On the Western Front E-Book

John Laffin

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 308

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Beschreibung

A serious attempt to illustrate the humanity of the soldier on the Western Front, this title reflects World War I as they saw it: from first shot to last. These tales, told to fellow men in the trenches, behind the lines, at base hospitals and at the estaminets and billets during rest periods, have been recorded here.

Leseprobe

A

Western

Front

Companion

1914–1918

A–Z SOURCE TO THE BATTLES, WEAPONS, PEOPLE, PLACES, AIR COMBAT

By the same author

Military

Middle East Journey

Return to Glory

One Man’s War

The Walking Wounded

Digger (The Story of the Australian Soldier)

Scotland the Brave (The Story of the Scottish Soldier)

Jackboot (The Story of the German Soldier)

Jack Tar (The Story of the English Seaman)

Swifter Than Eagles (Biography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Salmond)

The Face of War

British Campaign Medals

Codes and Ciphers

Boys in Battle

Women in Battle

Anzacs at War

Links of Leadership (Thirty Centuries of Command)

Surgeons in the Field

Americans in Battle

Letters From the Front 1914–18

The French Foreign Legion

Damn the Dardanelles! (The Agony of Gallipoli)

The Australian Army at War 1899–1975

The Arab Armies of the Middle East Wars 1948–1973

The Israeli Army in the Middle East Wars 1948–1973

Fight for the Falklands!

The War of Desperation: Lebanon 1982–85

The Man the Nazis Couldn’t Catch

On the Western Front: Soldiers’ Stories

Brassey’s Battles (3,500 Years of Conflict)

Holy War (Islam Fights)

Battlefield Archaeology

Western Front 1916–17 – The Price of Honour

Western Front 1917–18 – The Cost of Victory

World War I in Postcards

Greece, Crete & Syria 1941 (The Australian Campaigns)

Secret and Special (Australian Operations)

British Butchers & Bunglers of WWI

The World in Conflict

War Annual 1

War Annual 2

War Annual 3

War Annual 4

War Annual 5

War Annual 6

Western Front Illustrated

Guide to Australian Battlefields of the Western

Front 1916–18

Digging up the Diggers’ War

Panorama of the Western Front

General

The Hunger to Come (Food and Population Crises)

New Geography 1966–67

New Geography 1968–69

New Geography 1970–71

Anatomy of Captivity (Political Prisoners)

Devil’s Goad

Fedayeen (The Arab-Israeli Dilemma)

The Arab Mind

The Israeli Mind

The Dagger of Islam

The Arabs as Master Slavers

The PLO Connections

Know the Middle East

Dictionary of Africa Since 1960

and many novels

A

Western

Front

Companion

1914–1918

A–Z SOURCE TO THE BATTLES, WEAPONS, PEOPLE, PLACES, AIR COMBAT

JOHN LAFFIN

Contents

Author’s Note & Acknowledgements

Chapter One

C

REATING THE

W

ESTERN

F

RONT

Chapter Two

T

HE COMMANDERS

Chapter Three

T

HE ARMIES

Chapter Four

T

O

K

NOW THE

W

ESTERN

F

RONT

, K

NOW

I

TS

L

ANGUAGE

Maps of the Western Front

Chapter Five

O

FFENSIVES

, B

ATTLES

, C

AMPAIGNS

Chapter Six

T

HE

A

IR

W

AR

Chapter Seven

P

RINCIPAL

W

EAPONS

Chapter Eight

D

ECORATIONS AND

M

EDALS

Chapter Nine

P

LACES OF

S

PECIAL

I

NTEREST

Chapter Ten

T

HE

C

OMMONWEALTH

W

AR

G

RAVES

C

OMMISSION

Chapter Eleven

P

LACES TO

S

TAY

, T

OURIST

O

FFICES

, T

OUR

O

PERATORS

Bibliography

Author’s Note & Acknowledgements

A Western Front Companion is the result of decades of experience and study of the Western Front. In that period my wife Hazelle – my personal Western Front companion – and I have spent an aggregate of more than five years on the battlefields of France and Flanders, long enough to warrant a long-service medal, if such an award existed for the Western Front.

The need for such a book has been apparent to me for many years. Hundreds, probably thousands, of pilgrims and tourists meeting me on the battlefields have asked questions about the conflict on the Western Front. What is the Western Front? What were the major battles? What weapons did the soldiers use? Why were there such catastrophic losses? And much else. This book answers many questions and anticipates others, though it is not a guidebook in the conventional sense since such books are already available.

