Kensai wrote:Out of curiosity, was the Rupprecht Plan a real historical plan?
Kensai wrote:Out of curiosity, was the Rupprecht Plan a real historical plan?
Random wrote:With the caveat that none of the War Plans were actually war plans per se, a reasonable answer is probably "sort of".
What are generally referred to as war plans were more or less mobilization schemes in that hard objectives beyond initial contact were usually left pretty nebulous. In the case of von Moltke the Younger and his plan, generally called incorrectly the Schlieffen Plan, the seven west front armies were given tasks that largely depended on what the Entente did. That said, the invasion of Belgium was a given and extensive super-heavy artillery was provided to the right flank armies to deal with the fortified zones at Liege, Namur, Givet Mauberge and Lille.
The German's actually issued mobilization plans called Aufmarsches, generally in April and the one used in the Great War was Aufmarsche 1914/15.
However, generally every year would see staff studies and "staff rides" and kriegspiels to test different situations and the appropriate military responses. As near as I have been able to determine is that what is termed "Plan Rupprecht" was from a staff study aimed at preventing Britain joining France over Belgium and active Italian belligerence as an ally of Germany. Staff talks between Italy and Germany were very limited but using a southern German axis of advance was favoured by Cadorna, the Italian Chief of Staff. Invading Switzerland placed the German and Italian armies shoulder to shoulder and served to flank the French frontier fortifications.
Since Italian cooperation was always problematic and the Swiss Army was held in fairly high regard, there seems to have been little incentive to go so far as to creating an actual and complete mobilization scheme for a southern flanking operation. I could find nothing linking it to Crown Prince Rupprecht, Commander Sixth Army and de facto commander of the left flank of the German army in the West and so presume that the name was picked for colour.
Without Italian war entry on the side of the Central Powers and British neutrality, the Rupprecht Plan does not serve Germany at all well.
As an aside, those expansive arrows seen on map after map depicting the "Schlieffen Plan" have no counterparts in any existing contemporary German documentation and first appear in the post war US Army War Collage Atlas of the War! The German's were certain that they would be outnumbered in the West and the only forces actually anticipated to pass to the west of Paris as commonly believed, were some Ersatz corps that acted as strategic reserves and could be allocated to other areas if necessary. In the event those troops ended up at the siege of Antwerp, reinforcing Fifth Army at Verdun and to Eighth Army in the East before the right-flank armies reached the approaches to Paris.
-C
Also troops used to bulk up the eight army were not ersatz, these were highly trained elite troops including the famous "GARDE RESERVE KORPS" including the 3rd guards division and guards reserve division (unlike reservists it was made up of guards of the smaller kingdoms like mecklenburg, etc) and the 3rd foot guards was the best division in GERMANY after the ALPENKORPS.. witness its participation as the "breakthrough" unit in almost every major campaign.
Random wrote:Ersatz here is used in the original German Army sense, replacement troops, fully trained and equipped but not yet assigned as replacements to field units. Every annual conscription class produced soldiers in excess of the numbers necessary for the field units. In 1914, Ersatz units up to division level were created this way.
As for the rest, it is easy to be wise after the event. I suggest that you get hold of a copy of Gerhard Ritter's "The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth" for another view of the famous plan.
Everybody's pre-war doctrine (some might call it dogma) lay in the absolute faith in the primacy of the offensive; to just expect the generals to dump years of training in the opening days of the Great War makes zero sense and flies in the face of experience. Few of the leaders were "stupid" but many proved less than effective or unable to adapt to the realities they faced even if the command and control means allowed them to do so and that in itself was rare.
A Few Good reads include:
Norman Stone - The Eastern Front 1914-17;
Terence Zuber - The Battle of the Frontiers: Ardennes 1914 and The Real German War Plan 1904-1914
Robert Doughty - Pyrric Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War
Bruce Gudmundsson - Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army 1914-18
-C
I agree to an extent with that thesis, but if Germany has not supported Austria in 1914, it would have been a humiliation for Austria or maybe a Austro-Serb war in which Russia may launch on Austria with disastrous consequences for Germany as Austria was the only ally left due to horrible diplomacy.
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