The Battle of the Lys, 1918: South: Objective Hazebrouck

By Chris Baker

The German offensive in Flanders in April 1918 came close to catastrophe for the British Armies, but ultimately ended in strategic defeat for the Kaisers men. Following closely on the heels of the devastating Operation Michael attack in March on the Somme and around Arras, named as Operation Georgette, the offensive was aimed at strangling the vital railways and roads that supplied the British at Ypres.Having assembled an overwhelming numerical advantage, the Germans attacked in thick fog on 9 April 1918. They faced tired British formations that had just been relieved from the earlier battle and which were receiving replacements, mainly in the form of 18 year-old conscripts. By the days end, the Germans had succeeded in gaining a crossing of the River Lys and were well on their way to the vital railway junctions at Hazebrouck. Several British divisions were deployed to stop the advance, only to be effectively destroyed in the attempt over the next few days. Gradually, fresher British, Australian and French reserves arrived and held their ground. With disappointing results, mounting casualties and a diminishing return for their efforts, the Germans abandoned the offensive and turned their attention further south.What the British call The Battle of the Lys 1918 is a fascinating yet curiously neglected period of military history. Chris Baker examines this major battle from the strategic down to the platoon level, highlighting the key events, characters and acts of enormous bravery on both sides, both in a historical narrative and in a series of tours of the area.This volume, one of two on the battle, concentrates on the southern half of the battlefield.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526716989

Chris Baker

Professor Chris Baker graduated from his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, before beginning a Research Fellowship there at St Catharine’s College and the Department of Engineering. In the early 1980s he worked in the Aerodynamics Unit of British Rail Research in Derby, before moving to an academic position in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Nottingham. He remained there till 1998 where he was a lecturer, reader and professor with research interests in vehicle aerodynamics, wind engineering, environmental fluid mechanics and agricultural aerodynamics. In 1998 he moved to the University of Birmingham as Professor of Environmental Fluid Mechanics in the School of Civil Engineering. In the early years of the present century he was Director of Teaching in the newly formed School of Engineering and Deputy Head of School. From 2003 to 2008 he was Head of Civil Engineering and in 2008 served for a short time as Acting Head of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences. He was the Director of the Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education 2005-2014. He undertook a 30% secondment to the Transport Systems Catapult Centre in Milton Keynes, as Science Director from 2014 to 2016. He retired at the end of 2017 and took up an Emeritus position.

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Battleground Europe

The Battle of the Lys 1918 South

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Battleground Europe

The Battle of the Lys 1918 South

Objective Hazebrouck

Chris Baker

Series Editor

Nigel Cave

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street,

Barnsley

South Yorkshire,

S70 2AS

Copyright © Chris Baker, 2018

ISBN 978 152671 696 5

eISBN 978 152671 698 9

Mobi ISBN 978 152671 697 2

The right of Chris Baker to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Introduction by the Series Editor

List of Maps

Chapter One The Background to the Battle

Chapter Two The Battles of the Lys

Chapter Three The First Phase: Breakthrough and Bridgehead

Chapter Four The Second Phase: Into the Mixer

Chapter Five The Third Phase: The Hardening Crust

Tours Introduction

Tour A An Introductory Circuit

Tour B In the Footsteps of the 1st Australian and 5th Divisions

Tour C In the Footsteps of the 61st, 4th and 3rd Divisions

Tour D The Left Flank and the River Line. In the Footsteps of the 40th, 34th and 50th Divisions

Tour E La Couronne and 4 (Guards) Brigade

Appendix I Haig’s Special Order of the Day, 12 April 1918

Appendix II Selected Citations

Appendix III The Phases of the Battles of the Lys 1918

Acknowledgements

Selective Bibliography

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my wife’s grandfather, Acting Sergeant 955/470459 Thomas Park McSloy, 527th (2nd Durham) Field Company, Royal Engineers, 5th Division. He saw action in the Forest of Nieppe during the Battle of the Lys and went on to some quiet fame as one of the ‘Pitmen Painters’.

Introduction

April 1918: a most critical month for the British Armies in France and Flanders, when they fought against the third major German offensive that they had faced within a matter of weeks.

