Battle of Outtersteene Ridge

The Battle of Outtersteene Ridge was a small, carefully prepared attack by the British Second Army in French Flanders which opened the German retreat from the salient won in April 1918 in the Battle of the Lys. At 11 a.m. on 18 August, on a hot day and under cover of smoke, the 27th Brigade of the Scottish 9th Division struck from the north at the ridge between Meteren and Bailleul, and the 29th Division moved off behind it. The Germans were taken completely by surprise. In less than two hours the British stood on the crest of the ridge and beyond the village of Outtersteene, having taken almost 700 prisoners. The ridge rose barely a dozen or so metres above the surrounding plain, but it was the last high ground in the area that the Germans still held. Its loss threatened the whole German salient at Merville. The very next day the Germans began to withdraw, and by the beginning of September they had given up, without much fighting, almost all the ground taken in April, Bailleul and Mount Kemmel included.

Name and dates

The name “Action of Outtersteene Ridge” and the date of 18 August 1918 were fixed after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. It is the first engagement of “The Advance in Flanders”, the pursuit of the Germans withdrawing from the Lys, which the committee dates to 18 August – 6 September 1918. The British official history notes that the soldiers who fought in it called it the fight for Hoegenacker mill, after the mill on the crest of the ridge. The committee limited the action to a single day, but the British official history and the despatch of Field Marshal Douglas Haig link to it the completion of the attack on 19 August, when the 31st and 29th Divisions took strongpoints on the right flank. Facts, times and figures are given after the British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, volume IV, 1947) and Haig’s despatches.

Background

After the April offensive the Germans were left on the Lys in a flat, marshy salient which stretched from the La Bassée canal near Béthune to Bailleul and Mount Kemmel, with Merville and the Nieppe forest at its very tip. Throughout the summer German divisions held the front there under constant fire from the heights that had remained in Allied hands. Holding the salient made sense as long as Erich Ludendorff planned to return to Flanders. Since May a great attack on the British under the code name “Hagen” had been prepared there; it was to start at the beginning of August and end the war. The plan was buried by the Second Battle of the Marne. After the French, American and British counter-attack at Soissons on 18 July, German reserves taken from Flanders had to be thrown south, and on 20 July the front in Flanders went over to the defensive. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the army group from Albert to the sea, received permission to give up less important salients.

According to Haig’s despatch, from about 26 July the Germans removed from the salient the ammunition and stores gathered for the attack, and on the night of 4–5 August they began the first local withdrawals on its southern flank, near the Pacaut wood on the La Bassée canal. The British watched this closely, because the same German divisions and staffs had been on this front since April, and airmen photographed the whole foreground every week. The front of the salient was held by two British armies. In the south stood the Fifth Army of General William Birdwood with XIII Corps and the XI Corps of General Richard Haking; in the north, from the Nieppe forest to Ypres, the Second Army of General Herbert Plumer with XV, X, XIX and II Corps, in which two American divisions also served. The British official history admits that all these divisions had been through heavy fighting in the spring and had not yet recovered as fully as the divisions of the armies fighting on the Somme. Plumer ordered that in the event of a German withdrawal the rearguards were to be pressed without a break, the Germans were to be hindered in choosing new lines, and the retreat made as costly as possible.

When the Battle of Amiens began on 8 August, patrols and minor attacks were already under way in Flanders. The XV Corps of General Beauvoir De Lisle took the village of Vieux-Berquin on 11–17 August and advanced east of Meteren, but every step forward was hampered by the Outtersteene ridge. It rose to less than 40 metres above sea level, and the surrounding plain lay at a height of about 20 metres. Even so, it gave the Germans good observation over the low-lying country and was the last piece of higher ground they held here. As early as 10 August De Lisle ordered the 9th Division of General Hugh Tudor to prepare an attack. The same division had on 19 July retaken the village of Meteren, lost in April, in a carefully prepared attack.

Plan and forces

On the west the ridge was screened by the muddy Meteren Becque, a stream about three metres wide and hard to cross under fire. Near Meteren, however, the stream turned east and cut across the British line, so the ridge could be outflanked and attacked from the north, from the direction of the stream. The main attack was to be made by one brigade of the 9th Division, advancing south behind a creeping barrage with its right flank resting on the Meteren Becque. It was first to take Belle Croix farm and Hoegenacker mill near the crest, about a kilometre beyond the start line, then advance another half kilometre south, to Terrapin House, and swing its flank west to the old line near Gerbedoen farm. Then the 29th Division, temporarily commanded by Brigadier-General H. H. S. Knox, was to cross the stream and take the village of Outtersteene.

The plan relied on surprise and on smoke. The first salvo of the barrage was to be entirely smoke, and after that every fourth shell. The barrage moved forward 50 yards (about 45 metres) a minute. On the left an artillery brigade of the 36th Division was to screen the battlefield with smoke from the observers in Bailleul; on the right the artillery of the 29th Division fired oblique and enfilade fire. Six heavy artillery brigades of XV Corps, 57 guns and howitzers in all, were to shell selected points, and the machine guns of the 9th and 29th Divisions provided barrage fire. Zero hour was fixed for 11 a.m., in the expectation that the Germans would not expect an attack in the middle of the day. The price was that the infantry had to occupy the assembly trenches before dawn and sit in them for many hours. The trenches, as before the attack on Meteren, were covered with coconut-fibre mats painted with a black stripe, which from the air looked like a shadow.

