ABSTRACT
As Robert Doughty demonstrates throughout Pyrrhic Victory, French strategy was considerably better thought out than is usually allowed and the evidence considered herein previously suggests that French tactical practice and thought was likewise more competent than is usually accepted. Both the Marne and the Champagne operations of 1918, discussed in earlier chapters, illustrate the essential problem of offensive operations on the Western Front. The close planning needed for a successful offensive appears to have been only possible in the initial period of an operation, usually indeed only in the first part of the first day of such an operation. After that, whatever measures were taken prior to the attack to continue the struggle, the offensive power of the attacking forces would slowly weaken, due to an increasing lack of cohesion and slowing of its operational tempo, as the defensive forces grew correspondingly more powerful. The weakness in Allied offensive strategy before Foch took charge had been the expectation that one large operation could be used to break the German defences and achieve a breakthrough on the Western Front. Only by mounting a series of co-ordinated offensives could the Germans be successfully pushed back across the Western Front, such as those that the Battle of Soissons and the Champagne operations were part of. Was the difficulty of maintaining the tactical success of operations after the initial advance an inherent and insuperable problem of fighting on the Western Front or a failure of the armies involved to find ways to avoid this? The evidence presented in this book strongly suggests that it was the former. It is difficult to see how with the means available operations could have been conducted more successfully. Without better mobility on the battlefield and communications equipment, such as arrived for the next world war, it was extremely difficult to regain cohesion in units that had been fighting for a day or more, which in turn prevented a high tempo of operations being maintained. Various ways of dealing with these problems were tried; at Champagne the front-line divisions with 21 CA were retired for a day to refresh themselves, a tactic that seems to have worked if we compare the results with those divisions that were kept fighting. It certainly helped maintain better cohesion among the attacking troops.
