I've been listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast - specifically his series on WWI. It's been very interesting so far, but it's complicated enough that I've had to back it up and listen to certain parts a bunch of times to really understand what happened and why. But the one thing I still don't get is why Germany opened the war by invading France...? Everything up to that point makes sense.
Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, Austria-Hungary blames Serbian gov't for sponsoring/encouraging it.
Serbia asks Russia to protect them in the event of a war with A-H.
Germany tells A-H to go ahead and pursue military action against Serbia, they will back them up against Russia.
A-H begins assault on Serbia, Russia starts mobilizing.
?????????
Germany invades France.
Presumably, Russia would come in from the west to clash with Austro-Hungarian forces in Serbia, who would in turn need backup from Germany. Instead, Germany turns around and dumps like 750,000 troops across their eastern borders into Belgium and then France. Can someone give me a quick-and-dirty explanation of what Germany's motive was for putting so much effort and resources into launching a full-scale assault in the opposite direction of the original conflict? I just don't get it.
Hi there -- not to discourage further answers, but you may be interested in these older posts about the German Schlieffen Plan to invade France and knock it out of the war quickly, before Russia could fully mobilize:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/452zvg/what_part_of_the_schlieffen_plan_is_disputed/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gg4nm/was_the_schlieffen_plan_actually_a_german/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/57rzga/why_did_the_schlieffen_plan_fail/
As had been said- there was an existing alliance between France and Russia such that war with one would automatically mean war with the other.
The question that becomes for Germany- 'how do we defeat both?' Problem was, neither could be taken with half the German army. Send the entire army against one and the other just takes your entire country from behind.
Russia was huge, taking them down would necessarily be long and slow. Conversely it would take Russia a long time to get their armies going and on the German frontier.
So... If you are going to fight both France and Russia, you must knock out France first before the Russians can get to you, then turn around and fight Russia. You can't do it the other way around. You will have time to take out France while the Russians are getting things together.