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Railroads During Mobilization-5

During the first days, the army’s railroad personnel and the railroad formations had to carry out their own mobilization operation. During the first and second mobilization day the mobilization transports started carrying reservists to the railroad units or to the places where they received their equipment and their weapons. These transports then had to carry them back to their active or reserve formations where they were to be integrated. During the first and second mobilization day the Militärfahrplan and the pre-war civilian timetable still widely ran in parallel. Civilian traffic was fully stopped on the third mobilization day. The mobilization transports reached their peak between the third and the fifth mobilization day. Altogether 20,800 mobilization transports were scheduled in the Militärfahrplan.

Starting on the evening of the fifth mobilization day, the war transports began to deploy the mobilized active and reserve formations into their assembly areas. This huge wave of transports required 165,000 closed freight cars and 60,000 open platform cars that carried the bulk of the army between the fifth and the 14^th mobilization day. On 16 August, Liège was taken after a bloody assault. Meanwhile, the advance in the west commenced; 2,070,000 men, 118,000 horses, and 400,000 tons of material had already been brought forward. In the west, there were 13 double-laned transport lines available for the 660 trains per day that were planned to run along each line. Trains crossed the river Rhine over 15 railroad bridges at the rate of 563 trains of 54 cars each per day at an average speed of 30 km an hour. At the Hohenzollern bridge alone, 2,150 trains crossed between 2 and 8 August; one every 10 minutes.

The deployment of troops (including all columns and trains) required the following railroad car capacities:

On average, an army corps required about 140 standard military trains (two trains required by the corps staff); a reserve corps needed significantly less with only 85 trains. A cavalry division managed with about 31 standard military trains. Army commands (Armee-Oberkommando) required seven trains. Usually, an army corps was allocated 20 trains per day, which meant that it took seven days on average to have an army corps with all its columns and supply trains operationally ready in its assembly area. Some corps were transported with higher priority and used 30 or 40 trains per day. Formations of the II, V, and VI Army Corps spent up to four days sitting on their trains before arrival at their railroad head stations. This was due to the long distances from Pomerania and Silesia in the east to their western border assembly areas and the slow average speed of the military trains. After detraining, the troops often had to march another 50 or more kilometers before arriving in their scheduled assembly areas.

The railroad deployment was the most important piece of the entire mobilization plan. Mobilized active and reserve formations needed to arrive to their assembly areas in time, and they had to be operationally ready for the start of the offensive. This was the most essential task in the transformation process from a peacetime army to a fully mobilized war machine. This railroad deployment seemed to work with clockwork precision and exactly as scheduled in the mobilization plan. But this clockwork precision had one major and unintended side effect: it created inflexibility. During the first 15 mobilization days, the army was busy carrying out the scheduled mobilization and deployment plans. Because the General Staff had decided in 1913 to focus exclusively upon the Western Theater and to skip the alternative deployment plans to both east and west, things slipped out of political control. The 16^th Infantry Division had to conquer Luxembourg before dawn of the first mobilization day to make use of the scheduled Luxembourg train connections. The coup de main on Liége had to succeed by the fourth mobilization day to allow the First and Second Army to advance through the Liège bottleneck, which unfortunately was closed and barred by a Belgian fortress.

But the political side suffered the most from this inflexibility, because the clockwork mobilization schedule took away any control from the Kaiser and the Reichskanzler once it was set in motion. Moltke the Younger ruled out any attempt to limit the war to the Eastern Theater (today we know that it would have been impossible to limit the war to the east due to the alliances among Russia, France and England). The Chief of General Staff stated very clearly that it was impossible to change the current deployment with focus in the west into a new deployment with the trains moving eastwards. Moltke told the Kaiser on 1 August that doing so would create an “unorganized mass of armed men being concentrated in the East without having proper food and supplies available.” The Reichskanzler was only informed on 1 August that the mobilization plan, deployment schedule, and early operations would limit the diplomatic leeway to either localize the war in the east or to avoid the outbreak of hostilities at all. The assault on Liège required the violation of Belgian neutrality, which—bearing in mind that the political decision-makers were not informed in advance—was probably the climax of German militarism before 1914. The Versailles Treaty later labeled Germany as the aggressor and stated that Germany alone was responsible for beginning the war. This limitation was caused exclusively by a military-focused mobilization and deployment plan that lacked any consideration of possible political repercussions. This limitation is the real tragedy of Schlieffen’s idea of shifting the operational focus exclusively to the west.