Race to the Sea

The Race to the Sea is the name given to a series of manoeuvres and battles which in the autumn of 1914 shifted the Western Front from the Aisne all the way to the North Sea coast. When, after the Battle of the Marne, the Germans dug in on the heights above the Aisne and frontal attacks failed, both sides began moving corps to the west and north to turn the enemy’s open flank. Each time they ran into troops which the other side had brought there for the same purpose. The clash ended without a decision, the new stretch of front froze into trenches, and the attempt to outflank moved some tens of kilometres further north. In five weeks the fighting passed through Picardy, Artois and French Flanders, and at the same time the Germans took Antwerp. In mid-October the last gap was filled by the Belgian army and the British. There was no longer an open flank, and the war in the west entered the phase of great battles for a breakthrough.

Name and dates

The name “Race to the Sea” (French course à la mer, German Wettlauf zum Meer, Russian bieg k moriu) has become universal, although it describes these events wrongly. Neither side was racing for the coast. Both wanted to turn the enemy’s northern flank and strike at his rear, and they reached the sea because that was where the room for further attempts ran out. Historians have long pointed this out. The British scholar of the German army Jack Sheldon writes of a period “misnamed” the Race to the Sea, and French studies use the more apt term course au débordement, the race to outflank. The German official history described the successive attempts to outflank without a common name.

The limits of the race are conventional and every author sets them differently. The British official historian James Edmonds gave the dates 15 September – 15 October 1914 in one volume and 17 September – 19 October in another. The French general Palat entitled his volume on this fighting “La course à la mer (14 septembre – 15 octobre 1914)”. Hew Strachan adopts the dates 15 September – 17 October, and Robert Doughty 17 September – 17 October. Some French studies extend the “Race to the Sea” over the whole autumn, until the fighting in Flanders died down in November and December.

On this page we adopt the dates 15 September – 19 October 1914. The first is the day on which British nomenclature ends the Battle of the Aisne and the German Chief of Staff began planning to move an army to the western flank. The second is the start of the First Battle of Ypres, in which the war of manoeuvre gave way to a German attempt to break through an already continuous front. Some of the battles counted as the last stage of the race, fought at La Bassée, Armentières and Messines and on the Yser, went on into November.

Background: the open flank

In mid-September 1914 the front ran unbroken from the Swiss border through Lorraine, the area around Verdun and Reims to the Aisne and the Oise near Compiègne. To the west and north of the Oise, as far as the English Channel, stretched an area almost empty of troops. Cavalry of both sides roamed it, and it could be defended only by French territorial divisions made up of older reservists. Whoever first assembled a strong army there could turn the enemy’s flank.

On the German side there had just been a change of command. On 14 September the Kaiser removed Helmuth von Moltke, broken by the defeat on the Marne, and command of the army passed to the Prussian Minister of War, General Erich von Falkenhayn. The change was kept secret until November. Falkenhayn at first considered a further retreat and regrouping, but according to some historians he abandoned this plan when his staff judged that another withdrawal would break the troops’ morale. He chose to move the Sixth Army of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, Rupprecht, from Lorraine to the right flank, next to Alexander von Kluck’s First Army. At the same time the armies in the centre were to attack in order to pin the French to their positions. One of these attacks, south of Verdun, gave the Germans Saint-Mihiel in the second half of September and a salient on the west bank of the Meuse.

The French Commander-in-Chief, General Joseph Joffre, thought the same way. Already during the fighting on the Aisne he was moving corps taken from Lorraine and from the centre to his left flank. In this contest the French had the advantage of interior lines. Their railways were intact and ran in an arc behind the front, whereas the German corps had to use the lines in Belgium and northern France, destroyed during the August advance and the retreat from the Marne. Yet the Germans also arrived in time, because they travelled a shorter route, and their opponent lacked the reserves to exploit every gap. For five weeks both sides reached each new place at roughly the same time.

First stage: between the Oise and the Somme

The first outflanking attempts began right next to the Aisne battlefield. From 17 September the left wing of the French Sixth Army attacked along the Oise towards Noyon, but it ran into Kluck’s right wing and after a few days of fighting came to a standstill. Meanwhile, to its left, Joffre was assembling a new Second Army. He gave command to General Noël de Castelnau, who arrived with his staff from Lorraine, where he had earlier defended Nancy. The army comprised corps handed over by the Sixth Army and brought from the east, and its flank was covered by General Louis Conneau’s cavalry corps. The troops detrained around Amiens.

