******
The concept of pre-emptive attack in warfare is an idea almost as old
as war itself. From the charioteers of ancient Egypt to the Mongol cavalry
of the medieval era to the hit-and-run guerrilla raiders of the American
Civil War to the use of drone strikes against the Taliban in our own time,
the element of surprise has long been a major factor in military science.
Even the threat of a pre-emptive assault can have serious impact on world
history, as anyone who remembers the Cold War notion of “Mutually Assured
Destruction” can attest.
So it’s hardly surprising that when long-simmering tensions between
Germany and France threatened to explode into open war in the summer of
1870, the French military leadership of those days was highly tempted to
mount a pre-emptive invasion of what is today Germany in hopes of getting
the upper hand over the forces of Prussia’s King Wilhelm I. And at first,
the gamble seemed to be working brilliantly. But in the end, as we’ll see
shortly, all the French achieved in firing the first shots of the Franco-
Prussian War was to stoke the fires of Wilhelm’s anger and set the stage
for a long, costly stalemate which would have dramatic repercussions for
for both sides in the postwar years.
******
By all rights the invasion of what is today Germany should never
have happened. The royal government of France’s Napoleon III had little
to gain and a great deal to lose by mounting a large-scale land attack
on its Prussian neighbors; indeed, the majority of the French monarch’s
senior military and diplomatic advisors argued against war with Prussia
unless circumstances rendered any other action impossible. Likewise the
Prussian monarchy was in no rush to flex its martial muscles when it was
just as easy for Wilhelm I to gain his ends via diplomatic methods.
But in the autumn of 1869 that all started to change. A scandal
involving the French army chief of staff and his two most senior aides
trigged a major shakeup of the entire French military that in turn led
to a shift in the balance of power within Napoleon III’s cabinet. The
voices of caution started to find themselves being shouted down by the
factions that advocated a more activist stance in dealing with Prussia.
This in turn led to the Prussian army to begin a slow buildup of troops
and fortifications along Prussia’s border with France as the Kaiser grew
steadily more anxious about the increasingly hardline stance the French
was government was taking towards its Prussian neighbor.
By February of 1870 the two countries were locked in a bitter arms
race-- a race in which the Prussians had a considerable head start coming
out of the gate. Besides having more land area and a larger population on
which they could draw to fill the ranks of their army, the Prussians had a
far more cohesive government than the French did. Whereas the Napoleon
regime in Paris was increasingly riddled with corruption and dissent, the
Kaiser’s cabinet thought and acted as one; the same was true of his army’s
general staff, which had started wargaming possible scenarios for conflict
with France as early as October of 1869 and come up with at least a dozen
strategies for quickly overcoming their French adversaries. And as great as
the Prussian advantage was on land, the Kaiser had an even stronger edge at
sea-- not only did the Prussian fleet enjoy numerical superiority over its
French counterpart, but its ships tended to be better engineered and faster
to boot.
Another advantage the Prussians had over the French was an intangible:
while France’s civilian population was as sharply divided as its political
and military leadership if not more so, the Prussian people were united by
belief in the ideal of unification with their brethren in other regions of
what is today Germany. Like the American and French revolutions of the 18th
century, Prussia’s impending conflict with France would primarily be about
achieving a political goal as opposed to acquiring new territory or gaining
more resources-- although the Kaiser would certainly welcome such things if
they happened.
In May of 1870 French intelligence agents uncovered evidence that the
Prussian army was repositioning many of its elite artillery units along the
Prussian border with France. The militarists in Napoleon III’s cabinet, not
shy in the first place about urging their emperor to be more proactive when
it came to dealing with Prussia, seized on those reports as the proverbial
“smoking gun” to bear out their argument that the French had to strike the
first blow against Prussia before the Prussian army could get any stronger.
Despite having understandable(and, as it turned out, well-founded) qualms
about the wisdom of launching a pre-emptive attack on his neighbors in the
east, the French emperor agreed to follow the hard-liners’ advice, and on
June 1st he signed an imperial decree authorizing the French army to launch
a three-front assault on the weaker sectors of the Prussian frontier.
