Battle of Bailleul

The Battle of Bailleul was a fight for the belt of low hills that closes off the flat Lys valley in French Flanders from the north. After the first days of the German offensive known as Operation Georgette, the British front had bent here into a great salient. From 13 to 15 April 1918 a dozen or so divisions of the German 6th and 4th Armies attacked the positions of the British IX Corps, which was holding the knolls from Meteren to Neuve-Église. General Alexander Hamilton-Gordon’s troops consisted largely of the remnants of brigades already bled white in March on the Somme and in the first days of the Battle of the Lys. For two days they beat off the attacks, although on 13 April they gave up the projecting salient in front of Bailleul and on 14 April the village of Neuve-Église. On the afternoon of 15 April, however, the Germans took the Ravelsberg ridge east of the town. The young soldiers of the newly arrived 59th Division could not withstand an attack from the flank, and during the night the British abandoned Bailleul. The town, since October 1914 one of the largest British centres behind the front at Ypres, was reduced to rubble.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Bailleul” and the dates 13–15 April 1918 were fixed after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. It is one of the battles into which the committee divided the Battles of the Lys. It covers the fighting on the left flank of the German break-in, from Meteren to Wulverghem and Wijtschate, fought at the same time as the Battle of Hazebrouck to its right. The boundary between the two battles is arbitrary, since the fighting at Meteren concerned both sectors. The British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, volume II, 1937) describes them together, chapter by chapter for each day. The battle ends with the loss of Bailleul on the night of 15/16 April. Times in the text are given in British time. From 15 April Germany was on summer time, so from then on German time was an hour ahead of British.

Background

On 9 April General Ferdinand von Quast’s German 6th Army smashed the Portuguese Corps on the Lys, and the next day General Friedrich Sixt von Armin’s 4th Army took the Messines ridge. On 11 April the British gave up Armentières and Merville. On the right flank of the break-in, at the Forest of Nieppe, the Germans were pressing towards the railway junction of Hazebrouck. On the left flank their objective was Bailleul and the hills above it, and beyond them the range of Flanders hills from the Mont des Cats to the Kemmelberg. Whoever held them commanded the whole plain as far as Ypres. In those days the soldiers were reading Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s order of the day, which called on them to fight “with our backs to the wall” and to defend every position to the last man.

South of Bailleul and Neuve-Église the ground rises gently towards the knolls on which stand Meteren, Bailleul itself, the Ravelsberg, Crucifix Corner and Neuve-Église. The last three were separated from the main range of hills by the valley of the upper Douve stream. On 13 April the front of IX Corps of General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army was more than 20 kilometres long and faced south. In the centre, between Bailleul and Neuve-Église, it formed a large salient held by five tired brigades under General Cecil Nicholson of the 34th Division, among them the 88th Brigade of the 29th Division under General Bernard Freyberg. To their right the 19th Brigade of the 33rd Division covered Meteren, and to their left the 25th Division held Neuve-Église. Further east, as far as Wijtschate, stood the 19th Division. Behind the front there were almost no reserves, because after the fighting on the Somme the British Army was sending everything it had to Flanders, and the French divisions promised by General Ferdinand Foch were only just coming up.

Against them the Germans concentrated large forces. The 6th Army’s II Bavarian Corps had four divisions in the first line, among them the fresh Alpine Corps (Alpenkorps), an elite mountain formation that had fought earlier in Romania and at Caporetto, and two more in the second line. On the left flank of the 4th Army, X Reserve Corps attacked towards Neuve-Église. The Alpine Corps and the 117th Division were to take Bailleul in a pincer, outflanking it from both sides.

Course

13 April. The day was cold and grey, foggy in the morning. The German attack began badly. According to the 4th Army’s war diary, II Bavarian Corps moved off at 6.30 a.m., half an hour before the neighbouring X Reserve Corps, and its right-hand division advanced almost at right angles to its neighbours’ direction and ran into the fire of their own artillery. Shattered, it halted, and the Bavarians postponed the attack until the afternoon. On the other hand, at 5 a.m., without an artillery preparation, the German 214th Division struck in the fog at the 75th Brigade near Neuve-Église and pushed it back northwards. Some of the Germans broke into the middle of the village, but sappers and a reserve company of the 2nd Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment drove them out, and men of the York and Lancaster Regiment took fifty prisoners. In the afternoon the Germans came back again and again, and in the evening they entered the village once more. The headquarters of the 2/Worcestershire held out in the surrounded mairie.

At Bailleul Nicholson’s brigades held on despite the enemy’s superiority. At 3.30 p.m. the Germans began a general attack on the salient. The two brigades on the right flank fell back 200–500 metres, and the left flank more than a kilometre. The Newfoundland battalion, in reserve to the 88th Brigade, stopped the Germans with its fire only when they were some twenty-odd metres from its trenches. In the evening the enemy was working ever deeper round Nicholson’s left flank from the direction of Neuve-Église, and part of the 102nd Brigade was fighting facing to the rear. The brigade commanders, who considered further resistance in the salient too costly, obtained consent to a withdrawal. During the night the troops withdrew, unmolested by the Germans, to a prepared line from the southern outskirts of Bailleul through Mont de Lille and the Ravelsberg to Crucifix Corner. A shell hit the headquarters cellar, killing General R. C. Gore, commander of the 101st Brigade. That evening Haig ordered Plumer to prepare to defend the range of hills from the Mont des Cats to Kemmel and to withdraw from the Ypres salient.

