article should be clearer about that. That wikipedia entry also doesn't seem to bolster your case. It doesn't even mention the battle of Cannae, but it does talk extensively about the importance of capturing the Belgian rail network for the German logistics in fighting France
  - jakderrida 3y ago
    >That wikipedia entry also doesn't seem to bolster your case. It doesn't even mention the battle of Cannae In his defense, the Britannica entry does mention it. https://www.britannica.com/event/Schlieffen-Plan https://www.britannica.com/event/Schlieffen-Plan In your defense, you are right.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
TSiege 3y ago
This is basically true of most wars. The war in Iraq was supposed to be quick and decisive. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rumsfeld-it-would-be-a-short-war/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rumsfeld-it-would-be-a-short-wa...
- Miraste 3y ago
  The war in Iraq was quick and decisive. The occupation afterwards was a mess in every way possible, but the organized war between states went exactly as planned.
  - TSiege 3y ago
    The Iraq War ended in 2011. The initial invasion that toppled Sadam was quick
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Absolutely, and so different from Ukraine, where I think pundits expected an Iraq-like situation. Initial rapid capture followed by years of instability. American advisors at the beginning looked like they were interested in mainly supplying Ukraine with guerilla warfare tools, etc. expecting that kind of situation. ... but reality went another way and now the west is sending in cruise missiles tanks and cluster artillery.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
"none expected or prepared for a four-year slog of trench warfare" Yet another parallel with what's happening in Ukraine right now. Both Russia (and some in NATO) I think expected this to end in days with an ugly military defeat, capture of the capital, and then years of guerilla and political battles. We appear to be at a similar juncture as WWI in geopolitics and military organization/technology, where the relative capabilities of various forces are not well understood. (And similar to WWI this seems to be primarily about imperial economics, within which smaller nations get caught up as battle sites and pawns and the issue of the self-determination of smaller ethnic nation states becomes one of the defining issues. At least that's how Lenin and others analyzed WWI, and it's notable that Putin went out of his way to namecheck and attack Lenin in particular at the start of the conflict...) Coffee brainfarts, sorry. :-)
- pests 3y ago
  Both Russia and who?
soperj 3y ago
The american civil war was a full 50 years before WWI.
- bjourne 3y ago
  Yeah, but during the later stages of the American Civil war, machine guns mowed downs entire cavalry regiments. Many European officers didn't realize that made cavalry shocks useless and thus rapid advances would not be possible. Only infantry advances were possible and only under slower moving artillery cover. That made shock tactics mostly impossible until mechanized warfare became a thing in world war ii.
  - soperj 3y ago
    The germans used Calvary units in WW2 as part of of the blitzkrieg.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    Franco-Prussian happened after the civil war and had a much bigger influence.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    I’m assuming you mean Gatling guns, since machine guns hadn’t been invented yet. Out of curiosity, do you have an example of an “entire cavalry regiment” being destroyed by Gatling guns in the Civil War?
    - bjourne 3y ago
      You are right and I misremembered. I think mowing down "entire cavalry regiments" is something I read about the Second Boer war where indeed British cavalry charged against Boers equipped with machine guns with disastrous results, whether "entire cavalry regiments" is an exaggeration or not. However, I would say that already by the time of the American civil war traditional cavalry tactics had been proven to be ineffective. American generals learned their lessons and changed their use of cavalry during the war. European generals did not and continued to emphasize the use of sabres and lances. Thus, the early stages of the First world war featured some cavalry charges which ended in blood baths for the charging side.

gustavus 3y ago

So a couple of points of clarifications > specifically the battle of cannae, leading to world war one is pretty weak. I buy that German generals were obsessed with the battle, So not just the German generals specifically Schlieffen. The Schlieffen plan developed by it's namesake general was the governing document for the German plan of battle at the beginning of WW1. Schlieffen spent his entire life trying to figure out the plan that would eventually be his namesake, and he was also obsessed with Canne, so I could see an argument that was a contributing factor. If schlifen wasn't obsessed with the double envelopment he is less likely to send troops through Belgium and no Belgium means no UK involvement leading to a very different war. > Going to war is first and foremost a political act That is one of the fascinating things about WW1 is there are times where it seems as if forces more than men were dictating things. At one point after mobilization and but prior to the actual invasion of Belgium the Kaiser wanted to stop things as he believed a peace deal was reached and was told no, not only no but that such a thing was fundamentally impossible at that point because the military plans laid out by the generals many years ago had dictated so precisely how things had to happen that any change to the plans was close to impossible once they were set in motion. The same thing happened in the Russian side the Czar issued orders for mobilisation then stand down then mobilization again and then one general smashed his telephone so that it could not be rescinded. I think they is part of what made WW1 the war it was, it was one ran primarily by and for the generals (until the later years) with the political officials deferring all power and authority to them.

TSiege 3y ago
From what I've been able to find, the importance of invading Belgium had more to do with capturing it's rail network for logistics, than recreating the battle of cannae
- gustavus 3y ago
  I'd argue against that interpretation, the importance of invading Belgium had more to do with avoiding the French line of fortresses and hoping that the Belgians would just roll over than capturing rail networks that they wouldn't be able to use without a protracted war, which they had no anticipation of as they expected to be marching into Paris 900 hours after mobilization was declared.

leroy_masochist 3y ago

I agree with this assessment; the words "probably helped" are doing a lot of work here. Maybe a better way to put it would be, "probably were a factor in the timing of WWI". The German general staff was indeed very focused on the operational art of war and their working assumptions at the time of the war's outset (i.e., that they had an edge over the French via the Schlieffen plan) were certainly factors in Germany's overall calculus....maybe one of the proximate causeS, but not the underlying cause, which was the cumulative history of intense great power competition in the decades leading up to 1914.

Miraste 3y ago

The German military prior to WWI had far, far more political power than the US military in 2003. Voltaire's famous line "Where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state" didn't change in the intervening centuries, except that they acquired a whole empire in the meantime.

User23 3y ago

> Going to war is first and foremost a political act even if it is followed by a military response. Yeah I think we can safely assume that the German general staff were familiar with Clausewitz.