Helmuth Moltke was a German field marshal whose prestige contributed greatly to the militarization of German minds, as did his character.
Background
Moltke was born on October 24, 1800 in Parchim, Mecklenburg, Germany.
His father in 1805 settled in Holstein and1 He was said to be worth 10 million rix-dollars, but proved that he had less than one million. became a Danish subject, but about the same time was impoverished by the burning of his country house and the plunder by the French of his town house in Liibeck, where his wife and children were.
While away, he had been a constant letter-writer to his mother and sisters, and he now revised and published his letters as Letters on Conditions and Events in Turkey in the Years 1835 to 1839.
Education
At twenty-three, after much less than the regulation term of service, he was allowed to enter the general war school, now the war academy, where he studied the full three years and passed in 1826 a brilliant final examination.
During the summer he made extensive reconnaissances and surveys, riding several thousand miles in the course of his journeys, navigating the dangerous rapids of the Euphrates, and visiting and mapping many districts where no European traveller had preceded him since Xenophon.
Career
He was at this time regarded as a brilliant officer by his superiors, and among them by Prince William, then a lieutenant-general, afterwards king and emperor.
In 1827 he had published a short romance, The Two Friends.
In 1831 it was followed by an essay entitled Holland and Belgium in their Mutual Relations, from Iheir Separation under Philip II to their Reunion under William I, in which were displayed the author's interest in the political issues of the day, and his extensive historical reading.
In 1832 he contracted to translate Gibbon's Decline and Fall into German, for which he was to receive £75, his object being to earn the money to buy a horse.
After a short stay in Constantinople he was requested by the sultan to enter the Turkish service, and being duly authorized from Berlin he accepted the offer.
He travelled in the sultan's retinue through Bulgaria and Rumelia, and made many other journeys on both sides of the Strait.
In 1838 he was sent as adviser to the Turkish general commanding the troops in Armenia, who was to carry on a campaign against Mehemet Ali of Egypt.
In 1839 the army moved south to meet the Egyptians, but upon the approach of the enemy the general became more attentive to the prophecies of the mollahs than to the advice of the Prussian captain.
The Turks were well beaten and their army dispersed to the four winds.
Moltke with infinite hardship made his way back to the Black Sea, and thence to Constantinople.
His patron Sultan Mahmoud was dead, so he returned to Berlin where he arrived, broken in health, in December 1839.
When he left Berlin in 1834 he had already " the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword. "
When he returned it was with a mind expanded by a rare experience, and with a character doubly tempered and annealed.
No other book gives so deep an insight into the character of the Turkish Empire, and no other book of travels better deserves to be regarded as a German classic.
The fruits of his Eastern travels were by no means exhausted.
He thus had the opportunity of a long stay in the Eternal City, with no more than nominal duties to perform.
It was a life which he and his wife much enjoyed, and he spent much of his leisure in a survey, of which the result was a splendid map of Rome, published at Berlin in 1852.
On the 23rd of October 1857, owing to the serious illness of King Frederick William IV, Prince William became prince regent.
The appointment was made definitive in January 1858.
In 1859 came the war in Italy, which occasioned the mobilization of the Prussian army, and as a consequence the reorganization of that army, by which its numerical strength was nearly doubled.
In December 1862 Moltke was asked for an opinion upon the military aspect of the quarrel with Denmark then becoming acute.
He thought the difficulty would be to bring the war to an end, as the Danish army would if possible retire to the islands, where, as the Danes had the command of the sea, it could not be attacked.
He sketched a plan for turning the flank of the Danish army before the attack upon its position in front of Schleswig, and hoped that by this means its retreat might be intercepted.
When the war began in February 1864, Moltke was not sent with the Prussian forces, but kept at Berlin.
The plan was mismanaged in the execution, and the Danish army escaped to the fortresses of Diippel and Fredericia, each of which commanded a retreat across a strait on to an island.
The allies were now checked; Diippel and Fredericia were besieged by them, Diippel taken by storm, and Fredericia abandoned by the Danes without assault; but the war showed no signs of ending, as the Danish army was safe in the islands of Alsen and Fiinen.
On the 30th of April Moltke was sent to be chief of the staff to the commander- in-chief of the allied forces, and, so soon as the armistice of May and June was over, persuaded Prince Frederick Charles to attempt to force the passage of the Sundewitt and attack the Danes in the island of Alsen.
