Battle of Arleux

The Battle of Arleux was the fourth phase of the Battle of Arras and one of the many limited attacks with which the British kept up the pressure on the Germans in the spring of 1917 in support of the French offensive on the Aisne. On 28 April at 4.25 a.m. three divisions of the British Third Army, together with two British divisions and one Canadian division of the First Army, attacked on a front about 10 km long, from Monchy-le-Preux to the village of Arleux-en-Gohelle. Along almost its whole length the attack failed: Rœux and the chemical works on the Scarpe once again withstood the assaults, and at Gavrelle and Oppy German counter-attacks drove the British back to their starting positions. The only real success was the capture of Arleux by the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Canadian Division. The British official history called it “the only tangible success of the whole operation”.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Arleux” and the dates 28–29 April 1917 were fixed after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. They cover not only the capture of Arleux but all the attacks of those two days, from the Scarpe valley to the loop of trenches at Arleux. The Canadian official history describes the fighting as the Attack on the Arleux Loop. The battle takes its name from the only place where the attack succeeded, although it was not the Canadians but the British divisions at Rœux, Gavrelle and Oppy that bore the main weight of the fighting.

Background

After the Second Battle of the Scarpe on 23–24 April the British faced a new, deep German defence, and their divisions were increasingly exhausted. Whether to fight on, however, depended above all on what was happening in France. According to the British official history, the Battle of Arras was an auxiliary attack to General Robert Nivelle’s offensive on the Aisne and would never have been undertaken on its own. Meanwhile the French offensive, launched on 16 April, had brought heavy losses and gains of only a few kilometres, and the French government was turning against Nivelle. On 24 April at Amiens Nivelle assured Douglas Haig that he had no intention of halting operations. Two days later, in Paris, the Minister of War Paul Painlevé spoke to him as though the French had been beaten, and seemed to be waiting for a suggestion that Nivelle be replaced by Pétain. Haig was alarmed and asked the Chief of the Imperial General Staff to warn Painlevé that breaking off the French offensive would be regarded as a breach of faith.

In this atmosphere Haig decided to continue the attack at Arras, as he himself wrote in his dispatch, solely to help Nivelle until the results of the French offensive became clear. If the French broke off operations, he intended to shift the weight of the fighting to Flanders in order to clear the Belgian coast of submarine bases before the autumn. For this reason he did not want to bring fresh divisions from the Second Army in Flanders to Arras, and had to fight on with tired, depleted units. At a conference on 26 April it was agreed that a subsidiary attack would take place on 28 April: General Henry Horne’s First Army was to take Oppy and Arleux, which it had failed to do on 23 April, and General Edmund Allenby’s Third Army was to take Rœux and Greenland Hill. A great attack by three armies was to begin around 3 May.

The state of the British infantry was poor. According to the British official history, a battalion now went into the attack at a strength of at most 500, and often fewer than 400, men. In the 34th Division newly arrived recruits with three months’ training predominated, and in the 37th Division reinforcements had not arrived at all and battalions numbered little more than 200 men. Only ten tanks were fit for action: eight were allotted to the Fifth Army at Bullecourt, two to the Third Army, and Horne received none. On the other side, General Otto von Below had recently taken command of the German 6th Army (on 23 April according to some sources, on 28 April according to the Canadian official history), and its chief of staff, Colonel Fritz von Loßberg, was building a defence in depth based on counter-attacks by reserve divisions.

North of Gavrelle the Germans held the former third position, which formed a great loop in front of Arleux, called the Arleux Loop by the British and the “Nose” by the Germans. Behind it, in front of the village of Fresnoy-en-Gohelle, ran the next line, the Oppy–Méricourt position. The loop was defended by battalions of the 73rd Fusilier Regiment and the 76th Infantry Regiment of the German 111th Division.

Course of the battle

At Rœux and on Greenland Hill. 28 April was a warm day, but visibility was poor. South of the Scarpe the 12th Division was only to straighten the line north of Monchy-le-Preux. It took Bayonet Trench as far as the river, but a stretch of Rifle Trench, only about 450 metres long, remained in German hands despite attacks over two days. North of the river the 34th Division assaulted Rœux yet again. The first waves broke into the village and went on beyond it, and according to German accounts about 400 “English and Scots” reached the ridge in front of Plouvain, where they were surrounded and most of them taken prisoner. At eight in the morning a counter-attack drove the division back to its starting positions, and a night attack on 29 April on the buildings by the station also failed. The British official history calls the story of the successive failed assaults on the “gutted factory buildings” a sad tale.

The 37th Division experienced something like a breakthrough. Men of its 63rd Brigade veered to the left, crossed a valley beyond Hollow Copse, drove out the headquarters of three German battalions and crossed the first trench of the position in front of Fresnes, almost 1.6 km beyond their objective. They saw the Germans bringing up teams to withdraw their guns. In the poor visibility, however, nobody at headquarters knew how far they had gone, and the corps reserve consisted of only one brigade. After several hours of fighting the Germans surrounded this group, and the few survivors fell back to the Plouvain–Gavrelle road. The only sector of the Third Army where the attack succeeded was the front of the 111th Brigade, which reached that road. The attack of 28 April reduced the 37th Division to a shadow and practically destroyed its 63rd Brigade. On 30 April forty of its men were still found in one trench, having been without food or water for 48 hours.

