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Shared headstone of Otto Waldow, replacement reservist, and Hans Jobst, infantryman, in the Belleau German Cemetery, Belleau, France, died June 25, 1918, possibly during the final American assault to seize Belleau Wood, a battle begun on June 6.
Map of the 1918 German offensives on the Western Front from The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Ferdinand Foch. © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.
Photograph of Marshal Ferdinand Foch and General John Pershing meeting at Chaumont, General Headquarters on June 17, 1918.
Map showing the territorial gains (darker shades) of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece, primarily at the expense of Turkey, agreed in the Treaty of Bucharest following the Second Balkan War. Despite its gains, Bulgaria also lost territory to both Romania and Turkey.
The American cruiser Brooklyn in Vladivostok harbor, Russia in a 1919 Czech Legion photograph. The Legion consisted of Austro-Hungarian Czechs taken prisoner by the Russians, then organized to fight for Czech independence. With peace on the Russian front, they went east to leave Russia from Vladivostok, sometimes fighting their way through the Red Guard defending the Revolution. The Americans, British, and Japanese had forces in the city.
"Clearly this had been all along a job for the artillery. On June 25 the northern fringe of Belleau Wood was shelled for fourteen hours. In the late afternoon the marines advanced again behind a rolling barrage. 'Come on you sonsofbitches do you expect to live forever?' the sergeants yelled. This time the losses weren't too heavy.They found the great trees blasted to splinters, the German defenders stunned and helpless. By 9:30 that night Belleau Wood really was in American hands. Two hundred and fifty German prisoners and many machineguns. The Germans fell back on a defensive line along Clignon brook, and gave little more trouble in that sector." ((1), more)
"— A doctor tells me of the effects of mustard-gas: burns, blindness, pneumonia, inflammation of the testicles. 'We have a gas which is even more deadly,' he added.He also described the looting of villages by French soldiers when they abandoned them during the retreat. 'It was not for the sake of stealing. They could not take anything away with them. It was just a mania. To break into an empty house, to open drawers, to read letters, to play about with the linen and clothes, and then to leave it all where it was, after a few hours. The English, more methodical, carried off pianos in motor-lorries, on the pretext of organising the villages for defence." ((2), more)
"June 27 thus marked the final step in Foch's rise to power. Like previous selections of Joffre, Nivelle, and Pétain, Foch's elevation had a profound effect on French strategy, operations, and doctrine. The day after the War Committee met, Foch sent Pétain a letter that began, 'It is important to envisage henceforth the resumption of the offensive by the allied armies in 1918 as soon as means permit.' Bowing to Foch's new powers, on July 2 Pétain sent his army-group commanders a copy of Foch's memorandum of June 16 on doctrine. Neither Foch nor Pétain realized how close they were to the end of the war." ((3), more)
"The man who had talked best sense to him in Salonika was Prince Regent Alexander, and on June 28 (Serbia's National Day and the fourth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination) Franchet d'Esperey set out for the Serbian front in the special headquarters' train which had been fitted out by Sarrail two years previously and hardly used. With d'Esperey traveled the Voivode Mišić, the general whose men had stormed the Kajmakcalan and who was now to replace Bojović as Serbian chief of staff." ((4), more)
"The first victories gained by the Czecho-Slavs over the Bolsheviks were at Penza and Samara. Penza was captured by them after three days' fighting at the end of May. Later the Czecho-Slavs also took Sysran on the Volga, Kazan with its large arsenal, Simbirsk and Yekaterinburg, connecting Tcheliabinsk with Petrograd, and occupied practically the whole Volga region.In Siberia they defeated a considerable force of German-Magyar ex-prisoners in Krasnoyarsk and Omsk and established themselves firmly in Udinsk. On June 29, [1918] 15,000 Czecho-Slavs under General Diderichs, after handing an ultimatum to the Bolsheviks at Vladivostok, occupied the city without much resistance. Only at one spot fighting took place and some 160 Bolsheviks were killed. The Czecho-Slavs, assisted by Japanese and Allied troops, then proceeded to the north and northwest, while the Bolsheviks and German prisoners retreated to Chabarovsk." ((5), more)
(1) The American assault by U.S Marines and Army infantry to take Belleau Wood began on June 6, 1918 against well-entrenched German defenders. The battle continued for three weeks. The Marine casualties were 113 officers and 5,598 men killed, wounded and missing; the Army 9th and 23rd Infantry lost 65 officers and 3,496 men.
Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos, page 343, copyright © 1962, 2013 by John Dos Passos, publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
(2) Entry from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government writing in Paris. Mustard gas, a poison gas introduced late in the war, caused large, painful blisters of the skin, eyes, and mucous membrane. The German offensives of 1918 forced first the British and then the French to retreat. After two offensives (Operations Michael and Georgette) against the British, the Aisne (Blücher) Offensive (May 27 to June 4) pushed the French back to the Marne River. The Noyon-Montdidier Offensive was anticipated by the French and came to an early conclusion.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 357, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
(3) Joseph Joffre, Robert Nivelle, and Henri Philippe Pétain were the Commanders-in-Chief of the French Army during the war. Ferdinand Foch path to becoming Allied Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies began in late 1917 as the French and British Prime Ministers Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George struggled to guide military policy after a year that saw the disasters of the Nivelle Offensive, the French army mutinies, and the Battle of Passchendaele. Foch consistently pressed for a unified command and reserve force that could seize the offensive when the opportunity presented itself. Foch's rise was incremental, but after four German spring 1918 offensives that stunned first the British and then the French, the French, British, American, and Italian civilian and military leaders agreed the role required authority to command and not simply coordinate.
Pyrrhic Victory; French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, page 460, copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2005
(4) French General Louis Franchet d'Esperey was sent to the Salonica Front after being assigned blame for the stunning German advance of the Aisne (Blücher) Offensive in May, 1918. He followed Generals Guillaumat and Maurice Sarrail commanding an Allied line that included French, British, Italian, and Serbian troops. Salonika was the Allied base in Greece. Prince Regent Alexander was acting head of state and heir to the throne of Serbia. The assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 was the act that led to the war in little more than a month. A Voivode is a Serbian Field Marshal.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 187, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
(5) Excerpt by Vladimir Nosek, author of Independent Bohemia: an Account of the Czechoslovakian Struggle for Independence, and diplomatic representative of Czecho-Slovakia in Great Britain. The fault lines in the Austro-Hungarian Empire deepened and widened at the war progressed, as casualties mounted, as shortages of food and fuel bit. Czech prisoners of war held in Russia formed a Czech Legion fighting alongside Imperial Russian troops against Austria-Hungary. After the Bolshevik Revolution and peace between Russia and the Central Powers, these Legionnaires would make their way eastward to the Pacific port of Vladivostok in the next stage of a journey to circle the globe to return them home to fight for an independent Czecho-Slovak state.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. VI, 1918, pp. 150–151, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
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