Battle of the Sambre

The Battle of the Sambre, fought on 4 November 1918, was the last great battle of the British Army in the First World War. A week before the armistice three British armies, the Fourth, Third and First, attacked on a front about 50 kilometres long, from the Sambre–Oise Canal in the south to the area of Valenciennes in the north, while the French First Army advanced on their right flank. In a single day the British crossed the canal at Catillon, Ors and Landrecies, went through the great Forest of Mormal, and the New Zealanders climbed a ladder onto the ramparts of the fortress of Le Quesnoy. The poet Wilfred Owen was killed at the crossing at Ors. After this defeat the German Second Army no longer tried to make a stand on any prepared line, and on the night of 4/5 November it began to fall back to the Antwerp–Meuse position.

Name and dates

The British Battles Nomenclature Committee distinguished the “Battle of the Sambre” as a one-day battle fought on 4 November 1918. The British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. V) dates it the same way and describes the fighting from 5 November as a pursuit. Field Marshal Douglas Haig in his final dispatch used the name more broadly, for the whole fighting from 1 to 11 November, including the Battle of Valenciennes and the march on Mons. The French call the attack of their First Army on 4–5 November the second Battle of Guise. The first was fought in the same Oise valley in August 1914, during the Great Retreat (Battle of Guise). Some accounts also speak of the “Second Battle of the Sambre”, because the French also called the Battle of Charleroi of August 1914 the “Battle of the Sambre”. Times are given according to British sources.

Background

After the Battle of the Selle in the second half of October the British halted on the Sambre–Oise Canal and at the western edge of the Forest of Mormal. Here the Germans held the second line of the Hermann position (German Hermann-Stellung II). The canal, which north of Landrecies becomes the canalised Sambre, was according to Edmonds about 21 metres wide between the banks and 11–12 metres at the water surface, less at the locks, about two metres deep and with a muddy bottom. The Germans had flooded the low meadows at Ors, and the streams running parallel to the canal at Catillon were swollen. North of the canal lay the Forest of Mormal, partly cut down by the Germans for timber but thick with undergrowth in its untouched parts. Between the forest and Valenciennes the ground was cut by stream valleys, and the villages were surrounded by orchards and small fields enclosed by thick hedges and wire.

On 29 October British General Headquarters ordered the Fourth, Third and First Armies to resume the advance south of the Condé Canal, to break German resistance and move in the general direction of Avesnes–Maubeuge–Mons. The date was finally fixed for 4 November, once the Canadians had taken Valenciennes. Beyond the Forest of Mormal ran the railway through the junction at Aulnoye and Maubeuge, one of the main supply lines of the German armies on the Western Front. The ten-day pause allowed bridges, communications and fire plans to be prepared. The guns were brought into position gradually and most of them stayed silent until zero hour.

The British divisions were badly depleted: according to Edmonds those of the Third Army averaged about 8,000 men instead of 13,000, and the infantry battalions were at half establishment. The Tank Corps could put only a few dozen tanks into the attack, 37 according to the most commonly given figure. On the German side stood the Eighteenth Army of General Oskar von Hutier in the south, and the Second Army of General Adolph von Carlowitz and the Seventeenth Army of General Bruno von Mudra from the army group of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Their divisions were even weaker than the British. The Supreme Army Command nevertheless kept them on the Hermann position, so as not to weaken Germany’s position in the armistice negotiations and to gain time to evacuate the wounded and stores.

Course

Fourth Army: crossing the canal. The Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson had the hardest task. The night of 3/4 November was dark and rainy, and after midnight a thick fog filled the valley and lasted until nine. IX Corps of General Walter Braithwaite attacked at 5.45 a.m., together with the neighbouring French corps, and XIII Corps of General Thomas Morland at 6.15 a.m. Sappers carried footbridges behind the infantry, floating bridges on empty petrol tins, and rafts.

On the right flank the 1st Division crossed at the lock north of the reservoirs near Fesmy. The planks for the footbridges over a side stream proved too short, and German artillery hit the bridge-carrying parties, but a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment reached the canal bank and before 6.10 a.m. a bridge was already lying across the lock. Its commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Johnson, and the commander of the field company of sappers, Major George Findlay, received the Victoria Cross for that day. The battalions of the 1st Brigade, among them the Cameron Highlanders, crossed on four footbridges without heavy losses. At Catillon a battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment surprised Germans emerging from cellars after the barrage had passed and took 450 prisoners, losing four killed. According to Edmonds the losses of the whole 1st Division that day did not exceed five hundred men and were smaller than the number of prisoners it took.

The 32nd Division fared worse at Ors. South of the village the sappers built a floating bridge on petrol tins under fire, and a battalion of the Dorset Regiment crossed on it. North of Ors the 2nd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment and the 16th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers were unable to cross: one of the two footbridges was smashed after two platoons had gone over it, and the other was swept by machine guns. The losses exceeded two hundred men. Killed there were Lieutenant-Colonel James Marshall, commanding the Lancashire Fusiliers battalion, and Second Lieutenant James Kirk of the Manchester battalion, both awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, and also the 25-year-old Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, one of the most important English war poets. The surviving battalions crossed by the bridge at Ors and in the afternoon the division moved on, but according to Edmonds its losses reached about seven hundred men.

