Charles Lanrezac - WWI Hero?

[Behind The Mask]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lanrezac

I only just recently learned of this man, albeit from Wikipedia, but considering what is written about him I find him an interesting subject never really touched upon.

Accordingly the article refers to Lanrezas as a capable general; his efforts saved the French Army from decisive defeat and survived the German encirclement plan.

Although Lanrezac knew retreat to be necessary from the beginning of the war and warned against the danger of the German sweep through Belgium, his superior, General Joseph Joffre, believed that France should follow the offensive Plan XVII, regardless of what happened in Belgium, and discounted Lanrezac's warnings. With the help of the British Expeditionary Force, the French held the line in retreat even after the great defeat at the Battle of the Frontiers in 1914. His retreat after the Battle of Charleroi arguably saved the French army from decisive defeat as it prevented the much sought envelopment of the Schlieffen plan. After fighting another defensive action in the Battle of St. Quentin, the French were pushed to within miles of Paris, but the line held at the sacrifice of Lanrezac's career.

As it is a wikipedia article I have reasons to be skeptic so I felt if anyone could justify this claim it would be my mates here in World History.

Was Charles Lanrezac a tragic character in WWI? His efforts overlooked even though they (as claimed) helped save France from defeat?

Enlighten me if you will.

 

[Dachs]

Lanrezac gets a lot of retroactive credit because he's prominently featured as the Cassandra figure in Barbara Tuchman's famous Guns of August. He's portrayed as having warned off Joffre that the Germans were moving large numbers of troops through Belgium to no avail. The problem with this is that, while Lanrezac (and Joffre, and everybody else) understood that the Germans were going through Belgium, he totally missed the guess as to where precisely they were coming through. His proposed move to take the offensive in Belgium against the German right wing would have, he thought, have matched him against the extreme flank units of the German army in the west. In reality, it would have brought the French straight into the middle of the encircling armies, and exposed his Fifth Army to defeat in detail. When Lanrezac did move his troops, he did it more or less without the knowledge of either the Belgians or the British, neither one of whom had the ability to support him as he had thought they had. Poor operational liaisonship contributed to the Fifth Army's defeats in the Sambre Valley, where Lanrezac's troops fought without foreign support, and without the assistance of the fortified position at Namur. Most of the Fifth Army wasn't even entrenched. These latter problems were not merely due to Lanrezac's poor liaisonship, but to his inability to make up his mind. Admittedly, this failure was partially not his fault: French cavalry had been conducting long-range recon missions into Belgium, but they had all taken place before the German armies had started to move, so Lanrezac - like Joffre - had no real picture of the German deployments.

Subsequently, on the defensive, Lanrezac's Fifth Army played its role fairly well, stalling the German Second Army (von Bülow) at St.-Quentin and Guise (St.-Quentin was a clear loss, but at Guise the French actually executed a counterattack). Outside of these decent technical successes, though, Lanrezac was simply incapable of working with the British, whose BEF was becoming quite valuable. His choices of deployment as the French retreated would probably have ruined Joffre's evolving plan for counterattack and counter-envelopment, as well. In this context, his replacement by Franchet d'Esperey - whose technical competence was equivalent, and whose ability to work with the British far superior - is quite understandable. Lanrezac didn't really do that much worse or better than some of the other French generals on the Frontiers in 1914, except in one rather crucial aspect.

Now, his role as an "unsung hero" might have been an accurate description - well, at least the "unsung" part - before the 1960s, but since Tuchman's book came out it'd be hard to call him anything of the sort.