Second Chantilly Conference

On 6 December 1915 representatives of the armies of all the main Entente powers gathered at the headquarters of the French army in Chantilly, near Paris. The talks were chaired by General Joseph Joffre, who three days earlier had become commander-in-chief of all the French armies. It was the second such meeting. The first had been held at Chantilly on 7 July 1915, the day after the Calais conference, but had ended only in a general assurance that each army would act in its own way. This time the Allies agreed for the first time on a joint plan of war for the whole of the following year.

Who came

The British official history lists the following participants. Britain was represented by the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal Sir John French, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Archibald Murray, French’s chief of staff, General William Robertson, and General Henry Wilson, the chief liaison officer with the French army. Alongside Joffre, France was represented by his chief of staff (“major général”), General Maurice Pellé, with staff officers. Russia was represented by General Yakov Zhilinsky, head of the Russian military mission in France, Italy by the deputy chief of staff, General Carlo Porro, and Serbia by the military attaché, Colonel Stefanović. According to press dispatches from Paris, a representative of the Belgian General Staff and an officer of the Japanese army were also present. The newspapers wrote of a “council of war of all the Allies”, although no details of the talks were disclosed.

The conference was due to begin on Sunday 5 December. According to dispatches from the Russian ambassador in Paris, Alexander Izvolsky, the British insisted, however, that the ministers of the two countries should meet first, so on 4 December at Calais the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, and Lord Kitchener held talks with the Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, and the Minister of War, General Joseph Gallieni. Kitchener threatened to resign and demanded the withdrawal of the troops from Salonika. Briand told Izvolsky that he had agreed at most to an evacuation spread over four or five weeks, and he hoped that the generals at Chantilly would come out against it. The military conference opened a day later than planned.

The French plan

Before the talks the French circulated a lengthy memorandum, “Plan of action proposed to the coalition by France”. It envisaged Britain, France, Italy and Russia attacking simultaneously, with all their forces, on their own fronts as soon as they were ready. Until then the German and Austro-Hungarian armies were to be bled by vigorous operations, conducted above all by those states that still had reserves of manpower: Britain, Italy and Russia. In the secondary theatres, including the Balkans and Egypt, the Allies were to use only the indispensable minimum of troops. The French proposed holding Salonika, the occupation of Albania by the Italians and the rebuilding of the Serbian army, continued pressure on Greece, helping Romania to keep its independence from Germany, the gradual evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula and the strengthening of the defence of the Suez Canal. The last point was a jointly conducted economic war.

Conclusions

The conference lasted three days. At the final session on 8 December the participants unanimously agreed that the war could be decided only in the main theatres, where the enemy kept most of his forces: on the Russian, Franco-British and Italian fronts. The decision was to come from coordinated offensives, and the condition for them was that they should start simultaneously, or at such short intervals that the enemy would not have time to move reserves from one front to another. In a footnote to the conclusions the staff officers calculated that a strategic transfer of larger forces took about a month. All the armies were to increase their resources of men and equipment as quickly as possible, so that the greatest effort could come as soon as possible after the end of March 1916. The exact date was to be set later, taking account of the weather, the enemy’s situation and the political situation.

Until then each state was to halt any enemy offensive on its own front by itself, and if the enemy attacked one of the Allies, the others were to help it to the greatest possible extent. The wearing down of the enemy (“usure”) was from now on to proceed intensively through local and partial offensives, above all by those armies that still had large reserves of manpower.

On the secondary theatres agreement was incomplete. All the participants except the British agreed that the Franco-British corps should remain in the Salonika area. Field Marshal French declared that he could not give an opinion, because he did not know the ground or the position of the troops well enough. All agreed, however, that whatever the governments decided, the defence of Salonika had to be organised with the greatest haste. The conference also unanimously demanded the immediate and complete evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula. It agreed that Egypt had to be defended in all circumstances, but with the smallest possible forces, because a Turkish attack on the Suez Canal would not be possible before April and no more than eight divisions could take part in it.

Significance

The generals’ view on Salonika carried political weight. Briand told Izvolsky on 6 December that the opinion of the majority of the conference gave him strong grounds for further pressure on London, and on 8 December the ambassador reported that the British generals at Chantilly had not fully shared Kitchener’s view. In the following days the British government gave way and agreed to stay in Salonika. The recommendation on Gallipoli was also carried out: London decided to evacuate first Suvla and Anzac, and then Cape Helles.

The conclusions concerning 1916 proved more important. On 16 December Murray presented to the British War Committee a staff memorandum on the future conduct of the war that took account of the Chantilly recommendations: to send to France in the spring every division that could be raised. The plan of simultaneous blows became the basis of Allied operations in 1916, although the Germans forestalled it by attacking at Verdun in February. Nevertheless, the Brusilov offensive and the Anglo-French Battle of the Somme in the summer grew out of the Chantilly decisions. Joint military conferences at Chantilly became a regular practice of the coalition from then on, but there was still no unified command, and the Allies’ political direction of the war was only just taking shape.