Foch supreme commander against Germany

On 4 November 1918 the leaders of the Entente powers decided that Marshal Ferdinand Foch would exercise supreme strategic direction of operations against Germany on all fronts, including the southern and eastern. The decision was taken in the morning at a meeting in the Paris quarters of Colonel Edward House, President Wilson’s representative, attended by the premiers David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, and by Edvard Beneš on behalf of the Czechoslovaks. House informed Washington that same afternoon, and the news went round the press in the following days, which is why some chronicles give the date as 5 November. Since the spring Foch had been commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in France. Now his strategic authority also extended to General Armando Diaz’s Italian army and to the Allied forces in the Balkans under General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey.

A front through Austria

The reason was the collapse of Austria-Hungary. On 3 November at Villa Giusti the monarchy’s representatives signed an armistice, and at 3 p.m. on 4 November the fighting on the Italian front ceased. The armistice obliged Vienna to withdraw all German troops from the monarchy’s territory within 15 days, and its fourth article gave the Allies the right of free movement on Austro-Hungarian roads, railways and rivers and to occupy the strategic points needed for conducting operations. Germany could therefore expect an attack not only from the west but also from the south, through the Tyrol towards Bavaria.

The same meeting approved a plan for operations against Germany through Austrian territory, prepared by Foch, General Tasker Bliss, the American military representative on the Supreme War Council, General Henry Wilson, Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, and the Italian General di Robilant. The military advisers were also to examine urgently whether forces including the Czechoslovaks fighting in France and Italy could be sent to Bohemia and Galicia. They were to organise the defence of those countries against Germany, cut the Reich off from their oil and coal, and set up airfields for bombing Germany. Franchet d’Espèrey, whose troops were already approaching the Danube after the armistice with Bulgaria, was called upon to cooperate.

A blow in Lorraine

On the Western Front, meanwhile, Foch was preparing another offensive. At the end of October he instructed General Philippe Pétain to prepare an attack in Lorraine, east of the Moselle, from the Nomeny–Arracourt line towards Saint-Avold and Saarbrücken. According to the marshal’s memoirs, in October the Germans had only 32 divisions east of the Meuse against 127 west of it. The attack was to be carried out by General Noël de Castelnau’s Eastern Army Group with General Augustin Gérard’s Eighth Army and General Charles Mangin’s Tenth Army, brought over from the Aisne. On 5 November Pétain sent Castelnau amendments to the plan, and the next day Mangin and his staff arrived at the concentration area. Foch asked General John Pershing for six American divisions, and General Józef Haller, commander-in-chief of the Polish army since October, for the participation of the 1st Polish Rifle Division.

The offensive was to begin on 14 November. According to Foch, 28 infantry divisions and three cavalry divisions were to take part, backed by strong artillery and about 600 tanks. The attack never took place, however. A week later the armistice with Germany was already in force, and the operations through Austria and in Lorraine remained on paper. Pétain, and after him some French historians, later held that the armistice had come too soon and deprived the Allies of a victory on German soil, which could have robbed the Germans of the illusion that their army had not been beaten.