Allies take Menen

At 9 a.m. on 15 October 1918 patrols of the British X Corps entered Menen, a small town on the river Lys south-east of Ypres. The Germans had abandoned it and blown up all the bridges behind them. It was the second day of the offensive of the Flanders Army Group, which the day before had broken through the last German position west of the river. Menen, Menin in French, had fallen into German hands in October 1914, just before the First Battle of Ypres. For four years it lay a few kilometres behind the front and was one of the main rear bases of the armies fighting in the Ypres salient. Every British soldier knew its name, because the Menin Road led to the town, and along it some of the heaviest fighting on the Western Front had taken place.

The attack of 14 October had brought the divisions of X and XIX Corps onto the low hills above Menen and Wevelgem. During the night the British heard explosions in the town and saw fires, and early in the morning the French town of Halluin, on the other side of the river, went up in flames. The orders for 15 October did not envisage a major attack on this part of the front: the corps were to consolidate the ground won, send out patrols and, if possible, seize bridgeheads on the Lys without unnecessary losses. Patrols of the 30th and 34th Divisions, under machine-gun and artillery fire, reached the north bank of the river. Only Wevelgem put up resistance, and the patrols on the left wing halted in front of it.

Crossing the river at Menen itself was not easy. Only after midnight did sappers of the 200th Field Company, Royal Engineers, manage to build a pontoon bridge a little upstream of the town, at Bousbecque, under fire from German 8-inch howitzers. The orders for patrols to cross the river that night were issued too late, and the divisions of X Corps crossed only in the following days.

More important that day was the success further up the river. At 4.35 a.m. the 41st Brigade of the 14th Division of XV Corps began crossing on both sides of Comines under cover of a barrage. A company of the 33rd Battalion, London Regiment, crossed the river by a bridge south of the town, and the 29th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, meeting no resistance, searched Comines and found no Germans there. By 11 the brigade was on the far bank. Other units, partly on rafts, crossed the river at Warneton and Deûlémont, and in the afternoon also south of Wervik. The British official history calls the bridgehead from the mouth of the Deûle canal to beyond Comines an important strategic success, because it made it easier to clear the south bank of the river. The same day the German Sixth Army began to withdraw from around Lille.

In the north the attack went on. II Corps took Gullegem and Heule, and in the evening the 9th (Scottish) Division stood in Kuurne, less than two kilometres from Harelbeke and the Lys. Menen came out of the war badly damaged: about half of its houses lay in ruins or were heavily damaged. Four days later the British entered nearby Kortrijk.