The Treaty of Versailles terms, which was imposed on Germany, were humiliating and rapacious, stripping Germany of huge chunks of territory. Not only did Germany have to hand over the German territories of Alsace and Lorraine, which the French had greedily wrenched away from Germany before right after the Thirty Years War with the Treaty of Münster and Osnabrück, but also she had to surrender big portions of West Prussia, Posen and Silesia, to Poland, which isolated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The new territory gained by Poland ended in the Polish Corridor, which gave this country access to the Baltic Sea. The eastern banks of the Rhine also had to be handed over to the French. In the south, Germany was forced to cede the Sudetenland region, in which ethnic Germans lived, to form a new nation, Czechoslovakia. In the north, Germany also had cede Schleswig to Denmark. In the West, Eupen and Malmedy were given to Belgium. Finally, the Saar, Danzig and Memel were put under French control and the people of these regions would be authorized to vote whether they wanted to stay within Germany or not in a future referendum.

Germany was also forbidden to unite with Austria to form a larger Nation to make up for the lost land. Germany’s army was reduced to 100,000 men and was not authorized to have tanks. She was not permitted to have an airforce, too, and was allowed only six main naval ships and no submarines at all. The west of the Rhineland and 50 kilometers east of the Rhine River was turned into a demilitarized zone. No German military unit was allowed to be stationed in this zone. The Allies deployed an army of occupation on the west bank of the Rhine for 15 years.

In 1337, upon the death of the French King Philip IV, Edward III, King of England, claimed the throne of France. In response, the French raided the port of Plymouth and burned the town. In order to enforce his claim to the throne, Edward assembled a large fleet to invade the coast of Northern France and, also, in support of Flemish resistance to the French. To deal with this threatening situation, the new French King, Philip VI, organized a large fleet for an invasion of England in the Channel port of Sluys. It was put under the command of Admiral Hugues Quieret.

King Edward sailed with his fleet of 200 ships from Orwell on June 22, 1340. He was joined on the coast of Flanders by his admiral of the North Sea, Sir Robert Morley. Quieret deployed his fleet in four lines chained together, with a few ships stationed in front as outposts. King Edward entered the roadstead on the morning of the June 24, and after maneuvering to bring his ships to windward, he attacked the French with a shower of arrows from the longbowmen on board.

When Henry V ascended to the throne of England in April 1413, he resolved to revive the war against France to press his claim to the French throne. Negotiations between the two countries had resumed, but the French emissaries rejected Henry’s demands with increasing alarm, for they deemed them unacceptable. Meanwhile England prepared for war.

In the winter of 1415, King Henry ordered his officers to organize the shipping to carry his army of 12,000 men, which had assembled at Southampton, across the Channel. In August 1415 Henry’s army landed at Harfleur, which was sieged by the English. Harfleur finally surrendered on September 22, 1415. But the siege had taken longer than expected. and the English army did not leave until 8 October. The campaign season was coming to an end, and the English army had suffered many casualties through disease. Henry decided to move most of his army to the port of Calais, the English stronghold in northern France, where they could reequip over the winter.

By October 23 both armies faced each other for battle, but the French declined, hoping for the arrival of more troops. The next day the French began negotiations as a delaying tactic, but Henry ordered his army to advance, despite the fact his men had no much food left. They had marched 260 miles in two-and-a-half weeks and were suffering from sickness such as dysentery; besides, they faced much larger numbers of well equipped French men at arms. Henry needed to get to the safety of Calais. He knew that if he waited, the French would get more reinforcements.

As Henry V and his troops marched to Calais to embark for England, they were intercepted by French forces which outnumbered his in a ratio of 4 to 1. English effectiveness and readiness was questionable as a result of their prior maneuvres consisting of an 18-day-march across 250 miles of hostile territory under constant harassment. They were exhausted and were further hampered by inclement weather.

Early on the October 25, Henry deployed his army approximately 1,000 men-at-arms and 5,000 longbowmen, the latter commanded by Thomas Erpingham across a 750 yard part of the defile. The English adopted their usual battle line of longbowmen on either flank, men-at-arms and knights in the center, and at the very centre roughly 200 archers. The English men-at-arms in plate and mail were placed shoulder to shoulder four deep. The English archers on the flanks drove pointed wooden stakes called palings into the ground at an angle to force cavalry to veer off.

The French were arrayed in three lines. There were 10,000 men-at-arms, 4,000 archers and 2,000 crossbowmen in the vanguard, with two wings of 1,000 mounted men-at-arms each, plus a rabble of french commoners in the rearguard. Although the rearguard played little or no part in the battle.

The English waited for the French to begin the attack but there was no movement in the opposing army. It seemed that there was inadequate overall command and no central decision made when to start the assault or perhaps the French were waiting for further reinforcement to arrive and take their positions. Finally, King Henry ordered his commanders to begin the battle and the English army advanced blowing their trumpets.

Once Henry saw that the french were within arrow range, he gave the command to halt and the divisions closed up, the archers setting their long pointed stakes in the ground forming a fence leaning outwards towards the French. Now within the confines of the two woods Henry directed parties of archers and men-at-arms to move through the trees nearer to the French. On the king’s signal the English archers opened a devastating fire on the compact mass of French knights and men-at-arms.

