Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps (3 of 3 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps by Alan Axelrod. Copyright 2007 Alan Axelrod
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INTRODUCTION (CONT'D)

At six o'clock on the evening of July 23, Berchtold made ten demands of Belgrade, including a demand that Austrian officials be given free rein to root out and punish all sources of anti-Austrian agitation and propaganda within Serbia. In the meantime, the government of Czar Nicholas II promised Serbia's premier, Nicholas Pashich, that Russia would "do everything" to help Serbia defend itself. Armed with this pledge, on July 25 Pashich delivered his response to Berchtold's ultimatum. Serbia would comply unconditionally with nine of the demands, but could not allow Austrian military and judicial officials to operate independently within their sovereign country. Berchtold proclaimed this a cause for war, and Austrian Emperor Franz Josef signed the declaration against Serbia on July 28. Russia responded by ordering a partial mobilization of forces near the Austrian border.
Germany's chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, urgently telegraphed Berchtold: "Serbia has in fact met the Austrian demands in so wide-sweeping a manner that if the Austro-Hungarian government adopted a wholly uncompromising attitude, a gradual revulsion of public opinion against it in all of Europe would have to be reckoned with." Berchtold made no reply.

Even as he tried to make the unreasonable Berchtold see reason, Bethmann-Hollweg warned Russia that its partial mobilization was a cause for war, and the German navy was put on a war footing in the North Sea. This caused Winston Churchill, at the time Great Britain's First Sea Lord, to mobilize the British Grand Fleet on July 29--the very day on which Austrian gunboats commenced the shelling of Serbia's capital, Belgrade, thereby beginning the war. On the next day, Nicholas II ordered the full mobilization of Russia's armed forces, prompting Helmuth von Moltke, chief of staff of the German army, to pick up a telephone and instruct Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, chief of staff of the Austro-Hungarian army, to "Mobilize at once against Russia."

Moltke was a military commander, not a head of state, and yet it was on his unquestioned orders, barked over a telephone line, that the war was first fatally expanded. Austria-Hungary shifted from its Plan B, the scenario for a local war against Serbia--the only war it really wanted--to its Plan R, a blueprint for a general war against Serbia and Russia. As for Germany, it was governed by a plan first drawn up at the start of the century by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, which had been repeatedly refined and modified, but, in a strange lapse of imagination, did not include a scenario in which Russia played no part; the plan therefore committed Germany to war against France and Russia. Moreover, Moltke and everyone else in the German government and military assumed that every other major government operated from the same set of assumptions: that war necessarily meant a general war, all encompassing.
Therefore, Germany issued an ultimatum to Russia, demanding that it call off its general mobilization. To France, Germany threatened war if it made any move to mobilize. While Russia rejected the German ultimatum flatly, France replied more coyly that it would consult its "own interests." The German government took both replies as a motive for its own general mobilization, which was ordered on August 1. On that day, the German army began to execute the Schlieffen Plan.

The Schlieffen Plan was predicated on the assumption that the French, whose military was more modern and more efficiently led, would mobilize more quickly than the Russians, who, though numerous, were poorly equipped and poorly led. Schlieffen calculated that Russia would take at least six weeks to mobilize effectively; therefore, his plan called for a quick offensive war against France and a simultaneous defensive war against Russia. France would be invaded at lightning speed and with overwhelming force while a smaller army would fend off a Russian invasion of eastern Prussia. It was critically important that France be neutralized within weeks, so that forces could be transferred from the western front to the eastern before Russia fully mobilized. With France out of the picture, Germany could convert its eastern defense into an offensive operation. Knock out the French, and the Russians would be defeated.

Schlieffen did not propose a direct frontal assault on France--a straightforward east-to-west march across the border--but instead laid down what he called a "great wheel," a wide, turning movement up through Flanders Plain, northeast of French territory. From there, the German armies would swoop down on France, hitting the French left flank and also hooking around from behind. Five major German armies would sweep wide from Alsace-Lorraine all the way west to the English Channel. Schlieffen instructed field commanders to "let the sleeve of the last man on the right brush the English Channel."

To execute the great wheel, the German army needed to march through neutral Belgium. On August 2, the German government demanded free passage through that country. Even before King Albert could refuse, German divisions began advancing through Flanders. At three o'clock on the afternoon of August 3, Britain's prime minister, Sir Edward Grey, addressed Parliament on the nation's solemn treaty obligation to protect Belgian neutrality: "If . . . we run away from these obligations of honor and interest as regards the Belgian Treaty . . . I do not believe for a moment that, at the end of this war . . . we should be able . . . to prevent the whole of the West of Europe opposite us from falling under the domination of a single power . . . and we should, I believe, sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world." That evening, Germany declared war on France, and as day slipped into twilight and twilight into night, Grey took a friend aside.
"The lamps are going out all over Europe," he said. "We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." At dawn, having already invaded Belgium, Germany declared war on Belgium, and England, coming to Belgium's aid, joined all those other European powers, great and small, in what would be an all-consuming war.

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