Battle of Festubert

The Battle of Festubert was the second attempt by General Douglas Haig’s British First Army to support the great French offensive in Artois in May 1915. After the bloody failure at Aubers on 9 May the British changed their method. Instead of a short, violent bombardment and a distant objective, they chose a slow destruction of the German trenches lasting several days and an advance to a depth of only a kilometre. The attack began on the night of 15–16 May, which according to the British official history was the British Army’s first night attack of the war. For ten days British, Indian and Canadian divisions took single trenches, ditches and orchards in the mud, paying hundreds of killed and wounded for each of them. The Germans fell back to a new line, but did not give up the front.

Name and dates

On this page we use the dates 15–25 May 1915. That is how the battle was defined by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee set up after the war, how it is dated by the British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based, and also by the Canadian official history and The Long, Long Trail website. The infantry went forward at 11.30 p.m. on 15 May, and the last major attack was made on the evening of 25 May. On the same day Field Marshal John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, decided to end the offensive.

These dates do not, however, cover all the fighting. The preparatory artillery bombardment had already begun on the morning of 13 May. James Edmonds’s British official history dates the battle to 15–27 May in its chapter titles, because on 26 and 27 May units were still beating off German counter-attacks and consolidating the ground won. It counts losses, however, only up to 25 May, which it regards as the actual end of the battle.

Background

On 9 May 1915 the French Tenth Army began the offensive in Artois and in the first hours reached the edge of Vimy Ridge. The same day the British attacked north of it, at Aubers Ridge, but within one day lost more than 11,000 men and held none of their gains. General Ferdinand Foch, who coordinated operations on the northern sector of the front, pressed the British to attack again as soon as possible and pin down the German reserves that had begun to arrive at Vimy.

Haig concluded that the German defences could not be destroyed by a short bombardment. “The defences on our front are so carefully and so strongly made, and mutual support with machine guns is so complete, that a long, methodical bombardment by heavy artillery will be needed,” he wrote in his diary on 11 May. French agreed to the new plan and in a letter of 14 May recommended a “deliberate and persistent attack” in which the enemy was to be “gradually and relentlessly worn down”. The British official history later judged that at Festubert the British Army for the first time adopted a strategy of attrition.

The attack was directed at a sector about four to five kilometres long between Festubert and Richebourg-l’Avoué, a few kilometres south-west of Neuve-Chapelle. It was the same flat, waterlogged ground cut by drainage ditches on which the Indian Corps had defended Givenchy in December 1914. Trenches here were dug shallow, because water stood only a few dozen centimetres down, and both sides built breastworks of sandbags instead. On the German side stood General Eberhard von Claer’s Westphalian VII Corps of the Sixth Army of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. The sector to be attacked was held mainly by the 55th and 57th Infantry Regiments. The Germans had no reserves here, because after 9 May they had sent them to Vimy.

The plan

The attack was to be made by General Charles Monro’s I Corps with General Henry Horne’s 2nd Division and General Hubert Gough’s 7th Division, supported by the Meerut Division of General James Willcocks’s Indian Corps. The first objective was the La Quinque Rue road, running north-east from Festubert, about 900 metres from the British trenches. At Aubers the infantry had been meant to go three times as far.

For the bombardment 433 guns and howitzers were assembled, including two huge 15-inch howitzers. The fire was slow and carefully observed: each battery of heavy howitzers was given about 230 metres of German breastwork to demolish, and the field guns for the first time cut the wire methodically, shell by shell. There was, however, a shortage of heavy guns and ammunition, and many shells failed to explode. The bombardment began on the morning of 13 May. It was raining at the time, which hampered observation and softened the ground so that shells sank into the mud. On 14 May the Meerut Division reported that the damage was insufficient, and Haig postponed the attack by a day. The bombardment, planned for 36 hours, lasted 60. In that time the I Corps artillery fired more than 100,000 shells.

Since the bombardment had given away British intentions, Horne proposed that his division attack at night, over ground it knew well. The 7th Division, freshly moved from another sector, was to attack only at dawn.

Course of the battle

Night of 15–16 May. At 11.30 p.m., in complete darkness, about 10,000 soldiers of three brigades went out in front of their breastworks. Each wore a white patch on his chest and back so that friend could be told from foe in the dark. On the right the 6th Brigade crossed less than 300 metres of no man’s land in silence, with bayonets fixed, and almost without a shot took the German front line and then the support trench. On the left flank surprise failed. The Indian Lahore Division, standing further north, was to distract the Germans with bursts of rifle fire, but only alerted them. When the soldiers of the 5th Brigade and the Indian Garhwal Brigade rose to attack, the Germans lit up the ground with flares and a searchlight and swept it with machine-gun fire. Only part of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers reached the German trench; that day, mostly in this attack, the battalion lost nearly 650 men.

16 May. At 3.15 a.m., at dawn, the 7th Division went forward on the sector just north of Festubert. The 22nd Brigade took the German trenches and advanced about 550 metres, and its bombing parties cleared several hundred metres of trench to the south. Company Sergeant Major Frederick Barter with eight men took about 450 metres of trench, captured more than a hundred Germans and cut the leads of eleven mines. He received the Victoria Cross. The 20th Brigade, however, was held up by fire from a fortified quadrilateral of trenches lying in the unattacked gap between the two divisions. The gap could not be closed, and attempts by the 2nd Division and the Meerut Division to renew the attack broke down. In the evening the men of the 22nd Brigade had to fall back from their most advanced positions.

