Battle of Béthune

The Battle of Béthune was the last attempt to break the southern flank of the British in Flanders during the German Lys offensive. In the first week of Operation “Georgette” the German 6th Army had driven a deep wedge into the British front between Armentières and the La Bassée Canal, but its left, southern side still hung on the ruins of the village of Givenchy, on Festubert and on the line of the canal, behind which lay the town of Béthune, an important railway junction and the gateway to the last part of the Pas-de-Calais coalfield that remained in French hands. On the morning of 18 April 1918, after a seven-hour bombardment with a large proportion of gas shell, six German divisions attacked the front from Givenchy to Robecq. The British 1st Division, which had taken over the Givenchy–Festubert sector less than a day and a half earlier, and the 3rd and 4th Divisions on the canal beat off the attack, and by evening the Germans held only scraps of the ground taken in the morning. German documents call the day “another painful failure” of the 6th Army.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Béthune” and the date 18 April 1918 were given after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. It is one of the eight battles into which the committee divided the Battles of the Lys of 9–29 April 1918. It covers the fighting of the British First Army between the La Bassée Canal and the Forest of Nieppe, that is, of I Corps (1st, 3rd and 4th Divisions) and XI Corps (61st Division). The committee singled out the attack on the village of Givenchy itself as an episode called the Second Defence of Givenchy, to distinguish it from the defence of December 1914. On the same day, to the north below Mount Kemmel, the First Battle of Kemmel Ridge was dying down, but the fighting at Béthune had no direct connection with it. Times are given according to the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. II, 1937), which is the main source for this page.

Background

On 9 April, the first day of the offensive, the Germans smashed the Portuguese 2nd Division and within a few days forced the Lys and the Lawe. The southern pillar of the British defence, however, remained the 55th (West Lancashire) Division of General Hugh Jeudwine, which held Givenchy and Festubert and bent its flank back along the canal. Givenchy stands on a slight rise, a forward spur of the Aubers ridge, from which the whole surrounding country on the British side could be seen. The front had hardly changed here since the winter of 1914/1915, the ground was pitted with mine craters from the fighting of 1915, and the sappers of the 251st Tunnelling Company had spent several months building concrete machine-gun posts, redoubts and tunnels in the ruins. The British official history places the 55th Division’s defence of Givenchy on 9 April alongside the repulse of the attack at Arras on 28 March as the most striking examples of successful defence in the spring of 1918.

On 12 April the German 16th Division broke through the front of the weakened 51st (Highland) Division at Pacaut, and its leading troops reached the Bois de Pacaut on the canal itself and almost got to Robecq. The British lost several batteries, and the crews of the barges of the Inland Water Transport burned and scuttled them at Robecq. The canal line, about 6 kilometres long, was manned in haste by units of the 3rd Division, the last 170 troopers of King Edward’s Horse and the 4th Division, brought by bus from Arras. That day the sub-prefect of Béthune ordered the evacuation of the town’s population, and Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, who visited the commander of the First Army, General Henry Horne, and Field Marshal Douglas Haig, was worried above all about the coal mines around Bruay. A large part of the French northern coalfield, with Lens and Douai, had been in German hands since 1914, and the mines behind Béthune supplied the coal the armaments industry needed.

Over the following days the main German effort shifted north, towards Hazebrouck and Bailleul. On the southern flank there was relative calm, which the Germans used to bring up artillery. The British also regrouped. On the nights of 15/16 and 16/17 April most of the exhausted 55th Division was relieved by General Peter Strickland’s 1st Division, while the 55th Division’s artillery stayed in position. Strickland knew these trenches: in December 1914, as a lieutenant-colonel, he had commanded the 1st Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, which was then defending Givenchy. In the rear stood the untouched Canadian Corps, because its commander, General Arthur Currie, had insisted to Horne that his divisions should not be split up.

German plan

On 17 April the command of General Ferdinand von Quast’s 6th Army, in view of the arrival of French reinforcements, halted further attacks at Bailleul. On the army’s left wing, however, General Richard von Kraewel’s IV Corps (four divisions in the front line and one in reserve), supported on its right by General Karl Dieffenbach’s IX Reserve Corps (three divisions in line and one in reserve), was to take Givenchy and Festubert and the line of the La Bassée Canal as far as Robecq. The aim was to secure the left flank of the wedge, against which Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria expected a British counter-attack from the Béthune–Saint-Venant area. German prisoners carried maps on which the objective was Béthune itself, and orders captured on the canal showed that the attack on the northern bank was to reach Hinges and the hill of Mont Bernenchon, which dominate the town from the north. The attack was delayed by a day or two because British artillery had blown up several German ammunition dumps.

The British expected the blow. At 10.50 p.m. on 17 April First Army intelligence warned I and XI Corps that, according to prisoners’ statements, the attack on the sector from Givenchy to the Forest of Nieppe would come the next morning.

Course of the battle

Bombardment. At one o’clock in the morning of 18 April a bombardment by artillery of all calibres fell on the sector from Givenchy to Robecq. On the 1st Division’s front it lasted seven hours, in front of the 3rd and 4th Divisions about four. The Germans used the method of 21 March: gas shell on the batteries, high explosive on the rear areas, crossroads and Béthune, which was shelled among other things with very heavy shrapnel, according to the official history 16-inch naval shells, bursting high above the ground and doing little harm. The British artillery nevertheless suffered heavy losses; the 275th Field Artillery Brigade of the 55th Division alone lost 11 of its 24 guns. After about three hours the fire also took in the front lines and support positions, and the brick stacks of the old brickfields, which had until then given good cover, were smashed in many places. At about 7 a.m. the bombardment also moved to the southern bank of the canal. The day was overcast and cold, with mist, especially thick over the canals, and passing showers, which restricted flying.

