Battle of Messines (1918)

The Battle of Messines in April 1918 was the second act of the German offensive in Flanders known as the Battle of the Lys. The day after the 6th Army broke through the Portuguese front south of Armentières, General Friedrich Sixt von Armin’s 4th Army went into the attack north of the town. On the morning of 10 April, in thick fog, its divisions crossed the Lys on footbridges, broke into Ploegsteert Wood and took Messines, which the British had recaptured in June 1917 after the explosion of the great mines. The defenders here were three divisions of the British IX Corps, bled white on the Somme in March and filled up mostly with very young recruits. They would not be broken: in the evening the newly re-formed South African Brigade briefly went through Messines, and during the night the British held Wytschaete (PL). On 11 April, however, the Germans took Hill 63 above Ploegsteert Wood, from which they could take the ridge from the rear, and that night IX Corps came down from the southern part of the ridge. In two days most of the gains of June 1917 were lost.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Messines 1918” and the dates 10–11 April were given after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. It covers the fighting of IX Corps of the Second Army north of Armentières, from the Lys to the Ypres–Comines Canal, while the fighting of the First Army south of the town counts as the Battle of Estaires. Both belong to the “Battles of the Lys” (9–29 April). The boundary is arbitrary: the Germans assaulted the same sector on the following days as well, and Wytschaete, which survived 10 and 11 April, fell only on 16 April. On the German side the 4th Army’s attack on the ridge bore the code name “Hare Drive” (Hasenjagd). In April 1918 British and German time were the same, so the times in the text need no conversion.

Background

The Messines–Wytschaete ridge, a low bank rising south of Ypres, had an importance in Flanders out of all proportion to its height. The Germans took it on 1 November 1914, at the end of the Battle of Messines of 1914, and for two and a half years watched the British rear areas from it. On 7 June 1917 General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army took it back in one of the most successful attacks of the war, after nineteen mines were exploded beneath the German trenches (the Battle of Messines 1917). The front then moved more than three kilometres east of the ridge.

In spring 1918 the Germans planned Operation “George” in Flanders: the 6th Army was to break through the front on the plain of the Lys and advance on Hazebrouck, and the 4th Army was to strike at the Messines ridge and on to the Flanders hills with Mont Kemmel, which would force the British to abandon the Ypres salient. Sixt von Armin regarded the attack on the ridge as the most important of his tasks. After Operation Michael on the Somme, however, Ludendorff had too few divisions and too little heavy artillery left, the plan was reduced to “Georgette”, and of the 4th Army’s several blows only this one remained. It was to start the day after the 6th Army’s attack, and the two armies were together to cut off Armentières.

On 9 April the 6th Army smashed the Portuguese 2nd Division and reached the Lys. North of Armentières the day passed quietly, although the British command knew that the German preparations were complete. The Second Army’s reserves had already gone south to the threatened First Army.

Forces

The sector from the Lys to Shrewsbury Forest, north of the Ypres–Comines Canal, about 15.5 kilometres long, was held by General Alexander Hamilton-Gordon’s IX Corps. In the line stood, from the right, General Bainbridge’s 25th Division, General Jeffreys’s 19th Division and General Tudor’s 9th (Scottish) Division. All three had lost more than half their fighting strength in the March battle, had arrived from Picardy only a few days earlier and were still being filled up. The replacements consisted almost entirely of nineteen-year-olds with nine months’ training. On 9 April the 25th Division had given up one brigade to help the First Army. The 9th Division’s South African Brigade, shattered in March in the defence of Marrières Wood, had been re-formed from recruits and numbered about 1,300 men, less than one full battalion.

The forward position consisted for the most part of two lines of small, wired posts in a sea of water-filled shell craters left by the fighting of 1917, and behind them a continuous line on the low ground and the forward slopes of the ridge. A few kilometres further back, on the reverse slopes of Hill 63 and the ridge, ran the Corps Line, and further still the Army Line through Neuve-Église (PL) and Kemmel. A favourable legacy of the previous year’s battle was a deeply buried network of telephone cables, thanks to which communications worked throughout the fighting. IX Corps had 105 heavy guns. According to the British official history the 4th Army had 60 heavy batteries and 73 field batteries against it, as against 24 British.

The attack was made by two corps of the 4th Army: XVIII Reserve Corps (7th Division and 17th Reserve Division) in the north and X Reserve Corps (31st and 214th Divisions) in the south. In army reserve stood the 49th and 36th Reserve Divisions, and in the supreme command’s reserve, east of Armentières, the 11th Bavarian and 22nd Reserve Divisions. The 4th Army’s chief of staff was General Fritz von Loßberg, reputed to be the best German specialist in defence.

