I recently finished a book which has some information you might like reading, it is called "the struggle for the rhine" by hermann stegemann , and it has been translated into english by georges chatterton-hill.  it details the struggle for the rhine from about 55BC to about 1920AD.  The last chapter discusses the time period your looking for.  It is a military history of the rhine, but also includes what is going on elsewhere and how that effected the rhine.

Sorry for the delay in replying, I really don't know where to begin to try to puncture the myth of German military superiority that seems to hold so many people in thrall and is typified by your post. At first glance, a casual observer of history would be forced to agree with you until, that is, they delved deeper.

From the 1820’s, Germany [or more accurately Prussia] had one significant advantage over her neighbours, a large, professional, General Staff. This institution was capable, from time to time, of performing prodigious feats of organization and logistics in order to deploy mass armies that was the envy of other European powers, but on the whole it tended to be hidebound, unimaginative and inflexible.

There is no doubt that the German army was well trained and led by an experienced cadre of long serving N.C.O.s, but ironically this was also it's greatest weakness, since these were irreplaceable in the medium term and their high attrition rate in the Great War led to the eventual deterioration of the army as an effective fighting force. Strategy and ingenuity were not as significant to the German army's initial successes as numbers and technology.

Taking your original example of KÖniggratz, von Moltke's rash attempt at a battlefield concentration almost fell apart in the early stages of the encounter, leaving the Prussians in trouble and on the defensive for most of the battle, There were several points during the battle that the Austrians could have won despite their inferior equipment [except maybe their artillery] and training; only the fortuitous arrival of 100,000 reinforcements in the form of the Crown Prince's army on the Austrian flank at the point when they were poised to inflict a humiliating defeat on the Prussians, turned the tide of the battle. Although decisive, this was hardly an example of masterful strategy and ingenuity. It is well known that the French were unprepared, poorly led and were organizationally inferior to the Prussians in 1870-71, yet in most of the initial battles, they fought the Germans to a standstill against odds of 3 or 4:1 and only retired, usually in good order, as their positions were outflanked. Glorious victories?

However, since Germany/Prussia won both wars relatively quickly and with apparent ease, posterity seems to have given their army an undeserved reputation as “super soldiers”, much the same reputation as the Israeli army acquired in the 1956 and 1967 wars, only to see it humiliated in 1973, but I digress.

During the First World War, this reputation began to unravel. From the outset the Schlieffen Plan started to go wrong. The much-vaunted Imperial General Staff miscalculated how far and fast their armies could march. Their communications and supply arrangements fell apart as the advancing armies lost touch with each other, and in their hubris, they forgot the most important maxim of war, “no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy”. French performance during the first phase of the war is nothing short of remarkable in comparison. Wrong footed and outmanoeuvred, they nevertheless managed to change the entire axis of their operations in time to intercept and stop the German advance at the Marne. They showed the drive, ingenuity and flexibility normally attributed to the German side.

In the east, Tannenberg, although heralded as a stunning tactical triumph, was a strategic disaster for the Germans, and may even have cost them the war. Because of Tannenberg, almost a third of the forces allocated to the vital right wing of the Schlieffen plan were prematurely withdrawn from France to no useful purpose, and Hindenburg and Ludendorf came to the conclusion that defeating Russia would be easy.

With the failure of the Schlieffen plan, the Germans were bereft of any back up plans to win the war. Their sole aim being to hang on to whatever territory they had and to let the allied burn themselves out attacking them. To that end they devoted huge resources to creating acres of trenches and barbed wire defences. Who is more courageous and resourceful, the man that sits behind strong defences, or the man who leave the relative safety of his own to attack his opponent?

When opportunities arose to break the deadlock, [i.e. the use of gas at Ypres and the Verdun offensive] these were totally mismanaged and a myopic, inflexible insistence on outmoded methods doomed thousands of soldiers to unnecessary deaths, yet perversely, this is a charge almost always levelled solely at the allied high command, whereas the Germans retain a mystique of tactical genius.

