Battle of Hazebrouck

The Battle of Hazebrouck was a struggle for the road to the most important railway junction behind the British front in Flanders. After three days of the Battle of the Lys the German Sixth Army had driven deep into the plain west of Armentières, and on 12 April 1918 it advanced on Hazebrouck, through which ran the supplies from the English Channel ports for the whole British Second Army and for the Ypres salient. Against it the British had only exhausted, intermingled divisions, most of which had already been through the March fighting on the Somme. On the first day the Germans made two breaches in their front, several kilometres deep, and came to within about 8 kilometres of the town. On 13 April, while the 1st Australian Division, brought up from Amiens, was detraining, the 4th Guards Brigade held out all day against four German regiments at Vieux-Berquin and was almost wiped out. Behind it the Australians and the fresh 5th Division, brought back from Italy, closed the road through Nieppe Forest. On 14 and 15 April the German attacks broke against their line, and the German Sixth Army reported that its offensive had petered out.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Hazebrouck” and the dates 12–15 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 fighting on the Lys, and it also includes the Defence of Nieppe Forest. It covers the attack of the German Sixth Army in the centre and on the right wing of the breach, from the La Bassée Canal at Robecq to Merris. At the same time, from 13 April, the Battle of Bailleul was being fought to its left, and the boundary between the two battles is arbitrary, since the fighting at Meteren and Merris concerned both sectors. The British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. II, 1937) describes the whole front day by day, in chapters entitled “The Battle of Hazebrouck”. Times are given in British time. Until 15 April it was the same as German time, and from that day, when summer time was introduced in Germany, German time was an hour ahead of British.

Background

Operation Georgette, a cut-down version of the “George” offensive planned since the winter, began on 9 April, four days after Operation Michael had been halted before Amiens. General Ferdinand von Quast’s German Sixth Army routed the Portuguese Corps and crossed the Lys, and the next day the Fourth Army took the Messines Ridge. On 11 April the British gave up Armentières, and on the night of 11/12 April Merville. Before the Germans lay a flat plain cut by ditches and hedges and dotted with farms and orchards, and beyond it, a dozen or so kilometres from where they stood, Hazebrouck. The loss of this junction would have cut off supplies to the troops at Ypres and could have forced the British to retreat towards the coast. The Sixth Army’s objectives for 12 April were the hills at Bailleul, Meteren and Strazeele, the edge of Nieppe Forest and the La Bassée Canal.

The British were in a difficult position. Field Marshal Douglas Haig was moving to Flanders everything he could take from the Somme front without unduly weakening the link with the French. Ferdinand Foch, coordinator of the Allied armies since March, refused, however, to take over part of the British front or to send French divisions into the fighting directly. He believed the British would hold on by themselves and moved the French reserves north slowly. On 11 April he handed Haig a note saying that the Germans must first be stopped in their march on Hazebrouck and that the troops must hold where they stood. That day Haig issued an order of the day calling on his soldiers to fight “with our backs to the wall”.

The front before Hazebrouck belonged to two armies. South of the road from Estaires to Vieux-Berquin stood General Richard Haking’s XI Corps of General Henry Horne’s First Army: the remnants of the 51st and 50th Divisions and the 61st Division. Further north, as far as Bailleul, stretched General Beauvoir De Lisle’s XV Corps with the remnants of the 29th and 31st Divisions. At noon on 12 April it came under the command of General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army. According to the British official history it was in practice a battle of brigadiers and soldiers: the divisions fought without their own artillery, which was travelling by road behind the infantry carried by rail and lorry, battalions were often led by junior officers, and staffs learnt the position of the line too late to direct it. Coming to the rescue were the 5th Division, newly arrived from Italy and still with 13 full battalions, and General Harold Walker’s 1st Australian Division, carried by rail from Amiens.

