FREE ARTICLE: French Command, 1914-18
Today I thought I’d revert to what I love best - bludgeoning you with French history. For anglophone students of the Great War, it can be all too easy to ignore what’s going on on the rest of the Western Front, and beyond, outside of British sectors, and so herewith are pocket introductions to some of France’s highest ranking army commanders to get you started…
Ferdinand Foch was born in 1851, in Tarbes, right down in the southwest in the Hautes-Pyrénées department. The son of a civil servant, he entered the army in 1869, and joined the artillery. He then built a name as a student of military history and doctrine and became one of the French Army’s leading thinkers. By 1907, he was in charge of the War College and in 1911 he was promoted to Major General and commanded a corps at Nancy.
He was still in this role when the war broke out, and was quickly despatched to man the border. He took part in Joffre’s initial failed offensive in mid-August, then lost his only living son, who died aged 24 fighting with the Third Army on 22nd August 1914. Foch was actually guilty of contravening orders at one point here, but France was in the middle of an existential crisis, so rather than sanctions he was then given command of an ad hoc formation charged with maintaining the link between two armies as the Allies fell back in disarray during the Great Retreat.
By the time this retirement ended with the Battle of the Marne, his command had been upgraded to a proper army, the Ninth, and Foch more than proved his worth in saving France from defeat in the opening weeks of the war, charged with defending a large swathe of the line with his flank in the air.
1914 really was a watershed moment for Foch. During the fighting that followed, he was promoted again; commanding the French forces in the north of what would become the Western Front and trying to manage relations with both the British and the Belgians through all of the chaos that led up to and included the fighting at Ypres and on the Yser. He was always advocating the offensive, and displayed an absolute refusal to consider defeat. Another general wrote: ‘He has the energy of a devil… He did not hesitate to play the big game: “Perish or save the State!”’
Throughout 1915, including during repeated offensives that tried to break the deadlock on the Western Front, Foch retained this command, which became officially designated as the northern army group; comprising 2nd and 10th Armies, and an independent corps. This was a level of hierarchy the British didn’t have, unless you want to claim the BEF in itself was an army group.
In 1916 the main Allied attempt to win the war was to be carried out on the Somme, and Foch was tasked by Joffre with planning this offensive. Originally told he would have 42 divisions, he intended that the French contribution to the south of the river would span 28 miles. However, thanks to the German instigated misery at Verdun, which began in February, this was hacked away at until he was looking at 22 divisions, and a front of less than eight miles.
For Foch, though the Somme offensive failed to win the war, there was something to be said for the fact that subjecting the Germans to a second fight helped save the French at Verdun. However, at the end of 1916 he found himself out in the cold, relieved of his command and parked in an office. He would not emerge again until May 1917, when the failure of the Nivelle offensive dragged the French towards catastrophe. He was made Chief of the General Staff, which meant that he worked closely with the Minister of War on how operations should be conducted going forward, planning, and Allied co-operation. Thanks to this last one, after the Battle of Caporetto thrashed the Italians, Foch was sent to coordinate the fallout, with multiple Allied forces arriving in that theatre.
In spring 1918, the Germans threw everything they had at trying to win the war on the Western Front. They came close to pulling it off, and as the end of March approached, it became clear that in order to survive, the Allies were going to have to implement some kind of overall command. It was never going to be handed to a Brit, not on French soil, when the French were the bigger force. Foch was charged with ‘coordinating the action of the Allied armies on the Western Front,’ and when the German offensives kept on coming, it crystallised as a mandate to command with a new job title that he received on 14th April: Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies.
Now he was in charge, and summer had arrived. He was led to believe that the Germans would strike again, this time in the Champagne region, but Foch was scheming for a counter-offensive to hit back at the enemy. He wanted to achieve two things:
To push the enemy back across the lost ground and deny him infrastructure like railways, giving Foch space to manoeuvre.
To draw his forces up on a starting line ready for a proper offensive.
He hit back between the Marne and the Aisne initially, but was already planning to launch an overwhelming show of force himself. He called the counter-offensive to a halt on 6th August, the same day he was promoted to Marshal of France, and then turned to his attention to a primarily British effort in Picardy.
The 100 days to victory began officially on 8th August, and it was a miserable day for the Germans. But Foch did not stop there. He kept on punching. The British again on the Somme, the French east of the Oise, the Americans at Saint-Mihiel. But Foch was already thinking ahead again. By mid-September much progress had been made, and the Germans had no feasible chance of winning the war. Between 26th and 29th, the Allies attacked again, notably on the Hindenburg Line. By October, the war had come full circle, and the British were back at Mons, the French were back attacking a line between Mézières, Sedan and Longwy and on 11th November, the Armistice was signed.
When Foch died at the age of 78, in 1929, the national outpouring of grief was substantial. He was laid to rest at Les Invalides.
