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Ferdinand Foch served as the supreme commander of the Allied armies.

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1. He was appointed the prestigious title of marshal of France, which is the nation's highest military honor

2. His tomb is close to Napoleon Bonaparte, who was also a very successful general of the French armies

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Early Life, Education and Military Career

Foch was born October 2, 1851, in Tarbes, France, the son of a civil servant and grandson of a French soldier. He attended a local school and, at age 20, enlisted in the French Army, serving as a sub-lieutenant during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, but saw no action.

Following France's defeat, he graduated from the prestigious École Polytechnique military academy in Paris and, in 1885, continued his training by enrolling at the École Supérieure de Guerre (known as the War College), graduating as a commissioned lieutenant. Foch returned to active duty in 1901, holding commands in various French regions and steadily rising through the ranks.

He returned to the War College as a major in 1895, serving as a professor. His lectures, "On the Principles of War" and "On the Conduct of War," were published in 1903 and 1905, respectively. By 1908, with the rank of brigadier general, he was named the school's commandant, building on his reputation as an influential military strategy expert.

"Victory equals will," Foch wrote during his tenure, Time reported in 1926. "Victory goes always to those who deserve it by the greater force of will. . . . A battle won is a battle in which one will not acknowledge oneself beaten."

World War I

By 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Foch, in his 60s, had already been assigned command of the French XX Corps at Nancy and led troops to stop Germany's advance at the Battle of the Frontiers (August 1914). His success prompted General Joseph Joffre, France's commander in chief, to appoint him to helm the Ninth Army, which helped win the First Battle of the Marne.

Joffre promoted him to assistant commander in chief, and, after coordinating strategies among the French, English and Belgian armies in battles at Ypres, Somme and others, he was named chief of the General Staff of the French Army in May 1917, a position that put him in charge of military coordinations along the Western Front. A year later, with Germany seemingly headed for victory, Foch was made commander in chief of the Allied armies.

On March 26, 1918, responding to the deteriorating situation of Germany's Spring Offensive on the Western Front, Allied leaders, including British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau and British and French army commanders, appointed Foch supreme commander of the Allied armies. "He could not have done more for us had he been one of our own generals," Lloyd George said of his appointment.

Foch's leadership during the Second Battle of the Marne (July 15-August 6, 1918) proved to be one of his most significant battles as supreme commander. A crucial turning point in the war, the Allies' coordinated and integrated counterattack halted Germany's advance.

The Second Battle of Marne marked the start of a series of successful Allied counter-offensives, known as the Hundred Days Offensive. The Allies pushed the German Army back and weakened its defenses, ultimately ending the war.

To recognize his leadership, Foch was appointed the prestigious title of marshal of France, the nation's highest military honor, on August 6, 1918. He also received marshal titles from Great Britain and Poland.

Post-War and Legacy

Foch played a pivotal role in negotiating the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed June 28, 1919, which formally ended the war and imposed significant military, territorial and economic obligations on Germany. However, Foch was critical of the treaty's terms, controversially saying it was not harsh enough on Germany and that its leniency could lead to future conflicts. "This is not peace," he said. "It is an armistice for 20 years."

Following the war, Foch continued to serve France as a prominent figure in both military and diplomatic capacities. He served as president of the Inter-Allied Military Commission, charged with enforcing the Treaty of Versailles. He was also elected to the Académie Française in recognition of his contributions to military, literature and culture.

Foch died on March 20, 1929, in Paris at age 77, from complications from influenza and pneumonia. His tomb resides at the Dôme des Invalides in Paris, near that of Napoleon Bonaparte. His memoirs were published in 1931.

"He rose to his greatest moral heights when, putting aside the possible glory of marching his victorious troops into Berlin, he declared at the time of the Armistice that all the objects of the war had been gained, that the Germans had made a complete surrender, and that he could not tolerate the thought of sacrificing the lives of perhaps 100,000 soldiers in order simply to make a military triumph more ostentatious," The New York Times reported the day after his death.
Sources
"Marshal Foch," The New York Times.
"Foreign News: Foch Philosophy," .
"Ferdinand Foch," Pritzker Military Museum & Library.
"Marshal Foch Is Dead In Paris at 77," The New York Times.
Foch in Command: The Forging of a First World War General, by Elizabeth Greenhaigh, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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Ferdinand Foch was a French military leader who served as supreme commander of the Allied armies during the final months of World War I.

