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Date: June 28, 1914

Definition/What Happened: While visiting the Austro-Hungarian controlled capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Serbian nationalism group the Black Hand.

Significance: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand served as the spark that set off World War I. Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia after Serbia failed to met Austria-Hungary's ultimatum led to a chain reaction of declaration of wars by various European countries due to alliance system that dominated the European continent.

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Date: 1914
Definition/What happened:
If there was an outbreak of war they had a second plan. They would have Germany attack France first and then later after attack Russia.
Significance: The plan was significant because in case of unexpected enemies and the lose of control.

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The Schlieffen Plan was a battle plan, drawn up by German tacticians, to secure victory against both France and Russia. From the 1870s, German military tacticians mused over a particular strategic concern: if Germany ever found itself at war with both France and Russia, she would be surrounded and forced to fight on two fronts, dividing her resources and doubling the risk. A better strategy was to knock out one of her antagonists quickly, then deal with the other - but this was easier said than done. The French had constructed a chain of forts, defences and concrete pillboxes (machine-gun nests) along their eastern border with Germany. These fortifications made an invasion of France a difficult prospect; any assault on French territory would be held up, would take weeks to penetrate and would probably involve significant losses.

The Germans embraced a workaround to this impasse called the Schlieffen Plan. It was named for its inventor, Count von Schlieffen, who constructed the plan in 1905 after studying the Russian military's performance in its ill-fated war with Japan (1904-5). Schlieffen noted that Russia was enormous but lacked railways; any full mobilisation of its forces would take several weeks, perhaps as long as three or four months. He set his sights on finding a way to invade France, capture Paris and force a French surrender quickly, ideally within two months; after this Germany could turn its full attention to Russia. Schlieffen's battle plan involved some German troops entering France through its more lightly-defended northern borders - but most would instead invade via the small nations of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. These three nations were neutral, lacked sizeable military forces and had borders with France that were largely unprotected. Once into northern France, four waves of German troops would sweep south-west and down toward Paris. Since most French troops would be positioned on the German border, they could be outflanked and surrounded. Schlieffen and his planners predicted victory could be achieved in as little as 40 days.

"Demands imposed on men and animals, the requirement for perfect co-ordination over long distances and the difficulty of dislodging entrenched opponents all suggest that the plan could never have succeeded. Schlieffen's plan was a brilliant strategy but designed for an era when armies numbered in tens of thousands, not in the hundreds of thousands and millions. Still, the details of planning seem to have provided the basis for a pervasive confidence that they could win the war that they believe would happen, and that they could win it quickly."
Frank B. Tipton, historian

It was a bold and daring strategy that reflected Schlieffen's philosophy: "To win, we must be the stronger of the two at the point of impact. Our only hope of this lies in making our own choice of operations, not in waiting passively for whatever the enemy chooses to do." But not all in the German high command supported his plan. Some thought it risky, provocative and wasteful of men and resources. Schlieffen's replacement, General von Moltke, was of this view. When he took command in 1906 he downsized the Schlieffen strategy, reducing troop numbers and removing the Netherlands from the battle plan. In August 1914 German troops entered Belgium as per von Moltke's modified plan, catching the small Belgian contingent by surprise. But it was in Belgium that the strategy began to unravel. Belgian military forces, supported by civilian militia, held up the Germans for almost four weeks - double the anticipated time. The attack on neutral Belgium also drew England, a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, into the war. Belgium also provided a ripe source of Allied propaganda about callous German disregard for neutrality, as well as alleged German brutalities against Belgian civilians, women and children.

In military terms the Schlieffen Plan was partially successful, in that it allowed some rapid penetration into France. But the nature of this advance created its own problems. The speed of the German advance placed great strain on its troops, most of whom were travelling on foot. Within a month German divisions had reached the Marne River, to the immediate north-east of Paris - but they were fatigued, battle-weary from marching, plus many small but frequent engagements along the way. There was also considerable strain on long German supply lines (the routes by which an advancing army receives its food, munitions, reinforcements and other needs). The Schlieffen Plan also under-estimated the military, infrastructure and capacity for mobilisation of both France and Russia. On the Eastern Front, the Russians were able to launch an offensive against Germany faster than anticipated. The French also organised and moved their own troops rapidly. Several hundred Paris taxis were even commandeered by the military and used to ferry thousands of troops to defensive positions. The German advance was ultimately halted at the week-long Battle of the Marne (September 1914); their inability to advance further became a major factor in the development of trench warfare and the Western Front.