A Western Front Companion is much more than a guidebook, for it provides a basic understanding of the phenomenon which we call the Western Front, in all its military and human complexity. The Western Front was a way of death and a way of life for millions of men and it left a scar across the soul of their respective nations.

Over the years various people have been helpful to me and to Hazelle in the writing of this book and many others about the Western Front. Those who deserve our particular thanks include Anny De Decker, Tony De Bruyne, Jean-Pierre Thierry, Martial Delebarre, Jean Letaille, Yves Föhlen and Marcel Robidoux. Members and former members of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission have also assisted us, notably Steve Grady, Jacky White, Norman Christie, Colette Vanderville and Jouelle Scalbert.

Throughout my life as a military historian innumerable British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, French and German veterans of the First World War have shared their wartime experiences with me. Alas, few of them survive but the book serves as a form of memorial for them.

The illustrations in this book, photographs, paintings and sketches, are from my own collection unless otherwise indicated.

CHAPTER ONE

Creating the Western Front

The Western Front is probably the bestknown battle line in history, but the events which led to its creation need explanation and clarification. Without this help what are people of the late twentieth century to make of this extraordinary area and the astonishing events that took place there? In simple terms, the Western Front was a relatively narrow battlefield 460 miles in length and up to 20 miles in breadth on which, during a period of 50 months, more than 6 million soldiers were killed and another 14 million wounded.

To expand the description a little, vast armies confronted one another across belts of barbed wire many miles deep. The wire defended line after line of trenches that collectively ran for thousands of miles across a morass of mud, and in places hills and mountains. The hostility between the Allies and the Central Powers was intense and their soldiers fought ferociously, but for most of the time with little military result.

A mixture of political and military madness brought the Western Front into being and maintained the incredible violence, which made it so infamous. The nature of the war, the prodigious effort, limitless courage and sacrifice – on both sides – and the intensity of the fighting has intrigued those generations that followed the ‘lost generation’. There is a curious fascination with the Western Front and all that it entails – the memorials and monuments, the mine craters and trenches, the famous woods and rivers, the thousands of war cemeteries, the villages and towns with names that would excite not a moment’s attention had they not been the scene of some costly battle. Like the battlefields of Waterloo and Gallipoli and those of the English Civil War and the American Civil War, the killing fields of the Western Front have an apparently inextinguishable mystique.

The Western Front differs from the others in that fighting raged across it almost incessantly for the duration of the war. The death of 20,000 men in one day of battle was not cataclysmic enough to bring the madness to an end. Neither side could break through the other’s lines, no matter the force, the money and the lives expended.

The trigger for what came to be called ‘The Great War’ was a singular act of madness. It was the assassination, on 28 June 1914, of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of his wife. The murders took place in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo and the killer was a young student nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. The organization to which Princip belonged, Mlada Bosnia (Young Bosnia), considered his act ‘tyrannicide for the common good’.

Franz Ferdinand was undoubtedly a tyrant, as well as being a brutal, boastful and bloody-minded man. As a pitiless hunter he shot tens of thousands of birds and animals and fired his guns and rifles so frequently that he permanently injured his shoulder and impaired his hearing.

As a prince Franz Ferdinand was also a field marshal and he had gone to Bosnia and its sister province Hercegovina, which the Habsburgs had annexed in 1908, to inspect the Austrian Army. The populace of the province, a mixture of Slavs, Serbs and Croats, had always wanted to join Serbia, their national state, and they regarded the Austrians as a hostile occupying power. In killing the Habsburg royal couple Gavrilo Princip imagined that he was striking a blow for freedom.

Austria-Hungary saw the assassination as a challenge to its status as a Great Power, especially as its rulers had already had other trouble with Serbia. The Habsburgs asked their German allies to back them in a show of force and the German Emperor Wilhelm II and his chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, not only promised support but said that if Russia intervened to aid Serbia Germany would oppose Russia.

Uncertain about how to proceed, the government in Vienna took until 23 July to frame a formal note to be sent to Serbia. Its ‘Ten Points’ included cessation of all propaganda against Austria-Hungary, the arrest of certain people accused of complicity in the assassination, and the participation of Austrian representatives during the investigations in Serbia. The general intention was to humiliate Serbia.

