Would the world now be better off if Germany had won the Battle of the Marne? An historical thought experiment, reposted from October 2003.
The other day famed radio commentator Paul Harvey’s "The Rest of the Story" segment told of the German army’s drive toward Paris in the opening weeks of World War I, and how it was halted. The Germans were following the Schlieffen Plan, named for its originator, strategist Alfred von Schlieffen, who devised it in 1905.
Every major power in Europe had various war plans in store in case war broke out. France had four major plans, all concentrating on recapturing Alsace Lorraine from Germany. France had lost the territory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
The Schlieffen plan was a national military strategy in its own right, not merely a battle plan. Schlieffen and his German General Staff successors understood that their principal enemy would be France. But they also had to be ready to fight Russia at the same time.
The main thrust of the Schlieffen Plan was to devote only enough resources against Russia to hold the line there, while sending overwhelming forces against France. France had to be defeated in no more than eight weeks so that German forces could be shifted to fight Russia. The calculated risk, which proved correct, was that while Russia enjoyed a near-bottomless pool of manpower, it would take more than two months to mobilize. France had to be defeated within those two months.
Though France and Germany shared a common border, the Schlieffen Plan called for invading France through Holland and Belgium, to the north. By the time World War I broke out, Belgium had long declared its neutrality in continental warfare; Great Britain had warned that violations of Belgium’s neutrality would invoke Britain’s armed might.
Nonetheless, heavy German forces under Helmuth von Moltke, who had replaced von Schlieffen as chief of staff in 1906, invaded Belgium in August 1914 (also Luxembourg). Holland was left alone to keep it out of the war.
An old soldier’s saying goes, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Neither did the Schlieffen Plan. The Belgian army, less than 200,000 strong, offered stiffer resistance than the Germans had anticipated. Also, the Russian Second Army advanced into East Prussia and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) entered Belgium much more quickly than had been anticipated.
Nonetheless, the momentum continued to favor the Germans. The Germans decisively crushed the Russian army in late August in the Battle of Tannenberg. French and British forces fell back into France. By early September German units were within 30 miles of Paris. By that line, however, the German supply and command-and-control system was strained. Von Moltke wanted to exercise more control over the field forces than technology permitted him to do effectively from his headquarters far away. He refused to go closer. The supply lines were stretched as well.
Yet the allied situation was approaching chaos. The French government evacuated to Bordeaux and Paris began preparations to be besieged. French and British forces were exhausted, having been in near-constant combat for a month and in constant retreat for almost two weeks. Finally, the French forces, joined by the much smaller BEF, made a line south of the river Marne.
Here the tide of war turned. The Franco-British forces counterattacked and stopped the German advance cold. But as I wish to explore, was this really a good thing, considering history since then?
The French and British attacked the Germans on Sept. 6, opening a 30-mile-wide gap in the German lines when the Germans shifted forces to meet the attack. The allies promptly poured through this gap. This battle was later named the Battle of the Marne.
But by Sept. 7 the battle was again grave for the allies. The Germans had not only contained the allies’ advance, they were positioned to destroy the French Sixth Army.
The Sixth Army was saved only by the innovative use of Parisian taxicabs, 600 in all, to ferry 6,000 French infantrymen from Paris to the front on Sept. 7.
The next night the French again attacked, and on Sept. 9 the German army began to retreat under orders from von Moltke, who feared a crushing breakthrough by the allies. But the Germans withdrew only 40 miles and dug in north of the River Aisne. In no shape to continue their offensive, the French had lost a quarter-million men (the smaller Brit force lost 12,733). The French and British forces prepared trench works facing the Germans. Before long the two sides were racing to extend their defensive belts from the English Channel to the Swiss border.
Four years of stagnant trench warfare would ensure, broken only by the arrival of the American Expeditionary Forces in the spring of 1918. Germany surrendered on Nov. 11, 1918.
What if the Germans had taken Paris?
After the war, the Germans generals involved in the Battle of the Marne declared that von Moltke’s order to withdraw was far premature and that the Germans could have finally prevailed against the allies. This declaration is not without justification, but on their heads must lay some of the blame: their communications and status reports to von Moltke were fragmentary and not timely because land lines had not been laid sufficiently and wireless signals had to be relied on - this in 1914 at the infancy of the radio age. More energy in fixing their communications might well have won the war for the Germans, for they had so far advanced only from victory to victory.