1. The Schlieffen Plan was Germany's tactical solution for avoiding a two-front war with France and Russia.
2. Under this plan, drawn up in 1905, France would be forced to a quick surrender by a German invasion in the north.
3. German forces would move through neutral nations like Belgium and Luxembourg, bypassing French fortifications.
4. Schlieffen's initial plan, modified by General von Moltke, became the accepted strategy in the event of a European war.
5. The plan allowed the Germans to penetrate French territory quickly and with relatively few losses, however the speed and logistics of the advance meant that it could not be sustained, allowing the French to quickly mount a response.

© Alpha History 2014. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use.
This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation:
J. Llewellyn et al, "The Schlieffen Plan" at Alpha History, https://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/schlieffen-plan/, 2014, accessed [date of last access].

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The Schlieffen Plan was a battle plan, drawn up by German tacticians, to secure victory against both France and Russia. From the 1870s, German military tacticians mused over a particular strategic concern: if Germany ever found itself at war with both France and Russia, she would be surrounded and forced to fight on two fronts, dividing her resources and doubling the risk.

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Date: August 26, 1914 August 30, 1914

Definition: A fight between Russia and Germany. This battle destroyed all of Russians second army and the succeed of the commander Alexander Samsonov.

Signifigance: It destroyed most of the Russian army. Also, the suicide of their general commander Alexander Samsonov.

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First Battle of the Marne | Summary, Significance, & Map

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Date: September 5, 1914-September 12, 1914

Definition/What happened:
When the German army invaded France with a plan of winning the war within 40 days. To occupy Paris and destroy the British and French armies.

Significance:
It began the trench of warfare that characterized World War one.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

First Battle of the Marne, (September 6-12, 1914), an offensive during World War I by the French army and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) against the advancing Germans who had invaded Belgium and northeastern France and were within 30 miles (48 km) of Paris. The French threw back the massive German advance and thwarted German plans for a quick and total victory on the Western Front.

Allied retreat to the Marne

The British Expeditionary Force, after concentrating near Maubeuge, France, had moved up to Mons, Belgium, on August 22, ready to advance farther into Belgium as part of the offensive of the Allied left wing. On arrival, however, Field Marshal Sir John French learned that the French Fifth Army under Gen. Charles Lanrezac had been checked by a German attack on August 21 and deprived of the crossing of the Sambre. Although thus placed in an exposed forward position, French agreed to stand at Mons to cover Lanrezac's left. The next day Lanrezac had word of the fall of Namur and of the presence of the German Third Army under Gen. Max von Hausen on his exposed right flank near Dinant, on the Meuse. In consequence, he gave orders for a general retreat that night.

The British, after resisting the attacks of six German divisions in the Battle of Mons, began on August 24 to fall back in conformity with their allies, from the Belgian frontier toward the Marne. This retreat was achieved not a moment too soon, as the rest of the German First Army under Gen. Alexander von Kluck was marching still farther westward to envelop the BEF's open left flank.

French commander in chief Gen. Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre at last recognized the folly of pressing ahead with Plan XVII, the planned French offensive into Alsace and Lorraine. Plan XVII had vastly underestimated the size of German invasion forces, and its execution would have dramatically enhanced the effectiveness of the German Schlieffen Plan. The Schlieffen Plan called for a massive flank attack on the French defenses, but Plan XVII would have carried the bulk of the French army beyond those defenses and left it open to envelopment. The German attack would have then fallen on the French left flank and rear, virtually assuring the destruction of the French army and the fall of Paris. Joffre formed a new plan out of the wreckage. He decided to swing back his centre and left, with Verdun as the pivot, while drawing troops from the right and forming a fresh Sixth Army on his left to enable the retiring armies to return to the offensive.

Joffre's optimism might have been again misplaced but for German decisions. The first was Gen. Helmuth von Moltke's action in detaching seven regular divisions to invest Maubeuge and Givet and watch Antwerp, instead of using Landwehr (reserve) and Ersatz (replacement) troops as earlier intended. Moltke further undermined the effectiveness of the Schlieffen Plan on August 25 when he decided to send four divisions to check the Russian advance in East Prussia (that advance would be shattered at the Battle of Tannenberg, weeks before the detached troops would arrive on the Eastern Front). All these forces were taken from the right wing. Further, the German command lost touch with the advancing armies, and movements at the front became disjointed.

The British stand at Le Cateau (August 26), interrupting the retreat from Mons, and Lanrezac's riposte at Guise (August 29) were also factors in checking the German enveloping wing, and each had still greater indirect effects. Le Cateau apparently convinced Kluck that the British force could be wiped from the slate, and Guise led Gen. Karl von Bülow (Second Army) to call on the First Army for support, whereupon Kluck wheeled inward, intending to roll up the French left. Echoes of the decisive victory at Sedan rang loudly in the ears of German generals, and this led them to pluck the fruit before it was ripe. By prematurely wheeling his forces before Paris had been reached, Kluck exposed the German right to a counterenvelopment. One further factor must be mentioned, the most significant of all: the Germans had advanced so rapidly, outrunning their timetable, that their supplies had failed to keep pace.

