First Battle of Kemmel Ridge

The First Battle of Kemmel Ridge was an attempt to decide the German offensive in Flanders with a single blow against the range of hills that barred the way from the Lys plain to Ypres and on towards the English Channel. After taking Bailleul, Meteren and Wytschaete, the Germans stood at the foot of the chain of heights running from Mont des Cats through Mont Noir and Mont Rouge to Kemmelberg, the highest and most advanced of them. On 17 April 1918 the Fourth Army of General Friedrich Sixt von Armin, supported by the right wing of the Sixth Army, attacked the hills from the south, while at the same time it struck from Houthulst Forest at the Belgian army north of Ypres. Both attacks, planned as the two arms of a pincer around the Ypres salient, ended in complete failure. The exhausted divisions of General Herbert Plumer’s British Second Army held their lines, and the Belgians at Merkem recovered everything they had lost in the morning and took almost eight hundred prisoners. On 18 April the Germans made only weak renewed attacks, and on 19 April the French 28th Division took over the defence of Mount Kemmel. The failure very nearly led the Germans to break off the whole offensive in Flanders.

Name and dates

The name “First Battle of Kemmel Ridge” and the dates 17–19 April 1918 were fixed after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee. It is one of the eight battles into which the committee divided the Battle of the Lys, and covers the fighting of the Second Army from Meteren to Wytschaete. The word “First” distinguishes it from the Second Battle of Kemmel Ridge of 25–26 April. The First Army’s fighting on the La Bassée Canal on 18 April was treated by the committee as a separate battle, the Battle of Béthune. The Belgians call the engagement of 17 April the Battle of Merkem (Dutch Slag om Merkem, French bataille de Merckem), the French count these days as part of the Third Battle of Flanders, and in German nomenclature they belong to the “Battle of Kemmel”, covering all the Fourth Army’s fighting from Messines to Scherpenberg. According to documents captured from the Fourth Army, the attack of 17 April bore the code name “Tannenberg”. The actual fighting lasted only on 17 and 18 April; 19 April was already a day of regrouping and of the relief of the British by the French.

Background

On 9 April the German Sixth Army broke through the front on the Lys, and a day later the Fourth Army took Messines Ridge. Within a week the Germans occupied Armentières, Merville and Neuve-Église, and on 15 April, at the end of the Battle of Bailleul, Bailleul itself and the Ravelsberg ridge as well. The British fell back to a line from Meteren through Dranoutre to Kemmel. To save troops, Plumer shortened the front: on the night of 15/16 April his units abandoned the rest of their 1917 gains on the Passchendaele ridge and occupied a line along the Steenbeek stream and on the Westhoek and Wytschaete ridges.

On 16 April, in fog, the Germans took two important points at the foot of the hills. In the morning they captured Meteren, taking prisoner a company of a New Zealand entrenching battalion, the largest loss of New Zealanders as prisoners in the whole war. At 5.30 a.m. three German divisions struck the 9th Division and took Spanbroekmolen and Wytschaete (PL), together with the great craters of the mines blown in June 1917. The British, however, enclosed the village from the west and north. Plumer, in agreement with General Félix Robillot, commander of the French II Cavalry Corps, which had just arrived to help, ordered a joint counter-attack for the evening. The French 28th Division, however, was not ready in time and did not attack, and the British battalions that went forward alone recovered neither Wytschaete nor Spanbroekmolen. An attack by the French 133rd Division at Meteren also got no further than the British line.

The same day, at a conference in Abbeville, Douglas Haig, Lord Alfred Milner and the Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, General Henry Wilson, urged Ferdinand Foch, for two days commander-in-chief of the Allied armies, to send reinforcements at once and to flood the area between Saint-Omer and Dunkirk. Foch went to Plumer’s headquarters, gave him an hour-long lecture on how Mount Kemmel should be defended, and promised one more French division, the 34th, which was sent north by lorry that night.

The range of hills was the key to the whole of Flanders. Kemmelberg, the highest point in West Flanders (154 m), looked from the German side like a squat pyramid rising from the plain. From its summit there was a view over the flat country as far as Ypres, and whoever held it commanded by observation the rear of the Ypres front and the roads to the west. The Supreme Army Command (OHL) considered a frontal attack on the hill itself too risky. The left wing of the Fourth Army (XVIII and X Reserve Corps and the Guard Reserve Corps) was therefore, together with the Sixth Army, to take above all Mont Noir and Mont Rouge west of Kemmel and so outflank the hill, while the Sixth Army was to strike between Bailleul and Strazeele towards Godewaersvelde. After the British and Belgian withdrawal from the Ypres salient, OHL also brought forward by three days the attack from Houthulst Forest planned for 20 April. In it the Guard Corps was to separate the Belgians from the British. Of the eight divisions earmarked for it, some were already busy following the retreating Allies and some had not yet finished detraining.

