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The Marne (French pronunciation: ⓘ) is a river in France, an eastern tributary of the Seine in the area east and southeast of Paris. It is 514 kilometres (319 mi) long. [1] The river gave its name to the departments of Haute-Marne, Marne, Seine-et-Marne, and Val-de-Marne.
The First Battle of the Marne or known in France as the Miracle on the Marne (French: miracle de la Marne) was a battle of the First World War fought from 5 to 12 September 1914. [4] The German army invaded France with a plan for winning the war in 40 days by occupying Paris and destroying the French and British armies (Allies/Entente).
- 5-14 September 1914
- Allied victory
- Overview
- Allied retreat to the Marne
- Breakdown of the Schlieffen Plan
- Clash on the Marne
- Outcome
First Battle of the Marne, (September 6–12, 1914), an offensive during World War I by the French army and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) against the advancing Germans who had invaded Belgium and northeastern France and were within 30 miles (48 km) of Paris. The French threw back the massive German advance and thwarted German plans for a quic...
The British Expeditionary Force, after concentrating near Maubeuge, France, had moved up to Mons, Belgium, on August 22, ready to advance farther into Belgium as part of the offensive of the Allied left wing. On arrival, however, Field Marshal Sir John French learned that the French Fifth Army under Gen. Charles Lanrezac had been checked by a German attack on August 21 and deprived of the crossing of the Sambre. Although thus placed in an exposed forward position, French agreed to stand at Mons to cover Lanrezac’s left. The next day Lanrezac had word of the fall of Namur and of the presence of the German Third Army under Gen. Max von Hausen on his exposed right flank near Dinant, on the Meuse. In consequence, he gave orders for a general retreat that night.
World War I Events
Battle of the Frontiers
August 4, 1914 - September 6, 1914
Battle of Mons
August 23, 1914
Joffre’s optimism might have been again misplaced but for German decisions. The first was Gen. Helmuth von Moltke’s action in detaching seven regular divisions to invest Maubeuge and Givet and watch Antwerp, instead of using Landwehr (reserve) and Ersatz (replacement) troops as earlier intended. Moltke further undermined the effectiveness of the Schlieffen Plan on August 25 when he decided to send four divisions to check the Russian advance in East Prussia (that advance would be shattered at the Battle of Tannenberg, weeks before the detached troops would arrive on the Eastern Front). All these forces were taken from the right wing. Further, the German command lost touch with the advancing armies, and movements at the front became disjointed.
The British stand at Le Cateau (August 26), interrupting the retreat from Mons, and Lanrezac’s riposte at Guise (August 29) were also factors in checking the German enveloping wing, and each had still greater indirect effects. Le Cateau apparently convinced Kluck that the British force could be wiped from the slate, and Guise led Gen. Karl von Bülow (Second Army) to call on the First Army for support, whereupon Kluck wheeled inward, intending to roll up the French left. Echoes of the decisive victory at Sedan rang loudly in the ears of German generals, and this led them to pluck the fruit before it was ripe. By prematurely wheeling his forces before Paris had been reached, Kluck exposed the German right to a counterenvelopment. One further factor must be mentioned, the most significant of all: the Germans had advanced so rapidly, outrunning their timetable, that their supplies had failed to keep pace.
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The first, highly coloured reports from the army commands in the Battles of the Frontiers had given the German Supreme Command the impression of a decisive victory. However, the comparatively small number of prisoners raised doubts in Moltke’s mind and led him to a more sober estimate of the situation. The new pessimism of Moltke and the renewed optimism of his army commanders together produced a fresh change of plan, which contained the seeds of disaster. When, on August 26, the British left wing fell back southward badly mauled from Le Cateau, Kluck turned southwestward again. If the direction of Kluck’s advance was partly due to a misconception of the line of retreat taken by the British, it was also in accordance with his original role of executing a wide circling sweep. Moreover, it carried him into the Amiens-Péronne area, where the first elements of the newly formed French Sixth Army were just detraining after their “switch” from Alsace. This dislocated Joffre’s design for an early return to the offensive and compelled the Sixth Army to fall back hurriedly toward the shelter of the Paris defenses.