The landing was effected on the 29th of June, and the Danes then evacuated Alsen.
Moltke next proposed a landing in Fiinen, but it was unnecessary.
The Danes no longer felt safe in their islands, and agreed to the German terms.
Moltke's appearance on the scene had quickly transformed the aspect of the war, and his influence with the king had thus acquired a firm basis.
He had been the first to realize the great defensive power of modern firearms, and had inferred from it that an enveloping attack had become more formidable than the attempt to pierce an enemy's front.
At the same time he had worked out the conditions of the march and supply of an army.
Only one army corps could be moved along one road in the same day; to put two or three corps on the same road meant that the rear corps could not be made use of in a battle at the front.
Several corps stationed close together in a small area could not be fed for more than a day or two.
Accordingly he inferred that the essence of strategy lay in arrangements for the separation of the corps for marching and their concentration in time for battle.
In the strategy of 1866 the conspicuous points are: (1) The concentration of effort.
There were two groups of enemies, the Austro-Saxon armies, 270, 000; and the north and south German armies, 120, 000.
The Prussian forces were 64, 000 short of the adverse total, but Moltke determined to be superior at the decisive point against the Austro-Saxons; he therefore told off 278, 000 men for that portion of the struggle, and employed only 48, 000 men in Germany proper.
His brilliant direction enabled the 48, 000 to capture the Hanoverian army in less than a fortnight, and then to attack and drive asunder the south German forces.
(2) In dealing with Austro- Saxony the difficulty was to have the Prussian army first ready -no easy matter, as the king would not mobilize until after the Austrians.
Moltke's railway knowledge helped him to save time.
Five lines of railway led from the various Prussian provinces to a series of points on the southern frontier on the curved line Zeitz-Halle-Gorlitz-Schweidnitz.
By employing all these railways at once, Moltke had the several army corps moved simultaneously from their peace quarters to points on this curved line.
When this first move was finished the corps then marched along the curve to collect into three groups, one near Torgau (Elbe army), another at the west end of Silesia (first army, Prince Frederick Charles), the third between Lands- hut and Waldenburg (second army, crown prince).
The first army when formed marched eastwards towards Gorlitz.
The Elbe army advanced to Dresden, left a garrison there, and moved to the right of Prince Frederick Charles, under whose command it now came.
(3) Moltke now had two armies about 100 miles apart.
The problem was how to bring them together so as to catch the Austrian army between them like the French at Waterloo between Wellington and Bliicher.
If, as was thought likely, the Austrians moved upon Breslau, the first and Elbe armies could continue their eastward march to co-operate with the second.
But on the 15th of June Moltke learned that on the 11th of June the Austrian army had been spread out over the country between Wildenschwerdt, Olmiitz and Briinn.
He inferred that it could not be concentrated at Josefstadt in less than thirteen days.
Accordingly he determined to bring his own two armies together by directing each of them to advance towards Gitschin.
The order to advance upon Gitschin was issued on the 22nd of June, and led to one of the greatest victories on record.
The Austrians marched faster than Moltke expected, and might have opposed the crown prince with four or five corps; but Benedek's attention was centred on Prince Frederick Charles, and he interposed against the crown prince's advance four corps not under a common command, so that they were beaten in detail, as were also the Saxons and the Austrian corps with them, by Prince Frederick Charles.
On the 1st of July Benedek collected his already shaken forces in a defensive position in front of Koniggratz.
Moltke's two armies were now within a march of one another and of the enemy.
On the 3rd of July they were brought into action, the first against the Austrian front and the second against the Austrian right flank.
The Austrian army was completely defeated and the campaign decided, though an advance towards Vienna was needed to bring about the peace upon Prussia's terms.
Moltke was not quite satisfied with the battle of Koniggratz.
He also tried to prevent the first army from pushing its attack, hoping in that way to keep the Austrians in their position until retreat should be cut off by the crown prince, but he could not restrain the impetuosity of Prince Frederick Charles and of the king.
During the negotiations Bismarck, who dared not risk the active intervention of France, opposed the king's wish to annex Saxony and perhaps other territory beyond what was actually taken.
On the 24th of December 1868 Moltke's wife died at Berlin.
Her remains were buried in a small chapel erected by Moltke as a mausoleum in the park at Creisau. In 1870 suddenly came the war with France.
The probability of such a war had occupied Moltke's attention almost continuously since 1857, and a series of memoirs is preserved in which from time to time he worked out and recorded his ideas as to the best arrangement of the Prussian or German forces for the opening of the campaign.