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David Lloyd George was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922.

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1. He signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919

2. In 1915, he became the Minister of Munitions. The Minister of Munitions oversees and co-ordinates the production and distribution of munitions for the war effort

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David Lloyd George the Prime Minister - National Library of Wales

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David Lloyd George became British Prime Minister in December 1916. His leadership during World War One won him the title ‘The man who won the war’

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Paul Von Hindenburg was a German military leader and statesman who led the Imperial German Army during WW1. He was later the president of Germany from 1925 to 1934.

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1. Hindenburg partnered with Eric Ludendorff, and together they were responsible for Germany's successes during early WW1.

2. The Germans created the Hindenburg line, a defensive line up to 8 miles deep on the western front.

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Paul Von Hindenburg (1847-1934) was a German World War I military commander and president. He fought in the Austro-Prussian War and in the Franco-German War, and retired as a general in 1911. Recalled to duty at the start of World War I, Hindenburg shared power with Erich Ludendorff as commander of the Eighth Army and then as chief of the General Staff. A national hero for his early victories, Hindenburg later drew the United States into battle with his use of submarine warfare. After retiring again in 1919, he became president of the Weimar Republic in 1925, and died shortly after naming Adolf Hitler the German chancellor.

The "wooden titan" of the wartime empire and the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg saw action in 1866 and 1870-1871. Hindenburg is often dismissed by critics as lacking intelligence and imagination-"wooden"-but his career established him as a man of force and integrity who at the same time understood the difference between honor and intransigence. He spent most of his active service with troops, alternating command and staff appointments. Although regarded as a possible candidate for chief of staff and Prussian war minister, Hindenburg's talents were not sufficient to overcome his own well-founded opinion that he lacked the skills of the politician and the courtier required for success in the higher echelons of Wilhelm II's peacetime army. Hindenburg retired in 1911 as a corps commander. He was then sixty-four.

His career took an unexpected upturn three years later when Erich Ludendorff was appointed chief of staff of the Eighth Army, reeling from defeat at the hands of the Russians. Ludendorff was arrogant, touchy, and humorless, a man with more admirers than friends; someone calm and steady would be required to balance his mercurial temperament. Hindenburg's imperturbability, his good health, and his imposing physical presence all worked in his favor. On August 22, 1914, he was offered command of the Eighth Army. He promptly accepted.

The professional relationship between Hindenburg and Ludendorff became so close that Winston Churchill in The Unknown War consistently refers to them by the anagram HL. In fact, the association began as a marriage of convenience. If a new command team joining the headquarters of a defeated army (whose staff officers feared for their own careers) did not watch each other's backs, no one could be expected to do it for them. Hindenburg also had the gift, rare among senior officers, of knowing his own limitations and his own best qualities. He could provide without resentment a base and a framework for a man more brilliant than himself and gave free play to Ludendorff's intellect, will, and energy. Hindenburg's calm kept Ludendorff steady during the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, two of Germany's brightest victories of the war. And it was Hindenburg, not his chief of staff, who became a household word as the savior of East Prussia and a symbol of Germany at war.

Hindenburg's wartime image was psychologically specific. It focused on mature male virility at a time when war was becoming a young man's province. Institutionally, the German army badly needed heroes in the aftermath of the Schlieffen Plan's collapse. Hindenburg also had the advantage of being isolated from the tensions proliferating in a high command forced by the battles of the Marne and First Ypres to rethink its basic views of war. For the first time in its history, imperial Germany had a hero independent of the royal house. By the end of 1914, former chancellor Bernhard von B[udie]low and Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz were discussing the possibility of having Wilhelm II declared insane, his son appointed regent, and Hindenburg given the emergency post of imperial administrator. No one doubted where the real power would be.

Hindenburg's mystique increased during 1915 and 1916, both because of the achievements of his armies in the east and because of the continued loss of status by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn, and not least the kaiser himself. His appointment as chief of the General Staff in August 1916 surprised few politicians and fewer soldiers. Hindenburg, once again working in tandem with Ludendorff, however, was in well over his head as the supreme commander of a total war effort in a state already stumbling from exhaustion. He lent his name and prestige to a series of policies ranging from inauspicious to disastrous. The munitions program, the Auxiliary Services Law, and the unrestricted U-boat campaign overstrained Germany's resources and, in the latter case, added the United States to Germany's enemies. Hindenburg participated in the intrigues that led to Bethmann's dismissal in July 1917 and saw to it that the chancellor's successors remained no more than figureheads. He accepted the increasingly unrealistic war aims of the militarists and nationalists. The shrewd common sense that had been a hallmark of his earlier career gave way to a passivity ironically replicating that of Wilhelm II.

