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Detail from the Memorial to the French Moroccan Division at Vimy Ridge. The theaters and battles in which the division played a role are recorded on the sides of the monument. © 2013, John M. Shea
Northern detail showing Operation Georgette, the Lys Offensive, from a map of the 1918 German offensives on the Western Front from The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Ferdinand Foch. The white area north of the German advance shows the British strategic retreats of April 15/16 and April 27 that shortened the line of the Ypres salient. © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.
French (and one British) soldiers in what appears to be a hastily-improvised line. An official photograph on the British Front in France taken May 3, 1918. French reserves came to the aid of the British during the German Offensives of 1918. Operation Michael on the Somme had been fought from March 21 to April 5, and Operation Georgette on the Lys River from April 9 to 29.
Postcard map of the English Channel, the strait between England and France with the Channel Ports of Dunkirk and Calais in France and Dover and the mouth of the Thames River in England. Illustration by Eugen Felle, 1915.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie von Hohenberg was the cover story of La Domenica del Corriere for the week July 5 through 12, 1914. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, said he aimed, turned away, and fired, and was not targeting the Countess. The illustrator may have positioned her standing to make sense of the two wounds: the Archduke was shot through the throat, his wife through the groin. Illustration by Alberto Beltrame.The cover story includes a picture of the deceased with their three children. A second photograph shows the new heir to the throne, Karl, holding his son, captioned "I due futuri Imperatori d'Austria" — the two future Emperors of Austria. Karl became emperor when Franz Joseph died in 1916. His son never did, as the Empire had dissolved by the time his father died.
"The counter attack [at Villers-Bretonneux], executed the night of the 24–25th, was entrusted to some Australian battalions. They carried the high ground and the village by assault while, on the right, the Moroccan Division of the French First Army regained some ground north of Hangard. In order to consolidate the reëstablished situation, General Debeney continued his movement forward, while at the same time General Fayolle sent two divisions northwards, so as to be in a position to intervene between the Somme and the Luce." ((1), more)
"Beginning on the night of April 18 [1918], four divisions in the [French Army Detachment of the North] entered the front lines in the Mount Kemmel sector, north of the Hazebrouck salient. Although the Flanders front remained quiet after the eighteenth, the enemy launched a strong attack on April 25, striking the newly formed Army Detachment and the British to its north. Although some soldiers fought very well, the French lost Mount Kemmel, and the British scathingly criticized them for losing that important observation point. After an attempt to regain Kemmel the following day failed, British criticism of their ally escalated." ((2), more)
"On the 26th [April 1918], four tanks of the 1st Brigade had an interesting experience.The Allied forces on this part of the line consisted of a most curious mixture of arms and races.The scene, for example, in a neighboring wood about ten days before is thus described by the historian of the 1st Battalion:'The Bois d'Abbé presented a most picturesque spectacle, and any one taking the trouble to walk through it could have had the unique experience of seeing practically every branch of both the British and French Armies represented. In this wood were to be found Tanks of all descriptions, Mark IV.'s, V.'s, Whippets and French Rénaults, heavy and light infantry, British infantry, Australians, French cavalry and infantry, Moroccans, and lastly a detachment of the Legion of Frontiersmen mounted on little Arab ponies, which presented a strange contract to the heavy Percherons of the artillery.'On April 26, it was in company with the Moroccan Division that the 1st Battalion fought." ((3), more)
". . . there was no more ground to lose in Flanders. Mount Kemmel is only twenty-five miles from Dunkirk, and it commands the whole plain stretching up to that town. . . .I did not succeed, however, in preventing the British front in the Ypres salient from being moved back, on April 27th, to the walls of the city, with, as a consequence, the withdrawal of the Belgian front to the Yperlée Canal. . . .I was now struck with the enormous wastage among the Allied troops, subjected as they had been to incessant attacks and bombardment by a prodigious number of gas shells. In order to meet this situation, I ordered three more French divisions (the 32nd, 129th, and 168th ) to be sent to Flanders; a part of these would be used to relieve the British XXII Corps, which had reached the extreme limit of endurance." ((4), more)
"Princip, deeply grieved by the loss of his friends [Čabrinović and Grabež], and suffering, as they had, from tuberculosis in its most cruel form, died during the last year of the war, on the evening of April 28, 1918, in the hospital of Theresienstadt prison. His illness seems to have made his last years a period of physical torture. Not enough is known of the conditions of Princip's and his friends' imprisonment to pass any judgment on their jailers, or to say what might have been done to ease their final sufferings, but the evidence of three deaths in two years alone reflects little credit on the Austro-Hungarian authorities." ((5), more)
(1) German commander Erich Ludendorff's 1918 drive for victory began on March 21 with Operation Michael, an attack north and south of the Somme River. In April he moved north to the Lys River on the Franco-Belgian border with Operation Georgette. On April 23, after three weeks of relative quiet, he again struck the Somme sector, seizing Villers-Bretonneux from the British and Hangard from the French, high ground that threatened further progress westward towards Amiens. The villages of Villers-Bretonneux and Hangard are south of the Somme, between it and the Luce River.
