End of the Battle of Festubert

On 25 May 1915 the British First Army made the last attack of the Battle of Festubert. In the evening the Territorial 47th (London) Division took a stretch of the German line near Givenchy, and Canadian cavalrymen fighting on foot tried to push north along the German breastwork. The same day Field Marshal John French concluded that a further offensive had no chance of success and decided to end it. Ten days after the night attack of 15 May, the front had moved by a mere few hundred metres.

The last attacks

From 20 May the 1st Canadian Division and the Scottish 51st (Highland) Division held the line in place of the bled-out 2nd and 7th Divisions. The Canadians, barely a fortnight after coming out of the heavy fighting at Ypres, took a small orchard on 20 May, thereafter called Canadian Orchard, but further attacks on a German strongpoint marked on the maps as K.5 broke down. Success came only before dawn on 24 May: at 2.30 a.m. two companies of the Canadian 5th Battalion crossed a flooded ditch on footbridges and in half an hour took K.5 together with a stretch of trench. According to the Canadian official history they went into the attack shouting “Lusitania!”. The battalion, however, lost about 250 men, including 13 of its 18 combatant officers. An attack from Canadian Orchard half an hour before midnight on 24 May ended in disaster: the few soldiers who reached the German trench were killed or captured.

The main attack was set for the evening of 25 May. All day the British artillery shelled the German positions, and to deceive the enemy the batteries of the neighbouring 1st Division cut wire on another sector. At 6.30 p.m. two battalions of the 142nd Brigade of the 47th Division, made up of London volunteers of the Territorial Force, advanced north of the road from Givenchy to Chapelle St. Roch. According to the British official history they went forward with a steadiness and precision worthy of veteran troops. In less than an hour they took the German front line and support trench on a front of nearly a kilometre, advancing on average about 370 metres. Immediately afterwards, however, they came under the fire of German heavy batteries that had the ground precisely registered. The brigade held its gains but lost nearly a thousand men. It could go no further, as the Germans were already defending the next line. According to his citation, Lance-Corporal Leonard Keyworth of the 1/24th Battalion, London Regiment, stood for about two hours on the parapet of the German trench bombing its defenders. In this action 58 of the 75 men of his unit were killed or wounded. He received the first Victoria Cross in his division.

At 9 p.m. the attack was taken up by the dismounted cavalrymen of General John Seely’s Canadian Cavalry Brigade. They had sailed to France without their horses at the beginning of May to make good the Canadian losses at Ypres, and had no experience whatever of trench fighting. A party of bombers from Lord Strathcona’s Horse worked its way from K.5 along the German breastwork and after midnight reported the capture of a further 270 metres. It later turned out that the men, misled by inaccurate maps and a tangle of ditches, had occupied positions further west than they believed.

French’s decision

The same day French agreed, at General Ferdinand Foch’s request, to relieve another French division south of the La Bassée canal, so that the French could strengthen their attack on Vimy Ridge. He wrote to Haig that he considered it unlikely the First Army’s offensive could succeed. The Germans had brought up considerable reserves, including the fresh 2nd Guard Reserve Division, and had managed to fortify the new line almost as strongly as the old one. The British artillery was running out of ammunition. From then on the First Army was merely to pin down the Germans on its front. The Germans, too, regarded 25 May as the end of their offensive at Ypres. Over the next two days the British beat off counter-attacks at Chapelle St. Roch and Givenchy and consolidated the ground they had won.

Balance

According to the British official history, from the night of 15/16 May to 25 May the British, Indian and Canadian troops lost 710 officers and 15,938 other ranks, a total of 16,648 killed, wounded and missing. According to the Canadian official history, the Canadians, attacking over five days, advanced the line on average about 550 metres on a front of about 1.6 kilometres and lost 2,468 men. British historians estimate German losses at about 5,000 men, including about 800 prisoners.

The first British attempt at a “battle of attrition” achieved little. The Germans had to abandon a position fortified since the autumn and throw into Festubert every unit that could be taken from the neighbouring sectors, but the front was not broken. The failure was blamed above all on weak and badly directed artillery and the shortage of shells. The Canadians also complained of their Ross rifles, which jammed in the mud of Flanders.