World War I
During World War I, the division fought on the Western Front, seeing action in the Allied Great Retreat which culminated in the First Battle of the Marne and the Race to the Sea. It then spent the next several years in the trenches. In 1916, it fought in the Battle of the Somme. In 1917, it participated in the Battle of Passchendaele. In 1918, it fought against the various Allied offensives and counteroffensives. Allied intelligence rated the division as second class until 1918, but downgraded it to third class that year.
Read more about this topic: 40th Division (German Empire)
Famous quotes containing the words war i, world and/or war:
“Surely there is not a capitalist or well-informed person in this world today who believes that [World War I] is being fought to make the world safe for democracy. It is being fought to make the world safe for capital.”
—Rose Porter Stokes (1879–1933)
“It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)
“Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)