******
The next morning the French army struck at the weakest points of the
Prussian frontier defenses in an infantry and cavalry attack intended to
coincide with a change in guard shifts at the outposts being targeted. It
was a ploy which worked brilliantly; the men manning those outposts barely
knew what hit them, and by the time the Prussian general staff in Berlin
got word of what was happening the French had gained a sizable if tenuous
foothold on Prussian soil. Jubilant French civilians rejoiced at the news
of the successful attack, envisioning a victorious French army marching to
Berlin within two or three weeks.
But the Prussian army would wipe out those fantasies when it launched
its first counterattack. However the slow the generals in Berlin might have
been to catch on to what the French army was doing, when they finally did
catch on they unleashed a retaliatory blow on the invaders whose ferocity
surprised even Kaiser Wilhelm himself; on June 7th, six days after Napoleon
III signed the directive sanctioning a pre-emptive thrust into Prussia, the
Prussian army let loose its own infantry and cavalry on the center of the
French lines. The French army scarcely knew what hit it, and had to yield
much of the ground it had gained in its initial attack against the Prussian
forces. They might have found it necessary to withdraw from Prussian soil
altogether had heavy rains not struck on June 10th and slowed the movements
of both armies to a crawl; as it was, the combatants would spend the next
three weeks locked in a grim stalemate. During those three weeks both sides
worked nonstop to reinforce their respective battle lines in anticipation
of an attempt by one side to execute a breakout maneuver against the other.
And sure enough, on July 1st, 1870 French artillery and cavalry troops
struck at a weak link in the Prussian lines along France’s border with the
North German Confederation’s Rhine Provinces. Once again, the tide of the
war appeared to be flowing in favor of the French; at one point residents of
the town of Saarbrücken began preparing to flee to the north to avoid being
caught in the crossfire. But once more the greater strength of the Prussian
military reasserted itself, and after four days’ fighting the French attack
force was thrown back across the frontier with heavy losses in men, horses,
and equipment.
Now it was Prussian civilians’ turn to entertain visions of a swift
and triumphant march into the enemy’s capital. “Nach Paris!”(To Paris!)
became the battle cry of a people who longed to see the last traces of the
Napoleonic order wiped away, the French humbled, and Prussia united with
its German-speaking brethren in a grand confederation of Germanic peoples.
In the great cathedrals of Magdeburg and Essen, on the streets of Berlin,
at café tables in Hanover, these words were repeated over and over with a
fervor that surprised even the staunchest Prussian patriot. Young men began
flocking in droves to Prussian army recruiting stations in hopes of sharing
in the glorious of what they were convinced would be a spectacular ultimate
triumph over the French; young women becoming romantically attached to army
men home from the front either on leave or to recuperate from their wounds.
Soon enough, however, another stalemate ensued-- this time the result
of overextended supply lines after Prussian cavalry troops advanced faster
and deeper than expected into French territory and outran the quartermaster
units responsible for providing them with food and ammunition. The French
army was quick to take advantage of the Prussians’ plight, and early in the
evening of July 27th, 1870 struck at the Prussian lines near the village of
Blâmont in a surprise cavalry assault that threw the Prussian army back on
the defensive; within two weeks the French had pushed their adversaries into
retreat and closed to within eleven miles of the Franco-Prussian border.
******
By the first Saturday in August the French army had closed to within
five miles of the Prussian frontier and Kaiser Wilhelm I had cashiered two
of his field commanders on official grounds of incompetence(unofficially,
some historians suspect their sacking had less to do with job performance
than with the Kaiser’s disapproval of their alleged parts in extramarital
affairs with Frenchwomen). An observer from the American military attaché’s
office in Paris wrote to his superiors back in Washington that on his most
recent visit to the front lines he had been able to see the steeple of a
Prussian church without the aid of field glasses. The Russian embassies in
Paris and Berlin both sent memorandums to the czar’s war minister voicing
skepticism about the Prussian army’s strategic operation capabilities. In
London, Britain’s Queen Victoria confided to one of her senior diplomatic
aides that she didn’t think the Prussian war minister would still have his
job after September 1st. Even in Japan-- a country that eighteen years after
Matthew Perry’s historic 1854 visit was still trying to come to terms with
the outside world --knowledge of the Prussian military’s troubles was making
its way through the Emperor’s court in Tokyo.