Course

10 April, morning. The German bombardment began at 2.45 a.m. and lasted until 5.15 a.m. It was shorter and weaker than in the previous great attacks, but conceived in the same way: first gas shells on the batteries, then high-explosive shells on headquarters, crossroads, observation posts and camps in the rear, and finally fire on the forward posts. Under cover of the fog the Germans threw pontoon bridges across the Lys at Frelinghien and Pont Rouge. A British patrol had indeed discovered before dawn footbridges on piles, hidden a foot under the water, but they were taken to be part of a demonstration. After five in the morning the infantry, carrying boards for crossing the craters, moved against the 75th and 7th Brigades of the 25th Division and the 57th Brigade of the 19th Division. Three German divisions went against the two brigades of the 25th Division, and according to prisoners’ statements thirteen battalions attacked the 57th Brigade, five or six times as many as the defenders.

The Germans passed between the posts or overran them, and then attacked from the rear those that held out. Some battalion commanders learned of the attack only when fighting was going on around their own headquarters. In Messines the Germans surprised sappers of the 81st Field Company in their dugouts. Of two companies of the 8th Battalion, Border Regiment, only a dozen or so men survived, and a company of the 1st Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment, at La Basse-Ville held out until 8.35 a.m., when its ammunition ran out. One post of the 6th Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment, held out surrounded for 48 hours, and its garrison escaped in the fog. Before noon the Germans had Ploegsteert, the greater part of Ploegsteert Wood and Messines, which the 17th Reserve Division took with an attack from the north and south, and they came out onto the slopes leading towards Wytschaete. They broke in deepest, about 3.7 kilometres, on the southern flank, where they passed the Corps Line.

Counter-attacks by the 25th and 19th Divisions, without reserves, did not retake either the wood or Messines, but when the fog lifted, fire at close range stopped the Germans. The artillery helped, staying in position until the infantry had fallen back level with it, and thanks to the buried cables receiving reports from forward observers. For this example Captain Eric Dougall, a battery commander of the 19th Division, was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously; he was killed four days later. At about noon the British line ran from the Lys at Le Bizet, through Regina Farm west of Ploegsteert, to Hill 63, along the northern edge of the wood to St. Yves and on along the ridge west of Messines.

10 April, afternoon. Between 1 and 2 p.m., as the fog began to gather again, the Germans attacked the northern part of the sector, the 58th Brigade and the 9th Division’s 27th Brigade. They were stopped at the 27th Brigade’s continuous, heavily wired support line, in front of which, according to the official history, their dead lay in heaps. Things went worse for the 6th Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment, which received the order to withdraw late. When it began to fall back at about 4.30 p.m., the Germans went round it on both sides, and most of the battalion with its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Monreal, who was killed, and a company of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers were cut off. Three companies of the 9th Battalion, Welsh Regiment, near Wytschaete were also destroyed. The village was empty. It was held by a strong patrol of the 5th Battalion, Cameron Highlanders, which the commander of the 26th Brigade had sent out to reconnoitre and ordered to stay. The official history calls this “the most important service”.

In the evening the British went over to counter-attacks. The 75th Brigade, whose men returning from behind the lines reported that Germans were resting and eating in Ploegsteert, moved on the village at 5.30 p.m. together with Australian sappers. It got within two hundred metres of the buildings, but under fire from Le Bizet had to come back. At 5.15 p.m. General Tanner’s South African Brigade set out from near Wulverghem; it had been attached to the 19th Division with orders to retake the ridge from Messines to Lumm Farm. The commander of the 9th Division protested that a brigade made up of recruits was not ready to attack, but he was not listened to. The South Africans went down to the Steenebeek stream at the foot of the ridge and moved up the slope in drizzle. The British official history praises the barrage covering them, but according to John Buchan’s history of the South African forces it did not reach the German machine guns in the old British fortifications. The 2nd Regiment crossed the Messines–Wytschaete road and took several fortified farms with machine guns, but could not take the concrete shelters of Pick House. The 1st Regiment threw back with the bayonet Germans coming out of Messines and went through the village, but at its eastern edge, after an hour of hand-to-hand fighting in which almost all the officers were killed or wounded, it had to fall back to a line about a hundred metres west of Messines. The German 4th Army war diary recorded that evening four successive “violent counter-attacks” from beyond the Steenebeek. The commander of IX Corps later gave the brigade the first mention in corps orders for this attack.

