Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | страница 46

battles at the field-army level rather than as a whole,
so a coordinated response to the Allied advance, aside
from a retreat to regroup, probably was not possible.

Other Impacts
The attitudes, personalities, and leadership
styles on both sides of the conflict had a significant
impact on the outcome of the campaign.
Contrasting attitudes. Moltke became very pessi mistic at the first sign that there would be no swift
victory despite having a very large, well-organized,
and well-supplied force at his disposal that had won
an impressive successive string of tactical victories.
In contrast, his French counterpart, Joffre, remained
optimistic despite a month of continuous defeats
and retreat. In doing so, both Joffre and his troops
showed great psychological resilience in the campaign in contrast to the German High Command.
For example, despite general weariness, the German
troops continued to perform well. This was clearly
evident in their ability to blunt the effects of a great
French counterattack that could have been catastrophic for the Germans, who responded instead with a
relatively short and well-ordered retreat. Nevertheless,
Joffre publicly transformed the fact that the Allies had
forced the Germans onto the defensive and into a retreat into a major victory—in the minds of his soldiers,
the civilian population, and likely, the German High
Command as well.
As a result, given the strategic situation, the lack of a
quick victory was for Germany a major, if not immediately apparent, psychological and moral defeat. Ironically,
while the Germans operated using what is today almost
universally considered to be the superior mode of command (mission command) to tactically win all the battles
of the campaign in terms of number of casualties inflicted
and other damage to the Allies, they strategically lost
because their leaders had decided they had. The purported Napoleonic adage which holds that “the moral is to the
physical as three to one” evidently applied to the situation
of the Germans and French on 9 September 1914, as it
still applies to military forces today.
Impact of personality. Surely the personalities of
the individual commanders played the greatest role
leading to the outcome of the campaign. The most
glaring examples are manifest in the relationships of
Moltke, Kluck, and Bülow.
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The personality differences are evident in the
comparative reactions of the two field army commanders, Kluck and Bülow, to the abject fatigue resulting
from a month of marching, intermittent battles, and
the uncertainty of the enemy situation. While at the
start of September both commanders recognized the
exhaustion of their forces, Kluck continued to advance,
crossing the Marne and then transferring the bulk of
his army by forced marches to the Ourcq front. After
fighting there for five days, Kluck marched his troops
forty miles to the new Aisne positions, where they
then repulsed Allied attacks. Kluck was able to lead his
forces in such extraordinary effort even after they had
reached extreme exhaustion.
Meanwhile, Bülow rested his troops for a day and a
half and slowed his advance to invest the minor fortress
of La Fere, which the French then evacuated. Bülow’s
caution resulted in Kluck’s inadvertent gain of a day’s
march on him, which contributed to the gap that
opened between the two armies. Only Bülow’s left wing
continued to attack until the retreat to the Aisne began.
Kluck was able to get so much more out of his
troops than Bülow because his optimistic aggressiveness kept up their morale. He also seemed to have a
clear understanding of what his troops were capable
of, and he had confidence that he and his subordinates
could get them to do it. However, Kluck’s aggressiveness
irritated both Moltke and Bülow, causing Moltke to
twice place Kluck under Bülow’s command.
The enduring importance of leadership. The
most obvious lesson of first Marne campaign with
relevance not only to mission command but also to
the concept of command in general is the enduring
importance of leadership at all levels. At the start of
the war, Europe had enjoyed a period of more than
forty years of general peace, although it saw a concurrent rise of large conscripted armies. Formerly
intermixed national identities congealed into national states with deep mistrust of each other. Massive
armies emerged as had never been fielded before. As
a result, on the European continent, no senior officers
in any of the alliances that would eventually fight each
other had any practical experience commanding such
large forces except in exercises, though a great deal
of theory had been written about such commands. In
Great Britain, British commanders did not even have
the experience of exercise maneuvers, as the British
November-December 2015  MILITARY REVIEW