But events at sea would quickly remind the world at large not to count
the Prussians out too soon. On August 10th, 1870 the Rochambeau, the French
navy’s largest warship at the time, sank with all hands after a three-hour
battle with the Prussian ironclad SMS Friedrich Carl. Originally constructed
in and purchased from the United States at the end of the Civil War, she was
driven by two 1000-hp steam engines and weighed 5090 tons; the French naval
high command had regarded her as a vital element in their effort to preserve
freedom of operation for their ships against the Prussians, and her sinking
hit the admirals in Paris like a blow to the gut. At least one such admiral
was actually driven to suicide by the news of the Rochambeau’s destruction.
Nor was the French civilian population left untouched by her demise; for at
least three days it seemed like the entire country was plunged into a state
of mourning. (To this day flags are lowered to half-mast at all French naval
bases on the anniversary of the sinking in tribute to the Rochambeau’s crew
and officers.)
The deep gloom felt by the French people over the Rochambeau’s demise
was contrasted by an equally intense euphoria among the Prussians. Kaiser
Wilhelm I saw fit to declare a national holiday to honor the event. Church
bells rang in every major Prussian city. New mothers would name their sons
“Carl”, “Friedrich”, or “Friedrich Carl” in tribute to the ironclad which
had sunk the Rochambeau; fathers would encourage those sons to model their
lives after the gallant men in Friedrich Carl’s crew. Nearly every officer
and NCO then in active service aboard the Friedrich Carl got a medal or a
promotion-- and in the case of a lucky few, both. One of Friedrich Carl’s
junior officers would go on to attain his own command and eventually retire
from the navy with the rank of vice-admiral. Even now the Friedrich Carl’s
triumphant showing against the Rochambeau remains a source of national pride
for Germans; a bronze statue of the ironclad graces the Tiergarten in Berlin
and a guided missile cruiser named Friedrich Carl II is scheduled to go into
active service with the Federal German Navy late next year.
******
With the Rochambeau destroyed the Prussian navy’s already considerable
edge over its French counterpart became even greater, and the corresponding
boost the sinking gave to Prussian national morale inspired the soldiers of
the Prussian army to go back on the offensive. On August 15th, just five days
after the Rochambeau went down, three infantry regiments, two detachments of
artillery troops, and four cavalry squadrons crossed the French border under
cover of darkness and attacked the city of Metz in the beginning of a three-
stage campaign whose immediate goal was to seize Metz and the neighboring
town of Sedan; its longer-term objective was to force the French government
to open peace negotiations with Berlin. They were certainly successful when
it came to capturing Metz, at least-- the city’s overwhelmed defenders threw
down their guns and surrendered after less than three hours’ fighting.
Sedan proved to be an altogether different story. When word of the
capture of Metz reached the troops garrisoned outside Sedan, they vowed to
a man to fight to the last bullet rather than let their city fall to the
hated Prussians; Sedan’s civilian population joined them in that sentiment,
fashioning homemade weapons with which to carry out a guerrilla resistance
against the Prussian army should the regular French forces be beaten in the
coming battle for that city.
It was just after 7:00 AM on the morning of August 16th when the French
army’s first line of defense at Sedan sighted the advance detachment of the
main Prussian column. What happened next would set the tone for the battle
to control Sedan and have ripple effects on every aspect of both the French
and Prussian overall war strategies. Instead of quickly and totally falling
apart as the Prussians had thought it would, the French first line resisted
the initial Prussian assault with a ferocious, almost primal determination
that amazed and impressed generals on both sides; the men in that line then
proceeded to mount a counteroffensive which nearly split the Prussian forces
in two.
The Prussian army had hoped to occupy Sedan within a week(at most) once
Metz fell, but when two weeks had passed and Sedan still wasn’t taken, the
high command back in Berlin began to get understandably agitated about their
troops’ chances to get the job done. Accordingly, additional artillery and
cavalry troops were dispatched to bolster the Prussian front near Sedan; in
turn the French activated two of their reserve grenadier divisions to shore
up their own front lines. The upshot of these actions was that after a month
the situation at Sedan had settled into an exhausting and bloody stalemate.
Every time it seemed as if one side was on the verge of a dramatic advance,
the other would stop it cold. And it wasn’t just soldiers who were dying in
vast numbers-- errant Prussian artillery shells slammed into some of Sedan’s
outer districts and killed scores of French civilians.
