The Road To Smolensk

German war plans had always condensed the entire front, one of the largest of the war, down to a few critical points. The German general staff reasoned that if these points could all be captured then Russian capitulation was all but assured. While this might sound like the perpetuation of some kind of comical German stereotype, the truth is, that it was the methodical and detailed madness of the German General Staff, of this period, that treated their war plans like it were some kind of elaborate clock, that was largely responsible for most of the facets of the stereotype that we know today. In fact, the German staff officers, of that time, were the very source of making the comparison of wars and clocks. They were not entirely wrong.

There is an old joke about a man getting on a German train and not hearing the stations being called at each stop. When he questioned the conductor on the matter he was answered with a question about the schedule. The German conductor was told, by the man, that the schedule reported the train’s arrival, at his departure station, at eight-oh-five. The Conductor then told the man, “so, at eight-oh-five, just get off the train.” The man did and he was where he should be. It was the late nineteenth century that developed this mentality and it went back to a lesson that the German’s had learned in 1870. It was that, war runs on rails, and rails run on clocks.

The fact is that the Germans invented what, today, we generically refer to as a General Staff. Each nation has invented and reinvented names for these collections of organizations but, prior to just before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 it simply did not exist anywhere. After that war, and by the time of the Great War, every nation had one. The Germans had proven, quite spectacularly, that they were indispensable. A lot of the reason for this development in warfare is the emergence of the railroad.

While most people are familiar with cartoons of bafoonish generals pushing pins on a map, safely in the rear, and know the glorified names that these organizations call themselves, what has never truly come to light is exactly what the General Staff is. Too put it simply, the General Staff was the point at which someone applied Scientific Method to warfare, with a liberal helping of bureaucracy. In other words, the Germans had not just married the idea of critical thinking skills to warfare but, they had inadvertently done the same with middle management. While this has been the butt of many jokes, it is also proven itself crucial to the implementation of large scale warfare. It would be entirely impossible to do so, without it.

The early versions of these systems had some serious flaws and this war brought almost all of them to light. This war would also be the seed of how these flaws got fixed. While I have already mentioned the lack of attention paid to tactical details, such as those used by Jesse James and his “Confederate Foreign Legion” at Roswell, there was still another aspect of warfare that was also being equally ignored. That was at the Operational level.

For the uninitiated student of the military, who may have heard these terms but, are not quite sure what they mean, it’s really quite simple. Unfortunately, the military, like any other profession, tries to hide it’s inner workings by inventing a vocabulary that makes the job look more challenging than it really is. That’s why most people hear these terms, apply their own meaning, and then water down the term until it sounds stupid, at which point, the military makes up another word that sounds better until the cycle repeats itself. The truth is that while the terms might change, the job, itself, has remained largely the same for all of human history, the basics of which are the three levels, which are strategic, operational, and tactical.

Your strategic concerns are, quite literally, the big picture. This is the level where you consider resources, your entire military force, and how to channel these resources to get the most out of them. On the opposite end of the scale is the tactical. You could almost say that strategy is why you do things and tactical is how. In the middle of this is the art of operations and it is a curious blend of both. The operational commander has to blend the why and the how into a cohesive plan on the battlefield proper.

While there had been some thought put into tactical planning, mostly revolving around the new technology that was available, primarily long ranged rifles that were easy to reload, as we have seen it was nowhere near what it needed to be. At the same time, the operational level of warfare had not only been completely ignored but, this ignorance was defended vigorously by most professional soldiers. The time honored ‘rules of war’ had worked and no one had seen where they should change. The actual terminology for these rules differ from one nation to the next but, they can all be summed up to the most common which is most often called, ‘economy of force.’

While the professional soldiers were not completely wrong in their stubborn instance that the economy of force was still quite valid, they held to it so rigidly that it can be easily argued that the problem was in the very definition of the term that they had all come to universally accept. They held to it with such religious convictions that they had completely forgotten why they were doing it in the first place. They kept doing it even after there was plenty of evidence that something about it had gone horribly wrong. They were also at a loss to fix this.

Traditionally, a commander on a battlefield has only a few basic considerations and this is where the economy part comes in. His troops have to have beans and bullets and they all have to be at the same place and time when they meet the enemy. The commander Robert E Lee, was an exceptional operational commander even if his strategic thinking has, subsequently, shown a great deal to be desired. Lee was successful because he was good at scattering his forces when they needed to be and pulling them together when it was at the most critical of moments. Why scatter your men in the first place? It’s the beans and bullets part. An army is more than just the guys pulling the trigger, it needs all of those people in the rear to keep them in good enough shape to pull that trigger.

As anyone knows, a pack rat is a horrible person to take a vacation with. They tend to load down your car with everything imaginable, that makes the trip uncomfortable, increases your time on the road, only to find out that most of the junk that they packed is useless when you reach your destination. Military supply people are habitual pack rats and they have a very similar effect on armies. The way around this is to scatter your forces into smaller groups that makes living off the land practical because, the more land you cover, the more supplies you will find.

This tactic also solves the problem of insufficient roads. Anyone who has driven in rush hour traffic knows that the more people trying to use one road, no matter how well regulated, always results in a traffic jam. It is something that city planners have become intimately familiar with in more recent times. They had thought that the answer to rush hour traffic jams was to simply add more lanes. What they discovered was that no matter how much you widen a road the traffic always fills it to beyond capacity. Governments spent large sums on figuring this out when all they really should have done was ask the army for they have been intimately familiar with this problem since ancient times.