On 16 August the British captured a German document with lessons drawn from the fighting for Meteren. The Germans attributed the British success to smoke and ordered that as soon as a smoke screen appeared, the British front line was to be shelled at once with artillery and machine guns. The plan was therefore changed at the last moment. Instead of opening fire a minute before zero hour and sending the infantry forward three minutes after it, the fire was to start a minute after zero, and the infantry was to leave the trenches after counting to ten from the first salvo.

The 9th Division’s attack was led by the 27th Brigade of Brigadier-General William Croft, rehearsed beforehand in the rear: the 6th Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, the 11th Battalion of the Royal Scots and two companies of the 9th Battalion of the Scottish Rifles, attached from the South African Brigade. From the 29th Division went two companies of the 1st Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and two platoons of Monmouthshire pioneers, followed by the 87th Brigade. The ridge was defended by the German 4th and 12th Divisions, the former with an attached reserve regiment of the 13th Reserve Division, and further south by the 52nd Division. Each held three battalions in the front line.

Course of the battle

The approach to the assembly positions went unnoticed. At 11 a.m. on 18 August the barrage began and the Scottish battalions left the trenches. An eyewitness wrote that the men “went off like a pack of hounds and were difficult to hold, which, it must be admitted, is a good fault”. The Scottish Borderers, nearest the stream, met stronger resistance, but the two other battalions met hardly any, because the Germans had been taken completely by surprise. All units reached the first objective according to plan, and shortly after noon they took the final objective. They signalled the capture of the ridge with rifle grenades giving blue smoke, and to the British airmen with red flares. Meanwhile two companies of the 1st Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers swung the flank back to the Meteren Becque, forming a front from Gerbedoen farm to Terrapin House.

The 87th Brigade of the 29th Division then crossed the stream. A company of the 1st Battalion of the Border Regiment passed through Outtersteene and dug in south of the village, and at about 1.30 p.m. the brigade was consolidating a line from the level crossing on the Hazebrouck–Armentières railway in front of Outtersteene to Terrapin House. The right flank was less fortunate. At 12.50 p.m. two companies of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers from the 86th Brigade attacked Lyndé farm and a position called “The Trucks”, railway wagons on a siding filled with road metal and turned into machine-gun nests. All the division’s artillery, however, was taken up with the 87th Brigade’s attack, and a preparation by trench mortars alone did not silence the German machine guns. The brigade commander broke off the attack so as not to waste men, and the 2nd Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment was pushed forward to cover the flank.

According to German regimental histories, quoted by the British official history, the Germans admitted that they had been surprised and their main line of resistance broken. The front had long been so quiet that no attack was expected, and patrols sent out during the night had noticed nothing. At 5 p.m. three reserve battalions made a counter-attack which British war diaries do not even mention. One battalion of the 49th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Division was practically destroyed in the fighting, with only 29 men returning, and the 62nd Regiment of the 12th Division lost two whole companies.

At 5 p.m. the next day the inner brigades of the 31st and 29th Divisions, the 12th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment and the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, attacked again, this time under cover of a barrage from six artillery brigades. In less than an hour and a half they took Lyndé farm and “The Trucks” and reached the road from Vieux-Berquin to Outtersteene, achieving all the objectives of 18 August.

Losses

The British official history states that on 18 August the British lost 671 killed, wounded and missing and took 697 prisoners. The attack of 19 August cost them 228 men and brought in 160 prisoners. Haig in his despatch spoke of about 900 prisoners taken on both days by the 31st, 29th and 9th Divisions. The official history does not give German losses in killed and wounded, but German accounts show that they were heavy.

Significance

The capture of Outtersteene ridge was a small battle with large consequences. Haig wrote that it hastened the German withdrawal from the Lys. The British official history judges that the success threatened to outflank the German salient at Merville, so on the night of 19–20 August the Germans began a new withdrawal in front of the Fifth Army. The British entered Merville as early as 19 August, and by 23 August the front had moved to a line from Le Touret on the La Bassée canal, past Merville and Neuf-Berquin, to Meteren. At the end of August, as the Germans in the south fell back to the Somme, the withdrawal spread to the whole salient: on 30 August the British occupied the abandoned Bailleul, and on 31 August Mount Kemmel. By 6 September the German salient on the Lys had disappeared and the front had returned to near the 1915 line, from Givenchy through Neuve-Chapelle and Nieppe to Ploegsteert and Voormezele.

The battle also showed how much the British army had changed. Divisions which in the spring had barely withstood the German onslaught were by the summer making small, precisely planned surprise attacks, with smoke, enfilade fire and close co-operation between artillery, infantry and aircraft. For the Germans the loss of the Lys salient was yet another sign that the spring offensive of 1918 had brought nothing lasting. The ground won in April at the cost of tens of thousands of killed and wounded was given up within three weeks, largely without a fight. British assessments in September said that the withdrawal from the Lys, which no one had convincingly explained to the German soldiers, had lowered morale and discipline in the divisions in Flanders.