Alfred von Schlieffen

File:Alfred Graf von Schliefen.jpg

Alfred Graf von Schlieffen

Alfred Graf von Schlieffen mostly called Count Schlieffen (28 February 1833 – 4 January 1913) was a German field marshal and strategist who served as Chief of the Imperial German General Staff from 1891 to 1905. His name lived on in the 1905 Schlieffen Plan for the defeat of the French Third Republic and the Russian Empire.

Biography

Schlieffen was born in Berlin on 28 February 1833 as the son of a Prussian army officer. He entered the army in 1854 at the age of 20. Quickly moving to the general staff, he participated in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. In 1884, Schlieffen became head of the military history section of the general staff, replacing Count von Waldersee as chief of the Prussian General Staff in 1891, after thirty-eight years of military service.

In 1905 Schlieffen presented the Schlieffen Plan a scheme to prevent Germany from having to fight a two-front warby first defeating France quickly, then throwing its full weight against Russia.

The rest of Schlieffen’s career was spent inculcating the operational ideas required to make this strategy work. He retired on 1 January 1906 after nearly fifty-three years of service and died on 4 January 1913, just nineteen months before the outbreak of the First World War. In reference to his Schlieffen Plan, Schlieffen's last words were said to have been, "Remember: keep the right wing strong."

Influence

Schlieffen was perhaps the best-known contemporary strategist of his time, although criticized for his "narrow-minded military scholasticism." Schlieffen's operational theories were to have a profound impact on the development of maneuver warfare in the twentieth century, largely through his seminal treatise, Cannae, which concerned the decidedly un-modern battle of 216 BC in which Hannibal defeated the Romans.

His theories were studied exhaustively, especially in the higher army academies of the United States and Europe after World War I. American military thinkers thought so highly of him that his principal literary legacy, Cannae, was translated at Fort Leavenworth and distributed within the U.S. Army and to the academic community.

As General Walter Bedell Smith, chief of staff to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in World War II, pointed out, General Eisenhower and many of his staff officers, products of these academies, "were imbued with the idea of this type of wide, bold maneuver for decisive results."

General Erich Ludendorff, a disciple of Schlieffen who applied his teachings of encirclement in the Battle of Tannenberg, once famously christened Schlieffen as "one of the greatest soldiers ever."

Long after his death, the German General Staff officers of the Interwar and World War II period, particularly General Hans von Seeckt, recognized an intellectual debt to Schlieffen theories during the development of the Blitzkrieg doctrine.

Schlieffen in popular culture

Colonel Alfred von Schlieffen appeared in How Few Remain, by Harry Turtledove, a work of alternate history set in 1881 and assuming a Confederate victory in the American Civil War. Part of the story was told from Schlieffen's viewpoint, serving as German military attaché to the U.S. government. In the novel, Schlieffen's inspiration for the Schlieffen Plan was not the encirclement of the Roman Army by Hannibal's forces at the Battle of Cannae, but Robert E. Lee's circle of Washington, D.C.

Quotations

• "A man is born, and not made, a strategist." —Schlieffen

References

• Foley, Robert Alfred von Schlieffen's Military Writings. London: Frank Cass, 2003.
• Foley, Robert T. "The Real Schlieffen Plan", War in History, Vol. 13, Issue 1. (2006), pp. 91–115.

RB

External links

• Fieldmarshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen's book Cannae