End of the Fifth Battle of Ypres

On the evening of 2 October 1918 General Herbert Plumer, commander of the British Second Army, in agreement with the headquarters of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, halted the offensive in Flanders. His order, issued at 7.45 p.m., stated briefly that the day’s attacks had “made little progress in face of determined resistance by the enemy”, and ordered the corps to consolidate the ground taken, not to attack until further orders, and to repair the roads and bring up the artillery as quickly as possible. For the British this was the end of the battle they called the Battle of Ypres 1918, which went down in history as the Fifth Battle of Ypres. In five days the Flanders Army Group of the King of the Belgians, Albert I, had retaken all the heights around Ypres, but it had become stuck in front of the second German position.

The last days of the battle looked quite different from the first. After several days of downpour the roads across the old battlefield were choked with stranded lorries, guns and wagons, and the artillery could not keep up with the infantry. The Germans meanwhile had reinforced the Flandern I and Flandern II positions with several fresh divisions. On 1 October the Scottish 9th Division, hidden behind a smoke screen, broke through the German line and took the village of Ledegem, but without support from its neighbours it could not hold it. The French chief of staff of the Army Group, General Jean Degoutte, ordered that afternoon that the German defences be broken by a night attack. The British ignored this order, and the attack on Roeselare by General Massenet’s French and Belgian divisions, begun on 2 October at 4 a.m., “produced no result”, according to the French official history.

On 2 October the British 35th, 41st and 29th Divisions attacked eastwards towards Menen, well supported by a creeping barrage. They forced the Germans to give up some trenches south of the village of Gheluwe, but in the evening a German counter-attack took back part of the 41st Division’s gains. The Ulster 36th Division stormed Hill 41 in vain under heavy machine-gun fire. On the Second Army’s right flank it was quieter: during the night the Germans abandoned the ruins of Armentières, and the British 40th and 31st Divisions advanced almost unopposed on both sides of the town, with orders not to enter it, as it might be mined. The Belgian and French divisions in the centre of the front had been without food since the previous evening. On 2 October eighty Belgian and British aircraft dropped 15,000 rations, about 13 tons, to them in the space of four hours.

Degoutte would not give up. Still on the evening of 2 October he ordered the French 128th and 164th Divisions, supported by two tank companies, to attack Hooglede at 3 a.m. on 3 October. The 164th Division advanced about three kilometres, but a renewed attack on 4 October failed. The Belgians and French count their Battle of the Flanders Ridges as lasting longer, and the British chronology of the war ends it only on 10 October. According to the British official history, from 28 September to 3 October the Second Army lost 303 officers and 4,392 other ranks, and the Belgian army about 2,000 killed and 10,000 wounded and sick. The Army Group as a whole took about 10,000 prisoners and 300 guns.

On the morning of the same day in Berlin, the representative of the German Supreme Army Command, Major Erich von dem Bussche-Ippenburg, told the party leaders in the Reichstag that the war could no longer be won and that every day only made the situation worse. The defeat in Flanders was one of the reasons why General Erich Ludendorff had at the end of September demanded an immediate request for an armistice. The Allies began to prepare the next offensive. Marshal Ferdinand Foch wanted it to start on 10 October at the latest, but King Albert, shaken by the losses of his army, preferred to wait for fresh French divisions and a few days later fixed it for 14 October.