This gave Moltke the right to issue in the king's name, though of course not without his approval, orders which were equivalent to royal commands.
If the French should disregard the neutrality of Belgium and Luxemburg, and advance on the line from Paris to Cologne or any other point on the Lower Rhine, the German army would be able to strike at their flank, while the Rhine itself, with the fortresses of Coblenz, Cologne and Wesel, would be a serious obstacle in their front.
Moltke expected that the French would be compelled by the direction of their railways to collect the greater part of their army near Metz, and a smaller portion near Strassburg.
The German forces were grouped into three armies: the first of 60, 000 men, under Steinmetz, on the Moselle below Treves; the second of 131, 000 men, under Prince Frederick Charles, round Homburg, with a reserve of 60, 000 men behind it; the third under the crown prince of 130, 000 men, at Landau.
Three army corps amounting to 100, 000 men were not reckoned upon in the first instance, as it was desirable to keep a considerable force in north-eastern Germany, in case Austria should make common cause with France.
If, as seemed probable, the French should take the initiative before the German armies were ready, and for that purpose should advance from Metz in the direction of Mainz, Moltke would merely put back a few miles nearer to Mainz the points of debarcation from the railway of the troops of the second army.
This measure was actually adopted, though the anticipated French invasion did not take place.
If the French army should be found during this advance in front of the second army, it would be attacked in front by the second army and in flank by the first or the third or both.
If it should be found on or north of the line from Saarburg to Luneville, it could still be attacked from two sides by the second and third armies in co-operation.
The fortress of Metz was to be observed, and the main German forces, after defeating the chief French army, to march upon Paris.
This plan was carried out in its broad outlines.
The battle of Worth was brought on prematurely, and therefore led, not to the capture of MacMahon's army, which was intended, but only to its total defeat and hasty retreat as far as Chalons.
The battle of Spicheren was not intended by Moltke, who wished to keep Bazaine's army on the Saar till he could attack it with the second army in front and the first army on its left flank, while the third army was closing towards its rear.
Nothing shows Moltke's insight and strength of purpose in a clearer light than his determination to attack on the 18th of August, when many strategists would have thought that, the strategical victory having been gained, a tactical victory was unnecessary.
He has been blamed for the last local attack at Gravelotte, in which there was a fruitless heavy loss; but it is now known that this attack was ordered by the king, and Moltke blamed himself for not having used his influence to prevent it.
During the night following the battle Moltke made his next decision.
He left one army to invest Bazaine and Metz, and set out with the two others to march towards Paris, the more southerly one leading, so that when MacMahon's army should be found the main blow might be delivered from the south and MacMahon driven to the north.
On the 25th of August it was found that MacMahon was moving north-east for the relief of Bazaine.
MacMahon's right wing was attacked at Beaumont while attempting to cross the Meuse, his advance necessarily abandoned, and his army with difficulty collected at Sedan.
Here the two German armies were so brought up as completely to surround the French army, which on the 1st of September was attacked and compelled to raise the white flag.
After the capitulation of Sedan, Moltke resumed the advance on Paris, which was surrounded and invested.
Metz surrendered on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of January 1871 an armistice was concluded at Paris by which the garrison became virtually prisoners and the war was ended. On the 29th of October 1870 Moltke was created graf (count or earl), and on the 16th of June 1871, field marshal.
After the war he superintended the preparation of its history, which was published between 1874 and 1881 by the great general staff.
In 1888 he resigned his post as chief of the staff.
In 1867 Moltke was elected to the North German Diet, and in 1871 to the Reichstag.
His speeches, dealing mostly with military questions, were regarded as models of conciseness and relevancy.
He died suddenly on the 24th of April 1891, and after a magnificent funeral ceremony at Berlin his remains were laid beside those of his wife in the chapel which he had erected as her tomb at Creisau. As a strategist Moltke cannot be estimated by comparison with Frederick or Napoleon, because he had not the authority either of a king or of a commander-in-chief.
While it is doubtful whether he can be convicted of any strategical errors, it seems beyond doubt that he never had to face a situation which placed any strain on his powers, for in the campaigns of 1866 and 1870 his decisions seemed to be made without the slightest effort, and he was never at a loss. He had a tall spare figure, ' and in his latter years his tanned features had received a set expression which was at once hard and grand.
