French Strategy and Operations in The Great War
578 pages, maps, glossary, index, notes, ISBN 0 674 01880 X, $39.95 cloth.
This is General Doughty valedictory work capping decades of research, analysis and writing on the French Army in two world wars. In he presents a thorough yet concise analysis of French strategy and operations chronologically from the pre-war years and Plan XVII in 1914, through the army mutinies of mid 1916, major command changes in 1916, to Foch’s opportunistic strategy for unrelenting attack across a broad front in 1918. Carefully explained and analyzed is the willingness of Joffre and other French military and civilian leaders willingness to experiment with varied tactics, strategies and weapons. General Doughty reminds us that France mounted an almost superhuman to reconstitute an iron, steel and armaments industrial base almost entirely overrun and occupied by the Germans in the early weeks of the war to become what Dennis Showalter once labeled “the arsenal of democracy.” Also analyzed are the political forces and personalities at work in France and internationally, the push and pull between easterners and westerners, as well the evolution of inter-Entente relations as the conflict progresses. Indeed, Doughty’s character sketches of French military and political figures are among the best this reviewer has seen. In all, he emphasizes the nation’s grim determination to hang on, to prevail despite having suffered proportionally the highest casualties of any Western Front combatant.
In his final chapter, the author examines the results of the war for France and finds victory to be ephemerial and its effect fleeting. The Third Republic had survived, but was nearly bankrupt internationally, France having chosen to finance the war not through domestic taxation but by foreign borrowing. And, given the failure of Great Britain and the United States to guarantee French security and Germany’s sustained postwar economic and industrial strength, France found her strategic position little improved by the Treaty of Versailles. In all France found it impossible in the inter-war years to erase the political and psychological scars of The Great War.
Reviewer: Len Shurtleff