General Alexander von Kluck, commander of the German First Army, forcefully argued after the war that his army should have counterattacked rather than retreated. But von Kluck never got the chance to press his case at the time; his orders presented him with a fait accompli and in light of the withdrawal of friendly forces around him, he had no choice but to comply with von Moltke’s order to withdraw as well.
Yet it does seem apparent that the French offensive, despite the enormous gap it caused in the German line, presented the Germans with a great opportunity as well as great danger. More imaginative commanders, say those Germany enjoyed in the early days of World War II, might have been able to bring the action to a point that enamored the Germans generals for decades: kasselschlacht, or "cauldron battle," in which they hammer the enemy so mercilessly that he must abandon the field headlong, die or surrender.
Had they done so, the way to Paris would have been open. The British were not committed to ground warfare on the continent in a truly major way then, it was only the second month of the war, after all. With Paris occupied and the French field armies destroyed or scattered, the French would have every reason to sue for peace and the Brits would not have stood in their way.
The French would not have been subjected to abject surrender. The Germans had occupied Paris before, in 1871 at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Under the terms of France’s surrender, Germany kept Alsace-Lorraine and dictated the French to pay $1 billion in reparations. (It should be noted, though, that the Germans physically occupied a fairly small area of Paris, and the occupation itself was done only as part of the terms of the peace.)
As far as Franco-German relations were concerned, the 1871 war ended with the Germans going home, except they kept Alsace-Lorraine.
Had the Germans besieged Paris again in 1914 - it had withstood several months siege in the earlier war - it is most likely that the war very soon would have ended with a negotiated peace. The domestic aftermath of the F-P War in France was terrible. Civil war raged in Paris for more than three months and was very violent. More than 30,000 Parisians died and many were exiled by the government when it regained control. Paris remained under French martial law for five years afterward.
No one in the French government of 1914 would have been easy-minded about that experience possibly being repeated, hence the government would have certainly sued for peace had the Germans surrounded Paris, in my opinion. The British would have pressed for the un-occupation of Belgium, which the Germans would have gladly acceded. Other than that, the Brits had no dog in the fight, as their entire strategy regarding the continent was wholly reactionary to events.
France and Britain had been historical rivals and often outright enemies for centuries, while Britain and Germany had long been friendly and had long enjoyed ties between their royal families. France and Britain had been on the verge of war as late as 1898 over events in Sudan. However, the two countries had established in 1904 an Entente Cordiale, a "friendly agreement" to be at peace with one another.
Likewise, Britain and Russia were at imperial odds before the war, but they had come to a friendly settlement, with its own entente, in 1907. The object of forming the two ententes was Germany and its allies Italy and Austria-Hungary. (Italy dropped out in 1914, though, and joined the allies in 1915.) So by 1914, Britain, France and Russia were essentially, though not formally, allied with one another against Germany and Austria-Hungary, a fact they formalized, ironically, only two days before the Battle of the Marne began. They announced the Triple Entente, which bound the three governments to make no separate peace with Germany.
But there is little reason to suppose that the Czar would have continued the war against Germany in the east if France fell. And a mere treaty agreement of the Triple Entente would not have stood in the way of France capitulating to Germany by reason of German force majeur on the battlefield.
So had the allies lost the Battle of the Marne, the status quo ante bellum would have almost certainly formed the basis of the peace. Other than keeping Alsace-Lorraine, Germany had no territorial ambitions to the west, nor to the east. (Russia was very wary of Austria-Hungary’s influence and ambitions among the Slavic lands, though, and that may have been a continuing theater of conflict.)
Effects of World War I
The war lasted four bloody years after the Battle of the Marne. Millions of soldiers of all four major European powers died and millions more were maimed. An entire generation of men was gutted.
In the east, the war led directly to revolution and the overthrow of the Czar in Russia. Within a few years a communist government was established and the USSR was a reality.
British politics were permanently transformed. The rise of the Labour Party is directly attributable to social and demographic changes in the UK, brought about by the war.
France suffered catastrophic losses of people and material. Its political leadership did not recover by the time the Nazi army invaded in 1940. It fell quickly then.
The effects upon Germany were extreme. Punitive reparations were imposed by France and Britain. The imperial family went into exile in Holland and the Social Democrats assumed power. But this party enjoyed stratified support, not broad support, and was not able to govern effectively. The terms of the peace were despised by the German people. The 1920s saw economic collapse and severe domestic unrest in Germany. Those conditions enabled Adolf Hitler to assume the chancellorship in 1933.
