The Myth of the Eastern Front

This came up a while back in the discussion of that Waffen SS re-enactor Congressional candidate from Ohio.

Much of the rhetoric and stylized facts heard in the US about the Eastern Front are very close to that used for the Lost Cause movement. A morally and skillset superior set of soldiers fighting for a good cause, overwhelmed by hordes of equipment and manpower - Germany losing to the Russians in WW2, or the Civil War? The parallels in how people talk about them are realy striking.

They don't come out and say this, but I think the reason the Holocaust blew up to be such a big deal in the US popular imagination from the 1970s on is that it was consciously suppressed in the 1950-1970 Cold War period, as a side effect of our strenous effects to mainstream Germany again. US elites tried to normalize the behavor of the German military leadership to get them onboard during the Cold War, pardoning multiple war criminals, putting a light spin on the crimes, the Commissar order, and giving Wehrmacht officials access at all levels to pick their brains about how to defeat the no-doubt-imminent Soviet tank assault on Western Europe. US officials such as Robert Taft turned on the Nuremberg trials as early as 1948. I can't find the guy's name now, but there's actually a general who received Germany's highest medal award from Hitler and later received a medal from a US president for assisting with Cold War planning.

This, combined the rather relentless efforts of some German commanders and soldiers to reinterpret German actions as a "pre-emptive defense of the west against the Asiatic communist hordes" - rather than, you know, the war of racial exterminiation it was - pushed US opinion further and further towards the revisionist camp. As a side effect, you get the re-enactor movement - which decides the Waffen-SS was a bunch of total badass Rambos, who should be venerated for their commie-killing, rather than, you know, war criminals.

You get the seemingly endless series of "popular history" novels where the Germans are chivalrous, christian, nice-to-Russian civilians professionals, suffering under the yoke of Hitler's insane orders. There's apparently a publishing continum between outright Nazi-fetishist newsletters, small market publishing, and Ballantine books depending on how softened up the Nazi-loving is.

I now understand why there's so many people around who are willing to do the "but Stalin was worse, we should focus on his war crimes" thing whenever the subject of the two comes up, or the bizarre instance that the Nazis were on the left, or the fascination with hypothetical alternative outcomes for the war. It's not really about relative culpability; if that was the criteria, we should devote all our time to discussing the bodycount of the British Empire. It's actually kind of a backwards-facing rationalization about the post-WW2 Cold War alliances needed, and the bodies need hiding.

Most disturbingly for our purposes, you get an awful lot of the modern culture around wargaming, board and electronic. The chapter where he traces how German-focused, crime-minimizing, and outright venerating of German soldiers some games are is unsettling.

As a special bonus, check out the 1 star reviews complaining that he's falsely accusing some German generals of being war criminals.

It's a good book I pulled a few citations from. It's a little bit uneven polish-wise. It's frustrating to me that there isn't a single magisterial book about the Wehrmact myth for non-specialist scholars, but basically, "Yeah."

Wolfram Wette's The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality may come closest. The German subtitle - Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg, Legenden (view-of-enemies, war-of-annihilation/extermination, (postwar)legend) actually sums up the three subtopics he covers in the book rather better than the bland English title, which makes it sound like it's all about the Wehrmacht myth, rather than just 1/3rd about it.

Usually that's how the Wehrmacht myth is treated - it's covered sort of in an afterthought in books about what the Wehrmacht actually did. Most of the rest of the historiography I could cite would be primarily about what the Wehrmacht actually did, like Heer and Naumann's compilation War of Extermination: the German Military in World War II, which had a lot of august contributors. There can be a tone of '68er outrage at the sheer bald-faced dishonesty and moral collapse of a prior generation that can make it sometimes read as a tiny bit polemical, but they're very correct indeed about the facts.

My thesis was about Manstein's contribution to the Wehrmacht myth - less with his memoirs, which were super influential but only after the myth was already successful, than in his organization of the early mythmaking in 1945-6, which is very little known at all.

EDIT: The book itself is a monograph on a specific topic, but Theo Schulte's The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia actually has a useful enough overview of Wehrmacht myth historiography that I cited it in several papers. More recently Ben Shepherd - who I think must have been Schulte's student - has included similar reviews in articles and his good book War in the Wild East.

