World War I - Week 5 - August 31-September 6, 1914
POLITICAL
Sep. 1 - Russian capital St. Petersburg renamed Petrograd
Sep. 2 - French government abandons Paris, moves to Bordeaux
Sep. 5 - Agreement of London - Britain, France, and Russia pledge themselves to make no separate peace
MILITARY
Aug. 31 - Russian 1st Army begins retreat in East Prussia
Sep. 2 - Austria-Hungary loses 130,000 men at the Battle of Lemberg
Sep. 2 - Japanese forces landed for attack on German encampment at Tsing-Tao in China
Sep. 3 - German forces reach and cross the River Marne
Sep. 4 - Advance of German 1st Army diverted away from Paris in southeasterly direction
Sep. 4 - Belgians open their dikes and flood Germans to stop advance on Antwerp
Sep. 5 - British and French forces end their long retreat and prepare to counterattack
Sep. 6 - Battle of the Marne begins (see below)
Sep. 6 - Serbian forces invade Austria-Hungary
QUOTES
"The first month of the war resembled a month-long patriotic festival. In the first three weeks of August, Germans said goodbye to their troops, smothering them with flowers and so much chocolate that the Red Cross asked people to be less generous: the soldiers were getting sick". - Jeffrey Verhey, historian
"We are about to engage in a battle on which the fate of our country depends and it is important to remind all ranks that the moment has passed for looking to the rear; all our efforts must directed towards driving back the enemy. Troops that can advance no farther must, at any price, hold onto the ground they have conquered and die on the spot rather than give way. Under the circumstances which face us, no act of weakness can be tolerated". - General Order of the French commander Joseph Joffre on the eve of the Battle of the Marne
"Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack". - French General Ferdinand Foch (later Supreme Commander of Allied forces) during the Battle of the Marne
THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE
After nearly three weeks of retreat by the British and French and pursuit by the Germans, both sides found themselves 30 miles outside Paris. The Battle of the Marne was actually 5 separate and uncoordinated battles over a 200km front between September 6-12.All combatants were exhausted from marches of 25-30 miles per day broken up by frenzied and brutal engagements. In addition to being at the brink of endurance, the German Army had outrun their supply lines and heavy artillery. Both sides were nearly out of artillery ammunition. The British commander Sir John French believed defeat was likely and seriously considered taking the entire British Expeditionary Force back across the English Channel. On Sep. 6, a British-French attack on the extreme right flank of the German 1st Army forced the Germans to halt their offensive and consolidate their forces in a secure defensive position. In the words of one historian, it was "one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies would ultimately win the war, but because it determined the war would go on".
FRENCH COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF JOSEPH JOFFRE
General Joffre was the French Chief of Staff from 1911 until December 1916. Tall and fat, Joffre was famously known for his calm and imperturbability in the face of catastrophe. He was incredibly stubborn ("That is your plan. It is not mine"). He fired subordinate generals wholesale ("If you refuse to carry out my orders, I'll have you shot"). No matter what the situation, his daily schedule included a good lunch followed by a nap, a good dinner and uninterrupted sleep each night between 10pm-5am. His "wonderful calm" carried the French through many moments of impending defeat, though at a great cost. In August/September of 1914 alone, the French Army would suffer 329,000 killed. 
THE PARIS TAXI BRIGADE
When German forces were threatening the French capital of Paris, General Gallieni was named the Military Governor of the city. Though elderly and not in the best of health, he was a true man of action and a superb organizer. He enlisted thousands of Parisian civilians digging trenches with shovels and picks, assembled food and ammunition for a protracted siege, and transformed Paris into a fortified camp. He would make decisions after "one of those long conferences he holds on grave issues - they usually last from 2 to 5 minutes". His most famous action came during the Battle of the Marne when he commandeered 600 Parisian taxicabs to shuttle 6,000 desperately needed troops to the front to prevent a German breakthrough.
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Previous installments of the series can be found in the History and Sociology subsection under Health, Science & Tech at the top of this page.
A few visual aids:
Flyer announcing the French government leaving Paris for Bordeaux, leaving the city under the military command of General Joseph Gallieni. Gallieni had been widely favored for the position of Supreme Commander, which he declined in favor of General Joseph Joffre.
Widely regarded asa hero in France, Gallieni's reputation in Africa is much different, where as Governor of French Sudan he is remembered for his ruthless suppression of the Sudanese rebellion against French Colonial rule.
Map of the Battle of the Marne
While the Battle of The Marne saved Paris, stopped the German advance, and effectively put an end to the Schlieffen Plan, it would have to be considered a rather Pyrrhic victory. The Allied forces pursuit of retreatingGerman armies was only about 12 miles per day, allowing the Germans to dig in about 40 miles from the Marne area. This marked the beginning of 'trench warfare', which would last for years and result in the deaths of millions on all sides...
Copy of the declaration of war from Austro-Hungry sent to Serbia.
The Serbian Army declined severely towards the end of the war, falling from about 420,000 [ 2 ] at its peak to about 100,000 at the moment of liberation. The Kingdom of Serbia lost more than 1,100,000 inhabitants during the war (both army and civilian losses), which represented over 27% of its overall population and 60% of its male population. [ 5 ] [ 6 ] According to estimates by the Yugoslav government (1924) Serbia had lost 265,164 soldiers, or 25% of all mobilized people. By comparison, France lost 16.8%, Germany 15.4%, Russia 11.5%, and Italy 10.3%.