On 22 September the Second Army advanced eastwards on a line from Lassigny through Roye to Chaulnes. Thus began the First Battle of Picardy. Facing it were the German II Corps, just arrived from the Aisne, and IX Reserve Corps, and in the following days XVIII Corps, taken from the front at Reims. German counter-attacks stopped the French and took back part of the ground they had won. By 26 September both sides were exhausted, and the front between the Oise and the Somme froze on a line from near Ribécourt through Lassigny and Roye.

Around 21 September Falkenhayn decided to concentrate the Sixth Army around Amiens and strike with it westwards, towards the coast. The French attack in Picardy, however, forced him to throw its corps into battle as soon as they arrived. South of the Somme he sent XXI Corps and I Bavarian Corps, and north of the river II Bavarian Corps and XIV Reserve Corps. The latter clashed with the French around Albert, in a battle which British nomenclature dates to 22–25 September and most studies to 25–29 September. The Germans took Bapaume on 26 September and Thiepval the next day, but they did not capture Albert. At the end of September the front froze on the heights from Maricourt on the Somme through Fricourt to Thiepval. On this line the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme was to begin in July 1916.

Second stage: Artois

North of Albert, between the Somme and the coalfield around Lens and Douai, there was still no front. At the end of September Joffre formed another group there under General Louis de Maud’huy, initially subordinated to Castelnau. It assembled around Arras, and its core was X Corps, brought by rail. On 28 September Falkenhayn ordered Rupprecht to attack at Arras. The Guard Corps and IV Corps, taken from the Aisne, and I Bavarian Reserve Corps from Lorraine were heading for Artois, and further north German cavalry corps were on the move.

The First Battle of Artois, dated 27 September – 12 October, began with the gathering of forces. On 1 October the Germans forestalled a French attack and struck between Arras and Douai. In the following days Rupprecht shifted the weight of the fighting to the north of the town. On 4 October the Germans entered Lens and climbed Vimy Ridge, and a gap opened on the French flank. Maud’huy and Castelnau concluded that they had to fall back. Joffre forbade a retreat, removed Maud’huy’s group from Castelnau’s authority and turned it into an independent Tenth Army, formally created on 5 October. As his deputy, responsible for coordinating all the armies north of the Oise, he appointed General Ferdinand Foch, until then commander of the Ninth Army. Foch went north at once and kept telling the commanders that retreat was out of the question. By 6 October the crisis was over. Arras remained in French hands, although the front stopped just beyond its eastern suburbs, and the Germans took the Lorette spur. Local fighting continued until 12 October.

Meanwhile German cavalry was pushing out onto the plain of French Flanders, where only weak French detachments stood. IV Cavalry Corps passed through Ypres on 7 October, through Bailleul the next day, and reached Hazebrouck. There it was stopped by French territorial divisions and cavalry, so it fell back to the hills around Bailleul. South of the river Lys further German cavalry corps tried to break through between La Bassée and Armentières, but they were stopped by the French cavalry and the arriving XXI Corps. On 6 October Falkenhayn halted the German attempts to break through in Picardy and directed fresh forces still further north.

Antwerp and the Belgian army

The race was run in the shadow of the struggle for Antwerp. Since August the Belgian army had based itself on the forts of this fortress and with its sorties had tied down considerable German forces in Belgium. After the Marne Falkenhayn decided that it had to be eliminated before it threatened the communications of the armies fighting in France. On 27 September the troops of General Hans von Beseler began the siege of Antwerp, and from the next day heavy mortars were smashing the forts of the outer ring. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, arrived in the city on 3 October and sent the British Naval Division to help. From 6 October the British 7th Division and 3rd Cavalry Division also landed at Zeebrugge and Ostend, forming the IV Corps of General Henry Rawlinson.

The help came too late. On the night of 6/7 October King Albert I led the field army out of the fortress to the west bank of the Scheldt. On 9 October the Germans entered the city, and on 10 October the fortress capitulated. For the course of the race, however, what mattered most was that the Belgian army survived. Covered by Rawlinson’s divisions and a French brigade of naval fusiliers, it withdrew along the coast and on 14–15 October took position on the river Yser, between Nieuport and Diksmuide. Beseler’s corps, pursuing it, took Ostend on 15 October and reached the sea. Rawlinson, meanwhile, fell back from Ghent and on 14 October took position at Ypres.

Last stage: Flanders

At the beginning of October the British army joined the race. Field Marshal John French proposed to Joffre that the British Expeditionary Force return to the Allied left flank, closer to the Channel ports through which its supplies came. Joffre, despite fears that French transport would be blocked, agreed. The first units left the trenches on the Aisne on the night of 1/2 October. The move was carried out at night and in secret. II Corps detrained around Abbeville on 8 and 9 October, III Corps around Saint-Omer on 10 and 11 October, and I Corps, which left the Aisne last, did not finish detraining until 19 October.