EDIT2: The guy who got a medal of freedom from JFK was Franz Halder, who I was bitching about in the Syria thread yesterday, weirdly enough. Partly it helped that he was in a Nazi camp at the end of the war and halfheartedly involved in the military opposition, especially in '39-'40, but mostly he just struck a home-run with the Americans when he could've easily been hanged for complicity in various Nazi-Wehrmacht collaborations. OKH's own occupation plan for the East called for millions of superfluous civilians to die of starvation, to name one thing that originated from the OKH rather than that the OKH just agreed to, for example.

From what I have seen as a relative newcomer (i.e. I've only been playing them for about a decade, rather than 40 years) to the wargaming scene, while the revisionist view has been particularly virulent in the past, the last decade or so has seen a pretty significant backlash against the guys who were always just a little too into playing the German side.

I think it has coincided with the semi-rebirth of wargames that recent years have seen, driven by things like BGG, VASSAL, and other digital-era advances. Those wacky views were no longer safely contained to that guy at your local wargame convention, and instead were exposed and refuted publicly.

The "black counters" argument about SS units is always amusing though.

That and the post-Wehrmacht-exhibition controversy discussions and the historical work on the crimes of the Wehrmacht has been a big enough deal in professional WWII historiography long enough that it's actually percolated into the war buffosphere. Every once in a blue moon academic historians actually get to influence how people think about history!

Yep, Halder's the guy. Cool to see you have some expertise here.

Is this something that is available? I remember reading his memoirs and finding them interesting in several ways, both in what he chose to write about and what he didn't. This was quite some time ago so my memory is a bit foggy. I do have a memory of him "blaming" Hitler's idea of a war of extermination for Germany losing the war in the east, where he basically put it in terms of the idea being strategically unsound.

Rather horribly I sort of collapsed into a writer's block / administrative deadlines mess post-defence (!) and never got my M.A. or had it published. Aside from the lack of a proper intro and conclusion - and a few other revisions would've helped - it was a pretty good thesis, actually. I'd sort of idly wondered if Manstein had been a grey eminence behind the Wehrmacht's early revisionism - a famous 1945 memorandum he'd participated in the crafting of, and various things surrounding the first Nuremberg trial - and the more I looked the more I found, and the more I thought the Nuremberg military sub-trial - a historical footnote since it miscarried - mattered a great deal for the history of the army's whitewash.

As it turned out I was beaten to the punch in 2006 (the year I started) by a German Manstein expert named Oliver von Wrochem, who wrote probably the best overall Manstein bio, Erich von Manstein: Vernichtungskrieg und Geschichtspolitik. Unfortunately I'd read it back when I was focused on Manstein's 1948 trial by the British, and by the time I revisted it's stuff on Nuremberg I'd already independently (and proudly) figured out he was the busybody behind the defence - only to discover that Wrochem's found even more smoking gun proof of the same, including a draft of the German Army's defence summation - usually attributed to attorney Hans Laternser - written on Manstein's goddamned typewriter. A recently (same time period?) published jailhouse psychologist's account by Ewald von Kleist also painted Manstein as the organizing figure, as did a few comments later by Generals von Leeb and Westphal.

There's an English Manstein bio by a British general named Mungo Melvin that came out in 2010; it's solid on military stuff - Manstein's military career was, self-promotion aside, brilliant - but on the question of Manstein's involvement in war crimes it tends to paint a strangely rosy picture of him, even though it cites the various people who've criticized him heavily. If it doesn't go without saying, Manstein's own Lost Victories is a very calculated work of Wehrmacht (and personal) apologetics.

There were a few other works about Manstein that followed von Wrochem's, once by Marcel Stein and one by Benoit Lemay, but the former was sort of all over the map stylistically (and seemed to not take certain unreliable sources with as much salt as they required) and Lemay's book just didn't do much for me. Leaving one with, basically, Wrochem, still untranslated last I checked. The whole bombing out of grad school thing was sort of depressing enough that I haven't kept up with subsequent publications.

Hasn't the cool toys thing came into revision? I gather the "average" Soviet tank in terms of deployed numbers was better than theirs from '42 on.

Also FUCK, NOW WE'RE DOING IT.

Damn you Nazis!

Some clippings from the ol' bibliography relating specifically to A: the Wehrmacht and war crimes, books/articles about which tending to be where you hear about the Wehrmacht myth by contrast, and B: stuff just about Wehrmacht mythmaking.

