Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 33

MARNE

Liege on 16 August, the German forces successfully began
their sweeping advance through Belgium, aiming for the
French left flank and the vicinity of Paris. In contrast, the
French, led by Gen. Joseph Joffre, though they had brief
initial offensive success in Lorraine on the common border
with Germany, were soon repulsed by the extensive
German border fortifications.
Additionally, upon discovering the German sweeping
maneuver on his left flank in mid-August, Joffre assumed
the enemy center had to be weak, and he attacked there
in the Ardennes forest with two field armies on 22 and 23
August, intending to outflank the German forces in central
Belgium. However, it was a bad assumption. The Germans
were not weak there; they had deployed more troops to the
western front than Joffre estimated. As a result, the French
forces were badly defeated and forced to retreat.
At the same time, in central Belgium one French
field army and more than four divisions of the recently arrived British Expeditionary Force (BEF) moved
forward to strike at the advancing German main
effort. However, simultaneously with the battles in
the Ardennes, the Germans struck first at Mons and
Charleroi along the Sambre River, forcing the Allied
forces to retreat—a withdrawal that ultimately continued south of the Marne River over the next twenty
days. The Germans also defeated both a British rear
guard at Le Cateau on 26 August and a French counterattack at Guise on 29 and 30 August, and so the
Germans continued to advance.
Despite the successes, there were fissures in
German operational-level planning and execution
that quickly became debilitating cracks. In the spirit
of independence fostered among units in the prewar
Imperial German Army, the German field army commanders seemingly thought of themselves and their
units as, essentially, fighting their own individual battles.
As a result, they conducted operations without effective
synchronization with the other army commanders to
establish coherence of action relative to the larger strategic plan. This tendency was particularly pronounced
with the two commanders on the German right wing
(fighting the Allied left): Col. Gen. Alexander von Kluck
(First Army) and Col. Gen. Karl von Bülow (Second
Army). As a result, overall German commander Col.
Gen. Helmut Count von Moltke (the Younger), with a
weak communications system and a personal unwillingness to leave his headquarters that was located far
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2015

from the front, soon lost control of the right wing forces,
effectively ceding to his subordinates authority to direct
operations independently.
Consequently, a perilous lack of synchronization
and coherence between the armies soon emerged due
largely to a significant difference in the personalities
of the commanders involved. Kluck, on the extreme
right, was very aggressive and read directives from
Moltke in that light. However, Bülow, to Kluck’s left,
was much more cautious—particularly after having to
repulse an unexpectedly costly French counterattack
at Guise. Therefore, in the absence of clear and timely
revised instructions from Moltke, the German field
commanders—particularly Kluck—began to adjust
the pace of their operations according to their own
individual temperaments, resulting in overall loss of
unified action between their armies.
In addition, German miscalculation and command
impetuosity were fueled, in part, by overly optimistic
estimates of the damage caused by the success of the
early German attacks. The reality was that despite the
rapid progress of the initial German advance and the
heavy casualties they inflicted on the Allied forces, the
Germans were not really destroying the Allies as much
as they were pushing them away. This left Allied forces
largely intact; though in disarray, they were fully capable of reorganizing for counterattack if given the time.
Kluck saw this and tried to take advantage of it
by independently changing his route of advance in
order to envelop the French forces facing Bülow (see
figure 2). His intent was to smash the French before they had a chance to reorganize. However, this
maneuver turned his own right flank opposite Paris
and created a gap between his troops and those of
Bülow—while failing to catch the French. The gap
handed the French an unexpected opportunity to split
the German forces, which Joffre seized.
On 8 September, when Moltke found out about the
gap that had opened on his lines, he became very pessimistic about the situation. Kluck, however, remained
very optimistic, even after he discovered several days
earlier (5 September) that the French were massing
forces on his right. Willing to take what he viewed as a
calculated risk, over the next few days Kluck stripped
forces from his front on the Marne in phases to reinforce
his right flank across the Ourcq River. He did this in the
belief that he could beat the French there and then turn
31