Word: schlieffen
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...Caesar's policy of German occupation by destroying three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. As a primal hero of German history, Arminius was a great Nazi favorite, but here Kiefer conflates him with awkward portraits of all manner of later German "descendants" like Blucher, who fought against Napoleon; Schlieffen, whose strategy for the westward conquest of Europe was the basis of Hitler's blitzkrieg; writers from Klopstock to Rilke, and so on. Lines signifying affiliation, as in a family tree (a whole family forest, in fact, this Teutoburg), ramble slackly between some of the characters. Pictorially, the result...
...Basil thinks somewhat more highly of the German generals. But even they, he admits, succeeded in their dramatic 1940 breakthrough on the Western front partly by accident. Their initial plan for the invasion of France was a right-flank wheel through Belgium along the lines of the 1914 Schlieffen plan, which might easily have been met and thwarted. The strategy was dropped, however, when a German major, flying in a snowstorm, was forced down in Belgium with a full set of war plans that was seized by the Allies. The substitute plan sent General Heinz Guderian's spectacular armored...
...Jackstraws. "Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws," writes Author Tuchman; "one could not be pulled out without moving the others." Germany's battle plan was drawn by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German general staff from 1891 to 1906, a monocled Prussian with a mind that slashed through argument like a dueling sword. Schlieffen promised victory in six weeks by a massive, right-wing attack that would pivot across Belgium and fall on the flank of the French armies before Paris. Knowing of the scheme, France devised Plan 17, calling...
Germany moved into Belgium on Aug. 4-and the mistakes began soon thereafter. Until his death in 1913, Schlieffen had reiterated: "Make the right wing strong." But his successor, General Helmuth von Moltke, was a Christian Scientist, a cello player, and a cautious man: he weakened the right wing to strengthen the line elsewhere. When the preposterous Russians, unequipped, untrained and unafraid, invaded East Prussia, Moltke forgot Schlieffen and diverted two corps from the Belgian drive to the Russian front. The two corps were never needed; General Erich Ludendorff routed the Russians at Tannenberg before his reinforcements arrived...
...east were terrain and towns he knew as one of World War I's battalion commanders: the Somme, the Argonne, Sedan, Amiens, the Meuse. Those Allied objectives were reminders-if the German command needed any more -of how completely Lieut. General Omar Nelson Bradley had reversed their classic Schlieffen plan of enveloping France.*Now the Eisenhower-Montgomery wheeling movement, anchored at the mouth of the Seine, was developing arcs that expanded toward Belgium and Germany...