It's a shame that Telford Taylor, who had the bad luck to try to deal with military war crimes in 1946 using the broken reed of the "High Command charge" didn't live to see the post-1990s scholarship that vindicated most of his Sword and Swastika, and indeed his scathing speeches in court, some of the better prosecution rhetoric at Nuremberg. You can read him (along with the occasional dated-sounding evocation of Prussian militarism starting the war) exploding the Wehrmacht myth that had yet to even gain sway in both Germany and the West - and he correctly noted that the defence was intent, the courtroom, on building it. (See bolded section.) And yet, exactly that myth is what people thought - above all in West Germany but also in Allied countries to a remarkable degree - very soon afterwards.

The average Soviet tank was a T-34, the basic model of the tank when it came into production was so far ahead of contemporary german tanks in 1940-1941 that it was downright overpowering. The Germans beat early Soviet tank forces by being much better at combined arms warfare tactics. The Germans caught up fairly swiftly though by upgrading their Pz III's and Pz IV's and by 1943 rolled out their famous Tigers and Panthers which had no equivalent on the US/UK side until very late in 1945 (which is where the cool toys myth comes from I suspect, the eastern front getting a lot less attention). The soviets opted not to match the German cool toys but instead stuck a better gun on their T-34's and called it a day, figuring that they could outproduce the Germans 20-1 or some silly number like that on tanks. Which they did. Tigers and Panthers were better, but not good enough to fight off 20 tanks at once.

Actually, I lied. The Soviet made cool toy tanks too, notably the IS (Iosif Stalin) tanks and self-propelled artillery. But for every one of those there was a crapload T-34's backed by massive amounts of artillery and infantry. And by 1944 the Soviets did Blitzkrieg better than the Germans.

One of David Glantz' main hobby-horses is debunking the alleged German command superiority, particularly after Stalingrad as the Red Army's leadership sharpened up and started beating the Germans at their own game. That said, even allowing that the traditional, German-centric, German-sourced (and often German-written!) historiography of the Eastern Front made the Wehrmacht out to be superhuman geniuses, they did often compensate for inferior numbers and materiel with a certain command virtuosity, particularly at, iirc, the regimental level. That said you won't read, for example, in Manstein's memoirs about how he was outfoxed more than once in the Western Ukraine by his Soviet counterparts.

Re: you're "gah we're doing it too" comment, pure military history - the "Wehrmacht was so badass" historiography, specifically - was a part of the Wehrmacht myth and thus apposite to the thread. The war crimes aspect of the Wehrmacht myth was obviously a bit more important from a "not going to jail" point of view, but the ex-Wehrmacht leadership wrote both parts into their version of history.

Which, incidentally, was partly an Allied-supported enterprise. The US Army Historical division had a whole body of ex-German general staff officers working to on histories of the war in the post-war period, under Halder's supervision.* Central focus of the Wegner and Wood pieces in the bibliographical clippings above, and pretty important. That was, however, a while after the Nuremberg defence in '45-'46, during which I think Manstein was doing more legwork than Halder.

*Alaric Searle's Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament has a group photo of a whole gaggle of ex-General staff officers - in Wehrmacht uniform! - posing with their US Army minders at the history project. Sort of darkly hilarious to me writing my thesis. If you can't win the war...

Those IS tanks were just awesome looking.



I should start a Soviet army re-enactor group just to see what happens.

Also, the KV-1, and KV-2 heavy tanks, which were predecessors to the IS, gave Germany fits until they started deploying high velocity 50-75mm guns in large quantities. Also, a massive advantage in the production and design of self propelled guns and tank destroyers, which Germany was late to start producing and more often than not were cobbled together with odds and ends they had inherited from France or Czechoslovakia. Some of those designs were pretty good, some of them were garbage; in contrast the Soviet lineup was pretty consistently good.

Also, they didn't get that the entirety of the front glacis should be angled until they came out with the Panzer V (Panther). Which meant that even the "advanced" Pz.VI (Tiger) Pz.IV and late model Pz.III had a massive, glaring weak spot right across the entire front end of the tank.

Also, in the late war Hitler and his trusted design teams went full retard. Seriously. It got very weird. Very, very weird.

I present the KV-2:



DERP

If Panzer General is to be believed, it took a nuclear strike to destroy it. The derp is powerful.

The KV-1 you can just see to the side there is probably the more robust, due to it having the same chassis but not the freakishly giant turret with bad angles for shot deflection. On the other hand, it doesn't have the freakishly giant gun designed for bunker busting which may be capable of simply collapsing or shearing apart an opposing tank without penetrating through it's armour.