The Ottoman Empire of the Near East had allied itself with Austria-Hungary; both were defeated. The Ottoman Empire, holding sway over Islamic lands from Turkey in the north to Egypt and northern Libya in the west and all of modern Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and most of northern Saudi Arabia. This empire was dissolved by Britain’s military might in 1917, beginning 30 years of British rule over the former Ottoman lands. But the British could not provide a stable alternative to the former Islamic empire.
The United States became the world’s pre-eminent economic power and rivaled Great Britain militarily. But the US entered a period of isolationism after the war. Warren Harding won the presidency on the slogan, "Return to Normalcy."
All of these effects, reverberating to this very day, may be argued to have resulted from the allied victory at the Battle of the Marne. Had the allies lost that battle, I think one may make a good case that none of the following would have occurred:
- The rise fascism in Italy and of Nazism in Germany,
- The rise of a communist Soviet Union, although the Czar would likely have been deposed eventually (more likely, would have become a figurehead monarch along the lines of Britain’s)
- World War II in Europe, and probably not in Asia. Japan would still have had imperial ambitions, but they would not have brought the world into conflict, and perhaps not the US.
- Hence, no Cold War and none of its attendant ravages
- A much less powerful United States, but one still secure and free
- No communist China
- No Vietnam War
- No Korean War
- No free and democratic Japan
- No Holocaust
- Hence, no establishment of the state of Israel
- Hence, no history of war, conflict and terrorism in the Middle East
- No Iranian Islamic revolution, Hence, no rise of modern radical Islamism
- Hence no 9/11/01 attacks.
Of course I expect that this short list is neither exhaustive nor non-debatable. This is a thought experiment, after all. Add that science and technology would have progressed in wildly different ways and pace, as well, so perhaps no space race or moon landings (yet) nor medical MRIs nor even perhaps any personal computers (again, yet).
But also consider: the Ottoman Empire was a liberal one for its day. It was headed by Turks, not Arabs, and would have dissolved in the 20th century anyway - but not before civil societies could have been established throughout its reach.
Imagine the governments of Syria, Iraq, Egypt and possibly Saudi Arabia being much more representative of their people than now. Imagine that radical Islamism never had Israel as the object of its hatred, and that Western relations with the Arab countries had never been corrupted by the Cold War and fueled by World War II.
Imagine no significant militant Islam anywhere in the world.
Some historians say that the taxicabs turned the tide of battle 89 years ago. The arrival of those 6,000 French infantry from Paris blunted the Germans’ efforts of the day, and the Germans never got another chance.
It was the first large-scale use of motor transport for moving combat troops ever. Those taxicabs just maybe gave us the world we have today.
The Law of Unintended Consequences reigns supreme in human affairs, does it not?
More - My dad, who can recount the history of the Great War without pausing to think hard, directed me to this interview in American Heritage with historian Walter Boyne, who claims,
As I might point out that the generals commanding American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq came into the service late in the Vietnam War or shortly afterward, yet no one has embraced new technology better than they have, with the enormous savings of both American and non-combatant lives. I also argue that enemy combatant dead are fewer as well, simply because we concluded the wars so quickly.British and French reconnaissance aircraft turned the situation around. Their greatest coup came on the last day of August, when a British plane noticed that the Germans had stopped moving east—in effect, abandoning their strategy —and had turned to envelop Paris. Two more British aircraft confirmed this, and a couple of days later French planes saw the same thing. The first French aircraft relayed the news directly to the military governor of Paris, and he persuaded the French and British high command to make a stand at the Marne. They held, and at that point the Germans lost the war. They’d planned on knocking out France in six weeks, and now it wasn’t going to happen. But what is amazing about all this is not that pilots realized what was happening; what is amazing is that field marshals believed them, and acted on the intelligence.
You point out that, strangely enough, the same thing happened on the Eastern Front, but there airpower saved Germany.
That’s right. In the east, Germany planned to hold the Russians with weak forces while they were busy crushing France. They thought they had six weeks to deal with France, but Russia mobilized much faster than the Germans thought possible, and in a matter of days the Russians were poised to destroy the German armies they faced. The parallel to the Marne is uncanny. German reconnaissance aircraft spotted the Russian buildup, confirming intelligence gathered from radio intercepts, and this allowed the German commander, Paul von Hindenburg, to win the Battle of Tannenberg, which cost the Russians 140,000 men. It was the Marne of the East, and it saved Germany. As Hindenburg said, “Without airmen, no Tannenberg!” Again, what is surprising is that Hindenburg, who was 67 years old, had the insight to exploit this new technology.
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