Alfred von Schlieffen

Alfred Graf von Schlieffen (1833-1913) was a German field marshall and strategist who served as Chief of the Imperial German General Staff from 1891 to 1905. His name lived on in the 1905 Schlieffen Plan for the defeat of the French Third Republic and the Russian Empire. He served under Helmuth von Moltke during the Franco-Prussian War.

Alfred von Schlieffen in "Uncle Alf"
Despite his advanced age, Alfred von Schlieffen personally oversaw the implementation of his plan for two-front war, leading a strong right-wing advance through Belgium and France, despite the quick invasion from Russia. France and Britain immediately sued for peace, and Russia was in turn defeated.

Alfred von Schlieffen in Southern Victory
In 1881 and 1882, Alfred von Schlieffen served as his country's military attache to the United States and had the opportunity to observe firsthand the American prosecution of the Second Mexican War. (During the evacuation of Washington, DC he nearly killed Nellie Semphroch inadvertently.) He observed firsthand Orlando Wilcox's disastrous siege of Louisville, Kentucky. He was shocked by the incompetence he witnessed on every level of the badly run and badly organized US Army, and was disappointed that he was able to find nothing in the US's strategy which he could recommend that his own army adopt.

However, during his time in the US, he was inspired to draw up a plan for a German advance into France based on Confederate General Robert E. Lee's 1862 campaign against Philadelphia.

Schlieffen also recognized a potential military power in the US with its large population and enviable industrial capacity. He further recognized that, in Britain and France, the US and Germany had common enemies. He became an early advocate of the Teuto-American alliance which eventually became the Central Powers. His postwar discussions with American General-in-Chief William Rosecrans enabled the latter to see that the decentralized army he commanded made strategic coordination on multiple fronts a near-impossibility and that the US would do better to adopt a command structure on the Prussian general staff model. It was this reorganization which finally allowed the US to tap its military resources and win the Great War.