The record for a KV-1, by the way, is 135 hits bounced off it's hull in a single battle. Most of those being 20mm pisscutter guns on PzII's, with a few 37mm on PzIII's. But still: this is why when you have intelligence on the fact that your erstwhile allies are about a decade ahead of you in armour development and deployment you should not invade them. This became extremely problematic towards the end of the war, because the German materiel industry began breaking down in a bad way as supply shortages got progressively worse and labourers with low job satisfaction (hurr hurr) became sloppy with their welds and such.

Western tanks get a undeservedly bad rap too. The geometry and thickness of the armour on the Sherman was pretty good compared to the PzIII and PzIV, it's just the 75mm gun on the M4 was pitiful. Which wasn't an issue if you were Canadian or British, because we got to play with the Fireflies,while in spring 1944 when the Firefly went into production the USA was still jerking off trying to decide whether it really wanted to design and build an upgunned Sherman, or whether it would borrow them from the British. The USA eventually decided to design and build their own, because USA! USA! USA!

Yep, the tempo of Russian advances 1944-1945 was dictated by logistics more than the German resistance

Ehh, there's quite a bit more to it than that. Leading into that period you also saw the Soviet officer corps begin to rebuild, Tankograd come online, and Russia start fielding a vast arsenal of very practical weapons like the PPSh-41.

Well, the losses of Soviet Armed Forces were at least around 9 million dead. That's the entire current Swedish population. At one point Germany occupied the entire European continent AND a mindbogglingly large part of the Soviet Union. I believe that in the summer of 1945 over half of the planets tanks were Soviet. So while I'm all for re-evaluating the East Front and putting nazi worshipers behind bars, let's not pretend we don't get why the Allies wanted to pick the brains of the Germans.

On the "debunking germans" front, I read this book, probably from a recommendation on a forum somewhere, which was interesting (if a little preachy):

Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine, 1918-1945

(it's available in e-book somewhere, because I have it in e-book)

Basically it posits that the majority of the German Army High Command were mostly a bunch of passive aggressive, relatively unimaginative types, riven by numerous deficiencies. (All very very good at the tactical level mind, just failed to grasp the big picture). He goes in to quite some detail on the early war machinery (laughable PzKw I, II and III for example), the right balls up that the Luftwaffe / Goring made of the Battle of Britain etc. Procurement of any equipment (tanks, planes etc) comes in for a right kicking. IIRC correctly, Raeder and the Kriegsmarine only get addressed in passing.

Its a good read anyway, no idea on the veracity of the argument presented. A lot of what he says about early war tanks (circa 1939 - 1940) matches other sources I have read though.

Apparently this is more of the same, but focused more on individual battles - http://www.amazon.com/Blitzkrieg-Myth-Misread-Strategic-Realities/dp/0060009772

You don't have to go to 1942 to find better tanks than the Germans:
The French had them in 1940 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somua_S35 (early "medium" tank) or the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_B1 (huge heavy tank, France's version of the KV1)

Even the Brits had tanks in 1940 which could give Germans tactical scares - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_tank (The armour on this tank could defeat most German contemporary anti tank / tank guns during the fighting in France in 1940)

The problem though, was:

• The Germans deployed their tanks in combined arms formations - a "panzer" division in 1939/1940 had a whole motorised infantry regiment inside it (as well as artillery and engineers), so panzer divisions could still do infantry tasks (like stop enemy infantry from crawling all over your tanks in the dark etc - many times in the Fall of France in 1940, successful Allied (Brit and French) tank counter attacks had to withdraw due to lack of supporting infantry to secure ground)
• The French parcelled them out a "penny at time" in small formations (3-5 tanks) and made them subordinate to the local infantry commanders OR parcelled them together in formations lacking other supporting arms (infantry, artillery, Anti Air etc). the Brits were slightly better, but still behind the germans.
• Most crucially, most of the "proper" German tanks had 5 crew members AND they all had radios. This gave them far superior ability to co-ordinate their actions.

Bit bemused between the two "publisher's weekly" type blurbs there under the Mosier book. At first glance I'd have said "non-historian exploding myths that haven't been current in professional military history for a good while," but the second blurb says he has an interesting outside-the-field approach about institutional memory? - so I dunno, that could be interesting. The German counterparts to David Glantz' "how did the Red Army actually work as an army" scholarship that I can think of are mostly dated.

With respect to Talorc's "Allies vs. Germans '39-'40" bullet-points I'd caution that those contrasts are a bit old fashioned, historiographically. On balance the German doctrinal, unit structure and communications advantages were probably substantial - and one should probably also mention the concentrated use of the entire Luftwaffe, as against an ill-utilized portion of the Allied air forces.