Course of the battle

12 April. This was the critical day. In the morning there was fog, then it cleared, and the British air service, since 1 April the Royal Air Force, bombed and machine-gunned the German columns on the roads to Merville, Neuf-Berquin and Estaires all day. According to the British air history more hours were flown and more bombs dropped that day than ever before since the start of the war. At 5 a.m., in darkness and fog, the German 68th Infantry Regiment broke through the thin line of the 51st Division south of the Lys at Pacaut, advanced about 2 kilometres in half an hour and in the village of Le Cornet Malo captured the commander of the 152nd Brigade. The Germans reached the La Bassée Canal and the little river Clarence, a step from Robecq, took two batteries and came closer to Béthune. British battalions of the 3rd and 61st Divisions, sappers, gunners and the remnants of the cavalry occupied the bridges over the canal, however, and nobody on the German side exploited the success.

North of the Lys the German 35th and 12th Reserve Divisions attacked from 8 a.m. against the exhausted 50th Division, which fell back slowly while waiting for the 5th Division to arrive. On its left wing Brigadier-General Leslie Butler’s 4th Guards Brigade of the 31st Division was ordered to advance across open fields towards Vieux Moulin, 1,100 metres in front of its position. Without machine guns and supported by a single battery, the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards and the 4th Battalion Grenadier Guards ran into fire from the buildings around Neuf-Berquin. Captain Thomas Pryce’s company took the hamlet of Pont Rondin, but by evening both units had lost about 60 per cent of their men. After dark the brigade returned to its starting position around the La Couronne crossroads, south of Vieux-Berquin, and stretched out on a front more than 3.5 kilometres long.

The greatest danger was further north. The fresh German 81st Reserve Division and the neighbouring troops, advancing along ditches and hedges and taking the British lines in enfilade, drove a wedge about 8 kilometres wide and almost 5 kilometres deep into the centre of XV Corps. Four brigades of the 29th and 31st Divisions fell back from hedge to hedge and in the evening stood on a line from Vieux-Berquin to Merris. The 86th and 87th Brigades together now numbered only 11 officers and 352 men, and two battalions of the 92nd Brigade mustered 50 men between them. Between Merris and Bailleul gaped a gap, which was plugged only by the 19th Brigade of the 33rd Division with its machine-gun battalion, cyclists and men from the reinforcement camps. Before midnight the first two and a quarter battalions of Australians reached Hazebrouck. Their journey from Amiens had taken many hours longer than planned, because German guns and aircraft were shelling and bombing the stations. General De Lisle decided not to use them to patch the broken line but ordered them to build a new one behind it. Meanwhile the 5th Division passed through Nieppe Forest and deployed on its eastern edge, blocking the road to Hazebrouck through the forest. This proved crucial, because First Army headquarters had already been prepared to give up the eastern part of the forest.

13 April. The day was cold and grey, and thick fog lay over the rivers and canals. In the XI Corps sector the German 16th, 8th Bavarian Reserve and 8th Divisions made four attacks across completely open ground. All of them were stopped by the artillery and rifle fire of the 61st and 5th Divisions. The German history of one of the Bavarian regiments wrote that the attack on Nieppe Forest was “under an unlucky star from the start”, and the infantry and artillery crowded into a narrow sector suffered heavy losses from British shells and bombs.

The main weight fell on the 4th Guards Brigade. At 6.30 a.m. in the fog it was attacked by parts of four German divisions, and on its sector by four infantry regiments, each equal in numbers to a British brigade. An armoured car appeared on the road opposite its right wing, according to the German regimental history a captured Italian one, but it was soon driven off. Where gaps opened, small German parties tried to get round the defenders, and the Guards companies held their ground until battalion headquarters became part of the front line. Captain Pryce’s cut-off company fought on, firing in both directions, back to back. A company of the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, sent to its aid by the battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Alexander, later a field marshal of the Second World War, was almost wiped out on the way. In the evening, when the ammunition ran out, Pryce led a handful of survivors in two bayonet charges, from which, according to the British official history, one man escaped. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. On the left wing the 12th Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry fought in the ruins of Vieux-Berquin, where the Germans brought field guns up to within a few hundred metres. By evening the remnants of the Guards had fallen back to the Australian line, about 1.5 kilometres to the rear.

