La Maquina de Guerra Gris

Para todos los interesados, se ha publicado un nuevo libro sobre la batalla de la Marne, hay varios libros en francés pero hay muy poco en ingles y no conozco muchos en español, sobre la primera guerra mundial si hay varios y últimamente se han publicado en castellano varios trabajos sobre diferentes batallas (Verdun,Somme) , así que espero que se completo el circulo sobre batallas con la traducción del libro de Holgen H. Herwing, The Marne, 1914, the opening of World War I and the battle that change the world(La Marne, 1914, la apertura de la Primera Guerra Mundial y la batalla que cambio el mundo), con esta batalla se dio inicio a la terrible guerra de trincheras y se detendría el avance de la “Maquina gris de la muerte”(Will Irving corresponsal para la revista Collier’s), Irving siguió el progreso del ejército alemán, una ejercito hasta ahora imparable;“Sobre todo había un olor que nunca he oído mencionar en ningún libro sobre la guerra, el olor a medio millón de hombres sin bañarse, el olor de una casa de fieras elevado a la enésima potencia. Ese olor se extendía por días en cada ciudad a través del cual los alemanes pasaron”. Los alemanes fueron detenidos en la puertas de Paris (13km), el gobierno Frances ya se había movido a otra ciudad por temor aquedar encerrado en lo que todos miraban como un segundo sitio de Paris, pero una audaz movida por uno de los generales franceses, logro abrirse paso en la ofensiva alemana, con la ayuda de los taxis parisinos, se logro movilizar a seis mil reservistas que permitieron reforzar a los ya extenuados Poiliu. Bueno les dejo la reseña de Robert Messenger para el Wall street journal sobre el libro de Herwing dedicado a la famosa batalla.

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The Cruel Path To Impasse
Early in the war, Germany almost achieved victory. Why did it fail?.ArticleCommentsmore in . By ROBERT MESSENGER.

France and Germany marshaled 3.7 million soldiers for the Western offensives that began World War I in August 1914—with Britain adding an additional 130,000. In the decisive days between Sept. 5 and Sept. 11, the two sides threw two million men into desperate combat along the Marne River, the right tributary of Paris's famed Seine. More than 610,000 men were killed and wounded during the month-long campaign—two-thirds the number of casualties suffered by the U.S. in the whole of World War II.

But such numbers do little to bring home the ordeal. To reach the Marne, Alexander von Kluck's First Army had marched more than 300 miles on stiff-nailed boots through August's stifling heat and had to forage for whatever food it could find at day's end. A single infantry regiment (5,000 men) took up more than a mile of road, and a fully mobilized army corps covered 30. Kluck was driving seven corps (320,000 men) toward Paris. Will Irwin, a correspondent for Collier's magazine, reporting on the progress of the German "gray machine of death," noted: "Over it all lay a smell of which I have never heard mentioned in any book on war—the smell of a half-million unbathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised to the nth power. That smell lay for days over every town through which the Germans passed."

From the moment the offensive began, on Aug. 3, the German army was almost entirely victorious. No matter the intensity of the fighting, every battle ended with the French (or Belgians or British) in retreat. The German plan for war, the famed Schlieffen Plan, called for a vast right wing of attack to wheel through Belgium and northern France, strike the French forces in the flank, and then hammer them upon the anvil of the German armies grouped in Lorraine, along the German-French border.

The plan came close to working—and certainly the French co-operated by making repeated disastrous attacks in Lorraine and the Ardennes. But for all the local success of the German commanders, they kept failing in their main goal of creating a Kesselschlacht ("cauldron battle"): encircling and then annihilating a French army between two German pincers. Many opportunities arose, but conflicting orders and poor coordination allowed the French to escape. By Sept. 9, the great invasion had collapsed 13 miles short of Paris. It has been hotly debated ever since just why this happened and who is to blame.

For more than seven decades Sewell Tyng's "The Battle of the Marne, 1914" (1935) has defined how we view the opening battles of World War I, and it remains a great work of military history. Yet much material was not available to Tyng, an American lawyer and government official who had served in the French army's ambulance service during the war—particularly the German military archives that became accessible only after the Berlin Wall fell. Mining them to good effect after a long career studying the war, the Canadian scholar Holger Herwig has now delivered an account of the Marne campaign that supplants Tyng's and makes plain how the German command failed to seize its victories and why it retired from the Marne's close-run battles. Along the way, Mr. Herwig demonstrates the resilience of the French commanders, who took advantage of what defeat brought them—short internal lines and an overextended enemy.

In a couple of paragraphs, Mr. Herwig handily dismisses the "historian's war" that raged in recent decades over German war guilt, and he rejects the idea that World War I started by accident, because of a mechanical series of military measures over which politicians had no control. He shows, rather, that politicians in every combatant country made willing decisions to go to war in 1914.

The Schlieffen Plan, too, receives a revisionist interpretation in "The Marne, 1914." For more than a century, Helmuth von Moltke—Schlieffen's successor—has been criticized for shifting troops away from the right wing of the attack, but Mr. Herwig argues that Schlieffen's original memo was too vague to be an actionable plan. Moltke's mistakes, Mr. Herwig notes, came much more in failing to control his armies in the field. He let his disputatious army commanders— some brilliant, some over the hill—make their own decisions, all too often conflicting. The result was chaos, and yet the Germans nearly won, thanks to the excellence of their troops.

The great crisis of the German offensive came when Joseph Joffre, the French commander, went all in with an assault on the Marne on Sept. 5. Kluck kept his head and rushed forces to crush the French left wing. It looked as if his action, risky as it was, might achieve success for the whole German campaign—until Lt.-Col. Richard Hentsch arrived at First Army headquarters. Sent by Moltke, Hentsch was making the rounds of German commanders, encouraging each of them to pull back his main assault forces to a more defensible line. Kluck, fearing that First Army would be cut off, broke off the battle.

Hentsch has been endlessly blamed for the German defeat. The U.S. Army chief of staff, Peyton March, suggested that the Allied nations erect statues to Hentsch, who had unwittingly saved the day in 1914. Mr. Herwig offers little to exculpate him. Yet he is correct to say that the blame must rest with the German senior commanders. Kluck should have demanded a direct order from Moltke before breaking off his assault—he owed it to his troops, who had sacrificed so much. And Moltke ought to have himself been at the front.

Like Tyng before him, Mr. Herwig creates order out of overlapping events and makes vivid the full tragedy of what the Marne set in motion. The fighting soon moved into siege-style warfare; the goal was no longer decisive victory but simply to kill large numbers of the enemy. Victory would come when one of the combatants saw that it had been bled to death. Before the war was over in 1918, France, Germany and Britain would suffer 16.5 million casualties. As Georges Clemenceau noted in 1917: "War is a series of catastrophes that ends in victory."

Tomado del Wall Street Journal; The Cruel Path To Impasse, Early in the war, Germany almost achieved victory. Why did it fail? by ROBERT MESSENGER, Diciembre 4 del 2009