Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Having retreated from Mons two days earlier, Le Cateau and Mons being 24.8 mi (39.9 km) apart, the British II Corps (General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien) was exhausted.The corps had become separated from the rest of the BEF because of the unexpected retreat by Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of I Corps, who had fought a rearguard action at Landrecies on 25 August.
The Battle of Mons was the first major action of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the First World War. It was a subsidiary action of the Battle of the Frontiers, in which the Allies clashed with Germany on the French borders. At Mons, the British Army attempted to hold the line of the Mons–Condé Canal against the advancing German 1st ...
The Battle of Mons was a subsidiary action of the Battle of the Frontiers, ... Of the 40,000 Entente troops fighting at Le Cateau, 5,212 men were killed or wounded, ...
He commanded II Corps at the Battle of Mons, the first major action fought by the BEF, and the Battle of Le Cateau, where he fought a vigorous and successful defensive action contrary to the wishes of the Commander-in-Chief Sir John French, with whom he had had a personality clash dating back some years.
However, it has also been argued that the vigorous defensive action at Le Cateau relieved the pressure and allowed the troops to re-organise and make a fighting withdrawal. [6] On the morning of 26 August, while the Battle of Le Cateau was in progress, Sir John had a hostile meeting with Joffre and Lanrezac at St Quentin.
After the British and German armies first encountered each other at the Battle of Mons on 23 August 1914, the outnumbered British Expeditionary Force had begun to fall back in front of a stronger German army. The two clashed again at the Battle of Le Cateau on 26 August, after which the British again withdrew towards the river Marne. The ...
The British held up the German advance until the evening when they began retiring to a second defensive line in the retreat from Mons during which they were engaged in the Battle of Le Cateau. Following the battle at Le Cateau, the BEF retreated unmolested by the Germans for a further five days, eventually retreating a full 400 km in thirteen days.
II Corps was first engaged two days later at the Battle of Mons and forced into the Great Retreat with the rest of the BEF. It later fought a delaying action against Alexander von Kluck's German First Army in the Battle of Le Cateau which allowed most of its surviving forces to escape. [11] It remained on the Western Front throughout the war ...