But there wasn't really an acid test of German vs. Franco-British equipment and doctrines because May 1940 was very likely to be a one-sided contest already because of the Allies' extremely unfortunate deployment of forces along the front, in the face of an extremely concentrated German attack (backed by the entire Luftwaffe) in exactly the worst place for the Allies.

This was well laid out - by a grad student - in Don W. Alexander's "Repercussions of the Breda Variant," French Historical Studies Vol. 8, No. 3, Spring, 1974, but this "revisionist" emphasis on misdeployment (and as Ernest May argued, intelligence failure) has only gotten wide circulation in the last few years, with Ernest May and Julian Jackson's books on the Fall of France. In a nutshell, Gamelin's stretched out deployment with no strategic reserves larger than divisions might as well have had an arrow marked "Attack here and the French Army is doomed" at its Ardennes hinge, and that's precisely where the Germans poured all their best forces.

Speaking of interesting outside-the-field approaches, I strongly recommend Isabel V. Hull's Absolute Destruction: Military Culture And the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. It carefully avoids making too bold a claim about a direct connection with Wehrmacht war crimes, but it talks about how the (militarily) maximalist and "total annihilationatory-battle" orientation of the Imperial German Army fed into its (exceedingly harsh) attitudes towards real or perceived guerilla threats, and how its teeth-over-tail-logistics-be-damned aggressiveness in pursuit of Cannae-type battles led it to make logistical problems for itself that it then solved with ruthlessness towards the enemy (or civilian populations.) Without making claims about the WWII armed forces, one can certainly see connections between the harshness of Germany's colonial wars and its conduct in Belgium in 1914. (Not an idea original to Hull, but still.)

The German Army's mania for tidily perfect Cannae-type victories always interested me.

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By late '44, American tank companies had roughly even numbers of the piddly little 75mm gun and the 76mm high-velocity gun (the same one from the M18), which was at least on par with the Pz IV's gun and AT-gun-equipped StuGs.
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Yeah, that two-way radio thing is huge, a bit more efficient than trying to use signal flags in the middle of a fight.

EDIT: I think World of Tanks does a good job of showing all the 'toys' being pretty spread out. It has a bit of a Russian bias within its game system, but it does show the breadth of tanks available to the different armies, and how lackluster some of the armor layouts are on German tanks. Also, the KV-1 is indeed a monster compared to tanks of the early era.

EDIT2: Part of the 'their toys were better' bit, might be more that the Sherman was just a crappy tank. The Russians hated the ones they got through the lend-lease program. It wasn't just the gun, but also the treads weren't that great at dealing with mud that the T-34, with its wider treads, was much better at.

Depends on who you read, afaik there is no official assessment. There's also anecdotal evidence from soviet tankers' memoirs that they really liked the tank - especially the crew comfort & ergonomics that were >> T34-85.

I wouldn't disagree with that at all - other than a few hasty (desperate) counter attacks by elements smaller than a division in 1940, as you say they never really fought a proper "battle". Once the Germans crossed the River Meuse where they did it was a losing proposition for the French, absent a decent reserve to counter attack the breach.

How they would have gone in a proper fight in 1940 will always be one of those "what-if?" type scenarios. You can point to how things went in North Africa as an indicator, but again that campaign had so many strategic drivers (particularly supplies/logistics) that it still is probably not a perfect comparison.

yes, the institutional memory stuff is interesting - basic proposition is that Germans got World War I right tactically, particularly towards the end, and almost won, but were ultimately defeated by strategic methods. The Germans then took their correct tactical learnings forward from WWI, whilst the Allies kept their incorrect/inferior institutional learnings.This institutional memory then allowed them to win at the Division v Division level more times than not - but ultimately their strategic failures lead to defeat.

The whole EXPLODING MYTHS!!! thing is typical publisher oversell though, I didn't read anything hugely surprising.

EDIT: And lest I sound like one of the originally complained about German mythologists, the book mentioned spends maybe 25% of the time talking about superiority at the tactical level - whilst pointing out that the "self selecting" bias of an army made of of dour prussian military technicians that gave that advantage, also led to a dire shortage of imagination at the top ranks. The book then spends 75% of its time lambasting many many failures at the top level of German command. There is a whole chapter spent on criminality and war crimes committed by the German (ie non SS) army, as well as it being generally interwoven through the book.

