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Detail showing the northern, Belgian sector of the Western Front from a map of the Allied offensives of 1918, from July 18 and the Second Battle of the Marne to the Armistice on November 11. From The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Foch.
Detail showing the British sector of the Western Front from a map of the Allied offensives of 1918, from July 18 and the Second Battle of the Marne to the Armistice on November 11. From The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Foch. The 1st and other armies to the south are French.
A German Zeppelin visits Sofia, capital of Bulgaria on November 10, 1915. Less than a month earlier Bulgaria had joined the Central Powers.
Map of Damascus from Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus by Karl Baedeker.
Map of Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and Mesopotamia from the Baedeker 1912 travel guide Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus.
"SOLDIERS!You are about to deliver a powerful attack on the enemy positions. At the side of your British and French comrades, it is your task to fling back the invader who has oppressed your brothers for more than four years. This hour is decisive. . . .Forward for Right, for Liberty, for glorious and immortal Belgium!Albert" ((1), more)
"On the first day of their attack in this region, September 29, the British Fourth Army advanced five kilometers. After two more days of heavy fighting, the British pushed their way through German defenses. Though the density of enemy divisions between Arras and Soissons was almost double that between Soissons and Verdun, the British made rapid progress south of Arras while the French and Americans made only small progress between Soissons and Verdun. . . .To the south of St.-Quentin, Debeney's First Army, which had the mission of supporting the British Fourth Army's operation, did nothing more on the twenty-ninth than provide assistance with artillery and launch a small attack on an enemy strong point ten kilometers south of St.-Quentin." ((2), more)
". . . . General Franchet d'Esperey's ramshackle coalition of French and British and Italians and Greeks and Serbs and Albanians defeated the Bulgarian Army in the Balkans. Communist orators started haranguing mobs in front of the royal palace in Sofia and gave the selfstyled Czar Ferdinand such a fright that on September 30 he concluded an armistice on terms of unconditional surrender. The Allies couldn't move in soon enough to protect him from a Red uprising. What was left of Mackensen's army had to retreat in a hurry across the Danube, leaving behind great quantities of rolling stock and the imperial hopes for a Berlin to Baghdad railroad and all that it implied.Pro-Allied politicians took over in Bulgaria and a few days later Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his son. The loss of Bulgaria meant that communications between Germany and Turkey were cut off. Food riots and seditious strikes in Prague and Budapest disrupted the Hapsburg empire. Separatist movements came out into the open. In Vienna the Emperor Charles' government hung by a thread." ((3), more)
"At about nine in the morning on Tuesday, 1 October, Lawrence and Stirling drove into Damascus to find scenes of jubilation. Nuri Shaalan and Nasir had already entered the city, and the narrow streets of the old city of Damascus were 'aflame with joy and enthusiasm,' reminisced Stirling in his memoirs, Safety Last. 'Dervishes danced around us. The horses of the Bedouin, curvetting and prancing, gradually cleared a way for us through the dense crowds, while from the balconies and rooftops veiled women pelted us with flowers and—far worse—with attar of roses. It was weeks before I could get the smell of the essence out of my clothing.'" ((4), more)
"On October 2, 1918, Enver ordered the evacuation of the Transcaucasus, freeing up (in theory) four divisions to defend the capital. The Ninth Division of the Ottoman Sixth Army, still spread along the Persian front, was ordered back to Mosul, to defend against the British Indian Army advancing north from Baghdad.It was far too little, and at least a year too late. So spent had Turkey's fighting power been by the end of 1917, so overstretched her limited supplies of war matériel and lines of communication, that Liman had advised Enver, on the eve of Brest-Litovsk, that she could muster only enough strength 'for a vigorous campaign on one front.' Instead the Ottoman generalissimo had wagered the Ottoman Empire on a mad gamble to expand to the Caspian." ((5), more)
(1) Proclamation by Albert, King of the Belgians, the night of September 27–28, 1918, immediately before the third of four offensives on the Western Front launched on consecutive days. Albert and Allied Commander-in Chief Ferdinand Foch had agreed to the creation of the Flanders Army Group under the King of the Belgians on September 9. It included the Belgian Army, the British Second Army, and the French 7th Army Corps and 2nd Cavalry Corps. Responding to the British offensive against Cambrai launched the previous day, German commander Erich Ludendorff had redeployed troops from Flanders further south. The Allies advanced seven kilometers on the 28th and 14 by September 30. The advance was halted on October 3.
The War Diaries of Albert I King of the Belgians by Albert I, page 222, copyright © 1954, publisher: William Kimber
(2) The British offensive on September 29, 1918 was the last of Allied Commander-in Chief Ferdinand Foch's four offensives on four consecutive days at the end of the month, preceded by the Franco-American Meuse-Argonne Offensive of the 26th, the British offensive by the First and Third Armies towards Cambrai on the 27th, and the attack by the Flanders Group of Armies — Belgian, French, and British — under the command of Albert, King of the Belgians on the 28th.
Pyrrhic Victory; French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, pp. 488–489, copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2005
(3) French General Louis Franchet d'Esperey commanded Allied forces — French, British, Italian, Greek, and Serbian — on the Balkan Front, where for two years the Bulgarians had kept the Allied forces bottled up. In the two weeks between the opening of d'Esperey's offensive into Serbia on September 15 and the end of the month, the defenders collapsed, the Bulgarian home front rose up, and a new Bulgarian government signed an armistice. The liberation of Serbia would position Allied armies across the Danube River from the plains of Hungary and its capital of Budapest, and cut the rail line to Turkey, isolating another of Germany's allies. Sofia was, and remains, the Bulgarian capital; Ferdinand was the country's ruler. German Field Marshal August von Mackensen had been victorious on the Russian Front and in the conquests of Serbia and Romania. Charles was Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary and Austria-Hungary was breaking apart
Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos, pp. 412–413, copyright © 1962, 2013 by John Dos Passos, publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
(4) Damascus, a city of 300,000 in Syria, fell to the Allies on October 1, 1918, with the Australian Light Horse first passing through the city in pursuit of the retreating Turks, followed by the Arab Army. T. E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia — hoped to see an Arab government in the city. Nuri Shaalan was Sheikh of the north Arabian Rwala Bedu. Sharif Nasir was a supporter of Feisal and a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. Francis Stirling was a British intelligence officer.
Setting the Desert on Fire by James Barr, page 297, copyright © 2008, 2006 by James Barr, publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., publication date: 2009
(5) With the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and its removal of Russia from the war in early 1918, Turkish War Minister Ismail Enver diverted his limited resources to an expansion of the Ottoman Empire beyond the Caucasus Mountains into Russia and Persia. At the beginning of October, 1918, his troops were being driven back in Syria and Mesopotamia. Otto Liman von Sanders was a German general who had gone to Turkey in December, 1913 as head of a German Military Mission.
The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923 by Sean McMeekin, page 400, copyright © 2015 by Sean McMeekin, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2015
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