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz

The first, highly coloured reports from the army commands in the Battles of the Frontiers had given the German Supreme Command the impression of a decisive victory. However, the comparatively small number of prisoners raised doubts in Moltke's mind and led him to a more sober estimate of the situation. The new pessimism of Moltke and the renewed optimism of his army commanders together produced a fresh change of plan, which contained the seeds of disaster. When, on August 26, the British left wing fell back southward badly mauled from Le Cateau, Kluck turned southwestward again. If the direction of Kluck's advance was partly due to a misconception of the line of retreat taken by the British, it was also in accordance with his original role of executing a wide circling sweep. Moreover, it carried him into the Amiens-Péronne area, where the first elements of the newly formed French Sixth Army were just detraining after their "switch" from Alsace. This dislocated Joffre's design for an early return to the offensive and compelled the Sixth Army to fall back hurriedly toward the shelter of the Paris defenses.

Kluck had hardly swung out to the southwest before he was induced to swing in again. For, in order to ease the pressure on the British, Joffre had ordered Lanrezac to halt and strike back against the pursuing Germans, and Bülow, shaken by the threat, called on Kluck for aid. Lanrezac's attack, on August 29, was stopped before Bülow needed this aid, but he asked Kluck to wheel in nevertheless, in order to cut off Lanrezac's retreat. Before acceding, Kluck deferred to Moltke. The request came at a moment when Moltke was becoming perturbed over the way the French were slipping away from his grasp. He was concerned in particular with a gap which had opened between his Second and Third armies as a result of the latter's having already turned south, from southwest, to help the Fourth Army, its neighbour on the other flank. Moltke, therefore, approved Kluck's change of direction-which meant the inevitable abandonment of the original wide sweep round the far side of Paris. Now the flank of the wheeling German line would pass the near side of Paris and across the face of the Paris defenses into the valley of the Marne.

The decision to abandon the original plan was definitely taken on September 4, and Moltke substituted a narrower envelopment of the French centre and right. The Fourth and Fifth armies were to press southeastward into Lorraine from the north while the Sixth and Seventh armies, striking southwestward in Lorraine, sought to break through the fortified barrier between Toul and Épinal, the "jaws" thus closing inward on either side of Verdun. Meanwhile, the First and Second armies were to turn outward and, facing west from the Marne valley, to hold off any countermove, which the French attempted from the neighbourhood of Paris. To the chagrin of the Germans, such an effort had begun before the new plan could take effect.

Clash on the Marne

The opportunity for a move against the Germans was perceived not by Joffre, who had ordered a continuance of the retreat, but by Gen. Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the military governor of Paris. On September 3, when the German First Army was crossing the Marne east of Paris, Gallieni realized the meaning of Kluck's wheel inward and directed Gen. Michel-Joseph Maunoury's Sixth Army to be ready to strike at the exposed German right flank. The next day, with some difficulty, Gallieni won Joffre's sanction. Once convinced, Joffre acted decisively. The whole left wing was ordered to turn about and return to a general offensive on September 6. At Gallieni's urging, Maunoury was already off the mark on September 5, and as his pressure developed on the Germans' sensitive flank, Kluck was constrained to draw off first one part and then the remaining part of his army to support his threatened flank guard. Thereby a 30-mile (48-km) gap was created between the German First Army (in the vicinity of Meaux) and the Second (east of Montmirail)-a gap covered only by a screen of cavalry.

Kluck was emboldened to take the risk because of the rapid retreat of the British opposite-or rather with their backs to-this gaping sector. Even on September 5, when the French on either flank were turning about, the British continued a further day's march to the south. In this "disappearance" lay the unintentional cause of victory. On September 7 and 8, Maunoury's forces were reinforced by about 3,000 infantrymen who were transported to the battle from Paris by some 600 taxis, the first automotive transport of troops in the history of war. While Paris was preparing for a siege, the Allies exploited the gap between the German First and Second armies. On September 8 Gen. Louis Franchet d'Esperey 's Fifth Army made a surprise night attack on the German Second Army and widened the gap. When the British retraced their steps, it was the report of their columns advancing into the gap which led Bülow to order the retreat of his Second Army on September 9. The temporary advantage which the German First Army had gained over Maunoury was thereby nullified, and it fell back the same day.

