Ferdinand Foch

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Ferdinand Foch (1919)

Ferdinand Jean Marie Foch [ fɔʃ ] (born October 2, 1851 in Tarbes , Hautes-Pyrénées , † March 20, 1929 in Paris ) was a French military man.

During the First World War , Foch rose to Marshal of France and, from 1918, coordinated the Allied armies on the Western Front as joint commander-in-chief . On November 11, 1918, the undersigned representatives of the German Reich in his train car the Armistice of Compiègne .

Life

Foch was born in Tarbes in 1851 as the son of a civil servant. He spent his school years there, later in Rodez and finally at Jesuit schools in Saint-Étienne and Metz .

On November 5, 1883, he married Julie Bienvenüe (1860–1950). They had four children: Marie Foch (1885–1972), Anne Foch (1887–1981), Eugène Jules Germain Foch, who was born in 1888 and died after only eleven days, and Germain Jules Louis Foch (1889–1914), who died shortly after the outbreak of the First World War fell.

Career

Colonel Foch (1903)

In the course of his military career, Foch was appointed Marshal of three European nations, his home country France as well as Great Britain and Poland awarded him the highest military title. On January 21, 1871, he entered the 4th e régiment d'infanterie . He then graduated from the polytechnic , which he left in 1873 as an artillery officer. After serving as a sous-lieutenant in the 24th Artillery Regiment, he applied to the École supérieure de guerre , the French military academy . He entered it as a pupil, was soon promoted to professor of strategy and in 1908 became its commander. He soon distinguished himself there in the fields of military history and tactics . But he did not stop at purely academic achievements. In 1907 he was assigned to the troops as Général de brigade . He received a division command in 1911 and finally in 1913 command of the XX. Corps in Nancy .

In the First World War he took part in the unsuccessful offensive in Lorraine at the beginning of the war in 1914 as commander of the XX. Corps in Noël de Castelnau's 2nd Army . In the course of the Battle of the Marne he commanded the 9th Army and was appointed Deputy Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre on the Northern Front in October during the Race to the Sea , where he coordinated cooperation with the allied British. He commanded the newly formed Groupe d'Armées du Nord until December 1916. Due to the bloody failures of the battles in Artois in 1915 and on the Somme in 1916, Foch fell out of favor with the French high command. However, he was rehabilitated in 1917 and succeeded Philippe Pétain as chief of staff when he replaced Robert Nivelle as commander-in-chief. In the autumn of 1917, Foch was sent to Italy after the Italian front collapsed at the Battle of Good Freit . He was appointed permanent military representative of France in the Allied Supreme War Council.

The armistice is signed in Marshal Foch's saloon car

In 1918, as a result of the German spring offensive, the absolute necessity of a joint commander in chief became evident for the allies . Foch was appointed Generalissimo of the Allied Forces at the Doullens Conference on March 26 and received official confirmation as Commander-in-Chief of the entire Western Front at a further meeting in Beauvais on April 3 . After the failure of the German attack in the Second Battle of the Marne , Foch led a decisive counteroffensive at Villers-Cotterêts on July 18 , which marked the turning point of the war. On August 6, 1918, he was appointed Marshal of France and coordinated the attacks of the allies in the Hundred Days Offensive that ended the war. He was given the special honor of receiving the signing of the armistice by the German Republic.

Foch retired from military service in 1921, but remained an advisor to the French government.

Military theory and practice

The future marshal published extensive military works while at the academy before 1914. He was never able to break away from his general staff training, which was still entirely based on Clausewitz's way of thinking. Despite four years of practical experience and millions of deaths, he, the energetic organizer, could not open himself to the lessons and requirements of the industrialized war. This turned out to be fatal, especially during the last German offensive in 1918 . General Pétain relied on a mobile defense in order to let the German shock attacks run nowhere and then to set up quick counterattacks. This approach proved to be an efficient response to the new German tactics.

Foch, however, ordered every meter of terrain to be defended and refused tactical withdrawals for fear that the German troops might still reach Paris. In this way he played a significant role in the concept of the German Supreme Army Command and made the massive land gains of the imperial army possible. Foch became known both as a theoretician and as a practitioner of the attack, but here too he followed a conservative line: Analogous to General Falkenhayn on the German side, he carried out alternating mass attacks with long artillery preparations along the front. This did not lose the war for the Entente , but the losses of this approach were enormous and in 1917 even led to mutinies within the French army . Another criticism was his blindness to the new technologies on the battlefield. For Foch, artillery and infantry have always remained the decisive elements on the battlefield. He was not directly opposed to the use of tanks and fighter planes , but he was indifferent.

Germany policy

The marshal turned out to be a hardliner after the war on how to treat those who were defeated in the war. He advocated the division of the German Empire and a relocation of the French military border to the Rhine in order to make any German aggression against France impossible.

Tomb

Foch's bones lie in one of the graves of honor, which are arranged in a circle around Napoleon in the Invalides in Paris.

Honors

Foch memorial on the Clairière de l'Armistice ("Armistice clearing") in the Compiègne forest, 1940

After the victory over the Central Powers , Marshal Piłsudski awarded him awards and the Virtuti Militari order under the sign of the Polish alliance policy . On November 11, 1918 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. In 1919 Foch was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He became a member of the Académie française in 1918 , received countless military awards and several monuments across France. A grape variety ( Maréchal Foch ) and a French aircraft carrier ( Foch ) were also named after him.

The second largest island of the Kerguelen in the French Southern and Antarctic Regions , the Île Foch , bears his name. Furthermore, the avenue Foch in the 16th arrondissement of Paris is named after him. In addition, numerous other streets bear his name.

In addition to a number of barracks in France, the French Foch barracks in Donaueschingen , Baden-Württemberg, was named after Ferdinand Foch. In Berlin-Wittenau , the French allies named one of their housing estates Cité Foch .

A model of the abandoned French tank project AMX-50 as a self-propelled gun with a 120-mm cannon also bore the title AMX-50 Foch in his honor .

Fonts

  • The principes de la guerre. Berger-Levrault & Cie. Paris 1903, (“The Principles of War”).
  • La conduite de la guerre. Berger-Levrault & Cie. Paris 1904, (“The conduct of the war”).
  • Memoirs for the history of the war 1914–1918. 2 volumes. Plon, Paris 1931, (“Memories of Service in the War 1914–1918”).
    • My memories of the war 1914-18. KF Koehler Verlag, Leipzig 1931

literature

  • François Gaquère: Le maréchal Foch. A. Mame et fils, Tours 1930.
  • Elizabeth Greenhalgh: Foch in Command. The Forging of a First World War General. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2011, ISBN 978-0-521-19561-4 .
  • Michael S. Neiberg : Foch - Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War. Brassey's, Washington DC 2003, ISBN 1-57488-551-0 .

Web links

Commons : Ferdinand Foch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Ferdinand Foch  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter F. Académie des sciences, accessed on November 14, 2019 (French).