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Remembered Today:

Falkenhayn's Plans for 1917?


DixieDivision1418

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6 hours ago, Sasho Todorov said:

 

 

 

I personally think this is a misreading of Falkenhayn.

 

 

 

He's rather a hard man to read .

 

In that sense, he achieved his goal.

 

Phil

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On 28/01/2021 at 09:52, Sasho Todorov said:

 

the mathematical attrition that he increasingly obsessed over.

 

 

 

 

Sasho,

 

He claimed that in the main battle of Verdun   .....for two Germans put out of action five Frenchmen had to shed their blood. ( page 237 of his memoir).

 

A  preposterous claim on the face of it ; but one which caries more validity in terms of the numbers of killed and prisoners between February and June 1916.  Excluding the wounded, the casualties did give the Germans a big edge, on account of scores of thousands of French prisoners who are included in the totals of killed and missing.

 

He repeatedly emphasised his belief in the qualitative superiority of his troops over the Entente opponents, and I wonder if he would have maintained that outlook had he still remained in situ in 1917.

 

Editing here : after looking at Haig's dispatches, so preponderantly fixed on France and Flanders, it's quite mind boggling to see how huge Falkenhayn's remit was, as he dealt with  strategic problems extending from the Western Front, through the Eastern Front and right into Turkey, Italy  and the Balkans.  It's stating the obvious, of course, but it still makes an impact on me, and made me feel as if Haig's task was, by comparison, rather simple !

 

Phil

Edited by phil andrade
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Conscious that I'm rather too much to the fore here - this is my ninth post in this thread - I find myself struggling to consolidate my thoughts about Falkenhayn.

 

A post or two back, I wrote that he's a hard man to read ; that applies in the most literal sense....maybe there is flawed translation in his memoir.

 

Let me draw attention to what he writes at the beginning and end of his story.

 

In his preface, he concludes :

 

Rhetoric, self-adulation and lies, plunged Germany into the deepest abyss, when they stifled the sense of reality in our once strong and good people.  The continuance of their rule threatens to make us slaves forever.

 

What are we to make of that ?  

 

Written in Berlin in August 1919, so near to his death, it has a chilling prescience....or is he alluding to the follies of Ludendorff's regime of 1917-18, which exhibited profligacy which defied  that reality ?

 

At the close of his book, he makes another plea for the wisdom of realistic restraint :

 

.....the decision must be obtained not by the military defeat, in the literal sense, of all our foes, but only by hammering into them that they were in no position to pay the price of overcoming us..........A carefully calculated husbanding of....war resources was of enormous importance, and we had unconditionally to renounce all operations, the demands of which over-taxed our power to hold out.

 

There  he is then : the calculating realist, the advocate of husbandry.  I would look to those attributes as the defining features of how he would have carried on the fight had he been in control.

 

Phil

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15 hours ago, phil andrade said:

Conscious that I'm rather too much to the fore here - this is my ninth post in this thread - I find myself struggling to consolidate my thoughts about Falkenhayn.

 

A post or two back, I wrote that he's a hard man to read ; that applies in the most literal sense....maybe there is flawed translation in his memoir.

 

Let me draw attention to what he writes at the beginning and end of his story.

 

In his preface, he concludes :

 

Rhetoric, self-adulation and lies, plunged Germany into the deepest abyss, when they stifled the sense of reality in our once strong and good people.  The continuance of their rule threatens to make us slaves forever.

 

What are we to make of that ?  

 

Written in Berlin in August 1919, so near to his death, it has a chilling prescience....or is he alluding to the follies of Ludendorff's regime of 1917-18, which exhibited profligacy which defied  that reality ?

 

At the close of his book, he makes another plea for the wisdom of realistic restraint :

 

.....the decision must be obtained not by the military defeat, in the literal sense, of all our foes, but only by hammering into them that they were in no position to pay the price of overcoming us..........A carefully calculated husbanding of....war resources was of enormous importance, and we had unconditionally to renounce all operations, the demands of which over-taxed our power to hold out.

 

There  he is then : the calculating realist, the advocate of husbandry.  I would look to those attributes as the defining features of how he would have carried on the fight had he been in control.

 

Phil

 

The issue with Falkenhayn's memoir is that you are reading a man's retroactive ideas-- this is Falkenhayn writing with hindsight, no longer under the pressure of command, no longer tied to the belief that the Entente was on the verge of collapse in late 1915, and with a strong interest in protecting his legacy by casting shadows on the man who replaced him-- Ludendorff.

 

This is where I find the German Official History of the war to be very useful, as it was written with full access to the German archives (now destroyed in the Potsdam raid), i.e. it was using Falkenhayn's thinking at the time, not in 1919. And, at the time, throughout the entirety of 1915, until the crisis, and then success, in the East consumed the resources he had built up and prevented their return to the West, Falkenhayn was planning for a decisive breakthrough operation aimed at Amiens, a continuation of what he had attempted around Ypres in 1914. (As an interesting sidenote, Falkenhayn's planned 1915 operation, the 25 division assault between Arras and the Somme aimed at Amiens, is functionally the same operation as Michael, only Falkenhayn had a much stronger strategic focus to his offensive by keeping Amiens at its center, compared to Ludendorff's aimlessness and only late recognition of the critical importance of Amiens). 