On September 10 the Germans began a general retreat that ended north of the Aisne River, where they dug in, and the trench warfare that was to typify the Western Front for the next three years began. The attempt at a partial envelopment, pivoting on Verdun, had already failed. The jaw formed by the German Sixth and Seventh armies merely broke its teeth on the defenses of the French eastern frontier. The attack by Crown Prince Rupert's Sixth Army on the Grand-Couronné, covering Nancy, was a particularly expensive failure. It is difficult to see how the German command could have reasonably pinned its faith on achieving as an improvised expedient the very task which in cool calculation before the war had appeared so hopeless as to lead it to take the momentous decision to advance through Belgium as the only feasible alternative.

Outcome

For the Germans, the result of the Battle of the Marne was a strategic but not a tactical defeat, and the German right wing was able to reknit and stand firmly on the line of the lower Aisne and the Chemin des Dames ridge, where trench warfare set in after assaults by the Allies in the latter half of September (First Battle of the Aisne). That the Allies were not able to draw greater advantage from their victory was partly due to the comparative weakness of Maunoury's flank attack and partly due to the failure of the British and of the French Fifth Army under d'Espérey to drive rapidly through the gap between the German First and Second armies while it was open. Their direction of advance was across a region intersected by frequent rivers, and this handicap was intensified by a lack of initiative on the part of their chiefs. Greater results might have come if more effort had been made, as Gallieni urged, to strike at the rear flank of the Kluck's First Army instead of the front and to direct reinforcements to the northwest of Paris for this purpose.

The Allies' frontal pursuit of the Germans from the Marne was already checked on the Aisne before Joffre, on September 17, seeing that Maunoury's attempts to overlap the German flank were ineffectual, decided to form a fresh army under Gen. Édouard de Castelnau for a maneuver around and behind the German flank. By then the German armies had recovered cohesion, and the German command was expecting and ready to meet such a maneuver, now the obvious course. The "Race to the Sea" had begun.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Michael Ray, Editor.

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

First Battle of the Marne

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First Battle of the Marne | Summary, Significance, & Map

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First Battle of the Marne, an offensive during World War I by the French army and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) against the advancing Germans who had invaded Belgium and northeastern France. The Allied victory thwarted German plans for a quick and total victory on the Western Front.

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Date: December 24 -25, 1914

Definition/What happened:
Soldiers from both sides dropped their weapons, stepping aside of their trenches and called for a truce during this time period.

Significance:
There is a human component during the early part of war and shows there was no true hatred between the soldiers.

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World War I gave the world its first brush with efficient widespread death. More than 8.5 million people would lose their lives to the war. Troops used trench warfare for the first time. The hundreds of miles of trenches that marked the landscape from the English Channel to Switzerland held an astounding average of one soldier for every four inches. Both sides held tenaciously to their positions: The Battle of Verdun lasted nine months, caused 300,000 deaths and resulted in almost no change in the position of the lines [source: PBS].

New technology made its way onto the battlefields of France, Germany and Belgium, bringing death to soldiers in new, horrible ways. Machine guns, which made their debut in the American Civil War, became more efficient over the ensuing decades, and by the early 20th century could deal 600 rounds per minute. Chemical warfare was refined in the form of mustard, chlorine and phosgene gases. Airplanes were used for the first time in major combat, introducing the concept of mass-casualty bombings. The tank and the flamethrower both made their debuts with mixed results.

The casualties of World War I extended to civilians, making "The Great War" a "total war" [source: PBS]. Soldier Joshua Campbell wrote this of a bombardment in the town of Dunkirk, France: "Another day one of them hit a group of children at play in front of the billet where at one time we lodged, and one never knew how many children had been killed, so complete was their annihilation" [source: Campbell]. World War I also brought genocide into the 20th century, as the Ottoman Turks slaughtered more than one million ethnic Armenians.

In the midst of all of this madness, however, an event took place that serves to renew a little faith in humanity. The Christmas Truce was a brief moment of sanity standing out against the chaos of war. Read on to find out what happened.

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The Christmas Truce stands as a point of sanity in an otherwise chaotic environment in World War I. Find out what the Christmas Truce was and how it worked.

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Date: April 25, 1914-January 26, 1915

Definition/What Happened: A military campaign of the First World War at on the Gallipoli peninsula.

Significance: The significance was it showed the strategies of the intention to allow Allied ships to pass through Constantinople as well as cutting off the Ottoman Turkey absent from the war.

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Date:May 7, 1915

Definition: This event was a British-regristrated ocean line that was torpedoed by an imperial of German Navy U-boat during the first world war.

Significance: It turned people against Germany and made people hate Germany.

