End of the Battle of Loos

On the afternoon of 8 October 1915 the Germans launched their last major attack in the Battle of Loos. They wanted to recover the village and the trenches they had lost on 25 September, the first day of the British offensive. They attacked on the sector from the Double Crassier slag heaps near Lens to the La Bassée Canal, but were everywhere repulsed with heavy losses. The Battles Nomenclature Committee set up in Britain after the war ends the Battle of Loos on this day. It named the further fighting, for the Hohenzollern Redoubt, separately. James Edmonds’s British official history did not accept this division and regarded the October attacks as a continuation of the same battle.

Preparations

The Germans had been planning a counter-attack since the end of September. It was to be carried out by the Guard Corps, brought from the Eastern Front, but its divisions had to be thrown into the fighting piecemeal, mainly against the French, who were attacking Vimy Ridge in the Third Battle of Artois. Only on 6 October were the final orders issued. The main blow was to be struck by IV Corps of the German Sixth Army, with the 7th and 8th Divisions reinforced by regiments from other formations. The objective was Loos, which was to fall in the first wave, and the old German trenches around it. At the same time, further north, the 117th Division and units at the Hohenzollern Redoubt were to win back with grenades the lost sections of the former front line.

The Allies did not expect the blow. Royal Flying Corps airmen did report train movements, but bad weather hampered reconnaissance. The British and French were meanwhile preparing a new joint attack of their own. The sector at Loos and on Hill 70 had earlier been taken over from the British by the French IX Corps. The joint attack by General Douglas Haig’s First Army and the French Tenth Army had, however, been postponed several times, because the French had to relieve their exhausted divisions, and it was finally fixed for 10 October.

The attack

At noon the German artillery opened fire along the whole sector from the La Bassée Canal to Lens. The fire was heaviest between 3 and 4 p.m. At 4 p.m. the infantry left their trenches. The left wing and centre of the attack, according to the British official history about twelve battalions, struck the French of IX Corps on both sides of the Lens–Béthune road. They ran into uncut wire and crossfire. The Germans gained only about 400 metres of trench between the Double Crassier and the road. French accounts speak of hundreds of dead in front of the trenches of a single company, and say that the German attack, renewed more weakly on the morning of 9 October, ended in complete failure.

The right wing attacked from Bois Hugo and the Puits 14 bis pit against the British 1st Division at Chalk Pit Wood. The dense German columns were stopped by the rifle and machine-gun fire of the Gloucestershire, Liverpool and Munster battalions, some only 40 metres in front of the British trenches. Those who survived suffered further losses on the way back. On this sector the line did not move a single step.

The bombing fight

The fighting lasted longest in the north, at the Hohenzollern Redoubt and the quarries near Hulluch. It was defended by soldiers of the British Guards Division, who for the first time had plenty of the new Mills hand grenades, according to the British official history about 9,000. German assault groups armed with grenades worked their way along the communication trenches. One of them succeeded in driving a battalion of the Grenadier Guards out of a trench the British called Big Willie. A counter-attack by guardsmen of the Coldstream, Scots and Irish Guards recovered it after fierce fighting. Oliver Brooks, an NCO of the Coldstream Guards who led one of the bombing parties, received the Victoria Cross for it. At dusk the German columns advancing across the open from Fosse 8 were broken up by fire from the Guards’ trenches.

In the evening the British 12th Division also attacked, as planned earlier, a section of Gun Trench by the Vermelles–Hulluch road. One of its battalions broke into the German trench, but ran out of grenades and had to withdraw. After dark the fighting died down. The German attack had collapsed along the whole front.

End of the battle

German losses were heavy. Some British works estimate them at about 3,000 men. According to the British official history the Germans explained their failure by the fact that their artillery had not destroyed the wire. The bombardment of 8 October had, however, also damaged the British trenches and delayed preparations for the next attack. The French attacked Vimy Ridge alone on 11 October, and on 13 October the British, after releasing gas, again attacked the Hohenzollern Redoubt and the quarries. That day the Territorial 46th Division lost nearly 3,800 men in a few hours, and the attack brought no lasting success.

From 25 September to mid-October the British lost more than 50,000 killed, wounded and missing at Loos, according to the British official history more than twice as many as the Germans. They took Loos and a wedge of German positions about 3 kilometres deep, but did not break through the second German position. The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal John French, began to quarrel with Haig over who was to blame for the reserves arriving too late on the first day. The dispute was to cost him his post in December.