Second Battle of Kemmel Ridge

The Second Battle of Kemmel Ridge was the most spectacular German success of the entire Battle of the Lys. Kemmelberg, a hill rising to about 156 metres above the flat plain of Flanders, had been the Allies’ most important observation point south of Ypres since 1914. For a few days it had been held by the French, who had taken over the sector from exhausted British divisions. On 25 April 1918, after a bombardment lasting several hours with a huge proportion of gas shells, the German mountain troops of the Alpenkorps broke onto the summit in little more than an hour. By midday the Germans had taken the whole hill, the village of Kemmel (PL) and Dranoutre, and had captured several thousand men of the French 28th Infantry Division and its neighbours. The British on the left wing put up a stubborn defence and did not allow the Ypres salient to be closed. The Franco-British counter-attack of 26 April did not recover the hill, but it tied down the best German troops. The Germans did not exploit their success and there was no breakthrough.

Name and dates

The name “Second Battle of Kemmel Ridge” and the dates 25–26 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 fighting on the Lys between 9 and 29 April. The committee called the German attacks of 17–19 April the First Battle of Kemmel Ridge, and the last attack, on 29 April, bears the name of the Battle of the Scherpenberg. In France the “Battle of Mont Kemmel” (bataille du mont Kemmel) usually refers to the whole of the fighting from 25 to 29 April. The Germans spoke of the “storming of Kemmel” (Erstürmung des Kemmel). Times in the text are given in British Summer Time, one hour behind German time.

Background

On 9 April 1918 the Germans launched Operation “Georgette” in Flanders, a scaled-down version of the “George” offensive planned since the winter. Within a week the Sixth Army of General Ferdinand von Quast and the Fourth Army of General Friedrich Sixt von Armin had taken the Messines Ridge, Armentières and Bailleul and reached the range of low hills that closes the way to Ypres and Poperinge from the south: Mont des Cats, Mont Noir, Mont Rouge, the Scherpenberg and the highest of them, Kemmelberg. Whoever held these hills could see the whole plain on both sides of the front. The Allies had directed artillery fire from Kemmelberg since 1914, and for four years British sappers had built dugouts, tunnels and machine-gun nests on it. On 17 April the first attack on the hill broke down under the fire of the British Second Army of General Herbert Plumer.

The British divisions in Flanders, however, were utterly exhausted. Many of them had already fought on the Somme in March, and their ranks had been filled up with young recruits from home. Ferdinand Foch, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies in France since 14 April, finally agreed to move French reserves north. They were formed into the Army Detachment of the North (Détachement d’armée du Nord, DAN) under General Antoine de Mitry. Between 18 and 21 April French divisions relieved the British IX Corps on the sector from Meteren to Kemmel. From 19 April the defence of the hill itself was the responsibility of General Madelin’s 28th Infantry Division, subordinated to General Félix Robillot’s II Cavalry Corps. To its west stood the 154th and 34th Divisions, and on the far right wing, next to the Australians, the 133rd Division. The British heavy artillery, part of the field artillery, the air units and the British Kemmel Defence Force of Lieutenant-Colonel H. D. Bousfield, about 900 men strong and familiar with the hill’s fortifications, remained with the French. East of the French, as far as the Ypres–Comines Canal, the front was held by the British XXII Corps of General Alexander Godley with the 9th and 21st Divisions and a brigade made up of the remnants of the 39th Division.

The French disliked the defences they had taken over, and the whole sector lay on the forward slopes of the hills, in full view of the Germans. On the night of 24–25 April the 28th Division tried to push the line forward near Lindenhoek. It gained only about 200 metres, suffered losses, and the reserves it had thrown into the fight were still not in position at dawn. Meanwhile prisoners were announcing an attack with gas for 25 April. On 24 April airmen and intelligence spotted the Alpenkorps, withdrawn from Bailleul, opposite Kemmelberg.

German plan

On 20 April the Supreme Army Command decided that the offensive in Flanders had to be ended. It nevertheless agreed to two blows intended to improve the position of the flanks: at Festubert and Givenchy, and at Kemmel. The plan of attack was drawn up by the Fourth Army’s chief of staff, General Fritz von Loßberg, in consultation with Ludendorff. Two corps were to attack: General Sieger’s XVIII Reserve Corps with the 7th, 13th Reserve, 19th Reserve and 56th Divisions against the British, and General von Eberhardt’s X Reserve Corps with the Alpenkorps, the 4th Bavarian Division and the 22nd Reserve Division against the French. The Alpenkorps, in reality a division, was given Kemmelberg itself as its objective. Behind them stood another four divisions and one in army reserve.

