Franchet d'Espèrey takes command at Salonika

On the morning of 18 June 1918 General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey took over command of the Allied armies on the Salonika front in Salonika. He had arrived the day before, and the post had been vacant for a week: his predecessor, General Adolphe Guillaumat, had left for France before his successor reached the scene. This is how the change is described in Cyril Falls’s British official history of the Macedonian campaign. The British chronology of the war records Guillaumat’s recall under 6 June, his appointment as Governor of Paris under 15 June, and Franchet d’Espèrey’s appointment under 18 June. The cause of the whole change was the defeat the French had suffered on the Western Front at the turn of May and June.

Guillaumat returns to Paris

After the breakthrough on the Aisne the Germans stood on the Marne, a few dozen kilometres from Paris, and the capital was being shelled by a long-range gun. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau wanted to put at the head of the city’s defence a general who would inspire confidence and whose republican convictions were as sure as his military abilities. According to Falls, the government also wanted to have Guillaumat at hand in case something happened to General Ferdinand Foch or Philippe Pétain. According to some French accounts, Clemenceau considered giving him Pétain’s post, but was dissuaded by Foch and the Allies.

Guillaumat left Salonika on 9 June, in great haste and secrecy. He left temporary command to General Paul Henrys, commander of the French Army of the Orient, and, as Falls observes, probably passed his successor on a train in France. By 12 June he was in Paris. By a decree of 14 June, published the next day in the official gazette, he became Military Governor of Paris in place of General Auguste Dubail. Some biographies give the date as 17 June. Immediately after arriving he submitted to the War Ministry a note on “a possible offensive by the Allied armies in the East in 1918”. In view of the departure of some German troops from Macedonia, signs of disintegration in the Bulgarian army and the Greek victory at Skra di Legen, he believed that the previous caution could be abandoned.

In Macedonia his departure was received with regret which, according to Falls, bordered on exasperation. Within six months, following Sarrail, Guillaumat had put the command in order, improved relations between the contingents and prepared a plan for an offensive. For the Salonika cause, however, he was not lost: as Governor of Paris and adviser to the government he was to spend the summer persuading the Allies to adopt this plan.

The new commander-in-chief

Franchet d’Espèrey too came to the Balkans after a defeat. As commander of the French Northern Army Group he had been responsible for the sector struck by the German attack on 27 May, and together with the commander of the Sixth Army, General Denis Duchêne, he was held responsible for the defeat. In the Chamber of Deputies there were demands for the guilty to be punished, and Clemenceau had to defend the high command before it. Duchêne lost his army, and around 10 June Franchet d’Espèrey handed over the army group to General Paul Maistre. He was, however, too distinguished and influential a general simply to be removed. In 1914 he had commanded the Fifth Army in the Battle of the Marne, and as early as December 1917 Clemenceau and Pétain had seen him as Sarrail’s replacement. Now he was given Salonika.

The new commander-in-chief was 62, seven years older than Guillaumat, but Falls stresses that he had lost nothing of his energy, firmness and excellent memory for detail. He was born in Algeria, spent most of his career in the colonies, fought in Tunisia, Indochina, China and Morocco, and was moreover one of the few senior French officers who knew the Balkans. Several hundred thousand soldiers came under his orders: French, Serbs, Greeks, British and Italians.

Franchet d’Espèrey arrived in haste and without detailed instructions. A few days later the War Ministry, in a telegram of 22 June, announced a directive to him, including an instruction to prepare a plan on the basis of Guillaumat’s projects and to continue the series of operations begun at Skra di Legen and in Albania. Without waiting for written orders, by the end of June the general had already viewed the ground from a Serbian observation post and agreed to the Serbian plan for an attack in the mountains. Three months later his offensive broke the Bulgarian front and took Bulgaria out of the war.