Barbarossa

When the General Staff received the report on the Schlieffen Plan in November 1913, to say that they were astounded was an understatement. The conclusion of it was that their master plan for next war was flawed, deeply flawed. Point one was that the numbers of troops required to defeat the French could not be moved through Belgium given the current state of that country’s roads. Point two was that, the Plan assumed that no British expeditionary force would be despatched in response to such an invasion. This, the report’s authors claimed was wishful thinking. Given the guarantee of Belgian sovereignty that she (and Germany) had signed, were the Imperial Army to enter Belgium, perfidious Albion would land troops.

The authors proposed instead of attacking France, the Imperial Army in the west settled for just defending there, at least for the first part of the war. Then would then be sufficient forces in the east to knock out Russia in two to three years. A wargame demonstrated how this could be done: invade Poland then roll along the Baltic coast all the way to St Petersburg. Once it had been taken, the Imperial Army could then drive east to Moscow and the Murmansk railway. With those important cities in German hands, Russia would be forced to capitulate. France would then either have to also surrender or be crushed at the Kaiser’s convenience.

It took the General Staff a week of deliberation before it made its decision: hold the west, attack in the east. Six months of frantic revision of deployment orders immediately followed; the junior officers assigned to the task were merely informed that it is an "alternative battle plan". Thus when a certain Austrian duke was assassinated by a Balkan terrorist and the monoliths of Germany, Austro-Hungary, France and Russia slid down the ramps and into war, only in the vocabulary of the General Staff did "over by Christmas" mean Yuletide two year hence!

The French high command was very surprised when the might of the Imperial Army did not roll westwards. Whilst their spies had never obtained a copy of the Schlieffen Plan, they were conversant with the rational that their enemy needed to knock them out of the war before the Russian bear crushed them in turn. Anyway, German advance or no German advance, the high command had its own blueprint for war, Plan XVII. Within days of declaring war, they launched a full-scale assault on their hated enemy’s fortresses spearheaded by the flower of the French army. Concrete and steel are strong, but not as strong as the fighting spirit of the modern infantryman, or so they thought.

The Battle of Strasbourg was an unmitigated disaster. In the first day the wave after wave of dark blue and red uniforms supported by artillery flung themselves on the German defences only to be repulsed by heavy machine gun fire. By the tenth day, stocks of artillery ammunition were seriously depleted and morale on the front line was falling fast. It was then, and only, then that the French high command ceased the assault. The only consolation for them, if it were one, was that the casualties that they suffered were substantially less than those taken by their allies a continent away. There, a single German army routed two Russian ones, inflicting heavy casualties on the pair as well as taking thousands of prisoners.

The First Battle of Tannenburg was immediately followed by the Second in which three German armies drove into Russian held Poland. At the same time their Austro-Hungarian allies diverted troops from the invasion of Serbia to launch a series of offensives in the Galician sector.