Givenchy. At 8.10 a.m., when visibility had risen to about 150–200 metres, three German divisions advanced behind a dense creeping barrage against the 1st and 3rd Brigades of the 1st Division. They followed the fire so closely that they burst into the first trenches on the arc around Givenchy, held by the 1st Battalion of the Black Watch, from a distance of only about 40 metres. They had probably gassed the exits of the tunnels in which the reserves were waiting beforehand, and the men of the 1st Division, who had only just taken over the sector, did not yet know the shelters as well as Jeudwine’s men. Two companies of the Black Watch were overrun and their reserves were caught in the shelters. The battalion’s left wing held, and the Givenchy Keep redoubt held out to the end, although of its two officers and forty men only eight were left, under an officer who had come through the tunnel from a neighbouring redoubt. Other redoubts held too, and from the southern bank of the canal four machine guns of the 1st Battalion, Machine Gun Corps fired more than 30,000 rounds into the flank of the Germans crossing the field at a range of about 700 metres. By 11 a.m. the attack on Givenchy had come to a halt. The Germans kept part of the village and a few trenches and craters north of it. An evening attempt to recover everything failed.

Festubert. In the 3rd Brigade’s sector the Germans broke into Le Plantin, on the southern edge of Festubert, in the first rush, and on the other side of the village they took the Route A Keep redoubt, whose garrison lost 50 of its 70 men. Through the gaps in the discontinuous line they got behind the 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, which, as the official history puts it, “again, as in Egypt in 1801”, had to fight front and rear at the same time. The battalion’s last reserve, twenty signallers, cooks, runners and orderlies, fought its way through the gardens on the western edge of the village and drove the Germans out. With the help of a company of Cameron Highlanders and part of the 2nd Battalion of the Welch Regiment, the British infantry cleared the southern part of Festubert and regained touch with Le Plantin. Around noon the leading German troops, seeing that the attack had failed, tried to crawl back and were killed under fire. By 5 p.m. the fighting on the 1st Division’s front had stopped. Route A Keep and one post next to it remained in German hands, but behind them stood further lines of trenches.

La Bassée Canal. On the canal (PL), where the 4th Division held bridgeheads on the northern bank, the Germans attacked earlier, while it was still dark. Just after 4 a.m. the 240th Division overran two posts of the 2nd Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders near the Bois de Pacaut, but did not reach the bridge. Attempts to launch pontoons and light footbridges floated on bladders broke down under fire from the southern bank, and by 6.15 a.m. the attack on the 10th Brigade’s sector had completely collapsed. 115 Germans who had taken shelter under the northern embankment surrendered, and some swam across the canal. Next to it the 239th Division pushed the right wing of the 1st Battalion of the King’s Own back to Riez du Vinage, but beyond that the fire of the divisional artillery broke up its attack. In the evening two officers and a hundred men of the King’s Own recaptured part of the village, taking 19 prisoners and a machine gun. In front of the 3rd Division the German 18th Reserve Division confined itself to a few weak attempts. On the XI Corps front, opposite the 61st Division, the Germans briefly occupied a farm near Baquerolles on the little river Clarence, but a platoon of the 2/5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment immediately retook it, and the attack at 6 a.m. was stopped by rifle fire. The evening bombardment was no longer followed by an infantry attack, and by midnight all was quiet.

Losses

The British official history gives no total losses for 18 April. The 1st Division suffered most, especially the 1st Battalion of the Black Watch and the garrisons of the redoubts at Festubert, as did the artillery under gas bombardment. The British took prisoners from all six attacking German divisions, and the field in front of Givenchy was, as Edmonds writes, strewn with German dead, rifles and equipment. The history of the German 202nd Reserve Infantry Regiment (of the 43rd Reserve Division) records that the German heavy artillery fired short, into the ranks of its own infantry, and that the surviving machine-gun nests stopped the attack and prevented reserves from being brought up. Four of the six German divisions had been fighting without a break since 9 April.

Significance

The Battle of Béthune ended the German attempts to widen the Lys wedge to the south. German documents admit that IV Corps “almost took both villages” but had to fall back under counter-attacks supported by the fire of uncaptured concrete machine-gun posts. Rupprecht ordered the 6th Army to go over to the defensive, and on 20 April the Supreme Army Command decided to end the offensive in Flanders, except for the fighting for Mount Kemmel in the north. The capture of Festubert and Givenchy was to remain an objective for the future, and the factories of Béthune were to be kept under constant fire. The last fighting for the sector went on for a few more days: on 20 April the British recovered most of the trenches at Givenchy and Route A Keep, on 22 April the Germans took the redoubt again, and on 24 April it was recaptured by the 55th Division, returning to the line.

For the Allies this meant that Béthune, the railways behind it and the mines around Bruay remained in their hands, and the southern side of the Lys wedge was secure. The town itself, however, paid a high price. The Germans carried out the order to shell it, and in the second half of May 1918 heavy artillery destroyed almost the whole historic centre of Béthune, of which only the belfry (beffroi) standing in the market square survived. The British official history attributes the success of the defence at Givenchy not so much to the concrete shelters and redoubts as to the training and spirit of the soldiers who knew how to use them. After the breakthroughs of March and of 9 April, this was proof for the British that German storm troops could be stopped.