End of the Battle of Hill 70

At 2 a.m. on 25 August 1917 the 50th Battalion of the 4th Canadian Division attacked Aloof Trench on the western edge of Lens. Instead of the usual artillery barrage, the attack was supported by Stokes mortars and hundreds of rifle grenades. The trench fell almost without a fight, and the battalion lost only a few wounded. With this small success the Battle of Hill 70 came to an end, the first battle of the Canadian Corps under the command of General Arthur Currie. The hill above Lens, taken on 15 August, remained in Canadian hands, but the Germans held the town itself.

The attack on Lens

After taking the hill, the Canadians beat off German counter-attacks until 18 August, according to Currie as many as 21. The Germans used flamethrowers and shelled the Canadian batteries with a new gas, mustard gas, which blistered the skin and eyes and whose effects often appeared only many hours later. On 18 August Currie decided to improve his position on the southern slope of the hill, in front of Lens. At 4.35 a.m. on 21 August, while it was still dark, the 6th Brigade of the 2nd Division and the 10th Brigade of the 4th Division were to take the German trenches in the western and north-western suburbs of the town. The Germans seemed to have foreseen the attack: just before zero hour a battalion of the 4th Guard Division itself moved forward, and the two sides clashed with the bayonet in no man’s land.

The Canadians took only some of their objectives. The defenders sat in deep cellars, proof against everything except heavy artillery, and it was hard to dig in among the ruins. In the afternoon counter-attacks by the Guard forced two battalions of the 6th Brigade back to their starting positions. Of the 50th Battalion only three small parties reached their objective, and few of them came back. The 46th and 47th Battalions did better, taking their objectives by nightfall, the latter as far as the Lens–Arras road. This one day cost the Canadians 1,154 men.

The Green Crassier

On the night of 22–23 August the 44th Battalion attacked the Green Crassier, a large slag heap of mine waste between Lens station and the canal. Its capture was meant to envelop Lens on three sides and perhaps induce the Germans to abandon the town. The wedge driven into the German positions, however, had exposed flanks. At 3 a.m. the leading company climbed the steep slopes of the heap and established itself among the wrecked trucks and rails on its summit. The neighbouring Fosse St. Louis mine, supposedly empty, was meanwhile full of Germans of the 1st Guard Reserve Division, who emerged from underground tunnels. All day the mine changed hands, and in the end it stayed with the Germans.

By the morning of 24 August the Canadians on the heap were cut off. The Germans attacked them from all sides, supported by artillery, mortars and machine guns, and the defenders fought from shell holes and ditches scraped in the coal dust until they ran out of grenades and ammunition. By late afternoon all had been killed or taken prisoner. The 44th Battalion lost 257 men, 87 of them taken prisoner. The heap and the mine remained in German hands until the end of the war. After this defeat the attack on Aloof Trench on 25 August was, as the Canadian official history puts it, a “satisfying anticlimax”.

The reckoning

According to the Canadian official history (G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919), the fighting from 15 to 25 August cost the Canadians 9,198 men. Later researchers, among them Tim Cook, count 8,677 for the battlefield alone. Nearly 4,000 of these the Canadians lost in the attacks on Lens from 21 August, which Cook called clumsy and hasty. German losses cannot be established exactly. Currie estimated them at nearly 20,000, the intelligence of the British First Army at 12,000–15,000, and the British historian Robert Foley at about 10,000. According to various sources the Canadians took between 1,100 and nearly 1,400 prisoners.

Six Canadians received the Victoria Cross for this battle. A stretcher-bearer of the 7th Battalion, Private Michael O’Rourke, carried out the wounded under fire from 15 to 17 August. Private Harry Brown of the 10th Battalion, a runner, carried an urgent message through a barrage on 16 August with a shattered arm and died of his wounds. On 18 August Sergeant Frederick Hobson of the 20th Battalion rushed alone with the bayonet at the advancing Germans to cover a machine-gun crew, and was killed, while Major Okill Learmonth of the 2nd Battalion, badly wounded, directed the defence, throwing back German grenades, and died of his wounds. On 21 August Company Sergeant Major Robert Hanna of the 29th Battalion, after all the officers had been killed, led an attack on a German machine-gun nest. Corporal Filip Konowal of the 47th Battalion, born in Ukraine, a former bayonet-fighting instructor in the Russian army, wiped out several German machine-gun nests in the fighting for Lens.

The Canadian official history concluded that the capture of the hill and the attacks on Lens, though costly, achieved their aim. The German Sixth Army had to use up reserves that could have relieved the exhausted divisions in Flanders, where the Third Battle of Ypres was under way, and the army group commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, gave up retaking the hill, because it would have required strong new forces. The British still planned to encircle Lens with an attack on the hill near Sallaumines, but they lacked the forces, and in October the Canadian Corps was moved to Flanders. Hill 70 did not change hands again until the end of the war.