I find it curious that the month appears to attract little public and academic attention, despite the fact that the action took place within a short distance of Ypres and that the British force there was greatly endangered. The fighting was of a very large scale and accounted for British and Commonwealth casualties of around 82,000 dead, wounded and missing (a large proportion of which were men taken prisoner in the rapid German advance). It may be because this period of fighting goes by a variety of names. For the British, the fighting in Flanders was eventually given the official name of the ‘Battles of the Lys’. The title comes from the river which flows through the battlefield, and it is ‘battles’ because the committee that agreed such things defined it as a number of phases. The French call it La Bataille de la Lys; the Portuguese have it as the Batalha de la Lys. The Germans take a wider view. They called their attack Operation ‘Georgette’, but the fighting is often referred to as the Vierte Flandernschlacht (Fourth Battle of Flanders), part of the Grosse Schlacht in Frankreich (Great Battle in France). I have even seen it called the Fourth Battle of Ypres, although I find that misleading. For ease, I call it the Battle of the Lys.

The battlefield stretches from the La Bassée Canal near Givenchylez-la-Bassée, northwards past Armentières, almost to the very gates of Ypres – a front line of some thirty-seven kilometres before the German attack began. It can be considered as two distinct and different geographic regions, in which the topography played an important part in the way that the fighting developed. It is a matter of convenience for the historian that the two regions align with the German command structure.

This volume, Objective Hazebrouck, covers the southern region of the battlefield, which was attacked by the German Sixth Army from 9 April 1918 onwards, with the exception of the area which is already covered by Phil Tomaselli’s excellent book in the Battleground Europe series, The Lys 1918 – Givenchy and the River Lawe. The approximate dividing line between Objective Hazebrouck and the northern volume, Objective Ypres, is the Armentières – Bailleul railway.

Introduction by Series Editor

It is now several years since Phil Tomaselli’s The Battle of the Lys 1918: Givenchy and the River Lawe was published in the Battleground Europe series. As Chris Baker notes, Phil was the only other person he knew who shared his great interest and enthusiasm for this battlefield: in the same year as Phil’s book, Pen & Sword published his own The Battle for Flanders: German Defeat on the Lys 1918. With the publication of this book and its fellow, on the fighting to the north, the Battleground Europe series now completes its coverage of this huge battle fought over the contrasting battlefield of the flat land of Flanders and the dramatically different adjacent area of the Flemish Hills in the centenary year of the offensive.

Both of them rightly express some surprise that this important offensive, lasting some three weeks, the outcome of which could have had an enormous impact on the war, is both so little known and so very little written about, except as part of wider works. It seems to have got lost in the almost ceaseless run of major offensives that occurred on the Western Front from 21 March 1918 until the Armistice that November.

The context of this rush of activity in 1918 needs to be understood. As things stood at the end of 1917, the British offensive (with the significant involvement of the French, often little recognised) around Ypres had come to a not particularly glorious end in the rain and mud of Passchendaele Ridge. The glimmers of hope offered by the opening of the Battle of Cambrai in late November were soon dimmed and then almost extinguished by a German counter offensive, although that, too, did not live up to expectations.

But even though the Third Battle of Ypres, commencing on 31 July 1917 and lasting until the bitter, wet November, proved to be a terribly costly failure, achieving little except to wear down German resources and push the line a few kilometres further from the city, it did have a long term impact. One thing it did achieve, coupled with other factors, such as the US entry into the war in April 1917, was that the Germans realised that a war conducted largely on the basis of strong defence lines (as had largely been the case of the Western Front) was no longer viable – something that was underlined by the initial successes at Cambrai. The huge growth in artillery, amongst other developments, meant that no line, no matter how strong, could withstand a determined offensive. Nowhere is this more clearly shown in practical terms than in the effective abandonment by the Germans of constructing new, robust defence lines at the conclusion of Third Ypres. If a decisive military result was to be obtained before a skilled (as opposed to a large) American army emerged on the scene, probably by mid 1919, decisive action had to be taken as soon as practicable in 1918.

The favourable ending of the war with Russia on the Eastern Front provided the essential resources for such action. It would be a mistake to think that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March 1918 (and whose harsh terms on the new Soviet Union should be considered when criticising the Treaty of Versailles) meant that the large numbers of German troop there could be transferred en bloc to the West. The newly acquired territories needed securing and the whole needed safeguarding from the nascent Bolshevik republic. But it did mean that good quality troops could be moved, even if they were substituted to a substantial extent by lower grade manpower: indeed this process began as soon as the new Bolshevik government signed an armistice in November 1917. It also meant a fillip in war materiél of all types.

