Word: foche
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Reputation. The War made no big military reputations at the time. "Papa" Joffre was kicked upstairs as early as 1916 and General Foch was bitterly criticized for misjudging enemy strength and strategy. The British high command shifted from Sir John French to Sir Douglas Haig. The Germans fired Moltke, then tried Falkenhayn and finally brought from the East old Paul von Hindenburg, who lost his war. But a few younger men in secondary posts came through the ordeal with reputations not only untarnished but so brightened that now, a quarter of a century after Armageddon 1914-18, it is they...
...class of fine professional officers. With a hierarchy of officers whose continuity of tradition has not been broken since the 1870s, the French are probably weak on new tactics. They are scholars in warfare. It is typical that able Chief of Staff Gamelin, even-tempered Parisian who studied under Foch at the Staff College, is so close a student of Napoleon's campaigns that he is supposed to remember "every order as they were given, day by day, during the Empire" (the words are attributed to Foch). But Gamelin is considerable of a realist and it is quite possible...
...ability to foresee, to outguess, to improvise, to make the best of what you have, is absolutely necessary to the successful military "scientist." The Allies almost lost the World War because Britain's Lord Kitchener had grown stodgy, because France's Foch kept mistaking a trench "war of position" fof an open "war of maneuver," because the campaign to take the Dardanelles got under way too slowly. Britain's Sir Douglas Haig threw away a chance for a decisive breakthrough when he allowed the new invention of the tank to appear on the western front prematurely, without...
...periods of sweeping change history is measured by days and hours, not by years. In the last weeks of the War events followed each other so rapidly that General Foch himself could not believe that the end was in sight. Only one month before the end, when he was launching what he called "the greatest of all battles," Foch was making plans for campaigns the next year. Then, in 300 hours...
Perhaps the outstanding characteristic of the book is a series of biographical sketches, which includes Lord Haig, Marshal Foch, Joffre, Ludendorff, and Lawrence of Arabia, as well as numerous lesser known military figures. These portraits are much more than more recitals of the chief events in the men's lives. They rather attempt to evaluate the influence of their previous experiences on the events in which these soldiers took a leading part. Captain Hart attempts to pierce the enveloping mist of popular applause and adulation to present the war leaders as they really were. With an almost too brutal frankness...