Fifth Battle of Ypres

The Fifth Battle of Ypres was the first attack of the newly formed Flanders Army Group, made up of the Belgian Army, the British Second Army and several French divisions under the command of the King of the Belgians, Albert I. At 5.30 a.m. on 28 September 1918, in pouring rain, it struck the weak German Fourth Army east of Ypres. On that single day the Allies took Passchendaele Ridge, Houthulst Forest and the Gheluvelt plateau, almost all the ground the British had fought over for more than three months in 1917 and had given up without a fight in April 1918. The next day the Belgians recovered Diksmuide and the British Messines and Wytschaete. Then the attack bogged down in the mud of the shell-torn battlefield: the roads became choked, the artillery could not keep up, food for the Belgian and French divisions had to be dropped from aircraft, and the Germans had time to bring up fresh divisions. On the evening of 2 October General Herbert Plumer halted the Second Army’s attack.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Ypres, 1918” and the dates 28 September – 2 October were given after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. It is the fifth of the battles fought around Ypres during the war, after those of 1914, 1915 and 1917 and after the April Battle of the Lys, sometimes called the Fourth Battle of Ypres, hence its popular name. The Belgians and the French speak of the Battle of the Flanders Ridges (French Bataille des Crêtes de Flandre), and the British chronology of the war gives both names, though it ends the Battle of the Flanders Ridges only on 10 October. For the British the battle ended on 2 October with Plumer’s order; the French and Belgians tried to attack on 3 and 4 October as well. The course of events, times and figures are given chiefly after the British official history (James Edmonds and Robert Maxwell-Hyslop, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, volume V, 1947), which also summarises the account of the Belgian Ministry of War and the French official history, and after the dispatch of Field Marshal Douglas Haig.

Background

Since 1914 Ypres had been the symbol of Britain’s war, and the flooded front on the Yser with the ruins of Diksmuide, which the Germans had taken on 10 November 1914, the symbol of Belgium’s. In the Third Battle of Ypres in the autumn of 1917 the British, at the cost of enormous losses, had taken the Gheluvelt plateau and Passchendaele Ridge. In the spring of 1918, during the German offensive on the Lys, they lost Messines Ridge, and to shorten the front, in mid-April they gave up Passchendaele and fell back to a line only a few kilometres from Ypres. Once again the Germans looked down on the town from the surrounding heights.

In the summer the situation was reversed. After the action of Outtersteene on 18 August the Germans began to leave the salient they had won in April; on 31 August they gave up Mount Kemmel, and by 6 September they stood on the Wytschaete–Messines ridge and before Armentières. Marshal Ferdinand Foch planned a series of attacks along the whole front for the end of September, from the Meuse to the sea, to be launched one after another within a few days. Flanders was their northern wing. On 9 September a conference at Cassel agreed that the attack would be directed by King Albert, who had so far guarded the independence of his army and had not wanted to expose it to heavy losses. Now he agreed to take command of the Belgian Army, General Herbert Plumer’s British Second Army and French divisions from the reserve. The French general Jean Degoutte, until then commander of the Sixth Army, became chief of staff of the Flanders Army Group. Haig agreed to the plan and placed all the Second Army’s artillery and ten of its divisions under the King’s orders.

The Army Group’s first instruction, signed by Degoutte “in the name of the King” on 19 September, ordered it first to take the line from the Kruiseecke ridge across Passchendaele Ridge to Klerken, and then to push on without delay deeper into Belgium, towards Roeselare and Ghent. The British were to cover the Belgians’ right flank and reach the Lys between Armentières and Kortrijk. Against Plumer’s view, Degoutte decided that the Messines–Wytschaete ridge need not be attacked head-on; it was enough to outflank it. Preparations were made in secret: movement only by night, new batteries silent until zero hour, and no increase in air activity over the front. Officers of the British divisions studied the ground on a large terrain model at Plumer’s headquarters in Cassel. The British admiral Roger Keyes, commander of the Dover Patrol, prepared to occupy Ostend from the sea should the Belgians encircle it from the land.