Forces

On the western wing, in front of Meteren and Strazeele, stood the 1st Australian Division of the British XV Corps and the 98th Brigade of the 33rd Division with two French chasseur battalions of the 133rd Division. Further east stretched the sector of General Alexander Hamilton-Gordon’s IX Corps. On the forward slopes of Mont Noir and Mont Rouge six exhausted brigades under General Cecil Nicholson of the 34th Division had dug in, in shallow trenches without wire but with the support of the horse artillery of the French 2nd and 6th Cavalry Divisions. Further on stood units of the 49th Division, and the sector in front of Kemmel itself, over 5 km long, was held by a thin line of the 178th Brigade and three brigades of the 19th Division. Behind them the slopes of the hill were manned by Lieutenant-Colonel H. D. Bousfield’s Kemmel Defence Force of about 900 men, made up of sappers, tunnellers and stragglers: a pioneer battalion, a field company of engineers, a machine-gun company and a trench mortar company. The position in front of the hill consisted of a continuous wired trench and a discontinuous support line, and behind them on the slopes were machine-gun nests, some of reinforced concrete, and observation posts. To the north General Alexander Godley’s XXII Corps, with the 9th Division in front of Wytschaete, covered Ypres. Almost all these divisions had fought on the Somme in March and, as Haig wrote to Foch, had been worn out twice within a single month. Behind them stood the French 28th and 133rd Divisions and Robillot’s cavalry.

North of Ypres, from the Ypres–Staden railway near Langemarck to the southern shore of Lake Blankaart, a front about 10 km long was held by the Belgian 10th and 3rd Divisions. The Belgians had taken over this sector recently, partly only in March, on the shell-cratered battlefield of 1917, where, unlike further north, there was no protective inundation. Their defence, however, was organised on the latest principles, in depth, with a forward line of outposts and strongpoints and the artillery placed far to the rear.

Against the Belgians the Germans threw the 58th Division, the 6th Bavarian Division with a regiment of the 2nd Naval Division and the 1st Landwehr Division, keeping the 19th and 83rd Divisions in reserve. At Meteren the 35th, 12th, 38th and 81st Reserve Divisions attacked, and on Mont Noir, Mont Rouge and Kemmel the divisions of the Guard Reserve Corps and of X and XVIII Reserve Corps. According to the Belgian historian Rob Troubleyn, at Merkem 23 German battalions faced seven Belgian ones.

Course

17 April: Merkem. At dawn the German artillery opened a violent fire on the whole Belgian front, and at 8 a.m. the infantry went in to the assault. On the right wing, around Bikschote (PL), between the railway and Draaibank, the 58th Division took several advanced outposts by 1 p.m., but before dark the Belgians recovered them with counter-attacks covered by very effective artillery, supported also by batteries of the British II Corps. On the left wing, by Lake Blankaart, the Germans broke the line at the hamlet of Kippe, about 1.5 km east of Merkem, and began to roll up the Belgian front to the south. Behind the 1st Landwehr Division and the naval regiment the 6th Bavarian Division entered the fight and pushed further. Around noon, according to Belgian accounts, the Germans had advanced more than a kilometre on a front two kilometres wide. Two strongpoints north of Draaibank still held out, however, and reserves and survivors from the front line occupied the rise south and south-west of the village. Their fire stopped the Bavarians, who according to the British official history were “a magnificent target”. From 9.45 a.m. the Belgians made counter-attacks south of the lake, largely on the initiative of young officers on the spot and in close co-operation with their intact artillery. At about 1.30 p.m. they retook Kippe, and then one lost position after another. The last of them, a concrete shelter at Jezuïetengoed, was taken in the evening by Corporal Van Os with four soldiers, who bombed it from the rear. At about 9.30 p.m. the Germans inside surrendered. The whole Belgian line was back in the defenders’ hands.

17 April: Meteren and Mont Noir. At 9 a.m. a sudden, violent bombardment fell on the sector of the 1st Australian Brigade. It passed over the front line but hit almost everything marked on the map behind it: villages, farms, crossroads, even some hedges. At 10 a.m. the German infantry advanced in short rushes in extended lines, but the fire of the 4th and 1st Australian Battalions stopped it at once. The attack was repeated two or three times and each time the artillery broke it up. The Australians felt so confident that they reported the attacks only in the evening. In front of the 98th Brigade the Germans, spotted in columns among the hedges less than a kilometre from the line, had to deploy and go to ground, and after several attempts withdrew at about 11 a.m. At 6 p.m., after a short bombardment, they attacked again and took a farm on the Meteren–Flêtre road in the French chasseurs’ sector, but were at once driven out by a Franco-British counter-attack.

