Tinted postcard of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Made Commander-in-Chief of all Allied forces on the Western Front April 3, 1918, he led the Allies to victory in November.
Maréchal Foch, Notre VainqueurMarshal Foch, our VictorReverse:Undated handwritten message
"Circumstances oblige us to maintain a waiting attitude during the early part of 1918. From this fact there results the necessity of having a defensive plan for the whole line from Nieuport to Venice; but this plan must be susceptible of being transformed, according to the circumstances, into an offensive plan, partial or complete.Our offensive plan should be established with the idea of meeting the various enemy attacks which may be pronounced against the different Allied armies; from this there results the necessity, for these armies, of combining among themselves the means of ensuring their common defence. Each army must have its own defensive system; also its own reserves ready to through in at any menaced point of its front. But there should be, in addition, general reserves which can be transported from one part of the entire front to any other which may be in dangers; these reserves must also be susceptible of being united and used in a counter-offensive launched as a diversion to relieve one of the Allies from a concentrated assault directed against his lines."
The offensives of 1917 — the British at Arras and Passchendaele, the French Nivelle Offensive and subsequent army mutinies, the Italian Battles of the Isonzo and the destruction of their Second Army in the Austro-German Battle of Caporetto — and the Bolshevik Revolution that led to Russia leaving the war — left Allied commanders anticipating a German offensive with troops released from the Eastern Front, and planning for defensive postures in 1918. At a January 30–February 2, 1918 meeting of Allied prime ministers at Versailles, French General Ferdinand Foch made his case for a general reserve under a unified command, that could take advantage of opportunities to seize the offensive.
The Memoirs of Marshal Foch, translated by Col. T. Bentley Mott by Ferdinand Foch, pp. 239–240, copyright © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., publisher: Doubleday, Doran & Co., publication date: 1931
1918-02-02, 1918, February,