French and Foch agreed that the British and French would strike together eastwards and outflank the Germans north of Lille. The British went into battle one after another, straight from the trains. On 10 October the Battle of La Bassée began, in which General Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps slowly advanced across the waterlogged plain east of Béthune. On 12 October General Edmund Allenby’s Cavalry Corps took the Mont des Cats, opening the Battle of Messines. On 13 October General William Pulteney’s III Corps attacked at Meteren, which began the Battle of Armentières. In the following days the British took Bailleul, crossed the Lys and on 17 October entered Armentières, which the Germans had abandoned.

The gains, however, were small, and the enemy was growing stronger. On 12 October, after a three-day bombardment, the French garrison of Lille capitulated, and the city which the Allies had meant to outflank became a German base. Infantry corps of the Sixth Army, VII, XIII and XIX, were arriving in Flanders. The most important changes, however, were taking place behind them. Falkenhayn created a new Fourth Army under Duke Albrecht of Württemberg, composed of Beseler’s corps and four new reserve corps raised in Germany, largely from young volunteers. Brought by rail through Belgium, this army was to strike between Ypres and the sea and reach Dunkirk and Calais.

On 14 October the British cavalry took Kemmel and then the Messines–Wytschaete ridge and made contact with Rawlinson’s divisions. According to the British official history, on that day an unbroken Allied line, though very thin in the north, ran for the first time from Switzerland to the sea. Besides the British it was held by French territorial divisions at Ypres, French cavalry north of the town and the Belgians on the Yser. On 16 October German units attacked Diksmuide, which opened the Battle of the Yser, and on 18 October the main attack on the Yser line began, supported from the sea by the British ships of Rear-Admiral Horace Hood. The Belgians, exhausted by the retreat from Antwerp, were defending the last strip of their country.

End of the race

By 19 October the open flank had disappeared. That day General Douglas Haig’s I Corps was finishing detraining at Hazebrouck, and French still intended to send it through Ypres towards Bruges and Ghent. He was convinced that at most one enemy corps stood opposite. Meanwhile the British 7th Division at Ypres had just run into the head of the new German army. Both sides were preparing to attack on the same sector and both underestimated the enemy’s strength. The First Battle of Ypres began, in which for five weeks the Germans tried to break through the Allied front.

With it the race came to an end, although the fighting did not. At La Bassée, Armentières and Messines the British went over to the defensive against German counter-attacks, which from 20 October came along the whole front from Arras to the sea. On the Yser the Belgians stopped the Germans at the end of October by opening the sluices at Nieuport and flooding the plain. At Ypres the Allies held the town until the second half of November. Manoeuvres in open country gave way to bloody attacks on a continuous line of trenches.

Losses

The total losses of the Race to the Sea cannot be given. The fighting passed smoothly from one sector to the next and merged with the Battle of the Aisne and the battles in Flanders, and neither French nor German sources give separate figures for it. Both sides lost tens of thousands killed, wounded and taken prisoner in these weeks. Partial data show the scale of the fighting. The British III Corps lost over 700 men in a single day at Meteren on 13 October, and the British II Corps lost almost 14,000 men in October, including the fighting that continued to the end of the month. At Antwerp the Germans took, according to various sources, about 30,000 Belgians prisoner, and tens of thousands more Belgian soldiers were interned in the Netherlands.

The civilian population suffered too. Many villages in Picardy and Artois were reduced to rubble, Arras was shelled by German artillery from October, and at least a hundred people were killed in the bombardment of Lille. About a million civilians fled Belgium in 1914.

Significance

The Race to the Sea closed the period of mobile warfare in the west. Neither side turned the other’s flank, because each time the other arrived in time. When, in the second half of October, the front reached the North Sea, an unbroken line ran from Nieuport to the Swiss border which could no longer be outflanked, only broken through. The following years of war in the west were a series of attempts at such a breakthrough.

The line formed in September and October 1914 proved remarkably durable. At Roye and Lassigny, on the Somme and the Ancre, it lasted until the spring of 1917, when the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg Line. At Arras and on Vimy Ridge great battles were fought over it in 1915 and 1917. In Flanders the Belgian army held the front on the Yser until the end of the war, and the British were bound for the next four years to the salient around Ypres. The Germans held Lille, Lens and the coalfield of northern France, important for French industry, while the Allies kept the Channel ports through which reinforcements and supplies for the British army came.

For Falkenhayn the race was the last chance of a quick victory in the west. When that chance was lost at Ypres, he concluded that a decision could no longer be achieved by one great manoeuvre. On the Western Front a war of attrition began.