In front of Mont Noir and Mont Rouge the German bombardment began at 6.25 a.m. It was known from prisoners that the general attack had been set for 8.10 a.m. The Germans assembling behind the light railway from Bailleul to Wulverghem were broken up by the artillery. Attacks at 8.30 a.m. on the 103rd Brigade and at 10.30 a.m., soon afterwards and at dusk on the 74th Brigade collapsed under fire. The Germans took only a copse with advanced outposts, from which two counter-attacks failed to dislodge them. In one of these the 148th Brigade lost 75 of its 203 men.

17 April: Kemmel. From 6 a.m. the German heavy artillery pounded the summit and lower slopes of the hill, but its shells fell behind the forward position. At 8.30 a.m. the German infantry began to come down in scattered lines from the low ridge at Lindenhoek, less than a kilometre from the British. Under fire some of the soldiers fell and others ran, but the attack was soon resumed, with men coming forward singly. At about 10 a.m. the bombardment shifted to the front line and support line, especially to Donegal Farm, where a gap about 600 metres long had been patched with sappers during the night. At 10.50 a.m. the Germans launched a general assault on the 178th Brigade and the 56th and 57th Brigades of the 19th Division. The fire of artillery, rifles and machine guns shooting from the slopes of Kemmel over the heads of their own infantry stopped them 400–500 metres short of the line. They broke in at only two places: they took Donegal Farm, where of the whole garrison one officer and eight sappers survived, and reached the huts at Aircraft Farm. By 12.30 p.m. the fighting died down. In the afternoon the gap was filled by two battalions of the French 99th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division, and battalions of the 22nd Infantry Regiment occupied Scherpenberg, the village of La Clytte and the area of Kemmel. An attack at 6 p.m. on the left wing of the 19th Division was easily beaten off. A French counter-attack on Spanbroekmolen collapsed after two hundred metres in a hurricane of machine-gun fire. During the night the French twice attacked Donegal Farm and at the second attempt killed or captured its garrison.

In the XXII Corps sector at Ypres there was relative quiet. The Germans spent the whole day feeling for the new British line, and their concentrations near Polygon and Pheasant Woods were broken up by the artillery. Godley decided not to try to retake Wytschaete until the French 28th Division was ready to co-operate. The Royal Air Force, although from 11 a.m. low cloud and mist hung over Flanders, flew 61 patrol and reconnaissance sorties and dropped more than 10 tons of bombs. The German air force was almost invisible.

Evening of 17 April. The commanders of X Reserve Corps, the Guard Reserve Corps and the Bavarian III Corps reported that without the relief of their exhausted units they could not attack further. In the evening and during the night the Fourth Army’s chief of staff, General Fritz von Loßberg, told the chief of staff of Rupprecht’s army group, General Hermann von Kuhl, over the telephone that the situation was very critical. Seven divisions of his army urgently needed relief, and without at least five fresh ones the idea of taking Kemmel and Mont Noir by an attack on a broad front had to be given up. Kuhl replied that he could give him no new divisions before 21 April and told him to select a good defensive line just in case. Erich Ludendorff postponed his decision until he saw how the Guard Corps fared at Ypres on 18 April. Rupprecht noted in his diary that only very slight gains had been made towards Kemmel, that everywhere else the attack had stalled, that the enemy had evidently been reinforced, “and our troops are very tired”.

On the Allied side, Henry Wilson proposed to Foch that day a gradual withdrawal of the armies in Flanders to the line of inundations from Aire through Saint-Omer to Veurne, but Foch refused. In the afternoon Foch, together with President Raymond Poincaré, visited King Albert I of the Belgians, and in the evening sent two more divisions north, the 154th and 39th. The commander-in-chief of the French army, Philippe Pétain, decided to combine all French troops in Flanders, that is the 28th, 34th, 39th, 133rd and 154th Divisions and the II Cavalry Corps, into the Army Detachment of the North (Détachement d’armée du Nord, DAN) under General Antoine de Mitry. On the morning of 18 April, before leaving Flanders, Foch left Plumer and Robillot a directive: the Kemmel–Mont Noir–Mont des Cats massif was to be held “at all costs”, and then, by close, successive attacks, the lower slopes were to be recovered and, if possible, Neuve-Église, Wytschaete and Bailleul.