14 April. On Sunday, under low cloud and a strong wind, the Germans renewed the attack. From the morning it was meant to take Bailleul and Meteren. The German regiments themselves called the artillery preparation “weak and inadequate”, and instead of a great assault, as one of their histories puts it, there were only isolated attempts, because the field was dominated by British machine guns hidden in hedges and ditches. At Crucifix Corner the Germans broke into the positions but were driven out in hand-to-hand fighting, leaving a hundred prisoners. The Alpine Corps reached the railway embankment and Bailleul station. In the afternoon the Germans took the summit of Mont de Lille east of the town, but the battalion defending it immediately retook it, and the Germans left thirty bodies on the slope. At Meteren the 19th Brigade beat off three attacks, helped by men from the reinforcement camps, among them a New Zealand entrenching battalion and the XXII Corps reinforcement battalion, commanded by a 65-year-old retired colonel.

At Neuve-Église the men of the 2/Worcestershire headquarters fought their way out of the mairie to their own lines during the day. The battalion adjutant, Second Lieutenant John Crowe, who before noon had broken out of the encirclement with a handful of volunteers and captured two machine guns covering the exits from the village, was awarded the Victoria Cross. By about 4.30 p.m. the village was entirely in German hands. The commander of IX Corps decided that a counter-attack would cost too much and, with Plumer’s consent, pulled the left flank back to a line from the Ravelsberg through Crucifix Corner towards Spanbroekmolen. During the night two brigades of the 59th Division relieved Nicholson’s exhausted troops, who moved into the second line.

For the Germans it was a day of disappointment. In the evening the 6th Army reported that its attack had “died away” and that the soldiers were completely exhausted. Erich Ludendorff agreed that it could suspend its attacks on Meteren and Strazeele until 17 April, but the 4th Army was to keep attacking. At noon Emperor Wilhelm II arrived at its headquarters. The same day at Abbeville Haig asked Foch to have the exhausted British divisions relieved by French ones. Foch refused, arguing that a battle must not be interrupted by relieving troops, and to the surprise of the British declared that the Battle of Hazebrouck was over.

15 April. Plumer did not want to give up Bailleul without a fight, although the line in front of the town had no tactical value. He feared that if the Germans saw the British withdrawing simultaneously from the Ypres salient and from Bailleul, they would regain heart. The German 4th Army took over the northern part of the sector from the 6th Army, and the three divisions attacking the hills came under the headquarters of the Guard Reserve Corps, freshly arrived from Russia. At noon a very heavy bombardment fell on Crucifix Corner, and at 2 p.m. it spread to the whole front of the 177th Brigade. The attack began at 2.45 p.m. The brigades of the 59th Division, already shattered in March on the Somme and filled up largely with young soldiers under fire for the first time, held a front almost 5.5 kilometres long, which they had taken over at dusk. For an hour they beat off the attacks. When the Germans came on again, however, they took Mont de Lille, where of the whole garrison one officer and three men were left. A counter-attack retook the hill briefly, but at 5 p.m. it finally remained in German hands. Crucifix Corner fell at about 4.30 p.m. From there the Germans turned along the road to the Ravelsberg and began to roll up the British line from the flank. According to the divisional commander the front “crumbled”. The battalions of the 176th Brigade, holding south of Bailleul, withdrew through the town after dark for fear of being cut off.

The stragglers were stopped at about 8 p.m. on the roads north of Bailleul, where officers of the 34th Division collected several hundred men. On the hastily prepared line from Meteren to Kemmel stood Nicholson’s six brigades, numbering about 7,000 men in all. On the right the 33rd Division bent back its flank west of Bailleul, and on the left the 19th Division fell back to an intermediate line near Kemmel. The IX Corps artillery shelled the ground by the lunatic asylum on the edge of the town, where the Germans were expected to assemble. The next day an airman reported that hundreds of bodies lay there. Haig wrote in his dispatch that the Germans had forced their way into the town at about 9 p.m., but German regimental histories agree that they entered Bailleul only late at night or on 16 April, when patrols found that the British had left it.

Losses

The losses in the Battle of Bailleul itself cannot be separated from those of the Battles of the Lys as a whole. The British brigades that took part in it were mostly wrecks before they went in, and during it they melted away further. The British staff calculated that in the first three days of the Battles of the Lys, 9–11 April, the infantry had lost 26,000 men, and reinforcements were barely enough for a week of fighting. The 176th and 177th Brigades of the 59th Division suffered particularly heavily. The Germans also took heavy losses: the British official history, drawing on German regimental histories, writes of attacks decimated by artillery and machine guns, especially on 13 and 14 April.

Significance

The loss of Bailleul and the Ravelsberg ridge was painful for the British, but it did not mean a breakthrough. The front fell back a few kilometres to a line from Meteren through Dranoutre to Kemmel, at the foot of the range of hills that now became the Germans’ objective. The next day Meteren and Wijtschate fell, and Plumer completed the planned withdrawal from the Passchendaele ridge, won at such a high price in 1917. The Germans, on the other hand, despite a twofold numerical superiority, were advancing ever more slowly. In open fighting among hedges and farms they lacked the great mass of heavy artillery that had given them their victories in March, and their divisions, as the 6th Army staff admitted on the evening of 14 April, were exhausted. From Bailleul the nearest hills were close, but two more battles had to be fought for the Kemmelberg.

Bailleul itself, which had more than 13,000 inhabitants before the war, was destroyed. Shelled by the Germans in April, and then by British artillery and aircraft while it was in German hands, it turned into a sea of rubble. According to local sources, in November 1918 only one house was standing, and of the old town only the Gothic hall at the foot of the belfry survived. British patrols of the 36th (Ulster) Division entered the ruins on 30 August 1918.