However, the Serbians accepted the note, though they added qualifications to a few points in an attempt to salvage a little prestige. As a precaution, the armed forces were mobilized. On the whole, the Serbian official reply, handed to the Austrian minister in Belgrade, was such a cleverly drawn document that Vienna did not know how to react. It solved the problem, on 28 July, by declaring war on Serbia, though the Austro-Hungarian army was in no state to do any actual fighting.

Russia, as patron of the Slav states in the Balkans, felt itself threatened and began to mobilize its huge army of conscripts. Even now nothing more than grandiose bluffing was in progress, but German military might and pride became involved. General Schleiffen, chief of the German general staff from 1892 to 1906, had enunciated the dictum ‘Mobilization means war’, and although he was dead his slogan lived on.

The German general staff convinced themselves that a war was actually in progress and on this false premise argued that if they did not act now they would lose their great advantage of superior speed and sophisticated railway transport. Their paranoid fear was that Russia and France, as allies, would attack them on two fronts, – an alarming prospect. On 31 July Chancellor Bethmann Hollwegg asked his chief of the general staff, von Moltke, just one question: ‘Is the Fatherland in danger?’

‘Yes,’ said Moltke, a response that led directly to war. Even so, some statesmen were still trying to mediate in an effort to prevent war. In the early hours of 1 August, King George V appealed directly to Tsar Nicholas of Russia to refrain from hostilities. But the momentum towards war was now unstoppable and on that same evening Russia and Germany were at war. On 3 August Germany declared war against France.

On 2 August the Germans had demanded that Belgium give the German armies open thoroughfare across the little lowland country in order to attack France. The German general staff wanted to implement the Schleiffen Plan, or the Cannae Plan as Schleiffen himself called it. It was an imaginative and ambitious strategy to encircle the French armies in the event of another war. Though he was now dead, Schleiffen’s plan was still attractive to his successors.

When King Albert of Belgium refused to comply with the Germans’ wishes the British government was drawn into the conflict because of a treaty, dating back to 1839, which committed Britain to go to Belgium’s defence should it be attacked. On 4 August Britain became the only power to declare war on Germany, rather than the other way round.

The chain of reactions was moving so quickly that nobody could stop one declaration linking with another and suddenly the world was at war. Both sides were convinced that their cause was right and that God marched with them; German soldiers’ belt buckles carried the words Got mit uns (God with us).

Immense armies were soon on the march to the eastern and western fronts – that is, the German eastern and western fronts. In the east the more professional and better-armed Germans decisively defeated the Russian armies at Tannenberg at the end of August. Vast German and French armies could move rapidly towards the Western Front because of the efficient railway systems but once they were delivered to the railheads the troops’ movement was slow, since no army had any mechanical transport. The initial thrust provided military momentum for only a month, after which the armies moved no faster than in Napoleon’s time, a century earlier.

Defence was largely mechanized, because of the railways, but attack was not. Horses pulled the guns and the transport while forage for the horses occupied more space than ammunition or food.

On 14 August the French launched a great offensive at Lorraine and suffered casualties so heavy that they were not exceeded in any later campaign, including that of Verdun. The Germans swept through Belgium, with the soldiers sometimes covering 30 miles a day on foot. Each time the French generals ordered a major attack against the invaders they lost still more men.

The British, meanwhile, were deciding how best to help Belgium, and at a Council of War on 5 August several ideas were presented. After long discussion, much of it pointless, Sir Henry Wilson of the War Office pointed out that the British Expeditionary Force, although it was a small one of about 100,000, must move to a timetable drawn up in 1911 and the only one in existence. It placed the BEF on the French left. This couldn’t possibly help Belgium, the reason for Britain going to war, but the Council of War agreed to use the old plan, the cabinet concurred and the BEF was sent to the Western Front. We can only speculate on what might have been achieved had the BEF been kept as an independent force and used more intelligently.

A French drawing of August 1914 showing the French Army going to the rescue of the damsel Alsace. The German claim to sovereignty over Alsace is swept aside as the French troops arrive.

By 22 August advance divisions of the BEF had reached the town of Mons, where the following day they were attacked by two German army corps, vastly superior in numbers. The BEF held firm but as the French troops on the right fell back the British commander, General Sir John French, had no option but to retreat. At Le Cateau on 26 August the BEF stood and fought again and withdrew once more.

