Page 77 - Atti 2014 - La neutralità 1914-1915. la situazione diplomatica socio-politica economica e militare italiana

I SeSSIone - l’ItalIa dIplomatIca 77

The German war plan
Before entering the topic of how the military relations saw a revival in about
1908, it might be helpful to throw a short glance at the German operation plan of
1914.This document happen to know under the name “Schlieffen plan”, although
this is a misleading denomination. What we understand as “Schlieffen plan” today
is merely the operational idea as developed by the Chief of the General Staff, Al-
fred von Schlieffen, in 1905. In case of a war against France and Russia the plan
intended to at first throw the great majority of the troops in an attack at France,
approaching via the Netherlands and Belgium. This is where the French army was
supposed to be defeated. In the next step, the army was to be deployed to the east
to defeat the Russians there, as the General Staff expected their mobilization to
take place at a slower pace.
For Schlieffen’s successor from 1906, Helmuth von Moltke, there appeared
however a series of issues, leading to an adaptation of the concept to reality. For
example, Moltke refrained from breaking the Dutch neutrality out of political and
economic reasons, which was to result in complicating the attack via Belgium. By
contrast to his predecessor, from 1908 Moltke had also to assume that the French
would act offensively against Alsace-Lorraine. And finally the Russian army had
recovered from its defeat in Manchuria in 1905. The Germans therefore had to
take into consideration a faster mobilization of the Russians. This plan of Moltke
was remarkable in several ways: From 1912, there was no alternative to it: The
strategic option of opening a war with strong forces against Russia that so far
had been developed synchronously was discontinued in 1912. Furthermore, there
were hardly any joint-service, strategic considerations in Moltke’s deployment
plan. Actually, army and navy fought two separate wars. The multinational, com-
bined agreements with the major ally, Austria-Hungary, were equally non-com-
mitting. The General Staff only had this one single plan for any potential conflict
within Europe.

German assessment of Italian military potential

Given this extreme operational focus one will not be surprised to find that
the role of the Italian ally was assessed to be very marginal by the General Staff.
This was partly based upon the geostrategic conditions with the Alps and neutral
7
Switzerland impeding a combined Italo-German effort against France. The Ger-
man analysts also assumed a relatively low combat power for the Italian army.

7 For the role of Switzerland in the two General Staffs‘ considerations cf. Hans Rudolf Fuhrer
and Michael Olsansky, “Die “Südumfassung”: Zur Rolle der Schweiz im Schlieffen- und im
Moltkeplan,” in Schlieffenplan, pp. 311-338.