How did the first battle of Marne help the allies?

Answer 1

First of all, the Germans believed that the Allies were going to attack the port of Calay. So they focused on fortifying it and left all their other fortifications the way they were. Next, the Allies had a huge invasion force. Another reason was that Erwin Rommel, the German commander had left to see his family in Paris. Also Hitler had taken sleeping pills went to his quarters and said he did not wish to be disturbed. The Germans had plenty of forces to send but they could not do anything because they had no orders.

Answer 2

The First Battle of the Marne was almost exclusively a French victory. The primary reasons the victory became possible were the over-ambitious nature of the German invasion plan, the deviation from that plan by commanders on the ground, the judgment of General Joffre that the exact time had come to mount a counter attack, and his foresight in allowing Gallieni to collect the troops with which to make that attack in Paris, and the spirit and resolve of Gallieni himself.

The German plan of invasion involved seven field armies in line, pivoting like a gate swinging, with the hinge at the south end and the north end of the line sweeping through a great arc, through Belgium into France. This required the troops of the two field armies at the northern end of the line to march many miles, every day, for a month, occasionally fighting battles along the way. These hard marching men eventually outpaced food supplies, and got no rest either. They were exhausted and practically sleepwalking after more than a month of this brutal pace. The commanders of those two armies despised each other and would not cooperate. The plan called for the army at the end of the line to pass to the west of Paris, which would cause Paris to be enveloped, and then surrounded as the waves of the invasion lapped around the city from both sides. The loss of Paris, on top of the calamity of the invasion to which no effective resistance had so far been made, would probably have finished the French. But the commanders on the scene decided to "shorten the line", and pass the entire invading force to the east of Paris. This decision, at one stroke, undid the entire rationale behind the plan on which an entire generation of German General Staff officers had labored. It was abandonment of the goal of enveloping Paris, and thus it was also abandonment of the aim of the invasion, which was to bring swift, total defeat to the French. So the entire invading force passed to the east of Paris and continued on. This exposed the flank of the invaders, the end of the line, to a counter attack from Paris, where Gallieni had managed to assemble troops to supplement the garrison of Paris (including an army corps brought from the hard-pressed Lorraine front, opening the other end of the French line to the possibility of a break-through there). Gallieni delivered his attack very professionally, using the buses and taxi cabs of Paris to ferry his men to the battlefield, and produced "The Miracle of the Marne". But German exhaustion and over confidence in discounting the possibility of such an attack, and in failing to concern themselves with the flank they left open to recieve it, were as much to blame for the reversal as anything. The Germans had to cease their forward movement and pull back, and then there ensued the "Race to the Sea" as each side tried to outflank the other, continuously extending the lines back to the north, and when the sea was reached, the beginning of the digging of the trenches where the struggle would continue for four more years.