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Date: February 21, 1916 - December 18, 1916

Definition: This event was the longest battle. It was fought in the Western Front of France. This war took place also right on the hills North of Verdun- sur- Meuse.

Significance: The Battle of Verdun was remembered as World War 1’s Bloodiest Battles.

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Date: July 1, 1916-November 18, 1916

Definition: Major battle of the First World War fought between the armies of British empires and the French against the Germans on the western front.

Significance: Expresses the hardships and horrors of this war. As well as new techniques and a better understanding of how to emerge a stronger army.

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Date: January 17, 1917- February 24, 1917

Definition: This was a secret communication led by the Germans. It was for an alliance for Germany and Mexico in case the United States joined World War 1 against Germany.

Significance: This telegram made British the best intelligence in World War 1 and had an alliance against the US.

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Russian Revolution | Definition, Causes, Summary, History, & Facts

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Date: March 8, 1917-June 16, 1923

Definition/What happened:
A revolution that overtakes the imperial government that was placed back to the Bolshevik into full power.

Significance:
Created the rise of communism as a political belief to the system across all of society. Russia is turning communists

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Date:

November 6, 1917 - November 7, 1917 October 24, 1917 - October 25, 1917(Anniversary in 3 days)

What caused the Russian Revolution of 1917?

Why is it called the October Revolution if it took place in November?

How did the revolution lead to the Russian Civil War?

What happened to the tsar and his family?

Russian Revolution, also called Russian Revolution of 1917, two revolutions in 1917, the first of which, in February (March, New Style), overthrew the imperial government and the second of which, in October (November), placed the Bolsheviks in power.
(Read Leon Trotsky's 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)

World War I and the decline of the Russian Empire

Centuries of virtually unchecked Russian expansion in Asia ended with an embarrassing defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). This military reverse shattered Russia's dreams of establishing hegemony over the whole of Asia, but it also contributed to a wave of domestic unrest. The Revolution of 1905 compelled Nicholas II to issue the October Manifesto, which ostensibly transformed Russia from an unlimited autocracy into a constitutional monarchy. The tsar's reactionary policies, including the occasional dissolution of the Duma, or Russian parliament, the chief fruit of the 1905 revolution, had spread dissatisfaction even to moderate elements of the nobility. The Russian Empire 's many ethnic minorities grew increasingly restive under Russian domination.

Despite some reforms that followed the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian army in 1914 was ill-equipped to fight a major war, and neither the political nor the military leadership was up to the standard required. Nevertheless the army fought bravely in World War I, and both soldiers and junior officers showed remarkable qualities. The Russian invasion of East Prussia in August 1914 was defeated by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff at Tannenberg, but it required the Germans to send reinforcements from the Western Front and so saved France from defeat and made possible the victory on the Marne. The campaigns of 1915 and 1916 on the Eastern Front brought terrible casualties to the Russian forces, which at times did not even have sufficient rifles. As late as July 1916, however, the Russian army was capable of making a successful offensive under Gen. Aleksey Brusilov in Volhynia and Bukovina.

Plots and Revolutions Quiz

The Russian people did not respond to the war with real enthusiasm. The government could not overcome its traditional distrust of any public initiative, even in the organization of medical supplies or munitions for the forces at the front. In the Fourth Duma a majority of the centre and moderate right formed a Progressive bloc and proposed the creation of a national coalition government "possessing the confidence of the country" and a program of reforms which could be carried out even in wartime. The emperor rejected the proposal and prorogued the Duma on September 3 (September 16, New Style), 1915. Eleven days earlier Nicholas had decided to assume personal command of the armies in the field. The result was that in Petrograd (as the capital had been renamed at the beginning of the war, in place of the German-sounding St. Petersburg) the empress Alexandra was in fact in control. She herself was under the influence of the self-styled "holy man" Grigori Rasputin, whose hold over her was because of his ability to arrest the bleeding of the hemophiliac tsarevich, Alexis. Thus to the massive casualties at the front, the retreat of the armies, and the growing economic hardships was added the knowledge, widespread in the capital and among the upper classes, that the government was in the hands of incompetents. Rumours of treason in high places were widely believed, though the historical evidence does not suggest that they were true. On the night of December 16-17 (December 29-30, New Style), 1916, Rasputin was murdered by a group of conservative nobles, but by then the system was beyond salvation. There was no hand at the helm, and the ship was drifting onto the rocks.

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Russian Revolution | Definition, Causes, Summary, History, & Facts

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Russian Revolution, two revolutions in 1917, the first of which, in February (March, New Style), overthrew the imperial government and the second of which, in October (November), placed the Bolsheviks in power, leading to the creation of the Soviet Union. Learn more about the Russian Revolution in this article.