How Germany Could Have Won World War I In 1908
The Schlieffen Plan Could Have Worked
There is perhaps no military document that has been as scrutinized, studied, and rehashed as Germany’s Schlieffen Plan. The eponymous plan, named for Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, was worked on for decades. It was tweaked, tweaked, and tweaked again by the aging strategist who boiled the horrors of war down to a few lines on a map and volumes of tables and appendices. Even after Schlieffen’s death, the plan was put into action in 1914. The grand design called for a strong “right wing” that would sweep through Belgium and the Low Countries before striking Paris and knocking France out of a war in a matter of weeks.
The plan began its life all the way back in 1891, nearly twenty-five years before the outbreak of the Great War. Many historians have lambasted the plan as out of date. It was, after all, designed with the Franco-Prussian War in mind, a war which was fought in 1870. Despite the age of the plan, the Germans enacted it with vigor in 1914, invaded Belgium, dragged Britain into the war, and the rest is history. The plan failed. Not only did Schlieffen’s life work fail to bring Germany the quick victory against France that he envisioned, but it also embroiled his country in the world’s worst war up until that point and led to the disintegration of its empire.
