Battle of the Scherpenberg

The Battle of the Scherpenberg was the last attack of the German offensive in Flanders, called Operation “Georgette” by the Germans and the Battles of the Lys by the British. On 25 April 1918 the German Alpenkorps had taken Kemmelberg, the highest hill in that part of Flanders. Four days later the Fourth Army of General Friedrich Sixt von Armin tried to go further: to take the Scherpenberg and Mont Rouge hills behind it, descend to the plain near Poperinge and force the British to abandon the salient at Ypres. On the morning of 29 April seven German divisions attacked on a front of a dozen or so kilometres, from Locre to Zillebeke Lake. Only on the right wing, against the French, did they gain a momentary success: they took part of Locre and the col between the Scherpenberg and Mont Rouge, which caused alarm in the Allied staffs for several hours. By midday French reserves had thrown them back off the slope, and on the British sector the attack broke down under artillery and machine-gun fire. In the evening the Fourth Army’s chief of staff advised Erich Ludendorff to halt the offensive, and he agreed.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of the Scherpenberg” and the date 29 April 1918 were fixed after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. It was the last of the eight battles into which the committee divided the fighting on the Lys between 9 and 29 April. The British official history also describes, in the same chapter, the local fighting of 27 and 28 April near Voormezeele and the unsuccessful French attacks on Locre during the night and the evening of 30 April. The French called this fighting the Battle of Locre or counted it as part of the Battle of the Flanders Hills (bataille des Monts de Flandre), which in their view continued at lower intensity into May.

The Scherpenberg is a solitary conical hill about 125 metres high, lying about 3 kilometres north-west of Kemmelberg, between the villages of Locre and La Clytte. To its west rises Mont Rouge (Rodeberg), and beyond it Mont Noir (Zwarteberg) – the last heights before the flat plain stretching towards Poperinge and the coast. Times are given according to the British official history. French accounts say the attack began at about seven, which is probably due to a difference in time.

Background

The offensive on the Lys began on 9 April, four days after Operation Michael had been halted. In the first days the Germans broke through the Portuguese front, took Armentières, Merville, Messines and Bailleul, and came within a few kilometres of the railway junction of Hazebrouck. The British went through their worst crisis since 1914. On 11 April Douglas Haig issued an order to fight “with our backs to the wall”. General Herbert Plumer, commander of the British Second Army, gave up without a fight the ground won in 1917 at Passchendaele and shortened the front around Ypres. The Allied commander-in-chief, Ferdinand Foch, was long reluctant to release reserves for fear of a new blow towards Amiens, but from mid-April he sent French divisions to Flanders. They served in the Army Detachment of the North (Détachement d’armée du Nord) of General Antoine de Mitry, subordinated to Plumer in operational matters.

On 19 April the French took over from the British the sector including Kemmelberg. On 25 April, after a massive gas bombardment, the Germans took the hill and the village of Kemmel, capturing thousands of prisoners, and the next day they repulsed French and British attempts to recover the position. During the night of 26–27 April Plumer pulled his left wing back to a line closer to Ypres. On 27 April he issued a memorandum saying that every metre of ground must be fought for, but he also prepared confidential instructions in case of a further withdrawal. In them he stressed that the Scherpenberg – Mont Rouge – Mont Noir ridge must be held at all costs. If further attacks failed, he wrote, the enemy would have to give up or draw on fresh divisions from his general reserve. The same day Foch visited Plumer, de Mitry and the Belgian command and became convinced that the front would hold. He brought more French divisions into Flanders.

German plan

On 27 April the Fourth Army command issued an order to resume the attack on 29 April with the X and XVIII Reserve Corps. The objective was a line from Ypres along the road to Vlamertinghe, through Reninghelst (Reningelst) and Westoutre (Westouter (PL)) to Mont Rouge. The capture first of the Scherpenberg, and if possible also of Mont Rouge, was considered the condition of success. Seven divisions stood in the front line, from the south: the 22nd Reserve, the 4th Bavarian reinforced by units of the 10th Ersatz Division, the Alpenkorps, the 233rd, the 3rd Guards Division and the 13th Reserve, with four more behind them. The Alpenkorps, though short of officers, was still regarded as capable of attacking, and it was to take the Scherpenberg. The Fourth Army’s chief of staff, Fritz von Loßberg, had been promised fresh divisions by the army group of the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht if the attack succeeded. The divisions complained, however, of a shortage of ammunition, and up to 28 April the 4th Bavarian Division had received no gas shells at all.