Hindenburg came to life once more only as Germany stood on the brink of disaster. The great offensives of March 1918 so depleted Germany's human and material resources that the army proved unable to stop the battering Allied counterattacks. By October, the Second Reich was exhausted. While refusing to resign with Ludendorff, Hindenburg accepted the convictions of Ludendorff's successor, General Wilhelm Groener, that the army no longer supported the kaiser and the country needed immediate peace. Neither the abdication nor the armistice would have gone as smoothly as they did without Hindenburg's support. Even after his retirement in 1919, he remained a national hero-a fact made apparent in 1925 when he was elected president of the Weimar Republic. Hindenburg initially performed his new duties loyally and not ineffectually. However, the Great Depression, the rise of National Socialism, and his own advancing age robbed Hindenburg by 1930 of whatever effectiveness he still possessed. His appointment of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor in January 1933 gave the Nazi regime badly needed legitimacy. It thereby laid the groundwork for the destruction of the Germany Hindenburg loved after his fashion and served according to his best lights.

The Reader's Companion to Military History. Edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Paul Von Hindenburg (1847-1934) was a German World War I military commander and president. He fought in the Austro-Prussian War and in the Franco-German War, and retired as a general in 1911. Recalled to duty at the start of World War I, Hindenburg shared power with Erich Ludendorff as commander of the Eighth Army and then as chief of the General Staff.

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Vladimir Lenin was the head of the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution. During WWI, he advocated for Russia's defeat because he believed that it would speed up the process of having the political revolution that he wanted.

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1. He did not think that WW1 needed to happen

2. He returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution failed to transform it into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution because he believed it would cause the end of capitalism and the rise of socialism

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Who Was Vladimir Lenin?

Vladimir Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov in 1870 into a middle-class family in Ulyanovsk, Russia. The son of Ilya Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, he was the third of six siblings in an educated family and would go on to become first in his class in high school.

But it was exactly their educational background that made the family a target of the government; his father, an inspector of schools, was threatened with early retirement by officials wary of public education. As a teenager, Lenin became politically radicalized after his older brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander III.

Later that year, 17-year-old Lenin-still known as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov-was expelled from Kazan Imperial University, where he was studying law, for taking part in an illegal student protest. After his expulsion, Lenin immersed himself in radical political literature, including the writings of German philosopher and socialist Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital.

In 1889, Lenin declared himself a Marxist. He later finished college and received a law degree. Lenin practiced law briefly in St. Petersburg in the mid-1890s.

He soon was arrested for engaging in Marxist activities and exiled to Siberia. His fiancée and future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, joined him there. The two would marry on July 22, 1898.

Lenin later moved to Germany and then Switzerland, where he met other European Marxists. During this time, he adopted the pseudonym Lenin and established the Bolshevik Party.

Russia in World War I

Russia entered World War I in August 1914 in support of the Serbs and their French and British allies. Militarily, imperial Russia was no match for modern, industrialized Germany. Russian participation in the war was disastrous: Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any other nation, and food and fuel shortages soon plagued the vast country.

Lenin advocated for Russian defeat in World War I, arguing that it would hasten the political revolution he desired. It was during this time that he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) in which he argued that war was the natural result of international capitalism.

Hoping that Lenin could further destabilize their foe, the Germans arranged for Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries living in exile in Europe to return to Russia. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later summed up the move by the Germans: "They turned upon Russia the most grisly of weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus."

Russian Revolution

When Lenin returned home to Russia in April 1917, the Russian Revolution was already beginning. Strikes over food shortages in March had forced the abdication of the inept Czar Nicholas II, ending centuries of imperial rule.

Russia came under the command of a Provisional Government, which opposed violent social reform and continued Russian involvement in World War I.

Lenin began plotting an overthrow of the Provisional Government. To Lenin, the provisional government was a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." He advocated instead for direct rule by the workers and peasants in a "dictatorship of the proletariat."

