First Battle of the Marne
The French and British stopped the German advance thirty miles from Paris in September 1914 and the war of movement ended with it. The German plan had required the right wing to sweep west of the capital and take the French armies from behind, and by the end of August it had driven them back some 250 kilometres in five weeks and was ahead of schedule. Three things then went wrong. Two corps had been sent to East Prussia after Tannenberg; the troops had marched thirty kilometres a day for a month and were exhausted and outrunning their supply; and Kluck, commanding the outermost army, turned inward east of Paris to keep contact with his neighbour, exposing his flank to the city. Gallieni saw it from the fortress command in Paris and Joffre acted on it. The counterattack from 6 September struck the German right flank, and a gap of some fifty kilometres opened between the First and Second German armies into which the British Expeditionary Force advanced. A staff officer, Hentsch, was sent from headquarters with authority to coordinate and ordered a withdrawal to the Aisne. Some 6,000 French reservists were carried to the front in Paris taxis, which is a small operation and the most remembered detail. The Germans dug in on the Aisne, the two sides raced north to the sea, and the trench line ran unbroken by November. Moltke is reported to have told the Kaiser that they had lost the war, which he had not, and was replaced within days. What had been lost was the only plan Germany possessed, and everything after September 1914 was improvisation.
- Year: 1914 CE
- Category: Military
