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Updated: May 15, 2025
As wonderful as the German military machine had proven itself, as severe as their often repeated offensives were, as superior as their supply of artillery and munitions was both in quality and quantity, Russky and Dmitrieff proved a good match for them all.
How to make best use of the vast personnel in France is the business of the staff, who link the fighting members of the corps with the Intelligence Department and the rest of the Army in the field. To them has fallen the introduction and development of the various functions of war aircraft, besides the planning of bomb raids and concerted aerial offensives.
We cannot forget the heroic defense of Moscow and Leningrad and Stalingrad, or the tremendous Russian offensives of 1943 and 1944 which destroyed formidable German armies. Nor can we forget how, for more than seven long years, the Chinese people have been sustaining the barbarous attacks of the Japanese and containing large enemy forces on the vast areas of the Asiatic mainland.
Then, almost without warning, the barbed-wire entanglements commenced, and the miles and miles of abandoned trenches. This, not a year ago from the day on which I write, was the Hun's country. Last spring, in an attempt to straighten his line, he retreated from it. Our offensives on the Somme had converted his Front into a dangerous salient.
General Fries, the American authority, states, in reference to mustard gas, and the Northern offensives in 1917: "It is no disparagement of the British, nor of any one else, to say that they held up the date of their attack for two weeks pending further investigations into the effects of this new gas."
Since the days when the Germans had been beaten back by the French at Verdun, Teuton offensives had been few and far between. It had been the Allies who had advanced after that, with the one exception of the Austro-German offensive being made in Italy. The ground that the British and French had won, now they held.
Pétain was, however, a past-master in the art of limited offensives; his aims were less ambitious than those which Nivelle or even Haig had set before themselves, but he achieved them with scientific precision and without the devastating losses which had attended the larger and less successful projects.
The great offensives begin by blowing the first lines absolutely to pieces; this accomplished, the attacking infantry advances to the vacated trenches under the rifle fire of those few whom the terrible deluge of shells has not killed or crazed, works toward the strong second position under a concentrated artillery fire of the retreating enemy as terrible as its own, fights its way heroically into the second position, and stops there.
At first much of the space on the transports was devoted to supplies and materials for the camps and depots in France, but as the situation became critical owing to successful enemy offensives, fewer supplies and more men were sent. Great Britain lent her ships and the number of transports was largely increased, so that each month of 1918 showed a greater movement of troops across the Atlantic.
On the contrary, they seem to have regained strength after their withdrawal from China: they reorganized themselves and were soon capable of counter-thrusts, while Chinese offensives had as a rule very little success, and at all events no decisive success. In the course of time, however, the Chinese gained a certain influence over Turkestan, but it was never absolute, always challenged.
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