Schlieffen and the Avoidance of Tactics: A Reinvestigation

Abstract

This article challenges the view that Schlieffen tried to evade the tactical conundrum of the modern battlefield by resorting to the operational level of war. On that view, the outflanking strategy of the Schlieffen Plan, with its supposed avoidance of frontal attack, betokened a failure to come to terms with the firepower revolution that had so enormously strengthened the tactical defensive. But Schlieffen did in fact engage directly with this problem by creating a mobile heavy artillery to improve the offensive tactical capability of the German army. Moreover, the Schlieffen Plan was not based exclusively on the outflanking principle. Schlieffen reckoned that the envelopment of Paris could succeed only in conjunction with a frontal assault on the whole line between Paris and Verdun, an immense tactical undertaking crucially supported by the mobile heavy artillery.