By October 1st nearly half of the outer sections of Sedan had sustained
damage from artillery fire and there were even cases of entire houses being
literally blown to pieces. And still the front near the city wasn’t budging
an inch in either direction. Even an army as massive and robust as Prussia’s
couldn’t forever sustain the shocking casualty rates it was incurring in its
attempts to capture Sedan. Not surprising the Kaiser began to get impatient
with his generals, who in turn started to berate their field commanders, who
in turn took their frustrations out on the ordinary soldier.
Not that the mood was much cheerier among the men of the French army
high command back in Paris. Despite their soldiers’ best effort the Prussian
enemy still had a foothold on French soil, and if something couldn’t be done
to change that, soon, then Kaiser Wilhelm I’s legions might very well march
all the way to Paris eventually. It was a grim prospect for the generals in
Paris...and their troops too for that matter. In Paris itself fears of a
Prussian advance towards the French capital led to a spike in suicides in
the city’s civilian population; while the medical records of that time are
somewhat fragmented, modern statistical analysis of those records that are
available indicates one out of every six suicides committed in Paris during
the last months of 1870 was caused by war-related stress. For two months it
seemed as if a day seldom went by that the Paris newspapers didn’t print at
least one lurid account of someone blowing their brains out in a cellar of
hanging themselves up in an attic in a fit of despair over the prospect of
living under German rule.
******
Christmas of 1870 came and went with little change in either the tactical
or strategic situation in Sedan. This stasis irritated a great many people,
not least among them Queen Victoria’s top generals and diplomats in London.
While not officially a combatant in the Franco-Prussian war, Great Britain
had interests in continental Europe which the war was increasingly putting
at risk; at least one senior Whitehall military official had expressed deep
concerns Britain might eventually get pulled into the fighting herself the
way things were going. While Britain had a highly skilled professional army
and what at that time was regarded as the world's best navy, Victoria wasn't
by any means eager to get involved in a shooting war in Europe just then--
especially since she had deep family ties with the Prussian ruling dynasty.
Accordingly, in early January of 1871 British diplomats made approaches
to the French and Prussian governments aimed at kick-starting negotiations
to end the Franco-Prussian war. Although initially hesitant to accept the
British government's mediation offer, the French and the Prussians were in
the end persuaded that it would be in their best interests to agree to sit
down for cease-fire talks, and on January 16th diplomats from the two sides
met in London to open the negotiations. That opening session was to say the
least a contentious one; each side vehemently accused the other of abusing
POWs and there were bitter recriminations over who was actually responsible
for the outbreak of the war. The chief Prussian delegate laid all the blame
on France because of its original preemptive invasion of Prussia, while the
head of the French delegation asserted Prussia's aggressive and expansionist
behavior toward her neighbors had made it necessary for France to act.
It took hours of patient persuasion(and the threat of a British economic
embargo against Prussia) to convince Berlin not to break off the cease-fire
negotiations right then and there. As it was, the talks would go on for two
weeks before the faint outlines of an armistice finally began to emerge. In
the meantime a relative quiet settled over the battlefront; there were very
few engagements between French and Prussian troops while the diplomats were
meeting in London, and these engagements were usually defensive in nature.
The French and Prussian navies also adopted a largely defensive posture; in
the first two weeks of the cease-fire discussion, there were only two naval
skirmishes between the opposing sides, both of which ended quickly.
The French and Prussian governments finally concluded a cease-fire pact
on February 23rd, 1871, more than a month after the negotiations had started
in London. The actual signing of the armistice happened on February 27th at
the British embassy in Stockholm. While the terms of the cease-fire largely
favored the Prussians, the French negotiators had succeeded in gaining two
highly important concessions from their Prussian counterparts: the complete
and rapid withdrawal of all Prussian troops from the Sedan area along with
the swift release of all remaining French POWs in Prussian custody. On both
sides of the Franco-Prussian frontier civilian populations whose nerves had
been stretched thin by the war greeted the armistice with a sigh of relief.