At Gavrelle and Oppy. On the right flank of the First Army the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division was to cover its neighbours on the Gavrelle side, the village having been taken on 23 April. The task was given to the 188th Brigade with two battalions of Royal Marines infantry. The 2nd Battalion took the windmill on the hill beyond Gavrelle and beat off counter-attack after counter-attack, but at dusk artillery fire drove it back almost to its starting point. At the windmill, however, a handful of men, roughly a platoon, held on, fighting there throughout that day and the next. The 1st Battalion, enfiladed from a strongpoint by the railway, was almost entirely destroyed. According to sources on the history of the Royal Marines, on 28–29 April the marines lost 846 killed, wounded and missing, including about 335 killed, which is regarded as the heaviest single-day loss in the history of the corps.

This exposed the right flank of the 2nd Division, which was to take Oppy and the wood in front of the village but could field only about 3,500 rifles. Its men reached the eastern edge of the wood, but the Germans defended themselves in the houses, firing through loopholes knocked in the walls, and struck at the exposed flank. In the evening the brigade returned to the German front line, and then abandoned that too. The Germans later boasted that they had stepped aside, let the British into the wood and closed in behind them, “as if the doors of a great drawing room had been opened and shut when enough guests had come in”. The division’s left flank reached the sunken road from Oppy to Arleux and held there, linking up with the Canadians.

The capture of Arleux. The only complete success was achieved by the Canadians. The attack on the Arleux Loop was carried out by the 2nd Brigade of General Arthur Currie’s 1st Canadian Division, of General Julian Byng’s Canadian Corps, supported by the 1st Brigade in reserve and one battalion of the 2nd Canadian Division, which was to cover the left flank. Nobody had any illusions: patrols reported that the wire was only partly cut and that the Germans had an exceptional number of machine guns. At 4.25 a.m. three battalions, the 8th (90th Winnipeg Rifles), the 10th and the 5th (Western Cavalry), advanced on a front about 2.4 km wide.

The 8th Battalion on the right flank came under machine-gun fire from the village and from a copse to the south of it. Its centre company was held up in front of the wire and lost all its officers, but the flanks reached the objective, and after further attempts, supported by a company of the 7th Battalion, the battalion cleared the southern part of the village. The 10th Battalion knocked out with grenades two machine guns hidden by the wire, passed through the ruins of the village and stood on its objective less than two hours after the attack began. Emerging from the ruins, the Canadians saw Germans withdrawing so smartly that in the half-light they at first took them for British troops. The 5th Battalion took the ground north of the village, but its left flank was held up. The 25th Battalion (Nova Scotia Rifles) of the 2nd Division, covering it, mistook a sunken road only about 270 metres from its starting point for its objective, which lay more than half a kilometre further on, and halted. The left company of the 5th Battalion, enfiladed, had to fall back to a captured German trench.

Otherwise the 2nd Brigade reached all its objectives at about six in the morning. The Germans twice tried to counter-attack, but their movements were watched by gunners and by the airmen of No. 16 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, so the attacks were broken up by fire. The commander of the German 111th Division decided that the projecting loop was not worth further casualties, since he still held the line in front of Fresnoy, and forbade further counter-attacks. On the afternoon of 29 April, after an artillery preparation, the 25th Battalion and the left flank of the 5th Battalion occupied the line originally laid down. The new Canadian position formed a small salient about 350 metres from the line in front of Fresnoy.

29 April at Oppy. Before dawn that day the British renewed the attack on the stretch of line at Oppy that had remained in German hands. The attack largely failed, but small parties bombing along the trenches achieved more than the assault. Second Lieutenant S. F. Jeffcoat of the 22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, with a handful of men, bombed his way about 360 metres along a trench until he met men of the 63rd Division coming from the opposite direction. With the help of reinforcements the British cleared about 900 metres of trench, to within about 180 metres of Oppy Wood. Jeffcoat was killed, and the Victoria Cross for this fighting was awarded to two second lieutenants of the Honourable Artillery Company battalion of the 63rd Division, Alfred Pollard and Reginald Haine, and to Lance Corporal James Welch of the 2nd Division. The garrison at the windmill at Gavrelle was still holding out.

Casualties

According to the Canadian official history the Canadians lost nearly a thousand men, and according to other studies, including the Vimy Foundation, 1,255. They took 372 prisoners according to the British official history, and about 450 according to the Canadian. The forward battalion of the German 73rd Fusilier Regiment alone had 400 missing. XIII Corps took about 600 prisoners in the two days, and XVII Corps at Rœux only 140. The British official history does not give separate casualties for the Battle of Arleux. According to its figures, in the whole of April the Third Army lost 52,097 men and the First Army 27,635, of which about 24,000 are attributed to the Battle of Arras. Together with the Fifth Army, British losses since 9 April exceeded 78,000. In the same period the three armies took almost 18,000 prisoners and 254 guns.

Significance

According to the British official history, the Battle of Arleux was “on the whole a failure”. It achieved none of the Third Army’s objectives, and the First Army achieved only enough to cover the Canadians at Arleux. The Canadian official history attributes this to poor tactics: the British attacks followed a pattern in which successive lines were drawn on the map regardless of the ground, and the artillery pounded the thinly held front trench while missing the second, hidden behind the crest, where most of the defenders waited in dugouts. The British did not yet have an answer to this system of Loßberg’s.

The Canadian success was small, but in this phase of the battle, as the British official history puts it, even local successes were hard to achieve, and it must be counted “a fine feat of arms”. The Canadian Corps, which a little over a fortnight earlier had taken Vimy Ridge, confirmed that it was among the best formations of the British Army. The position gained in front of Fresnoy served as the base for the next attack: on 3 May, in the Third Battle of the Scarpe, the Canadians took Fresnoy. On the rest of the front the attacks of May achieved as little as those of 28 April, and the Battle of Arras turned into a costly effort to keep up the pressure on behalf of an ally whose offensive was dying away.