Capture of Cambrai

On 9 October 1918 British and Canadian troops took Cambrai, a town and railway junction in northern France that the Germans had held since the first weeks of the war. In the autumn of 1917 the British had advanced on it with hundreds of tanks, but a German counter-attack had taken their gains back. Now the town fell almost without a fight. The day before, the British Third and Fourth Armies had broken through the last German positions south of Cambrai, and the 63rd Division had taken Niergnies, which dominated the town from the south. The German 18th Reserve Division, which was defending the town, left it at about 2.30 a.m., and the German armies between the Oise and the Sensée Canal began withdrawing to a new position on the River Selle.

The Canadian Corps of General Arthur Currie, which had been fighting on the western and northern approaches to Cambrai for two weeks, attacked at 1.30 a.m., without waiting for the Third Army to take the whole ridge south-east of the town. It was a dark night with passing cold showers. The men of the 2nd Canadian Division wore white calico bands on their sleeves so as to recognise each other in the dark. The attack caught the Germans preparing to withdraw. The 27th Battalion took Ramillies, and the 5th Brigade crossed the Scheldt Canal on footbridges laid on cork floats and took Escaudœuvres. At Pont d’Aire Captain Coulson Mitchell reached the main bridge with his sappers, and while his men were removing the explosive charges fixed to the girders he single-handedly held off the Germans who were trying to blow it up. He killed three and took twelve prisoner, and the bridge was saved. For this he received the Victoria Cross. On the right flank the 3rd Canadian Division, seeing that the Germans were withdrawing, dispensed with its prepared barrage. Its 4th and 5th Battalions of the Canadian Mounted Rifles crossed the canal by partly demolished bridges and entered the town. From the south, once resistance had ceased at about five o’clock, patrols of the British 57th Division entered Cambrai and met the Canadians in the town. By seven in the morning the Canadians had passed through half the town, and by midday they stood on the railway beyond its eastern edge.

The Canadians found the town almost deserted, with fires raging in many districts. For several days they had seen columns of smoke rising over it. The Canadian official history writes that the Germans had decided to burn the town before leaving, but the rapid entry of the troops thwarted the plan: sappers found piles of combustible material that had not yet been set alight and put out the fires. They also found signs of looting and deliberate destruction. Even so, according to French sources, more than a thousand buildings in Cambrai were destroyed during the war, and the centre with the town hall had to be rebuilt. The sappers disarmed booby traps and time-fused charges, including a new type hidden in shells in ammunition dumps that differed from ordinary fuses only by a small mark. According to the British official history they did this so efficiently that no one was killed. By evening Canadian and British sappers had built several pontoon bridges and heavy-traffic bridges over the canal. At 11 a.m. the commander of the 3rd Canadian Division, General Frederick Loomis, made a ceremonial entry into the town.

South of Cambrai the Third and Fourth Armies moved off at 5.20 a.m. and followed the Germans until they ran into their rearguards in the villages. Cavalry, including the Canadian Fort Garry Horse regiment, helped the infantry take Gattigny Wood and several villages. By evening the British were about five kilometres east of Cambrai and about three kilometres from Le Cateau, and in captured Bohain they freed some 4,500 French civilians whom the Germans had herded there from the surrounding area. The 3rd Canadian Division, exhausted by twelve days of fighting, was withdrawn from the front to rest that evening, and on 11 October Currie handed over his sector to the neighbouring British corps.

The capture of Cambrai closed the Battle of Cambrai and, according to the British chronology of the war, the whole of the Battles of the Hindenburg Line, which had begun on 12 September at Havrincourt. Formally, the British Battles Nomenclature Committee also counted among them the pursuit to the Selle, on 9–12 October. The British official history observes that 9 October should really be counted as part of the pursuit, since the Germans had broken contact with the British during the night. The Canadians, who since the end of August had fought their way from Arras to Cambrai, lost more than 30,000 killed, wounded and missing between 22 August and 11 October, according to the Canadian official history, but took more than 18,500 prisoners and liberated 54 towns and villages. The Germans were now falling back to the Selle, where the next fighting was to begin.