Air raid on Étaples

On the night of 19/20 May 1918, during the same hours as the last great Gotha raid was taking place over London, other German bombers attacked Étaples on the English Channel coast, south of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Their target was the railway bridge over the river Canche. They did not hit the bridge, but the bombs fell on the hospitals and military camps clustered around it. According to H. A. Jones’s British official history of the air war, 182 people were killed, 643 wounded and ten missing.

A town of hospitals by the railway

From 1915 Étaples was one of the largest British bases in France. Around the small fishing port grew extensive camps, through which reinforcements on their way to the front passed, and at least several large hospitals, British and Canadian, with thousands of beds. The Canadian No. 1 General Hospital had been operating there since May 1915, and other Canadian units later joined it. The hospitals stood right next to the main railway line from Boulogne to Abbeville.

In the spring of 1918 this line became enormously important. After the German offensives on the Somme and on the Lys the British had lost their other connections and were left with only one railway running parallel to the front, through Boulogne and Abbeville. According to Jones, about a hundred military trains a day crossed the long stone viaduct over the mouth of the Canche. The British began building a reserve bridge a little way upstream, but the Germans too knew perfectly well how important the place was.

The night of 19 May

According to Jones, fifteen bombers attacked the bridge. Only one bomb fell near the target, and it did no damage. The rest exploded in the hospitals and camps. The Canadian official medical history writes of incendiary bombs that set the wooden huts on fire. According to it, in one hospital alone there were then over a thousand sick and wounded, including three hundred with fractured thighs who could not move. The Canadians also claimed that by the light of the fires German aircraft came down low and machine-gunned those rescuing the wounded. The first raid lasted about two hours.

The Canadian No. 1 General Hospital suffered worst. Nursing Sister Katherine Maud Macdonald of the Canadian Army Nursing Service was killed there; she is regarded as the first Canadian nurse killed by enemy action in the war. Seven other sisters were wounded. Two of them, Gladys Wake and Margaret Lowe, died in the following days. At the Canadian No. 7 General Hospital three doctors were wounded and patients were killed. The bombs also damaged British hospitals Nos. 24, 26, 46 and 56 and the St John Ambulance Brigade hospital, where according to surviving accounts five people were killed. Four ambulance trains standing in a siding were damaged.

The dispute over blame

On the Allied side the raid was presented as a deliberate attack on hospitals. The Canadian official medical history placed it alongside unrestricted submarine warfare and the sinking of hospital ships. The matter was not so simple, however. The crew of one of the bombers shot down that night, taken prisoner, insisted that they had not known about the hospitals near the railway and expressed surprise that anyone had placed large hospitals right next to such an important target. According to Jones, after an internal inquiry the Director of Military Operations at the British War Office admitted: “We have no right to mix up hospitals with reinforcement camps and place them next to main railway lines and important bombing targets. Until we remove the hospitals from the vicinity of these targets, I do not think we can justly accuse the Germans.”

That was not the end of it. The Germans returned to Étaples several more times at the end of May. On the night of 30/31 May a heavy bomb brought down a span of the bridge, but traffic was already running over the reserve crossing. The next night bombs set an ambulance train on fire. According to the Canadian official history, in four May raids 15 patients and 54 members of staff were killed in the Canadian hospitals at Étaples, including three nurses.