Person1851 – 1929
Ferdinand Foch
French general who became Allied supreme commander in 1918, halted Germany’s last offensive, led the counter-attack and received the armistice at Compiègne
Where they went
2 related events
- 1
French and British troops stopped the German army, which had swept through Belgium almost to Paris, on the river Marne. Germany’s plan for a short war collapsed and the Western Front froze into trench warfare.
- 2
Germany signed an armistice with the Allies in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne. At 11 a.m. on 11 November the guns fell silent and the First World War, more than four years long, came to an end.
People who appear alongside
- Joseph Joffre1852 – 1931
Commander-in-chief of the French army (1911–1916), hailed as “the victor of the Marne” for halting the German advance in 1914
Themes this person appears in
- World War I and the Russian Revolution1908 – 1923
From the Balkan crises to a war of trenches and total mobilization that toppled four empires; the Russian Revolution it unleashed, which created the first socialist state; and the Versailles settlement of national self-determination and the League of Nations