Have I Told You About WWI? Mobilization.
When major European powers declared war in 1914, what was their plan? One of the greatest advantages any army could have in the opening days of the First World War was fast mobilization. The army most likely to take contested ground was the army that got there first. Mobilization required a ready force of men, an efficient transportation system, and an effective supply line. In 1914, all the major players had hopes of ending the conflict quickly through rapid mobilization, but none was able to accomplish it.
Russia. Russia was arguably the least prepared for war. Still largely an agricultural economy, and seen as “backward” by many in the West, Russia lacked the industrialization necessary for effective mobilization. Her railroads were limited and her standing army was not large enough to cover the enormous front she faced against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Even recruitment was a challenge. The most efficient strategy would have been to gather troops from the dense population already living along Russia’s western border. But many of those living in the border areas were not traditionally, or “ethnically”, Russian; rather they identified first as a Slavic subset, like Poles or Ukrainians, or as Jews. Many sympathized with the Central Powers, who painted themselves as liberators of the small Slavic nation-states. Russian leadership felt the loyalty of these border people was unreliable, so they were forced to recruit from the vast interior, which only added more time for mobilization and transport on the outdated railways.
Germany. The Germans undoubtedly had the most effective mobilization. Germany had a highly efficient railroad system, and the militaristic bent of the Kaiser and other recent German leaders meant they had a large standing army before they even began war recruiting. Furthermore, German military leaders had been expecting an outbreak of war for years, and with the alliance of France and Russia, they were facing the unappealing prospect of a war on two fronts. To preempt this issue, they relied on what came to be known as the Schlieffen Plan.
Alfred von Schlieffen was Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906. Following the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894, Schlieffen worried that if European war broke out, Germany would be crushed between the two powers. His solution was simple: defeat one power quickly, then turn to face the other. Russia, with its enormous interior and outdated rail systems, would take longer to mobilize than France. So Schlieffen’s daring plan called for an enormous sweep through Belgium and into northern France which must force the French to sue for peace within just 40 days — at which time Germany would turn her attention east to the finally mobilized Russians and defeat them as well.
It was a very bold, but rather brilliant plan, and some historians argue it almost worked. Schlieffen’s last words (he died before the outbreak of war in 1914) were supposedly, “Keep the right wing strong!” Nervous German planners nonetheless pulled strength from the right (nearest the English Channel) to reinforce the left, and it’s possible that this damaged the plan’s effectiveness beyond repair. There were other factors, however, which summed to eventually undermine execution of the Schlieffen Plan, and they all point to its central, fatal flaw: it was inflexible. There was no margin for error when the tiny Belgian army mounted a fierce resistance to invasion, or when the Russians were able to mobilize slightly faster than expected, or when the British declared war and joined the resistance of their French allies. Thanks to the unexpected, the Allies were able to halt the German advance at the river Marne.
Britain. In 1914, the U.K. had a very small army by European standards. When asked what he would do if the British army invaded, former German chancellor Otto von Bismarck reportedly said that he would send the police to arrest them. Besides being small, the British military had been training for a different kind of war, one with cavalry charges and orderly marches and dashing officers taking the lead. The highly trained British Expeditionary Force (BEF), commanded by Sir John French, was decimated in the first months of the war. The officers who were supposed to be leading the charges shouldered a disproportionate burden of the casualty count. The destruction and rebuilding of Britain’s military institution was so complete that historian Dr. David Silbey argues that Britain began the war with one army and finished it with an entirely different one. (Dr. Silbey delivers a fascinating lecture on the subject; check out the Nov. 21, 2016 episode of the World War I Podcast by the MacArthur Memorial.)
It was the recruitment strategy of Lord Kitchener, secretary of war, that transformed the British army into a fighting force. Ordinary middle- and working-class men were convinced by his posters to do their patriotic duty and join up. Kitchener’s original recruitment strategy called for 100,000 men to volunteer. By the end of 1915, 2.5 million men had voluntarily joined the British army. These were the men who transformed the army from an elite force of highly trained, upper-class men into a mass force representative of the dogged determination of the British people.
Though the war began as a race, it ended as a game of numbers. The arrival of the Americans in force in 1918 turned the tide decisively in favor of the Allies. In this modern war, the skill and élan of the men mattered less than their sheer numbers, which could be thrown against the weapons of mass destruction which saw their debut on these battlefields. There’s a general view that because of its indiscriminate brutality, there were no heroes in World War I. I prefer to believe that simply by their endurance of that brutality, every soldier was a hero.
