6,500 more were at that date in training. After graduating from the
advanced course, pilots and observers joined the expeditionary
forces where they underwent a final training before going into action.
The total of qualified flying officers in March 1918 was 2,248 in the
United States and 650 overseas; these numbers had grown in July
1918 to 4,974 in the United States and 2,692 overseas, and in Nov.
1918 to 7,118 in the United States and 4,307 overseas (of whom,
however, only 1,238 were as yet at the front). Inclusive of ground
personnel and students, the total personnel of the U.S. air forces
was nearly 200,000 at the date of the Armistice.
In the production of service machines for these men to fly, grave difficulties arose, none the less grave because in the excitement of the time unreasonable expectations had been formed and encouraged.
After study of the problem, not only from the standpoint of qualitative efficiency in the machine but also from that of man production, the British DH4 (observation and day-bombing) and the Handley Page and Caproni night-bombers were selected as standard types for American production, being redesigned to take American motors.[1] For pursuit flights, only non-American machines were employed. At the end of the war, out of the 7,889 service planes on charge, about half were American-built, and of the total of 22,000 engines nearly three-quarters.
With kite balloons, these supply troubles seem hardly to have existed. From zero (or rather from an establishment of 20 borrowed balloons) in Jan. a total of 662 had been reached by Nov., of which 43 had been destroyed, 35 handed over to the British and French, leaving 574 in service.
The organization of the American air forces in the field was by squadrons, classified as pursuit, observation, day-bombing and night-bombing. The premier American squadron was one of American volunteers, the “Escadrille Lafayette,” which had been serving in the French army and was transferred to the U.S. army in the winter of 1917-8. In the spring of 1918 squadrons formed and came into the field in twos and threes, but in the late summer DH4 machines became available in large numbers, and observation and day-bombing squadrons began to increase more rapidly. From a July total of 15 squadrons, the figure of 30 was reached in Sept. and 45 in the first week of Nov. (exclusive of balloon companies in each case). The machines, however, were still preponderantly of foreign make. Twenty-six squadrons and 14 balloon companies took part in the St. Mihiel battle, and 45 squadrons with 740 machines, and 23 balloon companies in the final Meuse-Argonne battles.
- (C. F. A.)
FOCH, FERDINAND (1851-), French marshal, was born at Tarbes Oct. 2 1851, his father being a civil official and his mother's father an officer of Napoleon's army. Educated at Tarbes, Rodez, and finally at the Jesuit colleges of St. Michel (Loire) and St. Clément (Metz), he was preparing for the entrance examination for the École Polytechnique when the war of 1870 broke out. He enlisted in the army, but saw no active service, and returned to Metz, then in German occupation, to complete his studies, entering the École Polytechnique in Nov. 1871. On being commissioned in 1873 he was posted to the artillery, in which arm the whole of his regimental service was spent. As a captain, he became a student of the Staff College (École de Guerre) in 1885 and left, with fourth place, in 1887. From this time till 1901, save for a period in which as major he commanded a group of horse artillery batteries, his work lay in the general staff of the army, the staff of formations and the École de Guerre. It was in the École de Guerre that he developed his doctrines and his influence on the education of the army. From 1895 he was assistant-professor, and from 1898, as lieutenant-colonel, professor of military history and strategy in that institution, first under Gen. Langlois, and then under Gen. Bonnal, the two leaders of military thought whose work, with his own to complete it, established the new French doctrines of war, based on re-study and application to modern conditions of Napoleon's practice. This is the key idea of Foch's classical treatises, Principes de Guerre and La Direction de la Guerre.
Foch's career as a professor at the École de Guerre lasted hardly more than five years. The army was at that time in the midst of acute political troubles. The Minister of War, Gen. André, was engaged in a drastic, and not overscrupulous attempt to make the army safe for democracy; the Dreyfus affair was running the last stages of its fierce course, and, in his responsible post at the École de Guerre, Foch was an obvious target of attack, as an openly devout and practising Catholic, educated under Jesuit influence. He was returned to regimental duty, and his promotion to colonel only took place in 1903.
In 1905 Clemenceau, then Prime Minister, determined to make use of his military ability to the full, irrespective of political considerations, and, after a short time spent as deputy chief of the general staff, he was appointed commandant of the École de Guerre. Already in 1907 he had been made general of brigade. In 1911 he was promoted general of division and in 1912 corps commander. In 1913 he was appointed to command the most exposed of all the frontier corps, the XX. at Nancy, and he had held this appointment exactly a year when he led the XX. Corps into battle. Foch was then the only intellectual master of the Napoleonic school still serving. And the doctrines of the brilliant series of war school commandants, Maillard, Langlois, Bonnal, Foch, had been challenged, not only by the German school (see 25.994), but also since about 1911 by a new school of thought within the French army itself, which, under the inspiration of Gen. Loiseau de Grandmaison (d. 1915), criticised them as lacking in vigour and offensive spirit, and conducing to needless dispersion of force. The younger men carried the day, and the French army took the field in 1914 governed by a new code of practice. But history decided at once and emphatically against the new idea in the first battles of August, and it remained to be seen whether the Napoleonic doctrine would hold its own, give way to doctrines evolved in the war itself, or, incorporating the new moral and technical elements and adapting itself to the war of national masses, reappear in a new outward form within which the spirit of Napoleon remained unaltered. To these questions, it must be admitted, the war has given an ambiguous answer which will long provide material for expert controversy.
It was, in reality, as a leader in the field, far more than as thinker, that Foch personally influenced the course of the war on the western front. His conduct of operations in the first battles before Nancy, as a corps commander, presents no special characteristics, but in a few weeks he was placed at the head of the newly formed IX. Army, to fill the gap in the line caused by the divergent directions of retreat of the IV. and V. This army he commanded in the battle of the Marne, being opposed to the German III. Army and part of the II. in the region of Fère Champenoise and the Marais de St. Goud. After several crises he finally repulsed the attack, and initiated a counterstroke round which a legend promptly grew up and on which was founded a popular reputation that, no doubt, gave Foch the one element lacking in his equipment for the highest commands—prestige. Almost immediately after the battle, when the mutual attempts of Allies and Germans to outflank one another's northern wing produced the so-called “race to the sea,” Foch was designated assistant to the commander-in-chief and sent north to coördinate the movements of the various French armies and eventually those of the British and Belgian armies concentrating towards Flanders. Over the French army commanders he possessed the powers of a commander-in-chief, but over the British and Belgian forces, like Joffre, he had no authority. This delicate relation, in the midst of one of the greatest crises of the war—one which for Britain and Belgium was of graver import than even that of the Marne,—inevitably led at times to friction between the coequal commands, and after the war a rather unworthy controversy was waged in the press as to some incidents of this period. But in sum, the reputation which Foch already enjoyed amongst European soldiers before the war, and the fact that he had long been in intimate relations with Gen. Sir Henry Wilson, deputy-chief of Sir John French's staff, enabled him to carry out successfully a mission with which no other general could have been entrusted.
After the battle of Ypres and the stabilization of the fronts, Gen. Foch commanded the French “Group of Armies of the North” during 1915 and 1916. In this period, under Joffre, he was responsible for the offensives in Artois during the spring and autumn of 1915, in which again he stood in close relation to the British on his left, though now the sectors of each were
- ↑ The British “Bristol Fighter,” originally selected as one of the types, proved unsuitable for adaptation to American engines and was not adopted. It should be added that American machines were designed to suit these motors, but none had passed into quantity production at the Armistice.
