Subjects:
To the credit of the Prussians, Germany had the largest (except for Russia), best equipped and best-trained army of Europe. With their innovative use of the heavy machine gun (the Maxim gun) in protected pillboxes the German quickly had an edge in over the other European armies. To use this military might in an effective way the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Alfred Von Schlieffen devised an attack plan appropriately named the Schlieffen plan. According to this plan the bulk of the German army had to march through Belgium and Luxembourg attack France out flanking its armies in the process and after a six-week campaign France would be defeated and the whole German Army could then attack Russia. “The Schlieffen Plan rested on two critical assumptions. The first was the preservation of overwhelming German numerical superiority against France. The second was the inability of the R
. . .
. Second, the Franco-Russian alliance system, which also included Balkan states, had not only a great effect in the military side of things but also in the economic facet. At the end of the 1800´s and the beginnings of the 1900’s Germany had become the largest producer of industrial manufactured goods in Europe.
An army, however, does not order itself into war this is done by the state, and the German Government’s political structure in the early 1900´s proved especially prone to war. Although the United States did surpass both Britain and Germany in the production of steel and goods these were largely taken up by the United States huge internal market and therefore the United States did not need to export and played no important role in world trade (Pg.
Essay's Topics
All research is for reference purposes only.