In fact, both sides were moving away from each other, but the French and Germans again collided after 5 September when the Germans crossed the Marne. In an impossibly confused situation, because of nonexistent or inadequate communications, remarkable events occurred. For instance, the BEF advanced to find no opposition whatever, but instead of pushing on vigorously the generals advanced at only 8 miles a day. Nevertheless, under the French onslaught the German armies fell back and senior Allied officers spoke confidently of being in Germay within a month. The Allied pursuit lasted a mere five days. On 14 September the exhausted Germans crossed the Aisne and here set up a desperate and inadequate defence.

A French drawing showing German trench building, from a manual of 1914.

They were astounded when the advancing Allies stopped. This gave the Germans time to entrench, and this they promptly did, setting up machine guns to protect their lines. Trench warfare had begun. Since the lines of both sides ‘hung in the air’ – that is, they had no defended ends – there was still a chance for one side to turn the other’s flank.

Instructions on how to build and how not to build a trench, from a training manual of 1916.

General Joffre, the French commander, was too dull to see the value of aiding the Belgian Army besieged in Antwerp. In any case, he disliked the Belgians, reason enough in his case to deny them any assistance. The British Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, also failed to grasp the importance of Antwerp. The one man who did see the port’s strategic importance was Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. He rushed 3,000 Royal Marines to Antwerp but they were too small a force to be effective and on 10 October Antwerp fell. The marines were interned in nearby Holland. Escaping from Antwerp, the Belgian Army opened the sluicegates in the dykes, flooding much of the coastal areas and forcing the Germans inland.

In mid-October, the Germans and the British arrived, practically simultaneously, at Ypres, Flanders, with the intention of outflanking each other, and collided in what was later called the First Battle of Ypres. The Germans were stronger and drove a hole right through the British lines, only to be checked by courageous ‘odds and sods’ – cooks, batmen and unfit soldiers. Reserves were rushed up by rail, thrown into battle and slaughtered in droves but enough men survived to hold the lines. By the end of the battle the BEF had virtually ceased to exist.

British troops force German soldiers from a village in 1914.

As bloody First Ypres ground to a halt, the Western Front became a fixed reality rather than a loose concept. It stretched about 460 miles from the Belgian coast at Dixmuide to a point near the French city of Belfort on the Swiss border. Everybody soon accepted the term ‘Western Front’, though British troops actually had to move eastwards to fight on it.

Behind the front, to the east, the Germans had captured most of France’s coal mines, all of its iron supplies and much of its heavy industry. The Germans were stronger than the Allies in the number of heavy guns and machine guns. Most importantly, they held the high ground almost everywhere. This gave them enormous strategic and tactical advantages.

French troops capture a German standard in a Western Front action in 1915. (From a painting by François Flamenq)

Commanders on both sides spoke boldly of the great successes they would achieve in the spring of 1915. It was clear now that the war would not be over by Christmas, as British wishful thinkers had forecast. Nobody had prepared for a war of attrition and the generals did not know how to fight such a war. However, the German and French high commands were sure of one thing – millions of men would be needed to do the fighting. The Germans had an advantage here because their national birth rate had increased up to the beginning of the twentieth century. The French birth rate, on the contrary, had been declining.

In Britain Kitchener announced, to everybody’s surprise, that the war would last three or four years and that Great Britain would need to raise an army of ‘many millions’. He made this statement at the first cabinet meeting he attended and quite without reference to the Imperial General Staff, most members of which had accompanied the BEF to France. As the cabinet opposed conscription, Kitchener might have been expected to turn to the eleven divisions of the Territorial Army, but he had an unjustifiably low opinion of the part-time soldiers and instead sought volunteers. He hoped to draw in 100,000 men in the first six months and perhaps 500,000 in all. In fact, a wave of patriotic enthusiasm brought in 500,000 volunteers in the first month and for the next eighteen months 100,000 a month joined the colours.

A hand-to-hand struggle to the death in the trenches in late 1915. The artist’s impression reflected reality. (From a painting by Lucien Jonas)

The army was not prepared to receive so many men but they were soon needed in the killing fields of the Western Front.

CHAPTER TWO

The Commanders

The war on the Western Front made many generals famous, or infamous, according to the view taken of the campaigns, offensives and battles that they planned and conducted. A large number of officers reached the rank of brigadier-general, the most junior general’s rank, and every division was commanded by a major-general, so thousands of officers held senior rank. Above the rank of major-general they thinned out. Even so, over the period of the war many officers in the Allied armies held the rank of lieutenant-general or its equivalent.