I can’t do this piece without also covering ‘Papa’ Joffre. Slightly older than Foch, he was born in Rivesaltes in 1852, in the Pyrénées-Orientales department. With a flair for mathematics, he joined the army in 1869 and unsurprisingly, after his military education was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War and then by the Commune in Paris, by 1879 he had joined an Engineer Corps. A few years later, he requested to serve somewhere in the French Empire. This was another common path for forging a career in the army for officers before the First World War, and it was to the Far East that Joffre was despatched, and French Indochina. By 1892, he was in the Sudan for the purpose of building a railway, and after another stint at home he was off again, this time to Madagascar, where he reached the rank of brigadier-general at the age of 49.
His rise continued. By 1904 Joffre was Director of Engineering at the Ministry of War, then it was a divisional command in Paris, before he was promoted again and also made an inspector of military schools. In 1911, the French just about got over their reluctance to let a single man wield extraordinary military power, in the face now of what looked like an inevitable, large-scale conflict. They finally designated one individual both Chief of the General Staff and also Vice-President of the Supreme War Council. That man was Joseph Joffre, and he immediately got to work on getting ready for this inevitable showdown. Then came that war in August 1914.
Unlike the German Schlieffen Plan, the French Plan XVII was not a scheme to win the war, it was merely a plan to concentrate France’s manpower along the border facing the enemy. Joffre’s plan to beat Germany consisted of a feint with the right hand armies in his line, before he slammed the Germans in the middle with two more. It didn’t work, and the retreat began, but then Joffre came into his own. First off, he binned 160 generals who he claimed had not been up to the fight. He let the retreat of his left happen, and he plugged the line with Foch’s detachment, buying time. He then used that time to pluck troops from elsewhere and formed a new army, which he planned to rapidly redeploy west to block the Germans from getting to Paris. His manoeuvre worked, and he was given the credit for the Miracle on the Marne. Paris was saved, the German armies were stopped in their tracks and then they turned and retreated the other way.
Joffre did try to ram home a complete victory at this point, but it didn’t work. The Germans halted on the Aisne, and then the Western Front was etched across the landscape. So now he was charged at achieving the impossible, and finding a way to break the deadlock.
Not that he was alone in being stumped by this conundrum, but 1915 did not go well for Joffre. In all, France counted a million dead in the first year of the war, after offensives in both Artois and the Champagne. Like other nations’ commanders, Joffre had maintained that if he just had more men, more guns and more ammunition, victory might be possible. The next three years of war were about to squash that idea.
Now, at this point, the head at the top of the BEF, which belonged to Sir John French, rolled. Because 1915 had been a shitshow for Britain too. But this year of anguish did not cost Joffre his post. The French government stuck with him, and in fact on 2nd December they made him not only responsible for the war zone in northeastern France, but for all French units engaged in all theatres. His position was now so exalted that nobody was able to effectively challenge him.
So what had Joffre learned from 1915 and what did he plan to do? Obviously the plan was still to attack big, but he wanted better coordination between the Allies, not only on the Western Front but in all theatres. He wanted simultaneous offensives in 1916 in Italy, France and in Russia. On the Western Front he settled on an offensive in Picardy, on either side of the River Somme, and the British agreed; but then this plan was blown wide open on 21st when the Germans launched their own, giant, mid-winter offensive at Verdun.
Joffre was now faced with another existential crisis. Once again he remained composed. As the battle progressed, in the face of overwhelming demands for men and resources at Verdun, Joffre still had to consider that France had dragged Britain down to the Somme to launch their own joint offensive. But the way that the French had viewed this plan had changed. This was no longer a plan to end the war and defeat the Germans, the Somme Offensive was a lifeline; a way to draw the enemy away from Verdun and relieve the relentless pressure there.
In Britain, the opening day of the Somme is the worst day in British military history; but it was not without localised success. Down towards the river, the advance did get underway, and that success was also evident across the water where the reduced French contingent was participating. But much like the British, the French found that it was hard to gain any momentum. Miserable attrition followed for months on end. The Germans were not defeated, and Joffre’s time was up.
He had already begun thinking ahead to 1917, to continuing to apply pressure on the enemy with yet another offensive, when he was replaced by General Nivelle, who I’ll look at another day. Notable criticisms of Joffre were that he could have done better in 1915 (doubtful), or that he should have better prepared a crucial locale such as Verdun against a potential German attack. He had, it was claimed, settled for “nibbling” the enemy. The war of 1914, his war, had died. This was a new kind of war, and it was deemed beyond him.
Joffre resigned his post finally on Christmas Eve, 1916. When the United States joined the war a few months later, he went west on a diplomatic mission to encourage the burgeoning American war effort. He was still afforded the honour of opening the victory parade on Bastille Day, 1919, after the Treaty of Versailles was finished, and he did so alongside Foch. One of his last acts as an officer was to oppose what would become the Maginot Line, because he said it risked paralysing manoeuvres in the event of another war. He died in 1931, nine years before this sentiment was arguably justified, at least in part.
Lastly for today, I want to look at Philippe Pétain. We’re going to park everything that was to come in the Second World War, and his fall from grace, and look solely at the First World War, where he got to that revered position in the first place.
