Try, Try Again

Strange Maps gives us a quick history lesson on the Schlieffen Plan.

The Schlieffen Plan was the culmination of four decades of refining a series of military strategies that were designed with the purpose of ensuring the sovereignty and expansion of the German state in the case of a general outbreak of war on the Continent.

I always found the fact that the Germans had been extensively planning for a major Continental conflict since the completion of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) as the ultimate expression of German bureaucratic planning and their people's general neurotic state. This neurotic attention to detail was superbly expressed in Barbara Tuchman's brilliant book on the first months of World War One, The Guns of August. In the book she describes the intensive detail that the German Army built into the Schlieffen Plan -- right down to the number of minutes it would take to move this far along the railways with this much poundage in the fifth car of the train if the invasion was commenced during a particularly warm spring.

Alas, the Germans got halfway there in the summer of 1914 and would have to wait another 27 years to finally get it right.