The first objective was a line from Dickebusch Lake along the Kemmelbeek stream to the northern edges of Dranoutre. Then the second-line divisions were to pass Kemmelberg to the north-west, towards the road from Poperinge to Vlamertinghe, and cut off all the Allied troops in the Ypres salient. The Fourth Army’s artillery, which according to the British official history numbered 191 field and 129 heavy batteries, supported by guns of the Sixth Army, was to drench the Allied batteries and rear areas from 2.30 to 4.30 a.m. with mustard gas, tear gas and high-explosive shells, and after a half-hour pause to shell the front lines of the infantry for an hour.

Course of the battle

25 April: the fall of Kemmelberg. During the night a thick fog settled over Flanders. At five in the morning visibility did not exceed 50 metres, and airmen coming down to 30 metres above the ground could see nothing. At 2.30 a.m. the German bombardment began. According to British witnesses almost all the French batteries, crowded into the valley between Mont Rouge and Westoutre (PL), were gassed or silenced. By about 8.30 a.m. at most one gun was firing in each battery. The French, who remembered Verdun, said afterwards that the shelling of their trenches was worse than anything they had experienced there. The British batteries, more widely dispersed, suffered less, but according to the official history they lost more men per battery than on any other day of the war. Gas masks had to be worn until eleven.

At six o’clock three and a half German divisions advanced against six French regiments. The men of the Alpenkorps, who besides their usual equipment carried supplies for four days, went through the French line on the lower slopes in the first wave. At 7.10 a.m. the Bavarian Infantry Life Guards Regiment (Leib-Regiment), commanded by Franz von Epp and supported by low-flying aircraft, stood on the summit before the French reserves could get out of the dugouts cut into the hillside. Within half an hour it had taken 800 prisoners. At about 7.40 a.m. the left wing of the German 56th Division took the village of Kemmel and captured 1,600 prisoners. German patrols reached the British batteries north of the hill, where there was hand-to-hand fighting. The best observation point on the Flanders front had fallen in little more than an hour.

Isolated machine-gun nests, French and British, held out for a few more hours. Bousfield fired on the Germans at the entrance to the tunnel leading to the observation posts until a senior French officer ordered him to cease fire. According to the French official history resistance ended at about 10.30 a.m., according to the Germans at midday. The British Second Army staff still believed that evening, on the strength of airmen’s reports, that the French were fighting on the summit, but what had been seen were most likely the bodies of the dead and wounded. French authors later admitted bitterly that there had been no real resistance in the first and second lines, and that the battalion and regimental reserves had not been used. A sapper company and a pioneer company of the Kemmel Defence Force, which tried to get back onto the hill and counter-attack, were almost entirely wiped out.

The Germans came down the northern slopes into the valley of the Kemmelbeek, which separates Kemmelberg from the Scherpenberg, and at about eleven halted on the first objective. According to the British official history the Alpenkorps alone took 2,600 prisoners and 12 field guns. In the west the 4th Bavarian Division and the 22nd Reserve Division bypassed Dranoutre in the fog and by 10.30 a.m. had formed a flank guard reaching beyond Locre, taking 1,400 prisoners. The French 154th Division held on in the second position and even regained a little ground with a small counter-attack, and the 34th Division on the flank defended its second line. Things were hardest on the 28th Division’s sector. For several hours the only obstacle between the Germans and the plain near Poperinge was two weak battalions of the 99th Infantry Regiment, stretched over nearly five kilometres from Locre through the Scherpenberg to the village of La Clytte, reinforced with stragglers, dismounted cavalrymen and sappers. In the afternoon Robillot reported that his forces were now only sufficient to “hold on to the line”.

The British flank. East of Kemmel, on a front about 6.5 kilometres long, the Germans struck five weakened British brigades. The battle was fought in fog, without telephone communications, and until the afternoon it was directed mainly by battalion and company commanders. The leading battalions repulsed the frontal attack, but as early as 6.30 a.m. French troops were falling back along the road from Kemmel to La Clytte, many without masks, shouting “gas” and “all is lost”, with the Germans following them. The 12th Battalion, Royal Scots, next to the French, was surrounded on both sides. Three officers and 40 men fought their way back to the Cheapside Line, the third line of defence. The Yorkshire battalions in the Wytschaete salient defended themselves in the woods, but of two of them only 29 and 46 men survived. The Scots of the 5th Battalion, Cameron Highlanders held the craters at St. Eloi until dusk.

All day the British built a new flank facing south. Godley sent further battalions from reserve, cyclists and motor machine guns into the fight. At about midday the Germans took Vierstraat, but went no further. On Hill 44, west of Vierstraat, the 9th Battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry of Lieutenant-Colonel A. J. McCulloch three times repulsed the Germans at a range of a hundred metres. In the evening the front ran from La Clytte through Hill 44 and the Cheapside Line to Voormezeele, which remained in British hands. The German 19th and 13th Reserve Divisions were so exhausted that they could not go on, and the 3rd Guards Division, which was to support them, halted under fire on the Wytschaete ridge.

