Why Did The Schlieffen Plan Work?

World War 1 is known as one of the greatest turning points in the world’s history. The world would be altered by new countries that were created, how countries competed with its rivals, and WW1 would lead to even more loss of life in the second World War. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand in the Austro-Hungarian empire may have made war inevitable, but the course of war was dictated by the Schlieffen plan. The failure of the war plan set in place by the Central Power’s greatest strength, Germany, can be seen as the reason of loss by the Central Powers. This war plan was called the Schlieffen plan and set in course a sequence consequences that ultimately lost them the war. For the sake of my paper I will assume Britain would have abstained from the war if

One major reason the war plan did not work is the pure man power could not move quickly enough with the added burden of fighting with enormous losses of military personnel. Another contributing factor was even though Germany had an enormous army, they didn’t have the proper supplies to attack a fully supplied army. The reserve troops that were pulled to attack in the Schlieffen Plan didn’t have machine guns and were bogged down in the encirclement part of Paris. The Schlieffen Plan depended on the German Army being able to pass quickly through Belgium. The Belgian army attempted to hold up the German advance by putting up resistance from their frontier forts. They even blew up their own bridges and flooded land. Although this did not completely stop the German advance, it did slow the German army down and bought time for the British and French to mobilize their troops. Belgium delayed the Germans so much they did not reach Paris in the six weeks they planned for. Another factor was when the troops moved so quickly into enemy territory they left behind their supply line; becoming undersupplied and slowed down