Lieutenant-generals commanded corps and sometimes armies, though usually an army was under a full general. Few field marshals – the French equivalent was marshal – existed until 1918, or until after the war, when most of the army commanders were promoted to that rank.

Considering the many hundreds of generals in service, few were outstanding by appraisals of the time or in hindsight. By outstanding, I mean innovative, enterprising and imaginative. To be fair, it was difficult for a divisional commander on the Western Front to be enterprising because he was constrained by tactics imposed by higher command. A major-general had to do what he was

told by his corps commander, who was under instructions from his army commander. And all of them were profoundly influenced by their commander-in-chief, whom they wanted to impress. Sycophancy was the key to success. The rank of brigadier-general disappeared before the Second World War, when officers of this level were merely brigadiers.

On many occasions a major-general commanding a division profoundly disagreed with the orders given him by his superior but he was in no position to change them. Some divisions were considered ‘good’ and some ‘bad’ but these gradings were the result of varying levels of morale and fighting spirit rather than of what they achieved. Brigadier-generals and major-generals could have a great effect on morale. The brigade commander or divisional commander who showed himself at the front and took the trouble to visit his men in their camps generally built up a strongly motivated force under his command.

Most soldiers of all armies never set eyes on an officer above the rank of brigadier-general. During my researches, over a period of many years, I always asked old soldiers up to the rank of sergeant if they saw their own general. Perhaps two or three had done so. Most British soldiers had seen their own unit’s commanding officer, generally a lieutenant-colonel, only on the occasion of a unit parade. The situation was different in Australian, Canadian and New Zealand units where the CO often visited his men, right down to platoon level.

Major-General John Russell, who commanded the New Zealand Division throughout its time on the Western Front, is little known outside his own country but his division was one of the finest in the entire Allied armies. The stature of the men he is inspecting is impressive.

Under General Sir John French, the first commander of the British forces in France and Belgium, and then under General Sir Douglas Haig for the remainder of the war, lesser generals rarely risked taking a chance to shine because the two commanders-in-chief might have seen them as potential rivals. Neither of these two ego-ridden men would have brooked competition.

Smith-Dorrien was considered an able general, even a clever one, and French got rid of him. Under Haig, the men who rose to command armies were Plumer, Horne, Birdwood, Gough, Byng, Allenby and Rawlinson. Not surprisingly the ebullient, strong-willed Allenby was transferred to the Middle East. None of the others was conceivably a threat to Haig.

General Sir Edmund Allenby, GOC of the British Third Army, before he was sent to take over all British and Empire forces in the Middle East.

John Monash, commander of the Australian Corps after its formation in 1918, was the general who showed most imagination and initiative. It has long been said that Prime Minister Lloyd George wanted to dismiss Haig and replace him with Monash but this was never seriously considered. Monash held the rank of lieutenant-general only from mid-1918 and he was a citizen soldier, not a regular soldier. With the British Army as rigid as it was in 1914–18, Lloyd George could not have jumped Monash over the shoulders of the several full generals senior to him.

In the French Army some generals commanded respect for their ability and courage but they had no more enterprise and initiative then their British confrères. Rigid in their outlook, they were operating to a strategy and tactics which had been valid a generation earlier. Joffre was as solid as a rock and no more enlightened; Pétain had the spirit of a great commander but he lacked the intellect of a Napoleon; Gallieni had ideas – he sent reinforcements to the front in Paris taxis at a time of crisis – but no overall view of the strategy required to fight a great war; Foch was incisive, a great quality, and he was the best of the French generals, but he seemed unable adequately to coordinate the movements of the vast numbers of men under his command in 1918.

The American commander-in-chief, General John Pershing, and his senior subordinate generals were ready to learn but, like their eager men, they made mistakes while they were doing so. They were overconfident but they had a keen intelligence, and had the United States entered the war earlier the American generals would have become prominent.

The German generals were highly professional and they showed more elasticity of thought than most of the Allied leaders. German students of the fighting on the Western Front have always stated that their generals deserved to win the war because they were so much cleverer than those of the Allies. At his superior level of command, Ludendorff was the great thinking general of the war. Max von Gallwitz and General Prince Rupprecht were able and incisive and they handled their formations skilfully. Some other generals were retained by the German general staff beyond their level of competence and thus made serious errors. But this also applied to the opposing armies. Haig should have been removed from command after the disastrous early failure of the Battle of the Somme. It was a feature of the First World War that failed senior generals were retained in their posts, often because of their political influence at home. Also, powerful generals on the staff at home, as well as politicians of cabinet rank, hesitated to sack generals in the field because they feared that such a step would reflect badly on them.

