Battle of the Selle

The Battle of the Selle was one of the last great battles of the British Army on the Western Front. After the capture of Cambrai the Germans halted behind the small River Selle, a tributary of the Scheldt, on a new line of defence called the Hermann Position. On the morning of 17 October 1918 the British Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson, together with the American II Corps, crossed the river in fog south of Le Cateau, and by the evening had taken the town itself, near which in August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force had fought one of the battles of the retreat from Mons. On the night of 20 October the Third Army of General Julian Byng crossed the Selle by moonlight, and on 23 and 24 October three British armies in a joint attack pushed the Germans back by several to more than ten kilometres, up to the Sambre–Oise Canal, the Forest of Mormal and Valenciennes. According to the British official history the Allies took about 20,000 prisoners and 475 guns in this battle.

Name and dates

The British Battles Nomenclature Committee distinguished the “Battle of the Selle” on 17–25 October 1918. The British chronology of the war and the English Wikipedia give the same dates. The British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. V) describes the battle in two phases: the first, fought by the Fourth Army on 17–19 October, with the night crossing of the river by the Third Army on 20 October, and the second, the attack of three armies on 23–24 October. It treats the days from 25 October as a pause before the next offensive. The pursuit of 9–12 October, which brought the British to the Selle, still belonged to the Battles of the Hindenburg Line. Times are given according to British sources.

Background

At the beginning of October 1918 the British broke through the last lines of the Hindenburg system at the St Quentin Canal and at Beaurevoir, and on 8–9 October took Cambrai. The German Second Army of General Adolph von Carlowitz and the Seventeenth Army, which General Bruno von Mudra took over on 12 October, both part of the army group of the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht, fell back more than ten kilometres to the east. They halted behind the Selle, on the unfinished Hermann Position (German Hermann-Stellung), which ran from the Le Cateau area northwards towards Valenciennes and the Scheldt. A second position, Hermann II, rested further east on the Sambre–Oise Canal and the Forest of Mormal.

The Selle was a stream a few metres wide, but the Germans had dammed it in places so that it flooded the meadows in the valley. Behind it ran a railway embankment, and beyond that the eastern slope of the valley, cut by orchards and hedges. Le Cateau, a small town of ten to eleven thousand inhabitants before the war, with brick factories and deep cellars, was a natural bastion, and the station with its high embankment and sidings had been turned into a small fortress. The Germans valued this line for another reason too: in these days their government was exchanging notes on an armistice with President Woodrow Wilson. According to an order of one of the German artillery groups of 12 October, the supreme command considered that the chance of an armistice depended on stopping the battle, and it ordered: “The British must not cross the Selle on our front.” Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg warned the army groups that day that every retreat weakened the spirit of the army and Germany’s position in the negotiations.

From 11 to 16 October the British Fourth and Third Armies merely closed up to the river, built footbridges and seized small bridgeheads, often lost in counter-attacks. Field Marshal Douglas Haig decided that the Fourth Army, supported on its right flank by the French First Army of General Debeney, would attack first, south of Le Cateau, where the river was the weakest obstacle. The Third Army and the First Army of General Henry Horne were to join in a few days later. In the north, on 14 October, King Albert’s offensive began in Flanders, and on 16 October the German supreme command agreed to the withdrawal of the armies standing between Flanders and Douai to the Hermann Position.

Course

17 October. After a two-day bombardment the Fourth Army attacked at 5.20 a.m. on a front from the Bois d’Andigny to Le Cateau, about 16 kilometres long according to some accounts. The attack went in thick fog, which hid the crossings but also made it hard to keep direction and to cooperate with the tanks. On the right flank IX Corps (the 46th and 6th Divisions, with the 1st Division behind them) took the Belle Vue ridge, Andigny-les-Fermes and Regnicourt. In the centre the American 30th and 27th Divisions crossed the Selle near Molain and Saint-Souplet, took L’Arbre-Guernon and came out on the ridge above the valley, but most of their tanks got stuck or were destroyed. On the left flank XIII Corps had the hardest task. The sappers of the 50th Division threw plank footbridges across the river during the night, and its battalions fought all day for Le Cateau station and the railway junction on its southern edge, beating off two German counter-attacks. From the north the 66th Division attacked with the South African Brigade, which had crossed the Selle during the night and lay for three hours in the fog fifty metres from the Germans, waiting for the signal. By six in the evening Le Cateau, except for the eastern suburb, was in British hands. The British and Americans had broken deep into the first Hermann Position and stood on the ridge between the Selle valley and the Sambre valley, although nowhere had they reached the ambitious objectives of the day.

