Monday, May 11, 2009

The Guns of August

I recently read The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. It dealt with the first month of WWI and was very good. You might recall that I did a little piece that dwelt on the First World War a while back. From this book I learned some of my assumptions were wrong but the main point: that railroads allow defenders to reinforce rapidly at any point thus preventing breakthroughs to develop to be sound.
First, the von Schlieffen plan was a surprise to the French and the British. I had assumed that it would be well known as it decades old—surely it would have leaked out? In fact the entire plan as an official copy had been bought from a German general, but the French staff discounted it (and other signs- For example; the German military controlled the railroads in Imperial Germany and had built railroads to the Belgium frontier for the purpose of supporting the mobilization and logistics required by the von Schlieffen plan.) as being implausible and most likely a German deception.
As for my point, two of the victories in the first part of the war were due to defenders shifting troops rapidly by rail. The Germans in the East shifted Corps from their position facing the first Russian army to flank the second Russian army in the south- annihilating it. Of course they were able to attack with one army momentarily uncovered because they were listening in on Russian communications (unencoded) and knew what the first army was going to do.
At the battle of the Marne, the French pulled a number of troops off of the line on their left as well as the Parisian garrison to rapidly exploit the hole in the German lines. One could not have imagines the Germans as being able to do something similar as their lines at that point were far away from abundant rails with their resupply and reinforcement.
On the whole the book was very excellent. One thing was missing, though: It mentions that in the month of August the Russians gained a decisive victory over the Austrians, capturing so many officers that the Austrians were crippled for the duration of the war. It did not go into any details of that battle, which was unfortunate in my opinion.
Also, the author states that after August (Really August plus a week or two) the war entered into a stalemate and attrition without anything interesting happening. I disagree. World War I is, among other things, very interesting because it is the first war where the strategy of technology is first consciously used with combatants deploying all kinds of new weapons such as gas, tanks, and vastly improving others such as planes, subs, siege guns etc. (The American Civil War had something like it but generally a bottom up sort of thing, not a top down). I highly recommend it for any military historian buff.