There was no surprise. On 28 April the British and French noticed all the usual signs of an impending attack, and prisoners and deserters agreed that it would begin the next day in the Kemmel area. The Allied artillery prepared counter-preparation fire, which according to the British official history greatly discouraged the German battalions. To secure the junction of the armies, a “La Clytte defence force” was formed from the British 75th Brigade under the command of a French colonel. On the threatened sector stood the French 154th and 39th Divisions of General Félix Robillot’s corps, and to their north the British 25th, 49th, 21st and 6th Divisions of General Alexander Godley’s XXII Corps.

Course of the battle

At 3 a.m. on 29 April the Germans opened a gas bombardment on a front of about 16 kilometres, from the Douve stream south of Locre to Lake Zillebeke. Two hours of gas were followed by forty minutes of high-explosive fire, and at 5.40 a.m. the infantry went over to the assault. The clouds hung low, but visibility was somewhat better than on previous days. Large numbers of German aircraft appeared over the battlefield. The British shot down four, the infantry brought down a fifth, and they themselves lost one machine.

The French sector. The Germans were met by fire from artillery whose positions in the Grootebeek valley near Reninghelst they had not identified, and by heavy rifle fire. The Alpenkorps nevertheless pressed on regardless of losses. It broke through the line of a French battalion of the 414th Infantry Regiment, forced its way in at the junction of the 154th and 39th Divisions and took Locre, the Krabenhof farm north of the village and the col between Mont Rouge and the Scherpenberg, known to the British as Hyde Park. Alarming reports flowed to the staffs. At 8.50 a.m. the commander of the French 39th Division, General Massenet, telephoned the neighbouring British 25th Division to say that he had lost Mont Rouge and had nothing to retake it with, and soon afterwards reported that the Germans also held Mont Vidaigne. At about 10 a.m. Haig heard from Foch that the Scherpenberg had fallen too. His chief of staff had to tell Plumer that GHQ had no more troops for him and that he must decide himself on any withdrawal from the Ypres salient, but added that the situation “is never as bad or as good as first reports make out”. He was right. A British brigade commander sent to reconnoitre reported that there were neither French nor Germans on Mont Rouge. The Scherpenberg also remained in Allied hands.

Meanwhile de Mitry set his reserves in motion and, at Plumer’s request, gave Robillot a fresh division standing near Abeele for a counter-attack on Locre. Before it entered the fight, local reserves had settled the matter. Units of the 154th and 39th Divisions attacked the col from both sides, met on it after hard fighting and by 1.15 p.m. had pushed the Alpenkorps off the slope into a wood north-east of Locre. The Germans held part of the village but suffered heavy losses. According to the history of the Leib Regiment, which fought as part of the Alpenkorps, the regiment left almost half its strength killed and wounded on the field that day. At about 5 p.m. another French counter-attack pushed the Germans further from the col.

The British sector. On the front of the 25th and 49th Divisions and the South African Brigade the attack ended in disaster. The German infantry advanced across open ground and, as the official history puts it, offered an exceptionally good target. A feebly renewed attack at 5.15 p.m. broke down under fire from every kind of weapon, and the British pushed field guns forward to within a few hundred metres of the front line. Things were harder further north, near Voormezeele, where all three battalions of the 89th Brigade of the 30th Division withstood very heavy shelling, including from 203 mm howitzers. Two companies on the left flank were surrounded and taken prisoner, and the brigade drew back its left flank to the main line of resistance. The Germans did not follow, and an evening attack was stopped by rifle and artillery fire. Attacks on the 21st Division’s sector, among other places at French Farm by Zillebeke Lake, also failed. The 6th Division and II Corps were not attacked, and the attack on the Belgian right wing near Langemarck failed completely. The XXII Corps reserves were not needed.

