battles of the Marne
Marne, battles of the (1914, 1918). The stately Marne, which joins the Seine on the edge of Paris, offers a barrier to invaders entering France from the north: it saw fighting in the Champagne campaign of 1814. In 1914 the German invasion plan initially went well, but by the beginning of September was in difficulties, partly because of the weakness of Moltke ‘the Younger’, the German commander, and partly because of the effects of a long advance upon his troops. The Germans had planned to send their westernmost army (Kluck's First) west of Paris, but a counter-attack by the French Fifth Army at Guise on 29 August persuaded Moltke to edge it eastwards to support Bülow's Second Army, and subsequently to order it to follow in echelon behind Second Army—east of Paris.
Joffre realized that the main threat was to his left, around the Marne, and drew troops from his right to form two new armies, Manoury's Sixth and Foch's Ninth. An aviator from the Paris garrison brought news of Kluck's wheel in front of Paris, and Joffre planned a counterstroke, with Sixth Army attacking the German flank north-east of Paris, the armies in the curve of the salient standing firm, and in the east Third Army jabbing in across Champagne.
The battle did not go as planned. Gallieni, governor of Paris, sent troops to join Sixth Army in taxicabs, but Kluck, fighting with remarkable skill, swung round to check the attack. In the east the attack failed to materialize, and in the centre, in the stifling valley of the Marne, the fighting was fierce but inconclusive. Joffre was not helped by the fact that the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), sandwiched between Fifth and Sixth Armies, was not under his command, and Sir John French, bruised by previous French failures, required a direct order from his government to remain in the line.
The battle hung in the balance when Moltke sent a trusted staff officer, Lt Col Hentsch, to the front with ‘full powers to act on my own initiative’. Persuaded, by pessimism at Second Army and the chaotic state of the rear areas, that a retreat was essential, Hentsch ordered First Army to fall back to conform with Second. Most historians agree that the battle could have gone either way, and that it was a failure of nerve in the German high command that lost it. The Germans withdrew from the Marne and made a stand on the Aisne: they were to remain there for four years.
The second battle of the Marne was the result of operations BLÜCHER and YORCK, components of the Ludendorff offensive which began on 21 March 1918. The Germans had made tactical gains but no strategic success, and on 27 May they attacked the French Sixth Army on the Chemin des Dames, above the Aisne, driving it back to the Marne. Although Pershing had decreed that his American Expeditionary Force would only fight united, he was prepared to commit formations piecemeal to meet the Allied crisis. The first Americans were committed at Cantigny on 28 May, and, more significantly, at Château-Thierry/Belleau Wood on the Marne and to its north in May and June. Just as the Marne had proved the high water mark of German success in 1914, so it did in 1918.
— Richard Holmes