On the left flank the 25th Division took Landrecies, a small town on the Sambre where in August 1914 Haig’s I Corps had fought a night action during the retreat from Mons. A sapper jumped into the water and cut the leads of the charges, saving the bridge over the old bed of the Sambre, and men of the Worcestershire Regiment ran across the undamaged bridge over the canal. The main bridge into the town was blown up by a German officer who galloped up to the charge on horseback. Other units crossed on rafts made of petrol cans. By about 12.45 p.m. the British were already clearing the town of Germans, and the 75th Brigade took 838 prisoners and 27 guns. To the north the 50th and 18th Divisions fought their way through the orchards and villages in front of the Forest of Mormal, longest at Preux-au-Bois, and entered the forest. By the evening the Fourth Army held a bridgehead beyond the canal about 24 kilometres long and about 4 kilometres deep, and its corps had taken more than four thousand prisoners and about 80 guns.

Third Army: the Forest of Mormal and Le Quesnoy. The Third Army of General Julian Byng attacked at 5.30 a.m., and its right flank at 6.15 a.m. V Corps (38th and 17th Divisions) advanced through orchards and hedges and then along forest rides deep into the Forest of Mormal. The barrage in the forest consisted mainly of shrapnel, and the infantry were forbidden to follow it closely because the shells were bringing down treetops. A battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment of the 17th Division lost 13 of its 15 officers and 226 of its 583 men in the orchards, but after the first line had been broken resistance quickly weakened. Before dawn on 5 November the 38th Division stood on the eastern edge of the forest, and one of its patrols entered Berlaimont.

IV Corps was to surround Le Quesnoy, an old fortress with ramparts built on Vauban’s system, in which about 1,600 French civilians had remained. As the artillery could not shell the town, the New Zealand Division went round it from the north and south, while its 1st Brigade went on into the forest. By midday the fortress was surrounded. The garrison rejected successive calls to surrender, carried into the town by prisoners sent in and dropped from an aircraft. At about four in the afternoon, under cover of mortars, Second Lieutenant Leslie Averill of the 4th Battalion of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade climbed the single ladder onto the inner rampart, and the whole battalion followed him. From the north a party of the 2nd Battalion forced its way into the town over a partly destroyed bridge. Le Quesnoy capitulated, and 711 Germans were taken prisoner in the town itself. According to Edmonds the New Zealand Division took more than 2,450 prisoners that day, and the whole of IV Corps about 3,500 prisoners and 110 guns. The day was one of the most successful in the division’s history on the Western Front, but according to New Zealand historians it cost about 120 killed.

On the left flank of the Third Army, VI Corps (62nd Division and the Guards Division) and XVII Corps (24th and 19th Divisions) crossed the ravines of the Rhonelle and Petite Aunelle streams and took Frasnoy, Preux-au-Sart and both Wargnies villages, taking about two thousand prisoners in all. By the evening the Third Army was on its objectives along the whole front, and in several places beyond them.

First Army. The First Army of General Henry Horne, which had taken Valenciennes on 1–2 November, followed the Germans as they withdrew by night. XXII Corps crossed the Aunelle and took several villages, but on the heights beyond the river it was driven back by counter-attacks. The Canadian Corps of General Arthur Currie reached Onnaing and the outskirts of Rombies and Quarouble, where it was stopped by machine-gun fire from houses which could not be shelled with high explosive because of the inhabitants. The advance was resumed on the morning of 5 November.

The French. South of the British the French First Army of General Marie-Eugène Debeney attacked at 5.45 a.m. on the canal and in the upper Oise valley. The divisions next to the British were unable to get footbridges across the canal on the first day, and one of them crossed by improvised means. On 5 November the French entered Guise. According to Haig’s dispatch the French First Army took about 5,000 prisoners in this fighting.

Losses

The British official history gives no overall total for the one-day battle. The figures it quotes for individual corps show that on 4 November the British took about 10,000 prisoners and more than 200 guns; most accounts give the same number of prisoners. In his final dispatch Haig wrote that in the fighting from 1 to 11 November 26 British divisions defeated 32 German divisions, taking 19,000 prisoners and more than 450 guns. The sources give no overall British losses for 4 November. The canal crossing was the most costly: according to some accounts the 1st and 32nd Divisions lost about 1,150 men, and one battalion of the 17th Division lost about 40 per cent of its men in the orchards in front of the Forest of Mormal.

Significance

The Battle of the Sambre broke the last prepared German line on this sector of the front. On the evening of 4 November the right wing of the German Second Army was already ordered to retreat, and on the night of 4/5 November the whole Second Army began to fall back to the Antwerp–Meuse position. On 6 November the German Supreme Army Command extended this order to all the armies. The pursuit was hampered by torrential rain, destroyed bridges and mined roads, so the British were unable to turn the retreat into a rout. Even so the Guards Division entered Maubeuge on the night of 8/9 November, and the Canadians entered Mons on the morning of 11 November, where the British Expeditionary Force had fought its first battle in August 1914. The defeat on the Sambre coincided with the sailors’ mutiny at Kiel and with the last days before the German armistice delegation was sent to Marshal Ferdinand Foch. In British culture the battle is remembered above all as the day of Wilfred Owen’s death. His mother received the telegram announcing her son’s death on 11 November, as the bells in Shrewsbury were ringing to celebrate the armistice.