The ''Paris Taxi Brigade''...Damn brilliant. Reminds me of the British in WWII, when private boats were used to evacuate the troops from Dunkirk.
Another excellent chapter. Great work pokermike, and swamijim as well. This is really becoming a excellent history lesson.
One of your pictures provides a reminder that poison gas was a popular weapon back then ...
Thanks Swami. Your photos are always welcome and you do come up with some good ones. While I could write pages and pages of exposition on the War, you know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words.
Kavika, Serbia did suffer greatly in the War. Their army and many thousands of civilian refugees trekked west across the mountains to the coast where the soldiers were transported out by the Allied navies. A great percentage of the civilians died along the way due to starvation, disease, and exposure.
Petey, poison gas was introduced by the Germans in 1915 on the Eastern Front against the Russians though it was totally ineffective due to the freezing temperatures. The first gas was a non-fatal tear gas designed to stun the enemy while being overrun. The Germans would go on to use much deadlier types of phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas later in the war though both sides would utilize millions of gas shells against each other.
I'm gonna 'fess up, Kavika... I'm fairly up on WWII, since my father and (ex) father-in-law were WWII vets. (My Navy dad's carrier took three kamikaze hits in one engagement in the Pacific, while my former fa-in-law (Marine) took a bullet through the neck on Iwo Jima.)
I've never been much of a history buff apart from that, and when pokermike announced the start of this article series, I realized my apalling ignorance about WWI and how much it set the stage for subsequent event from WWII into the present. So poker's dedication inspired me to get off my ass and do some digging, simply to be able to make some kind of contribution to the work he's doing here. My hope is just to a) help add a few images that may help flesh out the events as poker unfolds them, and b) educate myself about events that (although they are distant in time) have ramifications & consequences that we are all still dealing with a century later. (My personal plan is to download/copy [steal] all of pokermike's excellent articles and work them through MS Office into one continuous narrative, just for my own enlightenment.)
Swamijim,my father hit the beach at Tarawa, then was at Saipan and Okinawa. A few other stops in between. Lost my cousin at the ''Battle of the Bulge''. Uncle wounded at Anzio. Numerous uncles, cousins etc were in WWII and Korea.
This is a excellent series by mike. I'm finding out more information on the smaller countries that were involved. The amount of KIA by some of these countries is beyond belief.
Swamijim, it gratifies me immensely that this is spurring you to learn more about this important event. This was my intention in starting it and I hope more people will follow your lead to pick up bits and pieces on their own. Your photos add much to my narrative which is obviously limited by space. Also, I am trying to get out the most important parts and still keep it interesting. The comments and questions from you, Kavika, Petey and others are a big help.
Many of the smaller countries who later joined the war remained on the sidelines to see which side would win so they could ally with the winners and get in on the spoils. Countries like Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and even Turkey only jumped in to grab land from their neighbors. Even tiny Portugal would lose over 2,000 men fighting on the Western Front.
The invention/development of poison gasses is another of those astonishing incidences of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. It seems the height of irony that the first widespread use of a 'Weapon of Mass Destruction' has its roots in an effort to benefit all of mankind...
In the latter part of the 19th century, it was recognized that population growth was outstripping food production. Agricultural research pointed toward the need for better fertilizers, particularly synthetic fertilizers that could be produced in large quantities, to increase harvests. Chemists around the world searched for a method to produce (especially) artifically-generated ammonium/nitrogen compounds that had the potential to feed the world...
Enter Dr. Fritz Haber-- a brilliant German chemist, who developed a catalytic process to produce ammonia from hydrogen & nitrogen under extreme temperature and pressure. In 1909-10, he and colleague Carl Bosch perfected the mass production of ammonium nitrate, a base for potent fertilizer. Unfortunately, the Haber-Bosch process also provided the base of powerful explosives, and as a side-effect,toxic gas. While both the Germans and the Allied powers had employed tear gas and a nasal irritant gas that produced violent fits of uncontrollable sneezing, all had refrained from the use of toxic gasses under terms of the Hague Convention of 1907.
Sadly, with the collapse of the Schlieffen Plan following the Battle or Marne, the European powers were faced with the reality of trench warfare, with nearly-impregnable positions fighting savagely over the same patches of territory for months (or potentially years). By early 1915, the German high command decided that the only way to break the trench-war stalemate was the use of poison gas. A patriotic German, Haber was proud to oversee the development & production of chlorine gas, and personally directed its first use at the Battle of Ypres (April 22, 1915).
Side note: Haber's wife Clara, also a chemist, was bitterly opposed to his involvement in chemical warfare, and on May 2 1915, she shot herself through the heart, using Haber's service revolver. The couple's 13-year-old son Hermann discovered his mother as she lay dying in the family garden; that same day, Fritz Haber left his dead wife & grief-stricken son for the Eastern Front--- to supervise the use of poison gas against the Russians. Hermann Haber later emigrated to the US early in WWII--- Hermann committed suicide in 1946, after learning about the death-camp use of the cyanide gas formulation known as Zyklon A (originally as a fumigant/insecticide)developed at his father's Institute.
Today, we're all familiar with ammonium nitrate as a base for powerful IEDs, and we've seen the horrors of poison gas used against both military and civilian-rebel factions. At the same time, the Haber-Bosch process yieldsfertilizer that grows about one-half of the entire world's food-- it is estimated that without the pioneering discoveriesof Fritz Haber, 30-40% of the world population would be facing starvation...
Mike,
I so enjoy this series. I learn so much from it. Like I never knew that how Paris prepared for the siege. It was quite clever.