Alfred von Schlieffen

Alfred von Schleiffen was an officer in the German Army in the late nineteenth century. He served in the military campaigns which marked the unification of Germany under Otto von Bismarck.

In 1881 and 1882, von Schleiffen served as his country's military attache to the United States. (During the evacuation of Washington, DC he nearly killed Nellie Semphroch inadvertantly.) He observed firsthand the US'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 reccommend 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 GeneralRobert E. Lee's 1862 campaign against Philadelphia.

He 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.