I'm trying to work up to this one now, no idea how good it is:

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

From the memoirs I recently read, the actual engineering of the Sherman Tank treads were superior in that they were significantly tougher and longer-lasting than the German treads. However, this still couldn't address the resting pressure of the tank, and due to the narrow profile it put a lot of weight on a low cross-section. Other tanks that were better engineered had a lower pressure on the ground than an adult human, if I remember correctly.

You can see that just in pictures of the track -

T-34



Sherman (m4a4 version)


The tracks got "fixed" in the later "easy 8" version (M4A3E8)

The "Myth of the Eastern Front" that I picked up (good old American High School History) was that it was (slightly!) smaller than the Western Front, which was somehow conveyed without any numbers. Hah! Had to work in someway for the US to save the day, I guess.

Don't remember anything about the Germans being repainted as not-really-so-bad-just-misunderstood though -- that particular stench came some of the (the bad sort of) grognards I met when I first got into wargaming. I never got the sense that the public at large really bought into that, despite some obvious whitewashing associated with the US gobbling up ex-Nazis post WW2.

Napoleon took Moscow, a feat Hitler was never really close to accomplishing. Besides which; anyone with half a brain didn't give a damn what the Nazis thought, because it obviously didn't serve them too well in the end. Russia has always adopted scorched earth as a policy when threatened by invasion. The rules change under scorched earth: it's not about how far you advance, it's about how far you extend yourself before realizing you don't have the logistical depth and breadth to sustain your current level of operations. The Wehrmacht didn't have any better answers to this than the Grand Armee did.

The Char B1 had some very serious mechanical defects, and a focus on outmoded warfare; which which rendered it utterly untenable as an effective fighting vehicle. The Somua S35 was by all means pretty good for it's intended role, but it wasn't exactly a mainstay of armoured combat.

From a purely military standpoint that might be the case but there were other factors in play. Stalin's reign of terror and the purging of the army meant that Soviet morale was close to breaking under the strain in 1941. One of history's greater ironies is that the Germans managed to unite the Soviet Union by proving that they were worse than Stalin. The Ukraine and Belorussia could and would have risen up as a man to fight alongside the Germans if the whole pesky Lebensraum/starvation/enslavement policies hadn't made them see that Soviet rule might actually be preferable.


Hell, if the Germans had, honestly, invaded to the cry of liberating Russia from bolshevism, I suspect the army would have revolted in 1941, overthrown Stalin, and negotiated a separate peace.

I was under the impression that the prevailing wisdom amongst WWI historians was that Germany had basically lost the war by 1915 when they abandoned the Schlieffen Plan and the remaining three years of the war was the inevitable defeat playing out in slow motion.

hence the EXPLODING MYTHS!!!!! bit in the publisher blurb :-) He does make some interesting points about late WWI German tactics - particularly the "Sturmtruppen" being the precursor to combined arms tactics, particularly the idea of bypassing strong points, and infiltration tactics. I really know nothing about WWI though, so I presume the prevailing wisdom is probably correct. A cursory glance at wikipedia certainly says that the Western Allies were familiar enough with the idea.

No, this is actually one of those history factoids that exists for decades in spite of scholarly consensus very much to the contrary. The Schlieffen Plan was fascinating, as a more-cowbell (more right-wing! More Cannae!) solution to the increasingly impossible problem of a decisive-battle campaign in France, but adhering to it in 1914 (and/or ignoring the Eastern Front entirely, whatever the Russians were doing, and/or not strengthening forces in South Germany as Moltke the Younger did) wouldn't have made the plan workable.

(There also wasn't a neat green folder marked "Schlieffen Plan," Count Schlieffen just kept cranking out memorandum iirc.)

The right wing had too few roads, too far to march and (in spite of ever larger troops tasked to it) not enough force for an impossible mission. There was never an answer to the fortifications of Paris or to the basic ratio of force problems on the right wing. That doesn't mean things weren't, in an operational sense, incredibly sticky for the French and British, but the vision of "Schlieffen's version" enveloping Paris could not happen in 1914, as I understand it. .

EDIT: One of the things in Isabel Hull's book is how she traces a pattern of "sexy super-decisive march plans" in general staff planning that ignore really gross logistical problems. Look at the 1905 "Schlieffen Plan" and its path for the First Army, then think about 1914 logistics.

You're forgetting: lowlands. Narrow roads perched atop high earthen berms. A problem that would rear it's ugly head once again during Operation Market-Garden in WWII.

Hey, we still have trotskyists in France.