Allies enter Germany

On 1 December 1918 the Allied armies crossed the German frontier. For two weeks they had been following the retreating Germans from the armistice line, and at the end of November they had reached the frontier of the Reich. Marshal Ferdinand Foch had fixed 1 December for the general entry into German territory, which under the armistice was to be occupied as far as the Rhine. That day saw the start of the occupation of the Rhineland, which was to last until 1930.

On the British side only one army entered Germany. Field Marshal Douglas Haig judged that the strip on the Rhine allotted to the British was too narrow for more than one army headquarters, and entrusted the occupation to General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army. It was given four corps, including the Canadian Corps, and the 1st Cavalry Division, while the units of the Fourth Army, which had until then marched alongside it, were withdrawn across the frontier to the area of Namur. In his final dispatch Haig called 1 December a day that “will always be remembered” as the fulfilment of the hopes and efforts of four and a half years of fighting. On the morning of that day the 1st Cavalry Division crossed the Belgian–German frontier. The infantry, however, did not get far. The supply trains, which were due on 30 November, arrived only during the night of 1–2 December, so the army practically stood still for two days. The advance resumed on 4 December. At nine o’clock that morning both Canadian divisions crossed the frontier, and according to the Canadian official history the Scottish battalions entered Germany to the sound of the pipes. The road now led through the northern Ardennes and the Eifel: steep hills, extensive forests, narrow valleys and sparsely scattered villages where billets were hard to find.

Further south the American Third Army of General Joseph Dickman moved off. It had been waiting on the Luxembourg–German frontier since 23 November, and on 1 December its columns crossed the Sûre and the Moselle. By evening its front already reached Trier, the old Roman city on the Moselle, which the Americans occupied that same day. According to an American study of 1938, the population, which in Luxembourg and France had greeted the soldiers with enthusiasm, looked at them in Germany “with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion”. There were no hostile incidents. The chaplain of a New York regiment of the 42nd Division, Father Francis Duffy, recalled that what surprised the soldiers most was precisely the behaviour of the Germans, and some householders even invited American officers to dinner. According to his account, the regimental bands played “Over There” as they crossed the frontier.

The other armies also entered German territory that same day. According to German studies, the Belgians occupied Aachen on 1 December, where the French also took up position from 7 December, and the French Eighth Army began the occupation of the Palatinate. The Allies went on following the retreating Germans at a distance of about 10 kilometres. They had roughly a week’s march left to the Rhine. Under Foch’s plan the British were to occupy a bridgehead around Cologne, the Americans around Koblenz and the French around Mainz. They were to cross to the far bank of the river on 12 and 13 December.