Haig wrote in his dispatch that among all the troops taking part in this defence “the 4th Guards Brigade, on whose front of some 4,000 yards the heaviest attacks fell, are especially deserving of the highest praise” and that since the start of the German offensive there had been no “more brilliant exploit”. The heroic resistance gave the leading Australian brigades time to occupy and organise their allotted line east of Nieppe Forest. As Haig wrote, then “the way to Hazebrouck was definitely closed”. North of Vieux-Berquin the remnants of the 29th and 31st Divisions held the main line before Merris until evening, with strong artillery support. During the night General Walker asked for the scattered parties to be taken out of the line in front of his troops, and all were withdrawn through the Australian positions.

14 April. At 9 a.m. the 1st Australian Division took over the whole XV Corps front, except for a small sector still held by the surviving Guardsmen. The first contact had come at midnight, when a battalion of the German 35th Division, marching along a road without protection, ran into a post of the Australian 8th Battalion, which opened fire at twenty metres. In the morning the Australians saw “miles of Germans”, with officers on horseback, advancing in several lines on the ridge at Strazeele. Artillery and Lewis guns stopped most of them a few hundred metres before the line of posts, and attacks renewed at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. brought only further losses. In the XI Corps sector the 61st and 5th Divisions were attacked without success, and at Riez du Vinage on the southern wing the British 4th Division took 135 prisoners in an evening attack and recovered two batteries lost on 12 April. In the afternoon Sixth Army headquarters reported to Ludendorff that its offensive had evidently petered out and the soldiers were completely exhausted. Erich Ludendorff agreed that the Sixth Army should suspend attacks north of Nieppe Forest until 17 April. That day, at a conference at Abbeville, Foch, refusing to relieve the exhausted British divisions, announced to the surprise of those present that “the Battle of Hazebrouck is over”.

15 April. The front before Hazebrouck was relatively quiet. Twice the Germans massed to attack the 5th and 61st Divisions, but the fire of artillery, rifles and low-flying aircraft broke up the concentrations, and the Australians repulsed several minor attacks. British airmen bombed the enemy’s roads and rear areas. Behind the front French divisions arrived, as did General Robillot’s II Cavalry Corps, which had covered about 190 kilometres in 60 hours. The main fighting meanwhile moved to the hills at Bailleul, which the British gave up on the night of 15/16 April.

Casualties

The losses in the Battle of Hazebrouck alone cannot be separated from the overall losses of the Battle of the Lys, in which, according to the British official history, each side lost about 80,000 men by the end of April. Many British brigades were in tatters before they went into action. The best documented are the losses of the 4th Guards Brigade: according to the official history about 250 men were left of the whole brigade. The 4th Battalion Grenadier Guards lost 17 of 20 officers and 449 men, the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards 12 of 16 officers and 449 men, and the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards 10 of 19 officers and 250 men. According to other tallies the brigade lost 39 officers and 1,244 men in two days, 767 of them missing. German losses were high, especially on 13 and 14 April, when attacks across open ground broke against artillery and machine-gun fire, but full figures have not been published.

Significance

At the Battle of Hazebrouck the German offensive in Flanders clearly lost momentum for the first time. The Germans were more numerous, had fresh divisions against tired ones and fought on ground that favoured infiltration and enfilade fire, and yet after their great success of 12 April they hardly advanced in the following three days. Many causes contributed: the German artillery struggled to get across the sodden ground, and supplies came along a few congested roads under British shellfire and bombs. Above all, however, the British managed to bring whole fresh divisions into action in time, without breaking them up to plug holes. The Australian official historian Charles Bean, otherwise sceptical of stories of Australians “saving” the front in the spring of 1918, noted that it was at Hazebrouck that the 1st Australian Division really did stop the German advance, just as the 5th Division did on its right and the 33rd Division on its left.

Hazebrouck remained in British hands, although German artillery shelled the town and station for months afterwards. The front settled a few kilometres from them, along the eastern edge of Nieppe Forest, and lasted until the summer. The Germans shifted their effort north, against the Flanders hills with the Kemmelberg, and the 4th Guards Brigade and its defence at La Couronne went down in history as one of the symbols of British resistance in April 1918.