Beauvais Conference

At 3 p.m. on 3 April 1918 another Allied conference met in the town hall of Beauvais, a town in the Oise department about 55 km south-west of Amiens. A week earlier, at Doullens, General Ferdinand Foch had been given the task of co-ordinating the actions of the British and French armies on the Western Front. He quickly found that this was not enough. In letters to Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau he complained that he had been given responsibility without the corresponding authority, that he had to persuade instead of direct, and that he often had difficulty carrying out moves he considered urgent. On 1 April Clemenceau discussed the matter with him and called a new conference, this time with the Americans taking part.

At Beauvais, alongside Foch and Clemenceau, sat the commander-in-chief of the French army, General Philippe Pétain, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Henry Wilson, General John Pershing, commander of the American forces in France, and General Tasker Bliss, the American military representative on the Supreme War Council. Lloyd George had crossed to Boulogne that day and reached Beauvais by car, late. Pershing had already been in favour of a unified command: on 28 March, at Foch’s headquarters in Clermont, he had placed all the American troops in France at his disposal.

After a discussion in which, according to the British official history, Haig fully concurred, a new text was adopted. The British, French and American governments entrusted Foch with co-ordinating the action of the Allied armies on the Western Front, conferred on him all the powers necessary for its effective realisation, and for this purpose gave him “the strategic direction of military operations”. The commanders-in-chief of the British, French and American armies retained full control of the tactical employment of their troops. Each of them could appeal to his government if he considered that Foch’s orders put his army in danger. The resolution was drawn up in English and French. As regards the American troops it required the consent of the government in Washington, which was later obtained.

Haig also asked that the French go over to the offensive as soon as possible and draw German reserves away from the exhausted British. Foch and Pétain assured him that they intended to attack within a few days. That same day Foch, using his new powers, issued his second general directive: in it he foresaw that the Germans might renew their attack north of the Somme, especially near Arras, and announced blows intended to push the enemy back from Amiens and from the railway to Paris. According to his memoirs, Lloyd George told him during the conference that the English had confidence in him, and on leaving asked jokingly whom he should back, Ludendorff or Foch. “You can back me and you will win,” Foch is said to have replied.

The Beauvais resolution did not fulfil all of Foch’s wishes. It did not cover the Italian front or the Belgian army, and according to French accounts a proposal to speak of “supreme command” fell through in the face of opposition from Lloyd George, who feared Parliament’s reaction. Even so, Foch went from co-ordinator to the de facto director of the common strategy of the three armies. On 9 April Lloyd George presented this to the House of Commons as the most important decision ahead of the coming battle. A few days later, already during the German offensive in Flanders, the Allies agreed on the title of Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies in France for Foch.