Forces

For the attack the Army Group had 12 Belgian, 10 British and 6 French divisions, with the French Cavalry Corps in reserve. The assault was made by nine Belgian divisions, seven of them in the front line, on a front of about 14 kilometres from the British left flank to Lake Blankaart, and by two corps of the British Second Army, General Claud Jacob’s II Corps (the 9th (Scottish) and 29th Divisions) and General Herbert Watts’s XIX Corps (the 35th and 14th Divisions), on a sector of just under 7.5 kilometres south of the Ypres–Zonnebeke road. Behind them the 36th (Ulster) and 41st Divisions stood in reserve. Further south, X and XV Corps were only to send out strong patrols, exploit any weakening of the enemy and shell the Messines ridge. The 28th Brigade of the 9th Division included a battalion from the Dominion of Newfoundland. The air arm supported the attack with 16 squadrons of the RAF’s II Brigade with the Second Army and 8 squadrons of No. 5 Group, lent to the Belgians by the Dover Patrol.

Facing them was General Friedrich Sixt von Armin’s Fourth Army, part of the army group of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. On the Second Army’s 26-kilometre front it had little more than five divisions, of which the British official history considers only one to be good, and opposite the Belgians three and part of a fourth. Two more stood in reserve. The German position was not a chance line where the fighting had come to rest but a chosen defensive line, based on concrete shelters, dugouts and wire entanglements from 1917. Its real strength was the ground itself: the heights, from which the whole Ypres salient could be seen, and the belt of devastated land without a trace of green, full of water-filled craters, remnants of trenches and wire. Behind it the Germans had prepared two rear positions, the Flandern I position from the Lys near Wervik through Moorslede to the north, and the Flandern II position from Menen through Ledegem towards Roeselare.

Course of the battle

28 September. At 2.30 a.m. the Belgian artillery began a three-hour preparation with high-explosive and gas shells. The British, contrary to the Belgian practice, did not fire before the attack, judging that unobserved fire in the dark would only betray their intentions. At 5.30 the whole line advanced behind a creeping barrage. Heavy rain fell, stopping only in the afternoon. The German artillery replied weakly, and the infantry’s resistance was, as the British official history puts it, “half-hearted”. By 11.30 the 9th (Scottish) Division had taken the ridge from Polygon Wood to Broodseinde, and in the afternoon its 27th Brigade occupied the village of Becelaere. The 29th Division reached Hooge as early as 6.30, and at 10.15 the 4th Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment recaptured Gheluvelt (PL), where in October 1914 the 2nd Battalion of the same regiment had stopped the Germans in the Battle of Gheluvelt. XIX Corps took the Bluff above the Ypres–Comines canal, and the 35th Division reached the ruins of Zandvoorde. The British advanced 7–10 kilometres and, as Haig wrote, went far beyond the furthest lines they had reached in the battles of 1917. Between 10 and 11 a.m. the Belgians passed through four of the six German defence lines, and after an hour’s pause, against growing resistance, they took Zonnebeke, Poelcappelle, Passchendaele and most of Houthulst Forest. In the south, near Wytschaete and Messines, X and XV Corps pushed onto the slopes of the ridge, and in the evening a patrol of the 30th Division entered Messines. The only painful British loss was in the RAF, which lost 26 aircraft in low-level attacks.