The Memoirs of Marshal Foch, translated by Col. T. Bentley Mott by Ferdinand Foch, page 296, copyright © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., publisher: Doubleday, Doran & Co., publication date: 1931
(2) The second of German commander Erich Ludendorff's 1918 drives for victory, Operation Georgette, the Battle of the Lys, began on April 9 on the Lys River along the Franco-Belgian border in Flanders. French reserves reinforced the British line after the latter had been driven back with heavy losses, but could not hold Mount Kemmel, adding failure to the criticism that they had moved too slowly to support their ally.
Pyrrhic Victory; French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, page 444, copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2005
(3) Excerpt from The Tank Corps by Major Clough Williams-Ellis & A. Williams-Ellis. The Moroccan Division fought at Hangard Wood on April 26, 1918. Percheron is a breed of draft horse that originated in western France and that has been used as a war horse, in agriculture, for pulling stage coaches, and hauling goods.
The Tank Corps by Clough Williams-Ellis & A. Williams-Ellis, pp. 174–175, publisher: The Offices of "Country Life," Ltd. and George Newnes, Ltd., publication date: 1919
(4) Allied Commmander-in-Chief Ferdinand Foch on the great losses of the British forces in March and April, 1918. German commander Erich Ludendorff's 1918 drive for victory began on March 21 with Operation Michael, an attack north and south of the Somme River. In April he moved north to the Lys River on the Franco-Belgian border with Operation Georgette, the Battle of the Lys, began on April 9 on the Lys River along the Franco-Belgian border in Flanders. Both sectors were held by the British. French reserves reinforced the British line after it had been driven back with heavy losses on the Lys, but could not hold Mount Kemmel, losing it on the 25th, adding failure to British criticism that they had moved too slowly to support their ally. General Douglas Haig's impulse was to save the British Army by falling back to the Channel ports of Dunkirk and Calais. The British had held Ypres since the First Battle of Ypres in 1914.
The Memoirs of Marshal Foch, translated by Col. T. Bentley Mott by Ferdinand Foch, pp. 298–299, copyright © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., publisher: Doubleday, Doran & Co., publication date: 1931
(5) In proceedings that began October 12, 1914, twenty-five stood trial for involvement in the murders of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on June 28, 1914, both shot by Gavrilo Princip. Of six would-be assassins, only one was over 20 years of age when the crime was committed, and he, Danilo Ilić, was executed. Under Austro-Hungarian law, the younger men could not be executed. Records for Princip's birth date conflicted, putting him just under or just over 20 years old on June 28: the judge ruled the evidence favoring him must take precedence. Princip, Čabrinović, who had thrown a bomb the exploded behind the royal couple, and Grabež, who had but did not throw a bomb, received the maximum sentence of 20 years. Princip had skeletal tuberculosis which led to the loss of his right arm before his death.
Sarajevo: The Story of a Political Murder by Joachim Remak, page 269, copyright © 1959 by Joachim Remak, publisher: Criterion Books, Inc., publication date: 1959
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