5/12/2023 0 Comments Battle of verdun summaryA final attempt by the Germans to break through was thwarted by French and British forces in late October near the city of Ypres. This phase of movement came to a halt in October on the shores of the North Sea near the Belgian town of Nieuwpoort. For several weeks the two armies were constantly on the move, fighting disorganized battles and suffering huge losses. The withdrawal was also the first indication that the war was not going to be over quickly, as many had thought, and that a long confrontation of considerable forces was to be expected.Īt the end of September, starting in the Aisne Valley, the two sides embarked upon what would be subsequently known as the Race to the Sea where each army attempted to pass round the flank of the other before it was able to shore up its defence. This decision was in effect an acknowledgement that the Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris and destroy the French Army had failed. On 9 September, the German Army withdrew sixty kilometres to the north, to a defensive line along the Aisne River. In early September 1914 the French, in a final spurt, halted the German thrust just forty kilometres from the capital at the First Battle of the Marne. The French were supported in this by the first wave of troops of the British Expeditionary Force which had arrived on 14 August. However despite the surprise, and at great human cost, the French Army was able to withstand the assault and retreat, without dislocating, to the great plains situated to the north of Paris. On 4 August 1914, forty-four German divisions streamed through Belgium in an attempt to attack the rear of the French Army massed in the north-east of the country, mostly in Lorraine. The plan prescribed a surprise attack through neutral Belgium and the plains of Northern France, executed by a considerable force of infantry, cavalry and artillery, while at the same time neutralizing the French initiatives on the Franco-German border. The principal objective of the Schlieffen Plan, the document which guided German military strategy in the summer of 1914, was to take Paris and thus force a rapid victory on the Western Front. In the final days of July 1914 the belligerents were able to mobilize their armies at great speed thanks to the efficient railway network then covering mainland Europe. The invasion and a war of movement (August to October 1914) a return to a war of movement for the final confrontation between March and November 1918.ġ. a war of position from November 1914 to March 1918 and a war of movement from August to October 1914 The Western Front of the Great War went through three main phases: ![]() Throughout the conflict the various sectors of the front experienced periods of calm punctuated by heavy shelling and bloody offensives. ![]() Millions of soldiers saw service on the front, where the incessant shelling of both sides transformed the area into a landscape of craters and desolation, and several million of them perished there after enduring the cold, unhealthy and parasite-ridden conditions of the trenches. It was essentially a line of defensive works comprising trenches, barbed wire entanglements, blockhouses and underground shelters. The militarized zone of the front, which separated the zone occupied by the Germans from the rest of France, stretched 700 kilometres from the shores of the North Sea to the Swiss border and varied in breadth from a few hundred metres to several dozen kilometres. ![]() On the Western Front, in an attempt to drive the German Army from the occupied territories, the Allies succeeded in mobilizing a coalition force comprising more than twenty nations with the French and British Armies providing by far the most soldiers and equipment however the United States, which entered the war in the spring of 1917, played a considerable role in the final days of the conflict, in the summer of 1918, which saw the Allies victorious. Except for a brief foray by the French into the region of Alsace, a German possession in 1914, the remainder of the fighting was conducted on French and Belgian soil (Belgium was wholly occupied apart from an enclave situated between Ypres and the French border) indeed, no Allied soldier set foot on German soil except for those taken prisoner. Only the Western Front saw action throughout the length of the war and it was there that the conflict was finally decided. ![]() the Balkan Front, against the Ottoman Empire. the Western Front, considered from the outset to be the decisive front World War I lasted for fifty-one months, from 1 August 1914 to 11 November 1918, and was fought on four fronts in Europe:
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