Kluck had hardly swung out to the southwest before he was induced to swing in again. For, in order to ease the pressure on the British, Joffre had ordered Lanrezac to halt and strike back against the pursuing Germans, and Bülow, shaken by the threat, called on Kluck for aid. Lanrezac’s attack, on August 29, was stopped before Bülow needed this aid, but he asked Kluck to wheel in nevertheless, in order to cut off Lanrezac’s retreat. Before acceding, Kluck deferred to Moltke. The request came at a moment when Moltke was becoming perturbed over the way the French were slipping away from his grasp. He was concerned in particular with a gap which had opened between his Second and Third armies as a result of the latter’s having already turned south, from southwest, to help the Fourth Army, its neighbour on the other flank. Moltke, therefore, approved Kluck’s change of direction—which meant the inevitable abandonment of the original wide sweep round the far side of Paris. Now the flank of the wheeling German line would pass the near side of Paris and across the face of the Paris defenses into the valley of the Marne.
The opportunity for a move against the Germans was perceived not by Joffre, who had ordered a continuance of the retreat, but by Gen. Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the military governor of Paris. On September 3, when the German First Army was crossing the Marne east of Paris, Gallieni realized the meaning of Kluck’s wheel inward and directed Gen. Michel-Joseph Maunoury’s Sixth Army to be ready to strike at the exposed German right flank. The next day, with some difficulty, Gallieni won Joffre’s sanction. Once convinced, Joffre acted decisively. The whole left wing was ordered to turn about and return to a general offensive on September 6. At Gallieni’s urging, Maunoury was already off the mark on September 5, and as his pressure developed on the Germans’ sensitive flank, Kluck was constrained to draw off first one part and then the remaining part of his army to support his threatened flank guard. Thereby a 30-mile (48-km) gap was created between the German First Army (in the vicinity of Meaux) and the Second (east of Montmirail)—a gap covered only by a screen of cavalry.
Kluck was emboldened to take the risk because of the rapid retreat of the British opposite—or rather with their backs to—this gaping sector. Even on September 5, when the French on either flank were turning about, the British continued a further day’s march to the south. In this “disappearance” lay the unintentional cause of victory. On September 7 and 8, Maunoury’s forces were reinforced by about 3,000 infantrymen who were transported to the battle from Paris by some 600 taxis, the first automotive transport of troops in the history of war. While Paris was preparing for a siege, the Allies exploited the gap between the German First and Second armies. On September 8 Gen. Louis Franchet d’Esperey’s Fifth Army made a surprise night attack on the German Second Army and widened the gap. When the British retraced their steps, it was the report of their columns advancing into the gap which led Bülow to order the retreat of his Second Army on September 9. The temporary advantage which the German First Army had gained over Maunoury was thereby nullified, and it fell back the same day.
For the Germans, the result of the Battle of the Marne was a strategic but not a tactical defeat, and the German right wing was able to reknit and stand firmly on the line of the lower Aisne and the Chemin des Dames ridge, where trench warfare set in after assaults by the Allies in the latter half of September (First Battle of the Aisne). That the Allies were not able to draw greater advantage from their victory was partly due to the comparative weakness of Maunoury’s flank attack and partly due to the failure of the British and of the French Fifth Army under d’Espérey to drive rapidly through the gap between the German First and Second armies while it was open. Their direction of advance was across a region intersected by frequent rivers, and this handicap was intensified by a lack of initiative on the part of their chiefs. Greater results might have come if more effort had been made, as Gallieni urged, to strike at the rear flank of the Kluck’s First Army instead of the front and to direct reinforcements to the northwest of Paris for this purpose.
The Allies’ frontal pursuit of the Germans from the Marne was already checked on the Aisne before Joffre, on September 17, seeing that Maunoury’s attempts to overlap the German flank were ineffectual, decided to form a fresh army under Gen. Édouard de Castelnau for a maneuver around and behind the German flank. By then the German armies had recovered cohesion, and the German command was expecting and ready to meet such a maneuver, now the obvious course. The “Race to the Sea” had begun.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
In saving Paris from capture by pushing the Germans back some 72km (45 miles), the First Battle of the Marne was a great strategic victory, as it enabled the French to continue the war.
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Sep 5, 2014 · Learn how the French and British forces stopped the German advance on the Marne River in 1914 and changed the course of World War I. The article describes the strategic, tactical and human aspects of the battle, as well as its impact and legacy.
Marne River, river, northern France, 326 miles (525 km) long, rising 4.5 miles (7.2 km) south of Langres on the Langres Plateau. Flowing north-northwest in a wide valley past Chaumont and Saint-Dizier, it then turns west before veering northwest to skirt Vitryle-François and Châlons-sur-Marne; it.
It is a right tributary of the Seine in the area east and southeast of Paris. Four departments are named after it: Haute-Marne, Marne, Seine-et-Marne and Val-de-Marne. The Marne is famous as the place of two battles during the First World War, the first in 1914 and the second in 1918.