By fall of 1917, Russians had become even more war weary. Peasants, workers and soldiers demanded immediate change in what became known as the October Revolution.

Lenin, aware of the leadership vacuum plaguing Russia, decided to seize power. He secretly organized factory workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors into Red Guards-a volunteer paramilitary force. On November 7 and 8, 1917, Red Guards captured Provisional Government buildings in a bloodless coup d'état.

The Bolsheviks seized power of the government and proclaimed Soviet rule, making Lenin leader of the world's first communist state. The new Soviet government ended Russian involvement in World War I with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

War Communism

The Bolshevik Revolution plunged Russia into a three-year civil war. The Red Army-backed by Lenin's newly formed Russian Communist Party-fought the White Army, a loose coalition of monarchists, capitalists and supporters of democratic socialism.

During this time, Lenin enacted a series of economic policies dubbed "War Communism." These were temporary measures to help Lenin consolidate power and defeat the White Army.

Under war communism, Lenin quickly nationalized all manufacturing and industry throughout Soviet Russia. He requisitioned surplus grain from peasant farmers to feed his Red Army.

These measures proved disastrous. Under the new state-owned economy, both industrial and agricultural output plummeted. An estimated five million Russians died of famine in 1921 and living standards across Russia plunged into abject poverty.

Mass unrest threatened the Soviet government. As a result, Lenin instituted his New Economic Policy, a temporary retreat from the complete nationalization of War Communism. The New Economic Policy created a more market-oriented economic system, "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control."

Cheka

Soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin established the Cheka, Russia's first secret police.

As the economy deteriorated during the Russian Civil War, Lenin used the Cheka to silence political opposition, both from his opponents and challengers within his own political party.

But these measures did not go unchallenged: Fanya Kaplan, a member of a rival socialist party, shot Lenin in the shoulder and neck as he was leaving a Moscow factory in August 1918, badly injuring him.

Red Terror

After the assassination attempt, the Cheka instituted a period known as the Red Terror, a campaign of mass executions against supporters of the czarist regime, Russia's upper classes and any socialists who weren't loyal to Lenin's Communist Party.

By some estimates, the Cheka may have executed as many as 100,000 so-called "class enemies" during the Red Terror between September and October 1918.

Lenin Creates the U.S.S.R.

Lenin's Red Army eventually won Russia's civil war. In 1922, a treaty between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Transcaucasus (now Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) formed the Union of Soviet Republics (U.S.S.R.).

Lenin became the first head of the U.S.S.R., but by that time, his health was declining. Between 1922 and his death in 1924, Lenin suffered a series of strokes which compromised his ability to speak, let alone govern.

His absence paved the way for Joseph Stalin, the Communist Party's new General Secretary, to begin consolidating power. Lenin resented Stalin's growing political power and saw his ascendency as a threat to the U.S.S.R.

Lenin dictated a number of predictive essays about corruption of power in the Communist Party while he was recovering from a stroke in late 1922 and early 1923. The documents, sometimes referred to as Lenin's "Testament," proposed changes to the Soviet political system and recommended that Stalin be removed from his position.

Lenin's Death and Tomb

Lenin died on January 21, 1924, in Gorki Leninskiye near Moscow. He was 53 years old. By that time, Stalin had already come to power-power he would do anything to keep, as evidenced by the Great Purge of 1936-38.

About a million people braved the cold Russian winter to stand in line for hours before paying their respects to Lenin, who was lying in state at the House of Trade Unions in Moscow.

Lenin's body was moved several times following his death, from a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square to the distant city of Tyumen, Russia, for safekeeping during World War II. His embalmed body remains on display in Lenin's tomb in Red Square.

Sources

Vladimir Lenin; PBS.
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924); BBC.
Vladimir Lenin's Return Journey to Russia Changed the World Forever; Smithsonian Magazine.

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Vladimir Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary and head of the Bolshevik Party who was leader of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

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Woodrow Wilson attempted to keep the USA out of WW1, but was unsuccessful. He decided to lead America into the war to "make the world safe for democracy".

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1. He was the main supporter of the League of Nations

2. He had a neutral stance and was not a fan of being involved with foreign affairs, which is a part of the reason that he wanted to keep American out of the war. He always advocated for peace

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Woodrow Wilson and the First World War | National Portrait Gallery

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By Lauren Holt, Intern, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery