Historical maps probably helped cause World War I

Ugh the first paragraph kicks off with a missing bit of information. Min Nan has at least 5 subvarieties. In my spouse's it's pronounced "de" not "te" (and she is Min Nan as a first language). She laughed and said there's no way the people in Xiamen said "te", or any of the subvarieties she is familiar with within coastal fujian where she spent the first 25 years of her life.

So failed look at archaic miss transliterations, kind of reminiscent of the entire theme of the article. The example map being built on an argument from a bad assumption (a historical error as a pretext for argument).

Perfect irony.

Cannae is undoubtedly the ur battle of annihilation in the western world (particularly in the relevant period). I think it's reasonable to argue that Schlieffen was heavily influenced and motivated by it, and that perhaps the schematic simplicity by which it was portraited may have led Schlieffen and other German planners astray.

But to lean completely on Tuchman to characterize the military planning of the Germans is completely negligent. Simply saying that it's imperfect scholarship does not excuse you from lifting your main thesis straight from the book.

It's clear that Schlieffen drew on Cannae as a model, but the argument presented in this article is just... missing a lot of stuff?

First, the Tuchman quote: "Under Schlieffen, envelopment became the fetish and frontal attack the anathema of the German General Staff.". I don't think this is a fair characterization ('fetish'). Why WOULD Germany -want- to perform frontal attacks when envelopment was an option? In nearly all scenarios, envelopment is strictly better than frontal attack when possible! And the Germans were hardly afraid of frontal assaults even at the start of WW1. They straight up face-tanked the Belgium fortresses!

And beyond Cannae, the Germans had plenty of recent military history where envelopment/flanking carried the day. In the Austro-Prussian War at the Battle of Koniggratz (arguably one of the major stepping stones to the foundation of the German Empire), an operational flanking maneuver carried the day. In the Franco-Prussian war (the actual founding war of the German Empire), the Battle of Sedan was a battle of encirclement (the Prussians basically totally enveloped the French).

Perhaps Cannae was the archetype they were chasing, but they also had recent (and nationally significant) examples to draw on. They were not 'just' chasing a 2000 year old mirage - they were trying to live up to their own recent traditions and history.

So when the author says, "Doubt never seemed to enter the minds of these military strategists of pre-war Germany. It did not seem to trouble them, for instance, that they were drawing world-changing lessons from a map of a battle of two thousand years earlier about which surprisingly little is known" - well, I'd argue that they weren't troubled because they weren't drawing world changing lessons from 2000 years ago. They were drawing world-changing lessons from recent world-changing events (they UNIFIED GERMANY! They MADE the GERMAN EMPIRE!) that their parents and grandparents just partook in.

I agree with this assessment; the words "probably helped" are doing a lot of work here. Maybe a better way to put it would be, "probably were a factor in the timing of WWI". The German general staff was indeed very focused on the operational art of war and their working assumptions at the time of the war's outset (i.e., that they had an edge over the French via the Schlieffen plan) were certainly factors in Germany's overall calculus....maybe one of the proximate causeS, but not the underlying cause, which was the cumulative history of intense great power competition in the decades leading up to 1914.

For anyone who finds the sequence from Cannae to WW1 tenuous or hard to follow:

- Alfred von Schlieffen, chief military planner for the German Empire during a crucial period (1891-1906), was obsessed with the battle of Cannae.

- A Cannae-style battle seemed impossible in the east, as the Russians had plenty of space to fall back and had done so during Napoleon's time.

- So Schlieffen focused all German planning on a decisive blow in the west. The Germans would encircle the French army and annihilate it Cannae-style.

- When, in August 1914, the Kaiser wanted to mobilize solely against Russia, the generals told him it was impossible to do so and they had to attack France instead.

- Schlieffen's Cannae-inspired plan had the further consequence of flanking the French through Belgium. This drew in Britain and made it a world war.

This is basically true of most wars. The war in Iraq was supposed to be quick and decisive. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rumsfeld-it-would-be-a-short-wa...