Helmuth von moltke the elder biography

An outdated army was coupled with a corrupt administration and constant meddling by the Sultan. Thus, despite a successful campaign in Kurdistan, he was largely ignored at the Battle of Nizip in which Egyptian artillery smashed Ottoman infantry. After this defeat Moltke decided to return to Prussia. He was an inveterate traveler and on one of those trips he established a relationship with his niece Marie Burt a young English woman adopted by her sister who was not related by blood to the Moltkes , whom he would marry.

He was appointed personal aide to Prince Henry who resided in Rome and remained there for almost a year, until the prince's death. He returned to Prussia and went through various postings, while rising to general. He was also appointed personal assistant to Prince Frederick William, whom he accompanied on trips to England and Russia. William I saw the need to strengthen the armed forces to deal with Austria if he wanted to gain control of Germany.

One of his first actions was to promote Moltke to chief of the General Staff. The Danish king intended to incorporate the first duchy into his realm, thus raised a wave of nationalism in Germany. In December Confederate troops entered Holstein, which was occupied with almost no resistance. However, it was not until February of the following year that Moltke was able to demonstrate the effectiveness of his approach in the conquest of the Duchy of Schleswig, which was carried out in four days.

Moltke's plans had been ignored by the operational commanders, and only when he was granted supreme command, he was able to organize a lightning campaign of immediate effectiveness. The English intervention forced a ceasefire, but Danish obstinacy and the skill of Otto von Bismarck made it possible for the fighting to resume until Copenhagen had no choice but to sue for peace.

In August , Vienna and Berlin divided the ducats. However, the fact that the Duchy of Holstein, which corresponded to Austria, was surrounded by Prussian territory did not help Austro-Prussian relations to be good and in the end the frictions led to war. The Austrian army was vastly superior to the Danish, but while the Prussian forces had incorporated new weapons such as the Dreyse needle rifle or the Krupp 90mm breech-loading cannon, the Austrian forces were endowed with much inferior weapons and almost barrels.

Hij wordt soms Moltke de Oude genoemd om hem te onderscheiden van zijn neef Helmuth von Moltke de Jonge, die bij het uitbreken van de Eerste Wereldoorlog het bevel voerde over de Duitse legers. Estudou na Academia Militar de Copenhague. Han var farbror till Helmuth von Moltke den yngre. Patrick Feaster en. Cornsilk en. Henry Spenser en. Graf en.

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He, along with his family, moved to Holstein at the age of 5. Around the same time, the 'War of the Fourth Coalition' broke out, and both his country house and town house were attacked by the French. As a result of this, the family became impoverished. Helmuth von Moltke was inspired by his father from early childhood and dreamed about joining the military like his father.

He received his early education from the Copenhagen Royal Cadet Corps For the next several years, he carried on with his education, and kept his focus on joining the Danish army and court. When he turned 18, he became a page to the King of Denmark and later, joined the Danish infantry regiment as a second lieutenant. He had a great future ahead in the Danish Army but he became interested in joining the Prussian Army when he was about 21 years old.

This also meant that he would lose the seniority that he had gained in the Danish Army, but he still went ahead with the decision. In , he became a second lieutenant in the 8th infantry regiment of the Prussian army. He also attended the general war school, which was later renamed the 'Prussian Military Academy. Moltke worked in the general staff's topographical office from to He wrote technical studies, histories, translations, and fiction in attempts to advance his career, which in he diagnosed as suffering from his own weakness of character.

In he became a first lieutenant in the general staff and in a captain. In September Moltke became an adviser to the Turkish army. The Ottoman army was known for its valour but they lacked in adapting modern techniques of warfare which had become a huge concern. For the next two years, he worked with the Ottoman army, which eventually showed in their war with Egypt.

Helmuth also fought in the war alongside the Ottomans. Despite their valor, the Ottoman army lost to Egypt and Helmuth escaped to save his life. After his reentry into Prussian service, the publication of his Turkish Letters established him as an author of some popularity. Moltke served on the Coblenz staff and the transport section and general staff at Berlin, then briefly headed the Magdeburg staff.

Royal unwillingness to use the Prussian army during the Revolution of briefly caused Moltke to consider migrating to Australia as a farmer. However, service as adjutant to Prince Henry in Rome, and later to Crown Prince Frederick William, gave Moltke diplomatic experience, more rapid promotion, the material for more "travel books," and the soubriquet of "the man who knows how to be silent in seven languages.

Moltke became Chief of Staff. He changed little in staff organization but emphasized modern technology in all sections. General strategy and a two-front war plan produced in occupied much of Moltke's personal attention. This promotion to a field post was then accounted the climax of Moltke's career, as well as a triumph of "staff" over "regulars. The Austrian infantry was routed and demoralized, and the Hapsburgs hastened to agree to Bismarck's terms.

This blitzkrieg campaign made Moltke famous. In the war against France, Moltke detrained the 2d Army on the Rhine, expecting to win a defensive battle there before marching on Paris. The conversion of this deployment into a German invasion of France was a measure of Prussian staff capacity, Moltke's confidence and adaptability, and French strategic passivity.

The German army units cohered in a general advance, while the French units collapsed into pockets of local resistance. Moltke attended the proclamation of the German "Reich" January 18, , followed by the January 28 armistice and May 10 Treaty of Frankfurt. As Chief of Staff, Moltke consistently discounted the chances of complete success in a two-front war.

A defensive victory on the Rhine or Vistula, followed by an offensive and a negotiated peace, was the essence of his strategy for conflict against France and Russia. Moltke's view that "perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one" must be set against his opinion that "a war, even the most victorious, is a national misfortune" to begin to grasp the breadth of his military thinking.