This is compounded in 1918, when infiltration tactics by “storm troops” was seen by many as evidence of tactical genius and heralded as a new and innovative war winner. Everyone seems to have overlooked that the French invented these tactics in early 1915, and they were widely used and developed by the British between 1915-17. Also overlooked is the fact that the British armies attacked by these “super” stormtroops in 1918 were under strength, thinly spread and attacked at odds of 8:1 or more. The amazing thing was that the British did not collapse. The lines bulged, but the German offensives were contained. The counter attack, when it came drove the Germans out of much of France and Belgium and finally forced the Germans to admit defeat.

The German soldier deserves respect for his courage and devotion, but not awe or veneration. The German army was nothing special but has been hyped up out of all proportion, possibly to over-emphasize the scale of the allied victory, who knows. Ironically, when German soldiers were given Lee Enfield rifles to compare and evaluate with the Kar ’98, the Germans preferred the Lee Enfield. 

A fascinating thread; I didn't see it mentioned here so... the forces during the franco-prussian war were just over a million troops for the prussians/germans and something like 750,000 up to just under a million for the french empire. 

I’ve been informed someone had responded to my post, so I thought I’d best have a look. I rarely visit or post on this site any more so many apologies for my delayed reply.

What a strange remark. Can you point out just where in my post I absolve the French from anything? I merely stated that French performance in recovering the situation in 1914 was truly remarkable in comparison to the Germans failures to remedy their breakdowns in supply, command and communications. Are you saying the Germans had no such breakdowns? If so, then the French achievement is all the more impressive.

The Schlieffen plan is generally considered to have been unworkable from the beginning regardless of what von Moltke tinkered with. Schlieffen overestimated the abilities of the German armies marching capacity and underestimated the likely resistance they would encounter. He also failed to adequately factor in the destruction to communications such as roads, railways, etc, in modern warfare which caused a breakdown in the rudimentary German logistic system. It should come as no surprise to learn that the over rated German General Staff never provided for a logistics or communications department in their organisation until after the war, still I suppose they had to learn that lesson the hard way.

Specific numbers are largely irrelevant here. If you’re that interested, look up the actual figures, I’m sure you can work it out for yourself. As I recall off the top of my head it was two Corps transferred during the battle and either 4 or 6 more during the battle of the Marne; I’d have to look it up. What is important, and the point I was making is, that a critical number of German forces that might have proved decisive in the West, spent their time travelling between fronts to no purpose, rather like d’Erlon’s Corps during Ligny and Quatre Bras.

My comments are in no way misleading nor in error. I’m afraid you appear to be misinformed about the origins of German so called “Hutier Tactics”. Hutier had nothing to do with inventing German infiltration tactics; this is better attributed to, amongst others, one Captain Rohr, who first encountered French infiltration tactics on the Western Front in 1915. Most WW1 historians including Keegan, Strachan, inter alia. now agree the Germans probably got hold of French training pamphlets and translated them for their own use. Hutier did however appreciate their usefulness and eventually developed Rohr’s ideas into a cohesive system at Corps/Divisional level, in conjunction with Bruchmueller’s artillery tactics, which incidentally, were also based on and developed from methods pioneered by the British and French. This is the system that is correctly termed “Hutier Tactics” as distinct from infiltration tactics used in general. The Germans first used these tactics at Riga in 1917, a year or more after the French and the British were using infiltration tactics extensively up to brigade level. The Allies never bothered to create specific storm troop units, recognizing the limitations and disadvantages such units entailed. This is something Hutier failed to do and the resultant concentration of the best, fittest men into irreplaceable specialist “elite” units dragged down the overall quality of the remaining army. Their heavy losses accelerated the army’s final collapse in 1918. German Storm troop tactics have been given greater prominence due to the initial successes of the Kaiserschlacht than they truly deserve; they were not as successful as many uninformed people think they were. Allied infiltration tactics, on the other hand, in conjunction with air and armoured assets, were far more successful when they were used to break the Hindenburg line and during the 100 days; and these rather than later German ideas formed the basis of modern combined arms operations. The Germans, of course, subsequently copied and developed their “Blitzkrieg” from these allied tactics, for the next war.

I’ve scanned many of your posts on this forum and you do appear to hold intensely pro-German views. This is fine with me; I have no problems with patriotism so long as you don’t allow it to close your mind to ideas or historical truths that don’t fit your world view. I hope I’ve clarified my original post to your satisfaction. Until next time. B.

I recommend this book:

@Serge, welcome to the forum by the way!