At about 1 p.m. Haig visited Plumer and found the situation under control. He also went to see de Mitry, whom he had not met since the First Battle of Ypres in 1914. The French general told him that when he had reported his difficulties to Foch that morning, Foch had given him a lecture on strategy over the telephone, “as always”.

Ludendorff’s decision

On the German side, as early as about 7 a.m. the Fourth Army knew that the infantry was meeting stiff resistance from the outset. The Germans were surprised that the Allied artillery, which had replied weakly to the preparatory bombardment, opened heavy and accurate fire from positions unknown to them as soon as the infantry moved off. Before 10 a.m. Ludendorff had the impression that the attack was “not developing favourably” and was considering whether to break it off. At 11 a.m. Loßberg reported to him that the troops everywhere were meeting a very solid defence organised in depth, with numerous machine-gun nests and artillery also deployed in depth. He still wanted to renew the attack in the afternoon with the 233rd Division, the Alpenkorps and the 4th Bavarian Division towards Millekruisse, La Clytte and the Scherpenberg. The 233rd Division was stopped by fire, the Alpenkorps did not move at all, without even informing corps headquarters, and the Bavarian official history states only that “the offensive power of the German troops was exhausted”.

At 8.35 p.m. Loßberg proposed to Ludendorff that the offensive be halted, and Ludendorff accepted the advice. At 10.20 p.m. the Fourth Army command ordered that the attack should not be resumed on 30 April and that the present front be held. The next day Loßberg judged that ten to twelve fresh divisions would be needed to take Poperinge, Mont Rouge and Mont Noir, and since there were none, the Fourth Army must go over to the defensive. The army group’s chief of staff, General Hermann von Kuhl, later wrote that the capture of Kemmelberg had been a great feat, but the goal had not been reached: the decisive hills at Cassel and Mont des Cats had not been taken, the Channel ports had not been reached, and the second great offensive had not brought a decision.

During the night of 29–30 April the French 31st Division relieved the exhausted 154th Division and retook Locre. One company of the 81st Infantry Regiment even broke into the buildings of the hospice south of the village and took nearly a hundred Germans from several divisions prisoner there, but, left on its own, it had to withdraw. On the evening of 30 April General Robillot renewed the attack. A British battalion of the 25th Division twice reached its objective line, but the French did not advance under heavy fire and it had to fall back. The British official history calls this counter-attack the last expression of Franco-British co-operation in Flanders in the spring of 1918. Local fighting for the Locre hospice and the surrounding farms continued into May.

Losses

The losses of the battle of 29 April alone cannot be separated from the figures for the whole offensive, but all accounts agree that the Germans suffered far heavier losses than the defenders. For the whole of the fighting on the Lys from 9 to 30 April the British official history gives 82,040 killed, wounded and missing, and about 76,300 after deducting the missing who returned to their units. French losses in Flanders are estimated at about 30,000–35,000, and German losses, depending on the source, at 86,000–109,000 men. From the start of the spring offensive on 21 March to 30 April the British lost about 240,000 men, the French about 92,000, and the Germans, according to General Ernst Kabisch, about 348,000.

Significance

The Battle of the Scherpenberg closed Operation “Georgette”. In three weeks the Germans had driven a dozen or so kilometres into the British front and taken Armentières, Bailleul and Kemmelberg, but they reached neither Hazebrouck nor the hills at Cassel, did not force the British to abandon Ypres and came nowhere near the Channel ports. Instead they were left in a shallow salient on the Lys plain, under fire from three sides, with exhausted divisions. In his memoirs Ludendorff stated briefly that in view of the enemy’s strength the Supreme Command had “stopped the attack”. On 29 April it had already set the date of the next blow, this time against the French on the Aisne, which was to draw French reserves away from Flanders before a new attempt to defeat the British.

For the Allies the battle was proof that they had learnt to stop German attacks. Defence in depth, accurate artillery and swift counter-attacks by local reserves halted an attack that had still seemed dangerous in the morning. The offensive had, however, cost the British so much that Haig had to break up several divisions and send others to quiet sectors of the French front. Kemmelberg remained in German hands until August 1918, when the Germans themselves began to withdraw from the Lys.