 

In fact, this forms the the crux of the Official History's main critique of Falkenhayn, that his central focus on an early breakthrough in the West kept forces there that might have brought the war in the East to a decisive end much earlier, thus allowing for bringing a critical mass to the West for the decisive victory there. It's difficult to read Verdun as anything but the first operational step in that search for a decisive victory through breakthrough in the west-- it was an evolution of the upper-Alsace operation which Falkenhayn had been considering launching as a direct counter-attack right after the twin Champagne-Artois offensives had failed. For Verdun to be intended as Falkenhayn describes, having the primary German battlefront on the West be a long attritional struggle for the purpose of being a long attritional struggle, there'd have to be a radical break in his thinking over the winter in 1915, and those working with primary sources have never found that break. In fact, what's been shown is a continuity of thinking.

 

The question for projection is thus what happens when the "sauve qui peu" period of the summer of 1916 ends. Does Falkenhayn's break from his original thinking that France was on the verge of collapse continue? Or does the evident weakness of the Russian army, the incredible clumsiness of the B.E.F., and the increasing political instability in France over the winter of '16, culminating in the crisis of May-June '17, convince him that he was right all along and decision can be found? It's very difficult for men in such high positions to decisively admit error, rather than a temporary pause before situations return to how they believed they had been all along.

 

Reading Falkenhayn is always difficult given how private he was. It becomes even more difficult thanks to how much of the record of the communications at the time have been destroyed. With that in mind, I think it's important to punch through the smokescreens created by memoirs and look as close as possible to what the contemporaneous primary sources (or as best as we can approximate them, through the interpretation of scholars who worked with those archives) show.

Edited by Sasho Todorov
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Sasho,

 

Thanks for those observations.

 

Your knowledge vastly exceeds mine in this realm.  I'm keen to admit that I hadn't properly appreciated the scale of his ambitions for a Picardy/Artois onslaught in 1915.

 

I have a nagging suspicion that the German Official History ( weltkreig ?) is rather biased in favour of Hindenburg - and, by association, Ludendorff - and that Falkenhayn is thrown to the wolves.

 

Phil

 

 

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On 30/01/2021 at 08:21, phil andrade said:

Sasho,

 

Thanks for those observations.

 

Your knowledge vastly exceeds mine in this realm.  I'm keen to admit that I hadn't properly appreciated the scale of his ambitions for a Picardy/Artois onslaught in 1915.

 

I have a nagging suspicion that the German Official History ( weltkreig ?) is rather biased in favour of Hindenburg - and, by association, Ludendorff - and that Falkenhayn is thrown to the wolves.

 

Phil

 

 

 

In terms of bias, I think it's less in favor of individuals, and more in terms of methods. Due to the heavy participation of Reichswehr staff in the creation of the official history, the German work is much more a "just so" story-- this is the best way to fight, here's why it's the best way to fight, and here's how we came to learn that it was the best way to fight. In this regard, the official history becomes very focused on the idea of a Schlieffen school+the need for flexible defensive and offensive operations. This is primarily because these books were intended to reinforce the education of young officers in the German army's chosen method for fighting the next war. So Moltke and Falkenhayn get somewhat thrown under the bus because they deviated from this method, the ostensible war winning mentality of Schlieffen, and Falkenhayn in particular comes under fire because of his supposed reticence to transfer forces east for a decisive mobile victory.

 

However, the official history is remarkably open about the degree to which the Artois-Champagne double offensive was a true crisis point due to the lack of available reserves to feed into the potential breakthrough sectors. In fact, the biggest element of criticism for Falkenhayn is in his strategic blindness as to French capabilities and their remaining resources. So, it's not just a full on Ludendorff love-fest, but rather I think a biased, but still fairly aware work that recognizes the strategic difficulties Germany was facing, as well as the complexities of balancing forces to take advantage of brief windows of opportunity.

 

It's in the latter regard that the history is in my view centered most on-- if there is a constant theme to the work at the strategic-operational levels (vs. the tactical levels, where it is very much a "listen up young officer, disperse your goddamn men") it's the need for German leaders to have a sixth sense of knowing when to take the gamble, because the windows of opportunity to force a decision in a two front war are incredibly short. 

 

Basically, if I were to summarize the core impetus of the histories, I'd argue that the French official history is the most "historical" of the works, being crafted primarily as a structure for the voluminous annexes. It is remarkably critical of French performance, and, contrary to what we might assume today, also quite open as to the extent and impact of the French army strikes/collective indiscipline/mutinies of 1917. The British Official History is a work of self-defense, both by individual officers and the army at large, of the BEF's performance. The German official history is a teaching instrument. It's the briefest and least detailed of the works, but its main job is forward looking, designed around reinforcing the doctrinal evolution of the Reichswehr and ensuring that the officer corps is on the same page by creating a form of canon they can refer back to.

Edited by Sasho Todorov
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Sasho,

 

This is a bit of a revelation to me : that the German official history was uniquely didactic.

 

“In fact, the biggest element of criticism for Falkenhayn is in his strategic blindness as to French capabilities and their remaining resources. “

 

That sentence packs a terrific punch.  

 

Phil

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