After the initial attack, the front line of the French army moved forward to the charge. In the narrow confines of the muddy rain soaked ploughland the charge quickly reduced to a stumbling walk, impeded by the floundering men and horses shot down by the archers. Thus French knights were unable to outflank the longbowmen, because of the encroaching woodland, and unable to charge through the palings that protected the archers. The shower of arrows shot by the English longbowmen was so intense that easily decimated the French knights bogged down in the mud. The battle raged over the stake fence along the English line, the archers abandoning their bows and joining the knights and men-at-arms in hand to hand combat with the French cavalry, much of it now dismounted; the soldiers from the woods attacking on the flanks.

After two hours of vicious fighting, it was clear that the English had won the Battle of Agincourt. Individual French soldiers fought hard to no avail, for they had been overwhelmed by English men-at-arms and archers, who took as prisoner those who might be worth a ransom and killing the rest.

As they marched toward the Seine, the English Army found the bridges across the river destroyed. Then they heard the news of an enormous army gathering in Paris under the French King, Philip VI, to fight the invaders. So, Edward’s army was forced to march up along the left bank of the Seine as far as Poissy, getting close to Paris, before a bridge could be found to cross the river. Having crossed the Seine, Edward went north for the Channel coast, followed closely by King Philip. When the English found the River Somme, the bridges were either heavily defended or destroyed. This forced them to march down the left bank to the sea. They finally crossed the Somme at its mouth at low tide, evading the clutches of the pursuing French. Exhausted and soaked Edward’s troops made camp in the forest of Crecy on the northern bank of the Somme.

The Battle of Crecy began on August 26, 1346, when the English army took up position on a ridge between the villages of Crecy and Wadicourt in anticipation of the French attack. the King took as his post a windmill on the highest point of the ridge. The French army, commanded by Philip VI, was not well organized, due to overconfidence on the part of his knights. The French tactical mindset was centered on the use of cavalry, and Philip was naturally confident that his cavalry could overwhelm Edward’s much smaller cavalry contingent. Philip set up his Genoese mercenary crossbowmen, under Ottone Doria, in the front line, with the cavalry in the back. The French even went as far as to leave the pavises, the only means of defence for the crossbowmen, behind, along with the infantries. Both decisions proved deadly mistakes.

The first attack was carried out by the Genoese crossbowmen, who shot a series of volleys with the purpose of disorganizing and frightening the English infantry. This was followed by the sound of musical instruments, brought by Philip VI to scare the enemy. But the crossbowmen would prove completely useless. With a firing rate of around 1-2 shots every minute, they were no match for the longbowmen, who could fire one shot every 5 seconds.

The crossbowmen did not have their shields, which were needed to cover their bows during the long reloading procedure. Under the hail of English arrows, the Genoese crossbowmen were unable to approach the English lines to the point where their crossbows would have been effective. Decimated, they retreated, as any trained professional soldier would have done. The knights, however, hurled insults at the crossbowmen. Calling these crossbowmen cowards, the knights and kings hacked down their own men. The fault was not the crossbowmen’s, for the decision of leaving the shields was made by the king. Meanwhile waves of longbow fell on the French. At this the French knights decided it was time to charge, and they ran right over the retreating Genoese in an unorganized way. The English longbowmen continued firing as the infantry advanced, and many French knights fell along the way.

On August 8, 1356, Edward, the Black Prince, had started a great raid northward from the English base in Aquitaine, in order to relieve allied garrisons in central France, conducting a scorched-earth campaign as he went. On his way north, he met little resistance, as his Anglo-Gascon forces burned numerous towns to the ground and living off the land. But when he reached the Loire River at Tours, his army was unable to take the castle and burn the town, due to heavy rains. This delay allowed John II, King of France, to catch up with Edward’s army, which John wanted to eliminate.

When Edward heard the news that king John was heading to meet him, he  began to retreat back towards his base at Bordeau, for he was outnumbered. But the French overtook the English a few miles south west of Poitiers. The French forces were divided in four parts. At the front were around 300 elite knights, commanded by general Clermont, accompanied by German mercenary pikemen. The purpose of this group was to charge the English archers and eliminate the threat they posed. These were followed by three groups of infantry commanded by the Dauphin, the future Charles V of France, the Duke of Orleans and King John.

When the Battle of Poitiers broke out, the English feigned flight on their left wing. This provoked a hasty charge by the French knights against the archers. Nevertheless, the English were expecting this and quickly attacked the enemy, especially the horses, with a shower of arrows. The French armor was invulnerable to the English arrows, that the arrowheads either skidded off the armour or shattered on impact. As the armor on the horses was weaker on the sides and back, the English archers moved to the sides of the cavalry and shot the horses in the flanks. This was the best method of stopping a cavalry charge, as a falling horse was an obstacle to the charging cavalry, destroying the cohesion of the enemy’s line. The results were devastating.

This assault was followed by the Dauphin’s infantry that engaged the enemy in heavy fighting, but withdrew to regroup. When next wave of infantry under Orleans saw that the Dauphin’s men were not attacking, they turned back and panicked. This stranded the forces led by the King himself. As the English archers were out of arrows, they joined the infantry in the fight. Some mounted horses to form an improvised cavalry. Combat was hard, but the Black Prince still had a mounted reserve in concealment in the woods, which were able to circle around and attack the French on the flank and rear. The French were fearful of encirclement and attempted to flee, but King John was captured with his immediate entourage.