Capture of Valenciennes

By 3 November 1918 Valenciennes in northern France was already in Allied hands. The British chronology of the war gives that day as the date of the town’s capture, but according to the official histories, British and Canadian, the Canadians passed through Valenciennes and cleared it of Germans on the morning of 2 November, the second day of the Battle of Valenciennes. On 3 November, by contrast, it became clear that the Germans had abandoned the whole Scheldt defence line during the night and that the town was no longer threatened by a counter-attack. The occupation, which had begun on 25 August 1914, ended after more than four years.

On 1 November the Canadian 10th Brigade took the hill of Mont Houy south of the town, and the 12th Brigade crossed the Scheldt canal and broke into the western part of Valenciennes, where it was halted by fire from the railway line. During the night the Germans withdrew from the town. At 5.30 a.m. on 2 November the attack moved on, and the 38th and 72nd Battalions of the 12th Brigade passed through the town without much resistance. According to the British official history Valenciennes was cleared by 7.20, according to the Canadian one the Canadians reported reaching its eastern edge at 8.30. There they met the 11th Brigade, which had taken the suburb of Marly, and before evening they reached Saint-Saulve on the road to Mons. The longest resistance came from the steelworks at Marly, which the British 49th Division stormed only in the afternoon. That day Sergeant Hugh Cairns of the 46th Battalion died of wounds; on 1 November he had won the last Victoria Cross of the war awarded to a Canadian.

On the afternoon of 2 November German heavy artillery shelled Valenciennes and Saint-Saulve, and airmen reported troop movements opposite the Canadians. The British expected a counter-attack and during the night relieved some of their exhausted divisions. On the morning of 3 November, however, patrols found that the Germans had gone, leaving only weak rearguards. Field Marshal Douglas Haig cancelled the attack planned for 4 November on the First Army’s front and ordered a pursuit. Divisions were to act independently and vigorously, so as to give the Germans no time to organise a new line. The first objective of the British XXII Corps was the Bavay–Hensies road, some fifteen kilometres further on, and the Canadian Corps was to cover its left flank.

That day the British took Curgies and Saultain, and patrols of the 4th Canadian Division reached the high ground between Estreux and Onnaing, a few kilometres east of the town, where the Germans were still holding out in a sunken road and farm buildings. The 3rd Canadian Division was building bridges over the Scheldt north of Valenciennes. So few Germans remained that the whole First Army took only 59 prisoners on 3 November. According to the Canadian official history, on the way from Douai to Valenciennes the Canadians freed some 70,000 French civilians from occupation, many of them hungry, because the retreating Germans had taken cattle and food from the villages.

The Battle of Valenciennes was the Canadian Corps’ last great planned attack of the war. In the following days the Canadians were already in pursuit, across the Belgian border towards Mons. To their south, on 4 November, three British armies opened the last great battle, on the Sambre.