18 April. The day was overcast and cold, with mist and passing showers. The fresh German 31st Division, which had relieved the 36th Reserve Division at Kemmel during the night, was to surprise the defenders of the hill with a sudden attack at 4.30 a.m., but according to the Fourth Army’s war diary its infantry was itself surprised on the way by violent fire of high-explosive and gas shells and did not reach its jumping-off positions in time. According to the British official history it may have been stopped by the German artillery itself. At about 8 a.m. groups of fifty to a hundred Germans tried to approach Donegal Farm, but the line did not break. False French reports of a breakthrough caused the British to abandon Aircraft Farm for several hours so that the French could shell it, but the bombardment never came. According to the French author A. Goutard, the British line was so thin that French patrols had difficulty finding it and sometimes ran into Germans having met almost no one on the way. At 3 p.m., in thickening mist, the Germans burst into the outposts north of Wytschaete and took 40–50 prisoners from the South African Brigade, but the main line held. An attack on the Belgian 4th Army Division at about 11 a.m. was repulsed after two hours of fighting. The Guard Corps at Ypres did not attack at all, because the 6th Bavarian Division proved unfit for battle after the previous day and the 83rd Division had not come up in time. It also turned out that the 58th Division had not crossed the Steenbeek at all, as it had reported on 17 April. At 3.45 p.m. Plumer issued relief orders: General Madelin’s French 28th Division was responsible for the defence of Mount Kemmel from the south and was to relieve the 19th Division during the night.

19 April. At 6 a.m. command of the Kemmel sector passed to General Madelin. The weather was very cold, with snow and hail. In the morning the Fourth Army informed the Guard Corps that the attack on the northern flank of the Ypres salient was being broken off and that its three reserve divisions were to move south for a new, methodically prepared attack by XVIII and X Reserve Corps on Kemmel. In the II Corps sector at Zonnebeke the Germans seized a post on a hill, which the British retook and then lost again in a snowstorm. General de Mitry arrived in Flanders that day and, after conferring with Plumer and Robillot, issued orders organising his forces. Foch reminded Haig in a separate note that Kemmel had to be held at all costs, as a position of capital importance for the defence of Ypres. By the morning of 21 April the French 133rd, 34th and 28th Divisions had taken over from IX Corps the whole front, about 10 km long, from Meteren to Spanbroekmolen. Of the British, only the Kemmel Defence Force and the IX Corps heavy artillery remained on the hill.

Casualties

The British official history gives no total losses for either side in this battle, only individual figures. According to it the Belgians lost 26 officers and 947 other ranks, although these figures may cover more than 17 April alone, and Belgian studies give 619 killed, wounded and missing for the day of the Battle of Merkem itself. According to the British official history the Belgians took 20 officers and 759 other ranks prisoner and 60 machine guns; Belgian sources speak of 779 or 789 prisoners and estimate total German losses at Merkem at about 1,900–2,350 men. The 6th Bavarian Division alone lost, according to the Belgian official history, 70 officers and more than 2,000 other ranks. The losses of the British, Australians and French at Kemmel and Meteren were not counted separately. The IX Corps artillery, shelled with high-explosive and gas shells, and the battalions on the northern slopes of Kemmel suffered particularly heavily. On 21 April the British Adjutant-General reported that since 21 March the losses of the British army in France had reached almost 250,000 men.

Significance

The British official history calls 17 April a day of “entirely successful resistance” and stresses that the measure of a defensive victory is not only the positions held but also the enemy’s intentions frustrated. The “Tannenberg” attack was meant to squeeze the Ypres salient from two sides and take the Flanders hills, and it ended in failure along the whole front. German regimental histories described how the waves of the attack were mown down by machine-gun fire from the flank, while the survivors lay all day in their jumping-off trenches under fire and under the bombs of British aircraft. Rupprecht’s chief of staff began to doubt the sense of the offensive, and on 20 April OHL decided to end the attack in Flanders and continue only with attacks on the wings, including Kemmel, to gain more ground.

For the Belgian army Merkem was its first such clear victory since the Battle of the Yser in 1914. Seven battalions beat off an attack by an enemy more than three times as numerous, and the British official history awards the Belgians the “palm” of the day. King George V sent them his congratulations, and Foch later decorated those who had taken part in the fighting. The success showed that the Belgian army, rebuilt after 1914, was ready for larger operations.

The battle also brought a change in the line. The French, whose reinforcements had reached Flanders slowly and reluctantly, took over the whole sector of the hills from Meteren to Kemmel and organised a separate army detachment there. Mount Kemmel passed from British to French hands just as the Germans were preparing a new, methodical attack on it, with fresh divisions and masses of artillery. The First Battle of Kemmel Ridge was therefore only a postponement. The Germans took the hill within a few hours six days later, on 25 April.