29 September. During the night the Germans abandoned the Messines ridge. Rupprecht noted in his diary that according to a report from the Fourth Army its soldiers “would no longer withstand a serious attack”, and the German official history later called the abandonment of the ridge “painful” but unavoidable. In the morning the 34th Division passed through Wytschaete as far as the Ypres–Comines canal, the 30th Division occupied Messines, and the 31st Division went through Ploegsteert Wood. In the north the 9th (Scottish) Division, with the Newfoundlanders in the front line, together with the Belgian 8th Division took the Keiberg spur and at 2.30 p.m. broke through the Flandern I position, while the 36th (Ulster) Division occupied Terhand and Dadizele. The Belgian right took Moorslede and broke into the Flandern I position about three kilometres from Roeselare, and the Belgian left, by a wide envelopment from the south and rear, took Diksmuide, which, as the British official history writes, was as much a symbol for the Belgians as Ypres was for the British. Despite these successes the day was, as the British official history admits, disappointing. After the night’s downpour the troops struggled to reach their start positions, the heavy guns got stuck on the ruined roads, and the 29th and 35th Divisions, almost without artillery support, came to a halt before fresh troops at Kruiseecke and Zandvoorde. Degoutte pressed for the Second Army not to go east but to cover the line of the Lys, and in the afternoon Plumer issued the corresponding order. The French cavalry, which was to advance on Tielt, could not get through the belt of craters.

30 September – 2 October. It rained all night and all of 30 September. The roads in the rear turned into jams of immobilised cars, lorries and wagons. The pursuit group of General Massenet, formed by Degoutte from two Belgian divisions and the French VII Corps, did not move because its troops received neither ammunition nor food in time. The Belgians took the last part of the ridge with Westrozebeke and Staden, and the British found Warneton and Comines abandoned. But before the Flandern I position at Gheluwe and Wervik and before the Flandern II position the Germans, reinforced by six fresh divisions, were already putting up stiff resistance. On the evening of 1 October word came that the forward Belgian and French divisions had eaten all their food supplies. The next day eighty Belgian and British aircraft dropped them 15,000 rations, about 13 tonnes, within four hours. For its time it was an exceptional operation to supply troops from the air. On 1 October the 9th (Scottish) Division briefly broke through to Ledegem, but without support from its neighbours had to give it up. On 2 October the British attacks at Gheluwe and Menen and the night attack of the French and Belgians on Roeselare achieved nothing. In the evening Plumer, after agreement with Haig’s headquarters, ordered the ground gained to be consolidated and no attacks to be made until further notice. On 3 October the French 164th Division advanced about another 3 kilometres, but the attack renewed the next day failed.

Losses

According to the British official history, from 28 September to 3 October the British lost 303 officers and 4,392 other ranks, and took 4,672 prisoners and about a hundred guns. According to figures from the Belgian Ministry of War the Belgian Army lost about 2,000 killed and about 10,000 wounded and sick. The Flanders Army Group as a whole took about 10,000 prisoners, 300 guns and 600 machine guns. Belgian studies give about 6,000 prisoners and 150 guns for the Belgians alone. German losses are not known.

Significance

The Fifth Battle of Ypres showed how much the war had changed. In two days the Allies recovered all the heights around Ypres, which had been fought over for years since 1914 and for which hundreds of thousands of casualties had been paid in 1917. The German Fourth Army, throughout the war one of the toughest, gave way almost without a fight. News of the defeat in Flanders reached the German Supreme Army Command in the same days as reports of the collapse of Bulgaria and of the attacks on the Meuse, in the Argonne and on the Canal du Nord, and was one of the reasons why on 28 and 29 September Erich Ludendorff concluded that Germany had to ask for an armistice. For the Belgians it was the first great attack since 1914 and the first step towards the liberation of their country.

The battle also exposed the limits of pursuit at the time. The battlefield, which the Allied infantry crossed in a few hours, held the Allies up longer than German resistance did: the roads across the crater belt could not bear the traffic of artillery and supplies, and Degoutte’s staff had not provided supplies for the troops it was sending in pursuit. The cavalry never came into action. The British official history also points to the staffs’ lack of experience in mobile warfare and the Army Group’s poorly worked-out orders. The Flanders Army Group’s next attack began only on 14 October and within a few days liberated Ostend, Bruges and much of the Belgian coast.