Play as · WW1 1914 · L4 · Continental Great Power

German Empire - August 1, 1914

The German Empire that mobilizes on August 1, 1914 is the strongest land power in Europe and the second industrial economy in the world - forty-three years after unification it has outproduced Britain in steel and chemicals, built the continent's most formidable army, and surrounded itself with enemies. The Franco-Russian alliance faces it from two directions at once. Britain, alienated by a decade of naval building, stands uncommitted but watching. Austria-Hungary, the one dependable ally, is a weakening empire whose quarrel with Serbia has just pulled all of Europe to the edge. Population about 68M, the largest in Europe after Russia. The strategic identity is the encircled continental great power - a state strong enough to beat any one rival, positioned so that every plausible war means fighting several, and committed by its own war plan to striking first, through neutral Belgium, on a railway timetable that leaves almost no room for diplomacy once mobilization begins.

Starting position

The July Crisis is nearly over when the campaign opens. Vienna's ultimatum to Serbia has gone unanswered in full, Austria-Hungary has declared war and shelled Belgrade, and the blank cheque Berlin issued on July 6 has made Germany answerable for a war its ally started. Russia has ordered general mobilization, which German war planning treats as an act of war, because the Schlieffen Plan allows no delay: seven-eighths of the field army must swing through Belgium and Luxembourg to destroy France inside six weeks, while a single army detains the Russians in East Prussia. The General Staff has refined this deployment for a decade; the civilian government barely controls it. The army Germany fields at mobilization - 1.7 million men, heavy artillery superior to the French, the best general-staff system in Europe - is the instrument. The High Seas Fleet, second only to the Royal Navy and built at the cost of Britain's friendship, is the hostage: too strong to ignore, too weak to break a blockade.

What turns the campaign

What the Empire wants is the short war the plan promises: France knocked out before Russian mobilization completes, then the whole army turned east for the decisive battle against a Russia that modernizes every year the war is delayed. It wants Britain kept out - which means Belgian neutrality respected, which the plan forbids - or at least kept from landing an army before Paris falls. It wants Austria-Hungary held together and pointed at Russia, the Ottomans and Bulgaria drawn in to widen the eastern front, and Italy's neutrality preserved despite its membership in the Triple Alliance. What it fears is the war it actually got: the check at the Marne, a trench stalemate the French and British can feed longer than Germany can, the distant blockade that strangles nitrate and food imports without a single battle, Russia given time to turn population into armies, and America provoked by the U-boats into adding its weight to the ledger. Every one of these fears is dated: the window in which German arms can still settle the war by battle is measured in weeks in the west and months in the east, and the economy behind the army - dependent on imported nitrates, rubber and grain - was never built for a war of exhaustion.

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