Fighting for the Scherpenberg

On 29 April 1918 the German Fourth Army attacked in Flanders for the last time. Four days after the capture of the Kemmelberg, seven divisions struck at the Scherpenberg and Mont Rouge, the last heights between the front and the plain that stretches towards Poperinge and the ports on the English Channel. Taking them was meant to force the British to abandon Ypres. In the morning it seemed that the Germans were close to their goal: they took the village of Locre and the saddle between the two hills, and a report even reached Douglas Haig’s headquarters that the Scherpenberg had fallen. It was false. At noon French reserves drove the Germans off the slope, and in the British sector the attack collapsed within a few hours. Late in the evening Erich Ludendorff agreed to halt it. So ended Operation “Georgette”, the second great German offensive of the spring of 1918.

Before the attack

After the fall of the Kemmelberg on 25 April the Allies expected the Germans to try to push on. The commander of the British Second Army, General Herbert Plumer, who also had the French divisions in Flanders under him, reminded his troops on 27 April that every metre of ground must be fought for, and in a confidential instruction to corps commanders wrote that the Scherpenberg – Mont Rouge – Mont Noir ridge must be held whatever happened. If further attacks failed, he predicted, the enemy would have to give up or draw on fresh divisions from the general reserve.

That same day, at a conference at Abbeville, the Allies argued over how to share the burden of the fighting. Haig proposed that the French take over the whole sector from the Kemmelberg to the junction with the Belgians, while Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau merely gave assurances that the Germans would not reach Mont Noir and Mont Rouge. The Allied commander-in-chief, Ferdinand Foch, did not want to relieve troops in the middle of a battle. He did, however, go to Flanders, visited Plumer, the French General Antoine de Mitry and the Belgian command, became convinced that the front would hold, and sent more French divisions there.

By 28 April the signs of an imminent attack were clear. Prisoners and deserters agreed that it would begin the next day in the Kemmel area. The Allied artillery prepared counter-preparation fire, which according to the British official history greatly discouraged the German battalions. On the other side, divisions complained of a shortage of ammunition, and until the afternoon of 28 April the 4th Bavarian Division had received no gas shells at all.

The attack

At 3 a.m. the Germans began a gas bombardment on a front about 16 kilometres long, from near Locre to Zillebeke Lake, held by the French 154th and 39th Divisions of General Félix Robillot’s corps and by the British divisions of XXII Corps. After two hours of gas and forty minutes of high-explosive fire the infantry went in to the assault. According to the British official history this was at 5.40 a.m.; French accounts speak of seven o’clock. Swarms of German aircraft circled over the battlefield, but British airmen managed to direct their own artillery onto good targets.

The Alpenkorps, which was to take the Scherpenberg, got furthest. Despite fire from artillery whose positions near Reningelst the Germans had not detected, it broke the French line at the junction of two divisions, took Locre and reached the saddle between Mont Rouge and the Scherpenberg. For several hours there was alarm at headquarters. The commander of the French 39th Division reported to his neighbours of the British 25th Division that he had lost Mont Rouge and had nothing to retake it with, and Foch told Haig that the Scherpenberg had fallen as well. Haig’s chief of staff had to tell Plumer that GHQ had no more troops for him and that he must himself consider a withdrawal from the salient at Ypres. He added, however, that the situation is never as bad or as good as the first reports claim. British reconnaissance soon established that there were no Germans on Mont Rouge and that both hills were still in Allied hands.

Meanwhile the reserves of the French divisions struck at the saddle from two sides and at about 1.15 p.m. drove the Alpenkorps off the slope. The Germans held part of Locre, but one of the Alpenkorps regiments lost, according to its own history, almost half its strength. In the British sector, from La Clytte to Zillebeke Lake, the attack ended even worse. The hardest fighting was at Voormezele (PL), where the 89th Brigade lost two surrounded companies and pulled its left wing back to the main line of resistance, but the Germans did not follow. Elsewhere the German infantry advanced over open ground and was cut down by the fire of machine guns and of guns that the British had pushed forward to within a few hundred metres of the front line. An attack on the Belgians at Langemark also failed. At about 1 p.m. Haig visited Plumer and found the situation under control.

Ludendorff’s decision

At Fourth Army headquarters it was known by the morning that the attack was going badly. Before ten Ludendorff had the impression that the attack was “not developing favourably”, and at 11 a.m. the army’s chief of staff, Fritz von Loßberg, reported to him that the troops everywhere were meeting a very solid defence organised in depth, with numerous machine-gun nests and artillery placed far to the rear. Loßberg tried one more afternoon attack on La Clytte and the Scherpenberg. One division was pinned down by fire, and the Alpenkorps did not advance at all. The Bavarian official history summed up the day briefly: “the offensive strength of the German troops was exhausted”.

At 8.35 p.m. Loßberg proposed to Ludendorff that the offensive be halted, and Ludendorff accepted the advice. At 10.20 p.m. Fourth Army headquarters issued an order not to resume the attack the next day and to hold the present front. General Hermann von Kuhl, chief of staff of the army group of the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht, later wrote that the capture of the Kemmelberg had been a great feat, but the Germans had not reached the decisive hills at Cassel and the Mont des Cats or the Channel ports, and “the second great offensive had not brought the expected decision”.

That same day the German Supreme Army Command set the date of the next blow. It was to fall on the French on the Aisne and draw their reserves away from Flanders before the Germans tried once again to smash the British army.

Outcome

On the night of 29/30 April the fresh French 31st Division relieved the exhausted 154th Division and recaptured Locre. Local fighting for the nearby farms and the buildings of the Locre hospice went on into May, but the Germans never resumed their great offensive in Flanders. In the three weeks of Operation “Georgette” they had driven a dozen or so kilometres into the front and taken Armentières, Bailleul and the Kemmelberg, but they had not taken Hazebrouck, had not forced the British to abandon Ypres and had come no closer to the coast. The British official history gives over 82,000 British killed, wounded and missing for the fighting on the Lys from 9 to 30 April. French losses are estimated at about 30,000–35,000, and German losses, depending on the source, at 86,000–109,000 men.

After Operation Michael it was the second offensive that brought the Germans territorial gains but no decision. Their best assault divisions had been bled white, and the Allied armies, under Foch’s single command, had learnt to stop their attacks with defence in depth and rapid counter-attacks.