End of the Battle of Langemarck (1917)

On 18 August 1917 a brigade of the British 14th (Light) Division attacked along the road from Ypres to Menin towards Inverness Copse, on which every attack on the Gheluvelt plateau had foundered since 31 July. It broke into the shattered wood, but a German counter-attack pushed it back to the middle of it. There, supported by two tanks on the road, it held on, repulsing three more attacks. This was the last act of the Battle of Langemarck, the second great attack of the Third Battle of Ypres. After two days of fighting for individual pillboxes and farms the front came to a standstill, and both sides began to fortify what they had managed to hold.

The last days of fighting

The day before, 17 August, French heavy howitzers pounded all day the Les Lilas and Mondovi blockhouses on the Broombeek stream, the only ones to have resisted the French on the first day of the battle. In the evening their garrisons surrendered. Since 16 August the French First Army had taken more than 400 prisoners and 15 guns, passed beyond the German third position and secured the northern flank of the British. On the XVIII Corps sector the 48th Division attacked in vain the fortified Maison du Hibou farm on the road to Poelkapelle, while the 29th Division pushed outposts beyond the Broombeek. In the ruins of Langemarck the soldiers of the 20th Division, who had taken the village, suffered heavy losses from German artillery, which had observation from the higher ground to the east.

On the plateau the bled-out divisions were being relieved. On the night of 17–18 August the 14th Division relieved the 56th (London) Division, which had lost 2,175 men in those days, and a night later the 47th Division replaced the 8th Division, which had lost 2,111. The commander of the 56th Division, General Frederick Dudgeon, reported that his brigades had had no time to learn the ground or prepare the attack, that no duckboard tracks had been laid beyond Château Wood, and that the mud had held up the delivery of supplies.

Looking for culprits

On 17 August General Hubert Gough assembled the corps commanders of the Fifth Army. He complained that his soldiers fell back too easily before German counter-attacks and wanted to court-martial some officers and NCOs for “flagrant cases” of such behaviour. He also complained that divisions were passing through the line too quickly and that the army might run short of men. In those days he explained the failure in the centre, at Frezenberg, where the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions had bled themselves white, by saying that the Irish “did not like shellfire”. Field Marshal Douglas Haig was not convinced by this “playing of the Irish card”. He pointed out that both divisions had been exhausted and that the artillery preparation had not destroyed the German pillboxes. Before the attack they had spent nearly two weeks carrying ammunition and supplies under fire. From the beginning of August to 18 August the 16th Division lost more than 4,200 men, and the 36th Division almost 3,600, more than half their strength.

On 18 August Haig wrote in his diary that the failure on the right and in the centre had resulted from the commanders being “in too great a hurry”, and that the artillery should have been given another three days to gain the upper hand. This was the same advice he had given before the battle but had not enforced. He instructed Gough to investigate the causes of the failure and discuss them with him. Discouragement spread among the soldiers and officers of the Fifth Army, together with a feeling that men were being thrown blindly against concrete pillboxes.

Balance and what came next

The battle gave the British Langemarck and about one and a half kilometres of ground in the north, and the French the Drie Grachten bridgehead, but the Gheluvelt plateau remained in German hands. The losses of the battle itself are hard to isolate. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson estimate the losses of Gough’s army on 16 August alone at about 15,000 men, and the figures of the British official history show that from 4 to 28 August, including other fighting, the British armies at Ypres lost about 36,000 killed, wounded and missing. The Germans lost about 24,000 men from 11 to 21 August.

Gough planned a series of separate attacks on the objectives not yet taken, corps by corps, and then a new general attack. On 19 August the XVIII Corps of General Ivor Maxse, with the help of tanks and a smoke screen, took with minimal losses the farms that had held it up on 16 August, but further attacks on the plateau failed. On 25 August Haig handed the main task to General Herbert Plumer and his Second Army. After three weeks of preparation Plumer struck on 20 September by the Menin road and took most of the plateau for which the Fifth Army had fought throughout August.