What Was The Schlieffen Plan?

The Schlieffen plan was a war plan, devised by the German army's chief of staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, which was put into effect by Germany in the First World War. It was designed to cope with the anticipated need for Germany to have to fight a war on two fronts, against France in the West and Russia in the East. The goal was to use the great bulk of Germany's armed forces against France in the early stages of the war, in the hope of defeating it quickly, and allowing German forces to then redeploy to meet the threat from the East. German strategists believed that the large but inefficient Russian army would be slow to mobilise, giving them a month or two in which to knock France out of the war before they would be forced to deal with the expected Russian attack.

In the event, the plan utterly failed. French and Belgian resistance proved stiffer than anticipated and German forces became bogged down in fighting in France for the entire duration of the war.