Of course, Robert E Lee did not invent this operational tactic. He was a student of Napoleon who did not invent it either. Napoleon was a student of Julius Caesar and while we do not know if Caesar invented it, his campaigns in Gaul were the first recorded uses. We also know that by 1901, with the widespread use of railroads, a lot of these common sense practices had fallen into disuse because many commanders on the field were overly relying on the technology that they saw as the ultimate answer to victory even if, so far, it had failed to deliver.

What they were concentrating on at the front was, just that, concentration of force. This is the flip side of economy and was best described by Napoleon when he said, “god is on the side with the biggest battalions.” It also comes down to what Nathan Forrest said, “get there first with the most.” Unfortunately, this was not working in 1901 and, again, everyone was at a loss to explain why. With the advantage of hindsight, we can easily see what the problem was. The simple fact was that they were not achieving concentration. Nobody was gaining numerical superiority because, again, they were so tied to those rail lines that it narrowed their front of advance.

Physical reality dictates that one piece of solid matter can only occupy one point in space at one point in time. Soldiers are solid matter and in order to get the kinds of numbers that are required, a minimum of three attackers to one defender, to make a successful attack, one needs a broad front to accomplish this. You would think that with all of the space on the Russian Front, one of the two sides might have used this advantage but, up till 1901, nobody had thought to try. They had spent too much time working on their rail schedules.

That situation was changing though. There had been divisional commanders who were clamoring for the authority to do just that, using the space to maneuver more effectively. Most notable of these men were two, by the names of Erich Ludendorff and Paul Von Hindenburg. While Hindenburg was already a divisional commander at the start of the war, Ludendorff had risen rapidly to that position after it’s start. He had also spent some time working as Chief of Staff for another key figure, that man being Helmuth Von Moltke. This connection would serve to be crucial in the months to come.

The Moltke name was already well known in the German military when the war began. That is why our Moltke had picked up the moniker, “the younger.” His uncle, with an almost identical name, had been largely credited with the defeat of France in 1870 and gained something of a hero status in Germany for the last part of the 19^th century. Even so, the Younger had yet to really prove himself in battle. His personality did not help matters and, strangely enough, this is not because he was stereotypical of what we tend to think of as German Field Marshall’s today. Those men somewhat earned the stereotype of being loud and bombastic while Moltke was most often described, by those who knew him, as a quiet and unassuming introvert who liked to read.

By 1901, his lack of volume was no longer a handicap and more of an asset. The simple fact that Waldersee had failed was enough. The term, “the road to Smolensk” had become something of a joke amongst German enlisted men. They had been hearing that jargon since the start of the war and, three years later, they had not gone much further than their own border. Smolensk was the last fortified point before Moscow. It was reasoned that once Smolensk had fallen then the primary Russian manufacturing center was no longer defendable. So far, Waldersee had not even managed to capture his month one objectives like Warsaw.

Now that a surge of Russian conscripts were threatening to break the entire front, Waldersee was recalled. He and the Kaiser were reported to have had a furious argument, although, we have no idea what the two men said since no one else was in the room. It was recorded by others, however, that the volume of this argument, which echoed past doors and down the corridors, was more than enough to give us the gist of the conversation. In the end, the fact that Waldersee left that room and retired from service is all we really need to know. The only question after that was, who would replace him?

Today, the ascension of Moltke seems to be set in stone. It looks like one of those decisions that was so automatic that we rarely even question it. The truth of the matter is there were any number of men vying for Waldersee’s job. The two most prominent of these were not Moltke. The first was, of course, Schlieffen who wanted a posting that would allow him to prove some of this theories. Unfortunately for him, the ferocity of the French offensive had required that he do the one thing that the General Staff had told him to avoid, and that was ask for more troops. Wilhelm was tired of listening to Schleiffen, at this point, anyway. He often called the general an, “old nanny,” and the Kaiser probably did not see himself dealing with Schleiffen on a daily basis anyway.

The other man vying for the job, probably, had the best chance of getting it. He was Waldersee’s deputy commander, and had personally overseen the fighting around Warsaw. His name was Hans Beesler and he has been largely forgotten in history. His record has been commented on as mostly unremarkable and, at the time, it must have seemed that way to the Kaiser as well. Still, there are those that say, Beesler had proven himself a competent commander. They also like to point out that he was senior to Moltke and that it was Moltke’s political ties to the Kaiser who ultimately got him the job.

How much of this is really true is open to speculation. What we do know is that when the Kaiser stomped out of that office, where he had just dismissed Waldersee, it is likely that he was tired of dealing with bombastic generals with giant plumes of feathers on their helmets. There was Moltke, who had been sitting quietly behind a crowd of military men, and had just sat down the book he was reading as he waited for his Emperor. The Kaiser obviously took notice and probably remembered that this quiet man had been at the heart of any number of key suggestions, one of which was a movie they were supposed to be screening later that evening.

The Kaiser looked at the faces of those around him, then stomped right up to Moltke and told him, “you are in charge. Bring me victory.” Wilhelm said nothing else to anyone. He left, obviously still enraged and nobody wanted to bother the man because of it. Moltke later recorded that he was as surprised as anyone and was at a loss for words when all eyes shifted to him. This indecision would not last long. In this matter, Moltke was very much like Roosevelt in that he had been at the heart of the German war effort long enough that he already knew the facts. He also had the presence of mind to quickly summon others who might have some idea about what to do with the situation.

That was why, two days later, Moltke had a meeting with most of his front line commanders. He listened to them instead of making speeches, then he retired to his private quarters where he read and thought. A few days later, some serious reorganizations were implemented and, key among them was that both Ludendorff and Hindenburg were raised to corps level commanders and given a virtual free hand in what they did. In less than a week, this would prove decisive.