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Comment by boomka | Hacker News Reader

There is a very interesting theory that claims one of the major factors leading to the start of WWI (not II) was that Germans could not change their mobilization plans to anything softer than outright invasion of Belgium because there was no easy way to modify the railway schedules on which mobilization plans rely: http://www.ae.metu.edu.tr/~evren/history/texts/taylor1.htm

So once they were forced into some kind of escalation, they had to escalate all the way. Other countries did not realize that (obviously) so they kept putting pressure on Germany with escalations on their end.

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The timetable thesis doesn't hold up that well. The Russians had no plans for a partial mobilization, and the tsar still ordered a partial mobilization (although the military did succeed in pressuring him to return to general mobilization within a few days). Germany not invading Belgium wouldn't have changed the course of the war all that much--Britain likely would have found another excuse to involve itself in the war had Belgian neutrality not been violated.

If you subscribe to the belief that the grand strategy of war should be left to the politicians and not the military, then the timetable excuse is gross dereliction of duty on the part of the military: the military is failing to provide plans for perfectly reasonable options that the government could wish to enact (i.e., limited war instead of total war).

There is some good sense to the argument though. Being entirely surrounded, Germany couldn’t afford to mobilise slower than it’s neighbours. I appreciate this isn’t exactly what you are arguing against but it a pretty complicated situation.

> and the tsar still ordered a partial mobilization (although the military did succeed in pressuring him to return to general mobilization within a few days)

That's not even remotely what happened. What actually happened was the Tsar ordered a full mobilization while lying to the world that their mobilization was only partial, to possibly delay the mobilization of other powers. From the start, not a single thing was done differently from a full mobilization.

For people who enjoy podcasts, the History of the Twentieth Century is currently on WW1, and explains both the background that led to war, the pre-war plans and the actual events.

https://historyofthetwentiethcentury.com/

More about the Western Front, but Hardcore History does a fantastic job there.

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