COMMANDERS OF YESTERDAY

Southland Times, Issue 23648, 25 October 1938, Page 16

COMMANDERS OF YESTERDAY

Three Great Leaders Still Alive FRENCHMAN, GERMAN AND AMERICAN Of the great captains in the world war only three remain alive today, says a writer in the News Chronicle. They are Marshal Henri Petain, of France, Field-Marshal August von Mackensen, of Germany, and General John J. Pershing, and these three are among the few whose reputations did not precede them into the grave. Marshal Petain was one of the most distinguished soldiers on the Allied side. His rapid advance in the first two months of the war, from the command of a regiment to leadership of any army corps, was only the prelude to his advancement, in 1917, to. chief command of the French troops in the field. Taking over after the stubborn efforts of General Robert Nivelle to break through on the Western Front, Petain found the French Army riddled with defeatism, and, by a mixture of tact and forcefulness, restored .it as a fighting force. He retained his command of the field forces after Ferdinand Foch was elevated to the supreme command of all the Allied armies in 1918, and carried out the Generalissimo’s “directives” with great ability. Von Mackensen, whose Hussar, busby with its death’s head insignia is still a feature of German army fetes, commanded the combined forces of German, Austrian, and Bulgarian troops whose operations in the Balkans resulted in the conquest of Serbia and Rumania. Though never in supreme command, as Petain, Pershing, and Ludendorff were at various times, he was a most efficient subordinate, and his sector was far enough removed from the War Office to make his command virtually independent. “BLACK JACK’S” RECORD “Black Jack” Pershing, who led a larger army into battle than any other American general, has a record unsullied by defeat. True, he conducted his first campaign at St. Mihiel after the tide had turned in favour of the Allies, but the divisions he had trained had contributed to that result at the second Marne battle and at Soissons, and his workmanlike direction at St Mihiel and the Argonne was a solid basis for a military reputation. The other military leaders, whose names once nieant headlines and battles lost or won, have all passed from the scene. Marshal Foch, who led alb the Allied armies of the Western Front after the grave threat of the great German “Peace Drive” of 1918, died in 1929. His opponent, von Hindenburg, who came out of retirement in 1914 to become the medium through which Ludendorff achieved his victories and eventually chief of the German General Staff, died in 1934, honoured as the last president of the Weimar Republic. Field-Marshal Earl Haig, commander of the British Army in France and Flanders, who rallied his shaken troops after the 'breakthrough near St. Quentin in 1918, and in his turn smashed through the Hindenburg Line, died in 1928. He left I behind him a controversy over tho artistic merits of an equestrain statue' and a deeper quarrel concerning the Battle of Passchendaele, in which thousands of British soldiers lost their lives during a futile struggle in the mud.

The Russian generals have all gone. The Grand Duke Nicolas, whose com-, mand of the Tsar’s forces from the outbreak of the war until August, 1915, was perhaps less of a sinecure than the military posts of other royalties, died, in 1929. He had lived near Paris ever since the Revolution drove him from his vice-royalty of the Caucasus. Tsar Nicholas 11, who ostensibly assumed the supreme command himself after the Grand Duke’s exile, was slain by Communists in Ekaterinburg in 1918. Alexi Brusiloff, perhaps the only Tsarist general of real ability, who smashed tiie Austrian front in 1916 (at the cost of 1,000,000 casualties), lived on in Moscow until 1926. THE EARLY LEADERS

Marshal Luigi Cadorna and Armando Diaz, commanders in turn of theItalian forces, both died in 1928, The former is chiefly remembered for the great defeat at Caporetto, for which he was retired in 1918. Diaz, more fortunate, won the victory of Vittorio Veneto which drove Austria to sue for peace. ' Out of the early days of the war, generals such as Helmuth von Moltke, who bore the name of his celebrated uncle without much glory; Erich yon Falkenhayn, successor to Moltke. and predecessor of Hindenburg as chief of the German General Staff; Robert Nivelle, who gave the French their slogan, “They shall not pass,” at Verdun; Joseph (“Papa”) Joffre, credited wrongly with turning the Germans back at the Marne in 1914; Viscount French, first commander of the British troops in France; Alexander von Kluck, commander of the , German First Army, fist of the German arm as it swung through -Belgium and northern France in the first month of tiie war, who won a transient. and doubtful notoriety when Gallieni’s taxi-cab army fell on the flank of his force at the Marne—none of them are still alive. . Moltke, in partial disgrace, died in 1916, Falkenhayn, bearing much of the onus of German failure at Verdun, died in 1922; Nivelle in 1924; Joffre in 1931; French in 1925; Kluck in 1934.