Allies retake Lille and Ostend

On 17 October 1918 the German armies, falling back along the whole front from the North Sea to Douai, gave up without a fight three towns they had occupied since the autumn of 1914: the Belgian port of Ostend and the French towns of Douai and Lille. The retreat was forced by Allied victories on both flanks. In Flanders the offensive of King Albert’s army group had opened three days earlier, and in the south the British had broken the Hindenburg Line and were nearing Le Cateau. On 16 October the German Supreme Army Command agreed to the withdrawal of the armies standing between the coast and Douai to a new defensive line, the Hermann Position.

Ostend

The Germans had taken Ostend on 15 October 1914 and made it, together with Zeebrugge and Bruges, a base for submarines and torpedo boats. In 1918 the British twice tried to block the harbour entrance, and in May scuttled the old cruiser Vindictive in it. On 16 October, as the Belgians and French pushed east from Roeselare and Torhout, the sound of explosions came from the coast: the Germans were destroying their harbour installations and depots. On 17 October Belgian cavalry reached the Bruges–Ostend canal, and the Belgian 5th Division entered the abandoned town.

The first to reach Ostend from the sea was Vice-Admiral Roger Keyes, commander of the British Dover Patrol and organiser of the April raid on Zeebrugge. As early as the end of September Haig had asked him to take the port as soon as the Belgians surrounded the town from the land side. That same day Keyes brought King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth to Ostend aboard a destroyer; throughout the war they had lived at seaside De Panne, in the strip of Belgium the Germans never took. The port, however, was mined: as British minesweepers cleared the approaches over the following days, two ships, the minesweeper Plumpton and the monitor M21, struck German mines.

Douai

In the south, in the sector of the British First Army, patrols found on the morning of 17 October that the Germans had abandoned the line of the Haute Deûle canal. At about two in the afternoon two battalions of the British 8th Division, the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and the 2nd Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, entered Douai. According to the British official history, much of the town was on fire, and there were neither Germans nor inhabitants in the streets. The occupiers had entered Douai for good at the beginning of October 1914, and in September 1918 had deported the whole population eastwards, deep into Belgium. According to French sources the deserted town was looted with impunity for several weeks.

Lille

Lille, the largest city of northern France, had capitulated in October 1914 and for four years had been one of the main centres of the German rear. The French government insisted that it be recovered “undamaged”, so British headquarters forbade shelling the city except for the exit roads and communication hubs. The plan was for Lille to be outflanked by thrusts from the south and from Flanders, without an assault. Facing it stood the weak British Fifth Army of General William Birdwood.

On 17 October the Fifth Army crossed the Haute Deûle canal and advanced some eight kilometres across the marshy plain. Patrols of the British 57th Division, sent out at dawn, learned after a few kilometres that the Germans had left Lille. By evening British posts were holding the gates in the city’s fortifications. Field Marshal Haig wrote in his dispatch that at 5.50 a.m. on 18 October British troops had surrounded Lille and found it clear of the enemy. That is why some studies give 18 October as the date of liberation, while French and British sources most often give 17 October, since by that day there were no longer any Germans in the city.

Lille survived almost intact. The Germans blew up the railway lines and the bridges over the moat, but did not destroy the city on a large scale, as they had during the retreat to the Hindenburg Line in the spring of 1917, though they smashed fittings in many houses. The power station and gasworks were working. Sappers, helped by German prisoners, disarmed booby traps left in the telephone exchange and other buildings. The inhabitants, as one British doctor noted, looked healthy but thin, their clothes hanging loosely on them: the weaker ones had not survived four years of starvation rations. The occupiers had left them food stocks for six days. In the following days the commander of the British XI Corps, General Richard Haking, made a ceremonial entry into the city and presented his corps flag to the statue symbolising Lille on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Birdwood made his entry on 28 October.