17 May. During the night the headquarters of the German 14th Division decided that it could not retake the lost trenches and ordered a withdrawal to a new line, dug in haste a few hundred metres further back by a Landwehr regiment brought from Ypres. For several days the British did not know exactly where it ran. In the morning accurate shelling swept away the German trenches in the gap between the divisions. About 450 Germans who had not managed to withdraw hung out improvised white flags and ran across to the British side to surrender. The British occupied the quadrilateral, but further attacks stalled in front of the new German line. It rained all day, turning the battlefield into a swamp. That day Haig learned from French that the First Army’s objective was no longer Aubers Ridge but the direction of La Bassée.

18 May. In the afternoon Lord Cavan’s 4th (Guards) Brigade and General Richard Turner’s Canadian 3rd Brigade went into the attack, but the artillery had been unable to destroy the new German line because it had not been located. The leading companies of Guardsmen lost nearly half their men before they had gone a hundred metres. The Canadians, whose orders reached them late, advanced a few hundred metres but did not reach their objective. In the evening the relief of the exhausted 2nd and 7th Divisions began, by the 1st Canadian Division and the newly arrived Scottish 51st (Highland) Division. The two were combined into a temporary force under the Canadian commander, General Edwin Alderson. The Germans meanwhile were bringing up reinforcements from all neighbouring sectors, and from 20 May the fresh 2nd Guard Reserve Division entered the line.

20–22 May. On the evening of 20 May, while it was still light, the Canadians attacked again. Two companies of the 16th Battalion took an orchard, thereafter called Canadian Orchard, and dug in a hundred metres from the German line. It was the furthest point the First Army reached in the whole battle. The attack by General Arthur Currie’s 2nd Brigade on a German strongpoint marked on the map as K.5 failed. The Canadian official history points out that the trench maps were full of errors of more than 400 metres and, moreover, had been printed upside down, with north at the bottom of the sheet. An attack renewed on 21 May brought temporary gains, but the next day German artillery forced the Canadians to give up most of them. On 22 May a dissatisfied Haig dissolved Alderson’s force.

24–25 May. At 2.30 a.m. on 24 May the Canadian 5th Battalion, after careful preparation, at last took K.5. According to the Canadian official history the soldiers went into the attack shouting “Lusitania!”, in memory of the British liner sunk on 7 May. An attack from Canadian Orchard on the night of 24–25 May ended in failure. The last major attack was made at 6.30 p.m. on 25 May by the Territorial 47th (London) Division north of the road from Givenchy to Chapelle St. Roch. Its 142nd Brigade took the German front line and support trench, advancing on average roughly 370 metres on a front of nearly a kilometre, but lost nearly a thousand men. In the evening dismounted troopers of General John Seely’s Canadian Cavalry Brigade tried to push forward from K.5 along the German breastwork. According to the Canadian official history they carried gas grenades, which would have been the first use of gas by the British Expeditionary Force sanctioned by the high command. On the same day French decided to end the offensive. For the next two days the British beat off counter-attacks and consolidated the ground won.

Losses

According to the British official history, from the night of 15–16 May to 25 May the British, Indian and Canadian units lost 710 officers and 15,938 other ranks, a total of 16,648 killed, wounded and missing. The heaviest losses, about 5,400, were suffered by the 2nd Division, the 7th Division lost about 4,100, the Meerut Division about 2,500, and the 47th Division and the Canadian Division about 2,200–2,400 each. The Canadian official history, counting differently, gives 2,468 Canadians killed, wounded and missing.

German losses are less certain. The British official history estimates them at about 5,000 men, including about 800 taken prisoner. The worst hit was the 57th Infantry Regiment, which defended the sector attacked: within two days its three battalions had melted away to about 600 men.

At least five soldiers received the Victoria Cross for the fighting at Festubert and on neighbouring sectors, among them Lieutenant John Smyth of the 15th Sikhs, who on 18 May brought bombs up to the front line under fire, and Lance Corporal Leonard Keyworth of the 1/24th Battalion, London Regiment, who on the night of 25–26 May spent two hours bombing the Germans while standing on the parapet of their trench.

Significance

At Festubert the British for the first time applied a method that the French had already worked out: a long, observed bombardment and an attack with a limited objective. The night attack of the 6th Brigade showed that no man’s land could be crossed almost without losses, and after two days the Germans had to abandon a position they had been building since the autumn. The British official history judged that if the new German line, dug in haste, had been attacked at once, it would probably have fallen. But the British did not know where it lay, and by the time they found it the Germans had manned it with fresh troops.

The battle also exposed the weaknesses of the British Army. The bombardment, which went on for 60 hours, robbed the attack of surprise. Orders reached battalions a few minutes before the attack, the maps were inaccurate, and British shells several times fell on their own infantry, because nobody commanded the artillery of the whole corps. The Canadians complained about their Ross rifles, which jammed in the mud. Above all there was a shortage of heavy guns and shells: on 26 May the depots in the rear held anything from a few to a few dozen shells per gun. The Shell Crisis, which broke out in mid-May after an article in The Times about the Battle of Aubers, contributed to the fall of the Liberal government and the formation of a coalition government in London.

Little changed on the map. The British had moved the front forward on a stretch of several kilometres by a few hundred metres, in places by about a kilometre. The offensive did, however, pin down German forces: the Sixth Army had to throw in at Festubert every unit it could take from neighbouring sectors, and a fresh division from reserve. The French continued their attack in Artois until mid-June, and the British took over from them another sector of the front south of the La Bassée Canal. In the autumn of 1915 Haig’s First Army attacked from precisely there, at Loos.