The stalling of the first Spring German offensive, on the Somme, Operation Michael, which had failed to achieve a decisive, strategic result, despite very considerable gains in ground; and the very limited success achieved further north, against Third Army around Arras, in Operation Mars, were a considerable disappointment. The territory gained was strategically not particularly important, much of which had been devastated in any case in the fighting in 1916 and 1917. Substantial losses in materiél were soon replaced by British industry that was operating at peak levels of production. Replacing manpower for the allies was a bigger problem; but even in this case at least partial solutions were found and there was the welcome prospect of masses of American troops – by June 300,000 of them, admittedly very raw indeed at this stage, were pouring into France every month.

All this should not mean that the German offensives were a matter of battering on firmly locked doors. The Lys offensives had clear strategic objectives (indicated by Chris’s two sub titles, Hazebrouck and Ypres), success in which would have severely impeded the ability of the allies to fight on. If they had not resulted in absolute victory for the Germans, they might well have led to a compromise peace treaty that would have preserved German gains in the east and (for them) a satisfactory resolution on the west. The stakes were very high.

The battles of 1918 are strikingly different from the trench warfare that is so closely associated with the First World War. It marks a return to open warfare, but of a type that was very different from that of the opening stages of the war. Indeed, the fighting of 1918 marked the beginning of the way that major conflicts by industrialised powers have been waged ever since, involving a combination of well-equipped and well-armed infantry, armour, artillery and air support. The transformation in fighting methods, developed over a period of less than four years, is quite striking and almost unknown to the popular mind. Very rapid developments in technology were harnessed, adapted and put into action in a remarkably short space of time – for example, the first cross Channel flight was only made in 1909 and yet by 1918 there were night bombers flying considerable distances.

This trilogy of books, it is hoped, will draw people to Flanders to revisit the scenes of such fierce, often heroic, fighting, which often involved large numbers of very young, 18-year-old conscripts. The casualties suffered were on an almost incomprehensible scale, considerably greater on a daily rate than, for example, Verdun, the Somme and Third Ypres.

With the combination of a detailed narrative and extensive tours, Chris has opened up the fast moving action on the ground to this generation of battlefield tourers. As with all of the books in the series, it is hoped that this one will enhance the understanding and appreciation of the achievements of the men of 1914-1918, in particular those who fought and all too often became casualties during the course of the fighting before Hazebrouck.

Nigel Cave

Ratcliffe College, March 2018.

List of Maps

A contemporary map of the area

The general situation on the Western Front after Operation ‘Michael’

The objectives set for Operation ‘Georgette’

Sketch map of the Lys valley

The railway network around Hazebrouck

The German break-in on 9 April 1918

The German forces deployed on first day

119 Brigade on the first day

The 40th Division front line facing Fromelles

The 18/Welsh and 13/East Surreys’ front line

The 40th Division’s communication trenches

The advance of Infanterie-Regiment 22 of 11th Reserve-Division

Counter attack at Croix du Bac

The 50th (Northumbrian) Division deploys on the north bank of the Lys

The Northumberland Fusiliers’ counter attack at Estaires

The 29th Division’s initial deployment

The 29th Division’s deployed near Doulieu

The 1/Lancashire Fusiliers’ advance to contact

The 29th Division’s withdrawal line

The 31st Division’s counter attack from Rau de Leet

The 31st Division’s withdrawal line

4 (Guards) Brigade’s last stand at La Couronne

Timeline of German progress towards the Merris–Strazeele–Méteren ridge

Timeline of German progress towards the La Bassée Canal

The 61st (2nd South Midland) Division’s initial deployment

The 61st (2nd South Midland) Division’s attempts to assist the defence of Merville

The Bacquerolles Farm area

The German Order of Battle facing the 61st (2nd South Midland) Division

The 3rd Division’s deployment and advance

1/Somerset Light Infantry’s counter attack at Riez du Vinage

The 5th Division’s deployment

The 7th and 8th Battalions AIF deploy at the Forest of Nieppe

The 1st Australian Division’s defensive line

Deployment of the French reserves

The 33rd Division’s deployment

Tour Maps

Tour A (1)

Tour A (2)

Tour A (3)

Tour B

Tour D

Note: There are no accompanying maps for the short tours C and E.

Chapter One

The Background to the Battle

The Great War in French Flanders.

The area in which the Battle of the Lys took place is in the