Ferdinand Foch
Ferdinand Foch commanded all the Allied armies in the last year of the First World War. Born in Tarbes in 1851 into a Catholic family — his brother was a Jesuit, which slowed his career in an anticlerical republic — he enlisted during the Franco-Prussian war without seeing action, and entered the artillery. He taught at the École de Guerre and became its director, and his lectures on the offensive and on morale were influential and were later blamed for the doctrine that produced enormous casualties in 1914. His actual argument was more careful than the version his students applied. He commanded a corps and then an army in 1914, and his handling of the Ninth Army at the Marne in September made his reputation; the message attributed to him — that his centre was giving way, his right retreating, and that he would attack — is almost certainly apocryphal. He directed the northern group of armies through the Somme in 1916 and was removed after it. He was recalled as chief of staff in 1917 and, at the Doullens conference in March 1918 during the German spring offensive, was given coordination of the Allied armies — the unified command that Haig and Pétain had resisted for four years — and was made generalissimo in April. He held the line, counter-attacked at the Second Marne in July, and directed the sequence of converging offensives from August that broke the German army. He wanted the frontier at the Rhine and said of the Versailles terms that it was not peace but an armistice for twenty years. He died in 1929.
- Lived: 1851 CE – 1929 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: field_marshal, military_leader
