Schlieffen Plan Myth: 48 Corps on Paper, 34 in 1914 and a Postwar Cover-Up

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The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 showed Germany that a quick win could turn into a people's war, as the new French republic raised mass levies and francs-tireurs forced over 100,000 German troops to guard supply lines. Moltke the Elder and Hans Delbrück concluded future wars would be wars of exhaustion, a fatal prospect for a Germany facing France and Russia. Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of staff from 1891, insisted on rapid destruction instead, and his 1905 memorandum sent a massive right wing through Belgium and the Netherlands to sweep around Paris. John Keegan and Martin van Creveld showed the roads and supplies could never support it.

Moltke the Younger, watching Russia rebuild its railways with French loans, dropped the Netherlands from the route and squeezed some 600,000 men through a 12-mile gap at Liège. In August 1914 Belgian sabotage, dying horses and dysentery slowed the march while Joseph Joffre shifted troops by rail, and the Marne in September ended the gamble. After the war former staff officers at the Reichsarchiv cast Schlieffen as an infallible genius and blamed Moltke, who died in 1916. Archives recovered after East Germany fell let Terence Zuber argue the 1905 memo was a one-front thought experiment.

• A single army corps stretched about 18 miles along a road, and the memo needed roughly 30 of them on a 190-mile front.
• Schlieffen's own figures called for another 200,000 men on the right wing with no road space left for them.
• Moltke kept Dutch neutrality so Germany could import food and raw materials through a neutral port under a British blockade.
• France's own Plan XVII offensive against the German border proved disastrous.
• Terence Holmes calculated the sweep required 48.5 corps, while Moltke had only 34 available in 1914.