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War Planning 1914
The major European powers drafted war plans before 1914 and executed them in August 1914; none brought the expected victory by Christmas. Why? This tightly focused collection of essays by international experts in military history reassesses the war plans of 1914 in a broad diplomatic, military, and political setting for the first time in three decades. The book analyzes the war plans of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia on the basis of the latest research and explores their demise in the opening months of World War I. Collectively and comparatively, these essays place contingency war planning before 1914 in the different contexts and challenges each state faced as well as into a broad European paradigm. This is the first such undertaking since Paul Kennedy’s groundbreaking War Plans of the Great Powers (1979), and the end result is breathtaking in both scope and depth of analysis.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 20, 2014
This is a very useful overview of the strategic planning of the Great Powers leading up to WWI. The book is a series of essays by different authors covering Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, Great Britain and Italy rather than a single analysis. It should also be noted that this isn't a detailed study of mobilization schedules and which army goes where (although army dispositions aren't completely ignored). Each essay is a general overview of the government's decision-making structure, the evolving of planning and how those plans fared in the early days of the conflict. The chapters also cover the decisions of key players, usually military chiefs such as Austria-Hungary's Conrad and Germany's Moltke.
Richard Hamilton, the editor, makes some interesting points in his introduction. He emphasizes that we aren't dealing with static plans but evolving ones--hence the use of "planning" in the title. He also mentions that business elites were generally opposed to conflict and were generally not even brought into the planning process and that military and political leaders often didn't coordinate with each other.
Some salient features from each chapter:
Austria-Hungary--Compromised intelligence and Conrad's sense of the inevitability of war with Italy and Serbia, the three-front dilemma and political infighting that kept defense spending low.
Germany--The fact that military planning was run to the exclusion of political elites. One should note that the author solidly disagrees with Terence Zuber's revisionist take on German planning and holds that Schlieffen did advocate a move through Belgium-Luxembourg on the French left and the general approach was consistently to focus on defeating the French first, and then the Russians.
Russia--The difficulty of mobilizing its troop strength given its massive size and frontiers and the limits of its rail capacity--with the particular danger caused by the salient of its Polish holdings. There was also the ongoing question of whether the bulk of forces should be placed against the Germans or the Austro-Hungarians. The Russian essay is by far the largest in the book.
France--The reluctance to give too much power to military leaders, the evolution of planning to deal with the increasing realization that the Germans were going to go through Belgium and the over-reliance on the 75mm gun.
UK--Imperial vs. European concerns and the competing maritime vs. continental strategies. There was also the fact that the UK military was making plans with the French despite the lack of a political consensus on the question of working with France.
The essays are an excellent high-level overview of the decision-making processes behind the 1914 military plans.
Richard Hamilton, the editor, makes some interesting points in his introduction. He emphasizes that we aren't dealing with static plans but evolving ones--hence the use of "planning" in the title. He also mentions that business elites were generally opposed to conflict and were generally not even brought into the planning process and that military and political leaders often didn't coordinate with each other.
Some salient features from each chapter:
Austria-Hungary--Compromised intelligence and Conrad's sense of the inevitability of war with Italy and Serbia, the three-front dilemma and political infighting that kept defense spending low.
Germany--The fact that military planning was run to the exclusion of political elites. One should note that the author solidly disagrees with Terence Zuber's revisionist take on German planning and holds that Schlieffen did advocate a move through Belgium-Luxembourg on the French left and the general approach was consistently to focus on defeating the French first, and then the Russians.
Russia--The difficulty of mobilizing its troop strength given its massive size and frontiers and the limits of its rail capacity--with the particular danger caused by the salient of its Polish holdings. There was also the ongoing question of whether the bulk of forces should be placed against the Germans or the Austro-Hungarians. The Russian essay is by far the largest in the book.
France--The reluctance to give too much power to military leaders, the evolution of planning to deal with the increasing realization that the Germans were going to go through Belgium and the over-reliance on the 75mm gun.
UK--Imperial vs. European concerns and the competing maritime vs. continental strategies. There was also the fact that the UK military was making plans with the French despite the lack of a political consensus on the question of working with France.
The essays are an excellent high-level overview of the decision-making processes behind the 1914 military plans.
August 4, 2012
A series of country-based articles on the strategic predicaments of what would become the warring states of Europe in WWI. The geo-political realities makes war planning complicated enough, but when you throw in bureaucratic infighting, incompetent political leadership and a lack of clarity about what the war would be like, the whole exercise becomes very difficult indeed. A must-read for those interested in the origins of WWI or of strategy in general.
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