He remained for two years at Constantinople, learned Turkish , and surveyed the city of Constantinople, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. He travelled through Wallachia , Bulgaria and Rumelia , making many other journeys on both sides of the Straits. In , Moltke was sent as an adviser to the Ottoman general commanding the troops in Anatolia , who was to carry on the Egyptian—Ottoman War — against Muhammad Ali of Egypt.

During the summer Moltke made extensive reconnaissances and surveys, riding several thousand miles in the course of his journey. He navigated the rapids of the Euphrates and visited and mapped many parts of the Ottoman Empire.

Helmuth von moltke the elder biography

In the army moved south to fight the Egyptians but upon their approach, the general refused to listen to Moltke's advice. Moltke resigned his post of staff officer and took charge of the artillery. Once home Moltke published some of the letters he had written as Letters on Conditions and Events in Turkey in the Years to This book was well received at the time.

It was a happy union, though there were no children. He published his maps of Constantinople, and, jointly with other German travellers, a new map of Asia Minor and a memoir on the geography of that region. He became interested in railroads and he was one of the first directors of the Hamburg—Berlin railway. Moltke also paid close attention to the tactical and operational implications of rifled weapons.

In , Moltke published The Russo-Turkish Campaign in Europe, — , which was well received in military circles. In the same year, he served in Rome as personal adjutant to Prince Henry of Prussia, which allowed him to create another map of the Eternal City published in In , after a brief return to the General Staff in Berlin, he became Chief of the Staff of the 4th Corps, of which the headquarters was then at Magdeburg.

There he remained for seven years, during which he rose to Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel. He also instituted a formal study of European politics in connection with the plans for campaigns which might become necessary. In , the Austro-Sardinian War in Italy caused the mobilization of the Prussian army, though it did not fight. After the mobilization, the army was reorganized and its strength was nearly doubled.

Moltke watched the Italian campaign closely and wrote a history of it in In an act that was yet another first in military affairs, this history was attributed on the title page to the historical division of the Prussian staff. In , "[Moltke] added a Railway Section to the military council. A contemporary would write that von Moltke never made an important decision without consulting the German railway timetables.

In December , Moltke was asked for an opinion on the military aspect of the quarrel with Denmark. 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.

He suggested that by this means its retreat might be cut off. The Danish army was safe on the islands of Als and Funen. On 30 April , Moltke was sent to be chief of the staff for the allied German forces. On June 29, battalions part of Herwarth von Bittenfeld 's army corps crossed to Als in boats, landed while under fire from the Danish batteries, and quickly seized the whole island as far as the Kekenis peninsula.

Days later, Eduard Vogel von Falckenstein 's corps crossed the Limfjord and occupied the remaining parts of Jutland while the Austrians seized the various islands. The Danish government, dejected by the course of the war, ended the war in defeat by signing the Treaty of Vienna. In contrast to Antoine-Henri Jomini , who expounded a system of rules, Moltke was a disciple of Carl von Clausewitz and regarded strategy as a practical art of adapting means to ends.

He developed the idea of Clausewitz and said "The purpose of war is to carry out the policy of the government with arms". He emphasized the autonomy of war. This brought conflicts with Otto von Bismarck. Moltke had worked out the conditions of the march and supply of an army. Only one army corps could be moved along one road in one 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. He believed that the essence of strategy lay in arrangements for the separation of the corps for marching and their concentration in time for battle. To make a large army manageable, it must be broken up into separate armies or groups of corps, each group under a commander authorized to regulate its movements and actions subject to the instructions of the commander-in-chief regarding the direction and purpose of its operations.

Moltke also realized that the expansion in the size of armies since the s made it impossible to exercise detailed control over the entire force as Napoleon or Wellington had done in battle. Subordinates would have to use initiative and independent judgment for the forces to be effective in battle. Campaign and battle plans should encourage and take advantage of the decentralization that would be necessary in any case.

In this new concept, commanders of distant detachments were required to exercise initiative in their decision-making and Moltke emphasized the benefits of developing officers who could do this within the limits of the senior commander's intent. He accomplished this by means of Mission-type tactics directives stating his intentions rather than detailed orders and he was willing to accept deviations from a directive provided that it was within the general framework of the mission.

Moltke's thesis was that military strategy had to be understood as a system of options since it was possible to plan only the beginning of a military operation. As a result, he considered the main task of military leaders to consist in the extensive preparation of all possible outcomes. Moltke planned and led the military operations during the Austro-Prussian War of In the strategy for the war, the main points are as follows.

First Moltke demonstrated a concentration of effort. There were two enemy groups opposing the Prussians, the Austro-Saxon armies, , and their allied North and South German armies, some , strong. The Prussian forces were smaller by some 60, but Moltke was determined to be superior at the decisive point. The Army of the Elbe consisted of three divisions, two cavalry brigades and guns in the cantonments around Torgau General Karl von Bittenfeld.

Those 48,, led by Falckenstein, managed to capture the Hanoverian Army in less than two weeks and then to attack and drive away the south German forces. In dealing with the Austrian and Saxon armies, the difficulty was to have the Prussian army ready first. This was not easy, as the king would not mobilize until after the Austrians. Moltke's railway knowledge helped him to save time.

Five railway lines led from the various Prussian provinces to a series of points on the southern frontier. By employing all these railways at once, Moltke had all his army corps moved simultaneously from their peacetime garrisons to the frontier. After marching into Saxony, the Saxon army retreated into Bohemia. Moltke had two Prussian armies about mi km apart.