Alfred von Schlieffen
Alfred Graf von[1] Schlieffen (February 28, 1833 – January 4, 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 meticulously conceived 1905 Schlieffen Plan for the defeat of the French Third Republic and the Russian Empire.
Biography
Schlieffen was born in Berlin in February 1833 as the son of a Prussian army officer. He entered the army in 1854 at the age of twenty. 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. This plan would prevent Germany from fighting a two-front war, by first defeating France in a lightning campaign and 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 January 1, 1906 after nearly fifty-three years of service and died on January 4, 1913, just nineteen months before the outbreak of the First World War. It is believed by many[who?] that the Schlieffen Plan would have proven itself successful were it not for the diminishing of the right wing by Schlieffen's successor, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger.
Influence
Although some criticized him for his "narrow-minded military scholasticism", Schlieffen was perhaps the best known contemporary strategist of his time. 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. 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 at a nominal charge 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.
Notes
- ^ Regarding personal names: Graf was a title before 1919, but now is regarded as part of the surname. It is translated as Count. Before the August 1919 abolition of nobility as a legal class, titles preceded the full name when given (Graf Helmuth James von Moltke). Since 1919, these titles, along with any nobiliary prefix (von, zu, etc.), can be used, but are regarded as a dependent part of the surname, and thus come after any given names (Helmuth James Graf von Moltke). Titles and all dependent parts of surnames are ignored in alphabetical sorting. The feminine form is Gräfin.
Quotations
- "A man is born, and not made, a strategist." —Schlieffen