Marne, First Battle of the (6-12 September 1914): Books, Audiobooks, and DVDs owned by Avn Tech Library

In 1914 the Germans launched an offensive that swept through Belgium and into France, threatening to crush French resistance in one fell swoop. However, through careful maneuvering and stubborn resistance, the French Army, aided by the BEF, blunted the assault, winning an important strategic victory that kept France in the war. This victory ensured that Germany would have to fight a two-front war, and the Western Front descended into the stalemate of trench warfare. One of the most important battles in the First World War, the First Battle of the Marne would be the last battle of maneuver to be seen on the Western Front for several years to come.

With diplomacy unravelling during the summer of 1914, Germany swept into Belgium in an audacious attempt to catch France and Britain off-guard. 'The Campaign of the Marne' traces and explains the battles at the Marne during 1914.

It is one of the essential events of military history, a cataclysmic encounter that prevented a quick German victory in World War I and changed the course of two wars and the world. Now, for the first time in a generation, here is a bold new account of the Battle of the Marne. A landmark work by a distinguished scholar, The Marne, 1914 gives, for the first time, all sides of the story. In remarkable detail, and with exclusive information based on newly unearthed documents, Holger H. Herwig superbly re-creates the dramatic battle, revealing how the German force was foiled and years of brutal trench warfare were made inevitable. Herwig brilliantly reinterprets Germany’s aggressive “Schlieffen Plan”–commonly considered militarism run amok–as a carefully crafted, years-in-the-making design to avoid a protracted war against superior coalitions. He also paints a new portrait of the run-up to the Marne: the Battle of the Frontiers, long thought a coherent assault but really a series of haphazard engagements that left “heaps of corpses,” France demoralized, Belgium in ruins, and Germany emboldened to take Paris. Finally, Herwig puts in dazzling relief the Battle of the Marne itself: the French resolve to win, which included the exodus of 100,000 people from Paris (where even pigeons were placed under state control in case radio communications broke down), the crucial lack of coordination between Germany’s First and Second Armies, and the fateful “day of rest” taken by the Third Army. He provides revelatory new facts about the all-important order of retreat by Germany’s Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, previously an event hardly documented and here freshly reconstructed from diary excerpts. Herwig also provides stunning cameos of all the important players: Germany’s Chief of General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, progressively despairing and self-pitying as his plans go awry; his rival, France’s Joseph Joffre, seemingly weak but secretly unflappable and steely; and Commander of the British Expeditionary Force John French, arrogant, combative, and mercurial. The Marne, 1914puts into context the battle’s rich historical significance: how it turned the war into a four-year-long fiasco that taught Europe to accept a new form of barbarism and stoked the furnace for the fires of World War II. Revelatory and riveting, this will be the new source on this seminal event.

One of the decisive battles of the 20th century began on August 29, 1914 with the cry that echoed throughout France: #147;The Prussians are coming!” It ended on September 10th, that same year. Earlier, more than a million German troops#151;five massive armies#151;poured into Belgium and France. The French army began the biggest retreat in its history, and Germany seemed about to triumph. But the German right wing, instead of wheeling to the east of Paris, as the famous Schlieffen Plan required, crossed to the west of Paris, exposing its anks. The counterattack was led from Paris, using the city’s taxi eets in a famous dash to take soldiers to the front. The German plan was thwarted, and the Kaiser’s army was forced to retreat. It was an astonishing and costly victory: over 300,000 French soldiers died. As stirring as a novel, The Marne is a classic of military history.