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This is a presentation delivered by Professor David Stevenson at the RUSI World War I Conference 2014.TRANSCRIPT
The First World War Conference
17 July 201417 July 2014
Session Four: Coalition Warfare
Professor David Stevenson
LSE
Coalition Warfare: the Political Aspects
Three Phases -
• Pre-War Planning and 1914
• Stalemate, 1915-1917
• An Atlantic Alliance, 1917-1918?
First Phase
Pre-War Planning
• Austro-German alliance, 1879
• Triple Alliance (A-H, Germany, Italy), 1882
• Staff talks (Moltke, Conrad, Pollio)
• Franco-Russian alliance, formed 1891-94
• British ententes with France (1904) and Russia (1907)
• Franco-Russian and Franco-British staff talks
1914 War Plans
• Germany: Schlieffen-Moltke Plan
• Austria-Hungary: Fall ‘B’, ‘R’, and ‘I’
• Italy: from Rhineland to neutrality
• Russia: Plan 19 Altered
• France: Plan XVII
• Britain: Scheme ‘W’
Pre-War Planning: Western Front
Eastern Front, 1914
Stalemate, 1915-1917
What do we do now?
Three sub-phases:
1915: Central Powers drive eastwards; Allies in disarray – Russia on the defensive, France on the offensive, Britain between Dardanelles and defensive, France on the offensive, Britain between Dardanelles and Western Front
1916: Verdun and the Trentino; Chantilly I – Brusilov, the Somme, Romania, Gorizia
1917: Chantilly II and its breakdown - the Calais conference and the Nivelle offensive
Stalemate Phase
The Nivelle Plan, 1917
1917-1918: an Atlantic Alliance?
• Disarray, 1917: Russian Revolution, French
mutinies, Passchendaele, Caporetto
• November 1917: Supreme War Council
• March-April 1918: Foch General-in-Chief• March-April 1918: Foch General-in-Chief
• Diplomatic, economic, and logistical co-
ordination
• The Armistice and the limits to co-operation
The Final Phase
An Overstated Case?
‘The war was won primarily by a tremendous
combined system of co-ordination and goodwill,
which focused all the efforts of the Allies on the
supreme task of defeating the enemy, but which supreme task of defeating the enemy, but which
only reached its zenith in the last year of the
war.’
Sir Maurice Hankey