Night of 10/11 April. During the night the 62nd Brigade from the 21st Division’s reserve reached Wytschaete. When its battalions entered the village, they ran into Germans climbing the ridge with machine guns and after half an hour of hand-to-hand fighting, although the German artillery was firing into the very middle of the fighting, drove them out. By 5 a.m. the whole of Wytschaete was in British hands. On the southern flank the Germans reached Le Bizet in the evening, and the British abandoned Armentières, which had become a narrow, increasingly threatened salient. IX Corps also received reinforcements: the weakened 148th Brigade of the 49th Division and the 108th Brigade of the 36th (Ulster) Division.

11 April. In the morning there was thick fog again. On the southern flank the 75th Brigade, which held a sector of almost five kilometres from the Lys beyond Ploegsteert to Hill 63 without any reserve, repulsed the first attack, but at 10.15 a.m. the Germans broke through its centre and reached Le Romarin, cutting the brigade in two. German troops entered the gap and were soon firing on Hill 63 from the south. The 7th Brigade stood in a sharp salient near St. Yves, on the northern edge of Ploegsteert Wood. What happened there the British official history called an “unnecessary disaster”. The brigade commander set the withdrawal for 5 p.m., but divisional headquarters ordered the brigade to be withdrawn behind Neuve-Église, leaving strong outposts on the spot which were to hold out until forced to retire. Three battalion commanders, gathered in the “Catacombs”, great shelters dug into Hill 63 by Australian tunnellers, understood this as an order to fight to the end and cancelled the withdrawal. By 5.30 p.m. the salient was almost encircled, the Catacombs surrounded, and the battalion commanders taken prisoner. The remnants of the brigade fought their way through to Neuve-Église; seventy men were left of the 1st Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment.

North of the Douve stream the 19th and 9th Divisions repulsed attacks all day. The South Africans on the ridge twice lost several hundred metres and twice regained them in counter-attacks, supported by Irishmen of the 108th Brigade, and near Wytschaete and Hollebeke the Scots shot down Germans emerging from the morning fog. The loss of Hill 63 nevertheless decided the fate of the ridge, because from its flat top the Germans could fire on the defenders from the rear. After a conference in the morning with the divisional commanders and with Plumer’s consent, General Hamilton-Gordon in the evening ordered the southern flank to swing back, pivoting on Wytschaete. By dawn on 12 April the 19th Division had come down from the ridge to a line in front of Wulverghem, and the 25th Division and the neighbouring 34th Division, which had left Nieppe, fell back to the Army Line in front of Neuve-Église. Wytschaete remained in British hands, with an outpost linking it to the new line.

Losses

The losses of the Battle of Messines cannot be separated from the overall losses of the Battle of the Lys, and the British official history gives no separate figures. The hardest hit were the 75th, 7th and 57th Brigades, whose forward battalions were largely killed or captured on 10 April. The 7th Brigade was shattered again a day later near Hill 63. A large part of the 58th Brigade, deployed in the front line, was cut off on 10 April. The South African Brigade lost many officers in its first attack, and the right-hand companies of its 2nd Regiment about half their strength. Of IX Corps’ 105 heavy guns, all but nineteen were successfully pulled back to new positions. The Germans also lost many men, especially in front of the 27th Brigade’s line and in the counter-attacks at Messines. The official history considers that only heavy losses could have stopped the 4th Army from carrying out the task it had been given for 10 April: helping the 6th Army across the Lys and attacking with its left wing towards Nieppe and Steenwerck.

Significance

The Battle of Messines widened the German attack on the Lys by the sector north of Armentières and took from the British most of their gains of June 1917. The ridge, fought over since 1914, passed into German hands in two days, largely because it was defended by few, exhausted and freshly filled-up troops, and the Second Army’s entire reserve had earlier gone south. The fall of Armentières, which the British had to abandon, and the withdrawal from the ridge opened the way for the Germans to Bailleul and the Flanders hills.

Even so, the 4th Army’s attack did not bring a breakthrough. Wytschaete held, and the new British line, though thin, remained continuous and kept contact with the First Army. The crisis did, however, force Douglas Haig to send north the last divisions he could take from Picardy, and to make ever more urgent requests to Ferdinand Foch for French reinforcements. On the evening of 11 April Plumer decided that with such pressure on his right flank he must prepare to shorten the front, and ordered the corps in the Ypres salient to fall back gradually to the battle zone. A few days later the British gave up without a fight the Passchendaele ridge taken in the autumn of 1917, and in the second half of April the fighting moved to Mount Kemmel.