18–19 October. The Fourth Army pressed on against weaker resistance. On 18 October the 1st Division took Wassigny, surprising Germans eating and sleeping in the cellars, and the 50th Division advanced beyond Bazuel. On 19 October the right flank and centre of the Fourth Army came up to the Sambre–Oise Canal. Between 17 and 19 October the Fourth Army took 5,139 prisoners and 60 guns, most of them on the first day. The British official history judged, however, that the chance to reach the Sambre at once had been missed: there were no fresh troops and no fast pursuit arm, and the commanders kept to the routine pattern of dawn attacks behind a creeping barrage. On 19 October Marshal Ferdinand Foch issued his last general directive: the British armies were to advance eastwards, south of the line Pecq–Hal, and push the Germans into the inaccessible Ardennes massif, cutting their main lateral railway. The American II Corps of General George Read was withdrawn to rest, and on 20 October Haig thanked it in a message for the energy and courage of both divisions. It was their last battle of the war. Meanwhile in the north, following the retreating Germans, the First Army entered Douai on 17 October, and the Canadian Corps of General Arthur Currie entered the western part of Denain on the evening of 19 October.

20 October. At two in the morning, without artillery preparation, in rain and under a full moon, the Third Army crossed the Selle between Montay and Saulzoir. The battalions crossed on footbridges thrown over in the dark or by fording, and then attacked the ridges beyond the river behind a creeping barrage. By a quarter past seven in the morning the 62nd Division had taken Solesmes: because there were French civilians in the town, the artillery fired over it only with shrapnel, from which people could shelter in the cellars. By the evening the divisions of the Third Army, among them the Guards Division, had taken the heights on the eastern bank of the river despite German counter-attacks.

23–24 October. After a two-day delay needed to bring up ammunition, the Fourth, Third and First Armies attacked together, again at night: the Fourth Army at 1.20 a.m., the Third Army at two and at 3.20 a.m. The aim was to reach the second Hermann Position and to win positions from which six-inch guns could shell the railway junction at Aulnoye, beyond the Forest of Mormal, through which ran the most important railway line behind the German front. In broken country full of orchards, hedges and woods the British advanced in two days by eight to nine kilometres in some sectors. IX Corps reached the canal at Catillon and Ors, XIII Corps passed through the Bois l’Évêque and took Pommereuil and the large village of Bousies, and the Third Army reached Englefontaine and Le Quesnoy. The German Second Army reported that at the Forest of Mormal it was already standing on its last position and proposed a general retreat to the Antwerp–Meuse line. It was ordered to hold on and to fall back only step by step.

25 October. The last day of the battle according to the British Nomenclature Committee passed more quietly. Patrols of IX Corps entered Catillon and Ors, and near Le Quesnoy and Valenciennes the Germans fell back from the railway line. The British took Englefontaine in a night attack on 26 October.

Losses

According to the British official history, in the Battle of the Selle 24 British and 2 American divisions took about 20,000 prisoners and 475 guns from the 31 German divisions that stood in their way. Edmonds gives no total of British losses in this battle. By way of example, VI Corps lost about two thousand men on 20–26 October, while taking 3,252 prisoners. According to War Office figures quoted by Edmonds, the British Army lost about 121,000 killed, wounded and missing in the whole of October 1918. The German divisions were by now only shadows of their former selves: on 18 October Crown Prince Rupprecht wrote to the chancellor that a division rarely had more than three thousand infantrymen, and that the soldiers “surrender in masses at every attack”.

Significance

The Battle of the Selle showed that the German Army was no longer able to stop the British even behind a water obstacle and on a prepared position. The loss of the Hermann Position on the Selle coincided with the decisive days of the exchange of notes with Wilson and with the crisis in the German supreme command, which ended on 26 October with the dismissal of General Erich Ludendorff. The British stood on the Sambre–Oise Canal and at the Forest of Mormal, from where on 4 November they set out for the last great battle of the war, on the Sambre. At Le Cateau the wheel had come full circle: the town from which the British had retreated in August 1914 was retaken after more than four years.