In the morning Plumer drove to see de Mitry and agreed that at 5 p.m. the French 39th Division, fresh after three months’ rest, and the British 25th Division would retake Kemmelberg. The French division, however, had more than 20 kilometres to cover, and at 2.30 p.m. its columns were only just passing the road from Abeele to Poperinge. Robillot postponed the attack to three in the morning. The Germans did not move forward either. In the morning Loßberg had counted on the British abandoning the Ypres salient, but Ludendorff warned him all day against counter-attacks and ordered him to bring up the artillery first. Allied guns were shelling the roads, and the assault units were intermingled and had lost many officers. In the evening the X Reserve Corps headquarters reported that the Alpenkorps could not attack the Scherpenberg that day. The attack was put off until the morning of 26 April.

26 April: the counter-attack. After dark torrential rain began to fall, and towards morning fog settled again. Robillot’s orders arrived late and twice during the night changed the objectives. At three o’clock the British 74th and 7th Brigades of the 25th Division set off on time and surprised the Germans. The soldiers, soaked and sinking into the mud, could not keep up with the weak barrage, and the swollen Kemmelbeek proved a serious obstacle. Even so, units of the 74th Brigade crossed the stream and entered the village of Kemmel, where there was house-to-house fighting. The French 39th Division, however, set off half an hour late, ran at once into strong defences and, according to the French official history, managed only to establish a continuous line south-east of the Scherpenberg. Fired on from the right flank, where the French were supposed to be, the British withdrew behind the Kemmelbeek at about nine. Many soldiers regarded the attack as a waste of lives owing to poor organisation, weak artillery and the French lack of drive. The counter-attack nevertheless had two tangible results: the French established a continuous line of defence, and the Alpenkorps and the 56th Division, tied down by the fighting, took no part in the German attack planned for eight o’clock.

The Germans therefore attacked only on the flanks. In the west the 4th Bavarian Division struck the French 154th Division at Locre. According to the British official history the village and the nearby hospice changed hands twice and finally remained with the French. German communiqués reported that Locre had been taken. In the east the German 13th Reserve Division and 7th Division captured the British forward line between Voormezeele and the Ypres–Comines Canal, with the Spoil Bank and, towards evening, the Bluff, but the main line of defence held. At about 2 p.m. Loßberg postponed the attack, first to 27 April and finally to 29 April, in order to relieve the divisions and bring up ammunition.

Plumer could not know that the German success would be so modest. At 2.05 p.m. he ordered XXII and II Corps to withdraw during the night. The existing line of defence from Voormezeele northwards was henceforth to be only an outpost line, and the main line of resistance became the Cheapside Line, running below the ramparts of Ypres and then along the Yser Canal. The Belgians on the left conformed to this movement. The withdrawal was carried out almost without loss. Foch, alarmed, telephoned several times that day, insisting that the British should not fall back west of Ypres, and sent further French divisions and artillery to Flanders.

Losses

The full losses of this battle alone cannot be separated from those of the whole Battle of the Lys. The German communiqué of 25 April spoke of 6,500 prisoners, “mostly French”. According to a German study, 150–200 British were taken, and later about 50 more. A German report of July 1918 stated that in the whole operation against Kemmel, including the preparatory and subsequent fighting, 8,200 prisoners, 53 guns and 233 machine guns had been taken. According to French studies the French 28th Division lost about 5,400 men. Today a French ossuary stands on Kemmelberg, in which lie more than 5,000 unidentified French soldiers killed in this fighting. Heavy losses were suffered by the British battalions of the 9th and 21st Divisions and by the 25th Division in the counter-attack of 26 April. The Germans also paid dearly: the battalions of the 13th Reserve Regiment that took St. Eloi, for example, numbered on average only a few dozen men per company after the battle.

Significance

The loss of Kemmelberg was a serious blow to the Allies. The Germans gained an observation point from which they could see the rear of the front as far as Poperinge, and the British had to shorten the Ypres salient. The defeat of the French division, which gave up the hill within an hour, sharpened the mutual recriminations between the allies. The British felt they had been let down, and French officers stopped speaking contemptuously of British setbacks, but they still treated the fighting in Flanders as a British affair.

The German victory, however, remained unexploited. The assault divisions halted on the first objective, and the planned advance of the second line towards Poperinge and the cutting off of Ypres never took place. Ludendorff, cautious after the experiences of March and April, preferred to wait for the artillery rather than risk a counter-attack, and by the time the Germans were ready the Allies had already strengthened the front. The last attack on the range of hills, on 29 April, ended in failure and closed the German offensive in Flanders. Kemmelberg remained in German hands until the end of the summer of 1918, when the Germans, withdrawing from the Lys salient, abandoned it without a fight.