alternatehistory.com

You can probably tell from the title where this is going. Anyways, I'm planning to make this much more involved than anything I've done before on this website... enjoy :)
And no, it's not an overdone topic.
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Luft 19

On Christmas Day, 1904, the 71-year-old Count Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, the German field marshal and Chief of the General Staff, was at home with his family. Although he was normally exceptionally devoted to his duty in the Deutsches Heer, and his health was by no means bad considering his advanced age, he had decided to take this opportunity to spend time with some old relatives of his in Rügen. The old fellow was absent-mindedly chewing a slice of pork when he felt a nauseating unpleasantness in his stomach.

He involuntarily spat chanking across his plate and onto the tablecloth. “Gesundheit!” exclaimed the portly woman next to him, his second cousin, once removed. She patted him on the back and he quickly regained his composure.

Barely a moment had passed when he began violently vomiting. The others at the dinner table screamed. A servant rushed over to help. But they could do nothing. Twenty-four hours later, von Schlieffen was dead of gastrointestinal sickness.




The death stunned the German military. At his funeral, Kaiser Wilhelm II spoke emotionally and passionately about the deceased field marshal:

“In von Schlieffen, we had a man whose strategic brilliance was unsurpassed, and whose devotion to his country was undeniable.”

Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, nephew of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (a strategist and commander revered perhaps even more than Alfred von Schlieffen) was subsequently appointed Chief of the General Staff.



Von Moltke began to give a great deal of thought to the possibility of a two-front war against France and Russia simultaneously. Von Schlieffen had said before that if the Germans went to war with France and Russia, that Germany should focus on defeating France first. But Moltke knew that the border with France was rather short and easily defensible. Surely, the French could send their armies through Belgium, but that could anger neutral nations and bring them to Germany’s side. The border with Russia, on the other hand, was long and undeveloped.

Surely, von Moltke reasoned, the answer was to keep a defensive stance against France in the West, and keep on the offensive against Russia. The Russians would have to spend a great deal of time assembling armies and sending them across their vast empire to the West. They would be caught off-guard, allowing the German armies to sweep across Russia’s agricultural and industrial regions like water across a flood plain. Meanwhile the French would be stopped in their tracks by fixed defenses manned by a moderately sized army. This strategy was widely accepted by the German Army, and came to be known as the Moltke Plan.
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