Pétain was born at Cauchy-la-Tour, in Pas-de-Calais, in 1856. His beginnings were humble. He was born into a family of farmers and orphaned young. He entered Saint Cyr in 1876, and five years after the ignominy of the Franco-Prussian War, he was fully on board with the notion of revanche, revenge for what had befallen his country, crowned by the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. An infantryman, by 1902 he was a battalion commander. His theories were contrary to those of Foch, who wanted to attack everything. At the École Militaire from 1908 - 1910, Pétain was chair of infantry tactics and taught a course that trashed all-out offensive tactics and championed the use of fire power to wear down the enemy before any attack. Despite the fact that his ideas were less fashionable, he literally stuck to his guns, and by 1914 he was looking towards his retirement, and commanding an infantry brigade near Saint-Omer. He’d reached the rank of colonel, and he was just about done.
Then the Germans arrived. Needs must, and by the end of August Pétain had been given command of 6th Infantry Division. Don’t forget the 160 generals shuffled off by Joffre. Job vacancies had opened up in spades. Thus, by October, he found himself even higher; commanding a corps at Arras precisely at the moment the Germans attempted to take the city.
Spoiler, they didn’t, though fighting raged again here in April 1915. That month, during the first of the years’ offensives here, Pétain managed to capture all of his objectives thanks in no small part to the coordination evident between his artillery and his infantry. Turns out, Mr Unfashionable’s ideas worked in this new kind of warfare. Promotion came again and by now, Pétain was in command of Second Army in time for the autumn offensives on the Champagne. His force did manage a breakthrough on 25th September, and captured some of the German front line, but then success petered out. In the downtime that followed, Pétain penned assessments of the fighting where once again, he propagated attrition before an assault, and he forwarded them over his superior’s head to general headquarters. That did not go down well.
When the Germans threw themselves at Verdun, Pétain was put in charge of stopping them, Verdun was already going to be a battle of attrition. That had been dictated by the enemy, but Pétain needed to challenge it.
One of the big calls he made was to not maintain the same army in the same place going in again and again, but to keep it fresh. To this end, he got approval from General Headquarters that divisions from all over the French Army would take their turn and rotate through this miserable sector. Another notable thing Pétain did was to ensure that the system of supply and of reliefs was impeccable.
Fending off disaster, Pétain’s star was on the rise, and his reputation grew. But he was insatiable in his demands for manpower and this irked people. Verdun, after all, was not the only place where the French were fighting. Tension mounted, and on 1st May he became commander of the centre army group. Yes, it was a promotion, but it also took him away from direct command of the battle. Nivelle received command of Second Army instead. Pétain resented the hell out of this move, but he stayed in this post as Joffre was punted out and Nivelle was given command of everything, another insult. When you add to it the fact that Nivelle was planning a gun-ho, ludicrous attack in 1917, he fumed. To anyone who would listen.
Nivelle fell flat on his face in April, and on 15th May, Pétain replaced him, and Foch was brought in from the cold as Chief of the General Staff. At this point, discipline was in chaos and a number of units were refusing to do as they were told. Pétain approached the problem rather like a Premier League manager coming in to a flailing club in any given November; by putting his arm around the team and calming everyone down with a firm hand, and by virtue of being the opposite of his sacked predecessor.
This is where the reputation that would carry him to the head of the Vichy Government in 1940 was really forged. He convicted the guilty sparsely, conditions were immediately improved for all. Now he was in charge, and given Nivelle’s humiliation, Pétain was now able to implement his more reserved ideas fully. Interesting that this is all happening at exactly the time that the British under General Plumer managed to invoke success at Messines with a hefty, but measured approach. Because Pétain also meticulously planned his attacks. There would be sensible, limited objectives. Beware those that tell you that donkey generals did the same thing over and over again and nobody learned anything in this war; because this is just one bit of evidence that they did not.
Moving into 1918, Pétain was crafty when it came to the attrition of his available manpower. By now, the United States had declared war and in the coming months, would be able to supply tens of thousands of troops. Pétain’s favourite suggestion at this point when called upon to hammer his resources was that he was waiting for the Americans. He did, however, agree, when push came to shove, to take over some 25 miles of the line from the British when the latter were bludgeoned by the German spring offensives.
That said, it was the failure of the two allies to withstand the pressure in concert with each other that led to Foch’s arrival as a supreme commander on the Western Front. Until then, Haig and Pétain were, perhaps naturally, aligned with doing what was best for their own nation, and that didn’t tally with trying to avoid the inter-allied front collapsing under the weight of the enemy onslaught. Pétain was by all accounts pessimistic at this stage. Nobody likes having someone brought in over their head. Not least someone whose fighting ethos was the opposite of everything he believed in. Here’s a quote from a letter written by Raymond Poincaré, the President of the Republic, to Georges Clemenceau, the Prime Minister:
‘I do not ignore… the great organisational qualities of General Pétain, I judge him to be unprepared: he is a somber, critical, restless mind, who, in serious times like these, does not inspire confidence in his interlocutors because he lets people believe that he has no confidence in himself.’
And yet, of course, he was on the winning side. At the end of the war, Pétain was made a Marshal of France. In a poetic turn for the man who had been so bitter about the loss of Alsace and Lorraine shortly before he embarked on his career, the ceremony took place in Metz; which was French once again.