Although militarily the Franco-Prussian war had ended in what for all
intents and purposes was a stalemate, politically Kaiser Wilhelm I spun it
as a victory for Prussia and was able to use that spin to unify his kingdom
with some of its German-speaking neighbors in June of 1871 into what would
soon be known as the German Empire. Much to the chagrin of France, that new
empire included sizable portions of Alsace-Lorraine. In the rest of Europe
the young empire's creation was greeted with a certain degree of anxiety by
its neighbors; even as the troops were starting to come home and the prison
camps' remaining inmates were returning to freedom, some of Europe's leading
diplomatic and political lights were already voicing concerns regarding the
Second Reich's militaristic tendencies...
******
....concerns that would turn out to be quite justified. Over the next
four-plus decades tensions between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorraine
would engender a renewed and growing hostility in Franco-German relations,
a hostility which exploded into all-out war in the late summer of 1913 when
a member of the Austrian royal family was assassinated by Serbian radicals
seeking to gain Serbia's independence. Germany, a strong ally of Austria in
those days, declared war on Serbia in response to the assassination; France
responded by issuing a declaration of war against Germany in fulfillment of
French guarantees to Serbia.
This time Great Britain would have no choice but to fight; the initial
German attacks on France in what we now know as the First World War led to
the occupation of neutral Belgium and directly threatened Britain's Channel
ports. By September of 1913, just three short months after the war started,
a new breed of German long-range guns-- "superguns" as they're called today
by modern military historians --were bombarding Dover from special railroad
flatbed cars and the German navy had started pioneering submarine warfare as
a means of wresting control of the seas from Britain.
Within a year after the assassination that had sparked the outbreak of
the First World War, nearly every major power except the United States was
involved in the fighting. And even there President Woodrow Wilson, for all
of his initial proclamations of U.S. neutrality in the conflict, had taken
it on himself to strengthen the U.S. armed forces in order to be sure they
would be prepared to defend American soil and interests if need be. As the
war approached its third year his decision to build up the American military
would prove to be the correct one; in May of 1915 two hundred Americans were
killed when a luxury passenger ship bound from New York City for London fell
victim to German torpedoes off the coast of Ireland; that sinking, combined
with growing suspicions in the ranks of Wilson's cabinet that the Germans
were secretly aiding the guerrilla campaign by certain Mexican extremists
to recapture Southwestern territories won by the United States from Mexico
in the Mexican War of 1846-48, prompted the U.S. Congress to grant Wilson a
declaration of war against Germany on May 10th. America's entrance into the
war crushed any hope Berlin might have had of prevailing against France and
Britain; not even the 1916 Marxist revolution which overthrew Russia's Czar
Nicholas II and brought about the end of Russia's involvement in the Allied
war effort could do anything to deter American forces from inflicting stiff
defeats on the German army on the Western Front.
For the French the war marked a golden opportunity to recapture those
sections of Alsace-Lorraine they had been forced to yield after the Franco-
Prussian conflict-- and it was an opportunity they were quick to capitalize
on. By September of 1917 France was back in total control of the region; to
add insult to injury from the German perspective, the French also took over
the coal-rich Saar region, which had played a key role in keeping the German
war effort going. Eventually discontent among German civilians would compel
Wilhelm I’s namesake and successor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to abdicate in March
of 1918; the final armistice between Germany and the Allies was concluded on
June 2nd.
At the time the First World War ended Great Britain was the only nation
on either side of the conflict that had retained its monarchy; every other
royal dynasty had either long since collapsed or was on the verge of doing
so. In France, the era of rule by kings was little more than a dim memory--
at the end of the Franco-Prussian war the French people had soured forever
on the idea of government by monarchy, so much so that Napoleon III had to
flee France and spend the rest of his days in exile in Switzerland. Not even
the economic hardships triggered by the onset of the Great Depression in the
autumn of 1928 could convince the French masses to accept the rule of a king
again.
Because of the unprecedented casualty counts incurred by the combatant
countries, the First World War was naively and optimistically labeled “the
war to end all wars.” That hopeful prediction would be repeatedly and sadly
as nationalist uprisings and fascist wars of conquest racked much of Europe
and Africa during the 1920s and early ‘30s. The never-ending tension between
the Western democracies and the fascist regimes that seized control of Italy
and Germany in the aftermath of World War I would finally spark the outbreak
of a Second World War in 1938...but that’s another story.