The Kaiser, surrounded by his staff officers, speaks to a British brigadier whose troops had been defeated and captured in a battle at Chemin-des-Dames in 1917.

Bullard, Lieutenant-General Robert Lee

Bullard graduated from West Point in 1885 and by 1917 he was a brigadier-general. In June that year he was appointed commander of the Second Brigade of the Third Division and took it to France. As a major-general he was given the American First Division in December and the following May he carried out the successful attack at Cantigny. A popular field commander, Bullard was promoted to command III Corps in July 1918 and he led this formation in the bloody fighting at the Vesle river or ‘Death Valley’. These operations were part of the Allied counteroffensive along the Aisne–Marne front after Ludendorff’s ‘Michael’ Offensive petered out in July 1918. After leading III Corps to the Meuse–Argonne sector, Bullard took charge of the American Second Army on 12 October. During the final weeks of the war his sector was quiet.

General Bullard, commander of the United States Second Army.

Bülow, General Karl von

An able infantry general, Bülow was given command of the German Second Army on 2 August 1914 and was responsible for the capture of the Belgian fortresses of Liège and Namur. These triumphs led to his being given nominal command over General von Kluck’s First Army. His troops defeated the French Fifth Army on the Sambre river and Bülow had further successes at St Quentin.

The apparently invincible Germans crossed the Marne on 4 September but a 30 mile gap opened up between Bülow’s Second Army and Kluck’s First. Bülow showed the limitations of his thinking. When he realized that the French-British allies had discovered this gap Bülow panicked and showed all the symptoms of military paralysis. A staff colonel, arriving at Bülow’s HQ on 9 September, recognized Bülow’s inadequacy and ordered an immediate retreat from the Marne behind the Aisne river. Briefly, Bülow commanded the entire German right wing of three armies and on 10 October he took over a newly formed Second Army at St Quentin. In preparation for sacking Bülow, the Kaiser promoted him to field marshal in January 1915, following which he suffered a heart attack. The German general staff did not again offer him a command and in June 1916 Bülow resigned from the army.

Byng, General Sir Julian

Byng was in Egypt when war broke out and was recalled to take command of the Third Cavalry Division, which he led during First Ypres. In March 1915 he commanded the Cavalry Corps but was sent to Gallipoli to take charge of IX Corps in August 1915. In May 1916 he was back on the Western Front in charge of the Canadian Army Corps. With this corps, Byng checked a German advance in June at Mont Sorrel and Sanctuary Wood but with great loss of life among his own men.

A contemporary portrait of General Sir Julian Byng, GOC of the British Third Army.

In 1917 the Canadian Corps captured Vimy Ridge, a triumph for Byng and the reason for his being given command of the Third Army when Allenby was sent to the Middle East. In this capacity he planned the Cambrai Offensive. In November 1917, using 486 tanks as his spearhead, Byng was initially successful but the campaign failed for lack of infantry and reserves. Byng blamed the setback on his troops, ‘namely,’ as he said, ‘lack of training on the part of junior officers and NCOs and men’. The Germans’ Michael Offensive in March 1918 hit the Third Army but Byng, after losing the Cambrai Salient, held the enemy at Arras. With the Fourth and Fifth armies he drove the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line during a counter-offensive that began on 21 August.

Castelnau, General Noel de

More important on the Western Front than British histories indicate, Castelnau commanded the Second Army when the war began and moved it into German Lorraine in line with Plan XVII, which he had drawn up. On 20 August 1914 he was defeated at the Battle of Morhange but he managed to save the great fortress city of Nancy. In mid-1915 he commanded the central front and later that year he controlled the Champagne Offensive. When the Germans attacked Verdun in February 1916, Castelnau was sent there and it was he who made the decision to defend to the last the great fortress complex. When Joffre was removed as commander-in-chief, Castelnau, who had been Joffre’s chief of staff in 1915, also lost his job. In 1918 Foch gave him command of the Eastern Army Group in Lorraine and Castelnau successfully directed the final campaign there. An underestimated Western Front general.

