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King Albert of Belgium decorates Willy Coppens, Belgium's Ace of Aces. Coppens describes this June 30, 1918 ceremony, in which he was awarded the Ordre de la Couronne in his memoir Flying in Flanders.
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.
Postwar postcard map of the Balkans including Albania, newly-created Yugoslavia, expanded Romania, and diminished former Central Powers Bulgaria and Turkey. The first acquisitions of Greece in its war against Turkey are seen in Europe where it advanced almost to Constantinople, in the Aegean Islands from Samos to Rhodes, and on the Turkish mainland from its base in Smyrna. The Greco-Turkish war was fought from May 1919 to 1922. The positions shown held from the war's beginning to the summer of 1920 when Greece advanced eastward. Newly independent Hungary and Ukraine appear in the northwest and northeast.
Enver Pasha, Turkish Minister of War
German and Austro-Hungarian forces under the command of generals von Hindenburg and Archduke Friedrich besieged Warsaw, and took it during the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive. Austrians von Hötzendorf, Friedrich, and Pflanzer-Baltin form the bottom of the ring; the others are German. The flag and shield of Germany are on the bottom left; those of Austria and Hungary the bottom right.
"On February 1 [1918], a thick fog lay over the aerodrome. . . .Lieutenant Vertongen, wishing to keep his appointment at Furnes, left the ground at Beaumarais in a machine that had to be taken up to the front. Georges took off in another, but landed again at once, because of the fog. René Vertongen went on, flying practically at ground-level along the mouth of the channel there and its two breakwaters. He was at once enveloped in the fog, and turning a little left-handed, estimated that he had passed the second breakwater, and came down. Had he still been over the shore he would have seen the ground, but he was over the glassy water and, seeing nothing in the uncertain light, flew straight into it. Alas, that such a skilled pilot as Vertongen should have braved death—and met it thus!" ((1), more)
"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." ((2), more)
"Even among the Greek divisions sent to Macedonia there were units of questionable loyalty. Two detachments at Lamia and Larissa mutinied while on their way to Salonika early in February. But the general could rely on the support of King Alexander. He would not tolerate acts of indiscipline. He sought a soldierly obedience as resolute as his father had received in the halcyon days of the Balkan Wars. It was, of course, as much in his interest as in the interests of the Allies that the Greek Army should cease playing politics. Courageously he visited the dissident troops in Lamia, refusing clemency to their ring leaders and making it clear to the others that Venizelos' Government enjoyed his full confidence. When a group of conscripts defied their officers and pillaged a village, he gave orders that two of the troublemakers were to be shot. He would brook no nonsense." ((3), more)
"On my return journey at the beginning of February I touched at headquarters at Kreuznach. There I learned to my surprise that the new chief of the Turkish general staff, General von Seekt, would shortly take over all establishments erected and administered by the military mission on the lines of communication. The Turkish headquarters thus was to exercise a direct and uniform influence on the entire supply of all armies. . . .The position of the chief of the Turkish general staff was in many ways dependent upon Vicegeneralissimo Enver; that of the chief of the German military mission was more or less independent, insofar as, in spite of friction, the stipulations of the contract had been enforced. It was this kind of independence that made the mission so disliked by Enver." ((4), more)
"February 5, 1918.—Sitting all day. I had several violent passages of arms with Ludendorff. Matters seemed to be clearing up, though this is not yet altogether done. Apart from deciding on our tactics for Brest, we have at last to set down in writing that we are only obliged to fight for the pre-war possessions of Germany. Ludendorff was violently opposed to this, and said, 'If Germany makes peace without profit, then Germany has lost the war.'" ((5), more)
(1) Willy Coppens, Belgium's greatest ace in World War I with 37 victories, all but two of them observation balloons, on the death of Lieutenant René Vertongen on February 1, 1918. A pilot before the war, Vertongen had trained several of the pilots in Coppens's squadron. Earlier in the war, he had gotten lost in fog, and landed in neutral Netherlands, where he was interned, but later escaped. Furnes was the wartime seat of the Belgian government.
Flying in Flanders by Willy Coppens, page 131, publisher: Ace Books, publication date: 1971
(2) 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
(3) Greece had been sharply divided between its pro-German King Constantine and its pro-Entente-Ally, sometime-Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. In mid-summer 1917, Constantine abdicated in favor of his son Alexander who strongly supported the Allies, but led a still-divided country. By the beginning of 1918, over 600,000 Allied troops were on the Salonica Front under overall French command — British troops in a malarial area to the east, Italian forces on the Adriatic to the west, French troops, and the revivified Serbian army in the center. Greek troops were needed in part to replace Russian troops that, since the Bolshevik Revolution, were covered by Russia's armistice with the Central Powers. Greece had significantly expanded its territory as a victor in the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912 and '13. The general referred to was General Bordeaux.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, pp. 173–174, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
(4) Excerpt from German General Otto Liman von Sanders' account of his return to Constantinople after a January visit to Belgium on the Western Front. With Interior Minister Mehmed Talaat Pasha and Minister of the Navy Ahmed Djemal Pasha, War Minister Ismail Enver Pasha ruled Turkey throughout the war. Starting in December 1913, six months before the war began and ten months before Turkey entered it, General Otto Liman von Sanders led a German mission to Turkey to reorganize and train its army.
Five Years in Turkey by Liman von Sanders, page 194, publisher: The Battery Press with War and Peace Books, publication date: 1928 (originally)
(5) First paragraph of the entry for February 5, 1918 by Count Ottokar Czernin in his In the World War. As Minister of Foreign Affairs, Czernin headed the Austro-Hungarian delegation to the Brest-Litovsk peace conference between Russia and the Central Powers. He wrote in Berlin where he was meeting with his German counterparts and the German High Command, including Erich Ludendorff, which insisted on annexing territory Germany had taken in the war. The negotiations were at a stalemate. Austria was desperately short of food and other supplies, and had suffered strikes and riots in January.
In the World War by Count Ottokar Czernin, page 275, copyright © 1920, by Harper & Brothers, publisher: Harper and Brothers, publication date: 1920
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