Falkenhayn, General Erich von

A lieutenant-general in 1914, the Prussian Falkenhayn fancied himself as a strategist. On 3 September 1914 he advised the chief of the general staff, General von Moltke, to capture the Channel ports and halt the German advance on the Marne. Von Moltke rejected the sound advice and two days later the hurried retreat from the Marne began. Moltke’s reputation was lost and on 14 September Falkenhayn replaced him. He presided over the battles of attrition in October and November, mainly at Ypres. Just why he used units of raw recruits when he had veterans resting between the Aisne and the Vosges has never been clear. On 21 February 1916 it was Falkenhayn who ordered the great assault on Verdun. The German losses here, as well as a German rout on the Eastern Front, lost Falkenhayn his reputation and strengthened his enemies, who included Ludendorff and Hindenburg. He lost his job on 29 August 1916 and had nothing further to do with the Western Front.

Fayolle, General Marie-Emile

As an artilleryman, Fayolle saw that the French Army had too few guns in comparison with the German forces and he criticized Foch and Joffre, the French commanders of 1915 and 1916, for their wasteful infantry assaults. As commander of the Sixth Army he was responsible for the French part of the Somme Offensive in July 1916 and his advance greatly outstripped that of his British allies to the north. Nevertheless, he was considered too cautious and was transferred to command of the First Army, an inferior command, in 1917.

General Nivelle took over the Sixth Army and failed lamentably in an offensive of April 1917. When General Pétain became commander-in-chief he appointed Fayolle to command Centre Army Group. After a success at Verdun in August he was sent to Italy to be deputy commander of the French troops there. Back in France in March 1918, he was given command of forty divisions, but from then on suffered from conflicting orders and demands by Foch, now the Allied supreme commander, and by Pétain, the French commander-in-chief. Nevertheless, he performed well and during the summer of 1918 he controlled fifty-five divisions, fully half the strength of the French Army.

Foch, General Ferdinand

With a diverse military background, the aggressive Foch quickly gained promotion in the first months of the war and by December 1914 he held power second only to that of Joffre, the commander-in-chief. He was responsible for wasteful offensives in Artois during May and September 1915, but learned from these reverses. At the end of 1915 Foch reported that a decisive breakthrough was a responsible action; the reality of trench warfare demanded that the Allies should make attacks on various parts of the front and wear down the Germans. His own attack on the Somme was not successful and when Joffre was sacked in December 1916, to be replaced by General Nivelle, Foch fell with him.

A 1916 postcard showing, from the left, General Joffre, President Poincare, George V, General Foch and General Haig.

For fully a year Foch was more a consultant but he was made chief of the general staff after Nivelle’s fall from grace. When the Germans launched their offensive in March 1918 coordination of Allied operations became vital and Foch was given this task. On 3 April he was given the authority for the ‘strategic direction’ of the armies and on 14 April he was named Supreme Allied Commander-in-Chief. At first this meant control over French, British and American forces but soon he had similar authority over the Italian and Belgian forces as well.

A rarely seen photograph of General Foch. The enormous pressures of command over the entire Allied force show on his lined face. The undone uniform pocket perhaps hints at his preoccupation.

The Allies somehow absorbed the power of the German attacks, which lost their power by July. Foch then organized the Allied offensive that was maintained until the victory in November 1918.

French, Field Marshal John Denton Pinkstone

French was nearly sixty-two when he was given command of the British Expeditionary Force on 4 August 1914. He landed at Boulogne on 14 August and on the 23rd his formations were in action at Mons. Virtually enveloped, the BEF retreated. French was too far from the front and he panicked, ordering a retreat from Mons. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, hurried to France and countermanded the order to retreat. French blamed General Smith-Dorrien, commander of II Corps, for the setback.

French led the BEF to Belgian Flanders and late in October he reported to Kitchener that the Germans were ‘playing their last card’ in Flanders. This was a wildly optimistic forecast. He made another error of judgement in March 1915 when he tried to break the Germans’ lines at Neuve Chapelle and the British suffered heavy casualties. Another disaster followed in April when the Germans counterattacked. Driven by a mixture of desperation and overconfidence, French began an offensive in Artois on 25 September 1915, only to be repulsed twice; his troops again suffered heavily. After trying gas against the Germans at Loos, French broke off his offensive on 14 October and on 4 December he resigned, to be succeeded as commander-in-chief in France by Douglas Haig.

A rarely seen image of General Sir John French, commander-in-chief of the BEF for the first eighteen months of the war.

Gallwitz, General Max von