Germans abandon Kemmel

On 31 August 1918 troops of General Herbert Plumer’s British Second Army occupied the hill of Kemmelberg south of Ypres, the highest point of Belgian West Flanders. The Germans had abandoned it without a fight. Four months earlier, on 25 April, the German Alpenkorps had taken it in a single swift attack, driving out the French defenders, and in Germany streets and barracks were afterwards named in memory of the victory. Now the hill from which the Germans had overlooked the Allied rear all summer was back in Allied hands.

Kemmel lay at the northern edge of the salient that the Germans had driven into the front in the April Battle of the Lys. Throughout the summer the two armies faced each other at its foot. The Allies planned to retake it. General Ferdinand Foch had envisaged an attack on Kemmel as early as May, and at the beginning of August the British XIX Corps advanced towards it and repulsed a German counter-attack. When, however, in the second half of August the Germans began to abandon the Lys salient, the attack proved unnecessary. On 30 August the British entered abandoned Bailleul, and the retreat extended along the whole front from the La Bassée Canal to Ypres.

According to the accounts of prisoners, cited in American studies, the Germans left only a few men from each company on the hill, manning machine guns, to give the impression that they were still holding it, and withdrew their main forces to the Wytschaete–Messines ridge. As early as 30 August scouts reported that the hill was almost empty. On 31 August, as the British official history records, units of the Second Army occupied Mount Kemmel and the village of Vierstraat north-east of it. General Fritz von Loßberg, in April chief of staff of the German 4th Army, later wrote that the ground won by the 4th and 6th Armies had returned to British hands without a fight.

At the foot of the hill two American divisions were then fighting, the 27th Division from New York and the 30th Division from Tennessee and the two Carolinas, which since July had been training and fighting under the British XIX and II Corps. For them this day was the start of their first serious attack. The New Yorkers advanced through Vierstraat against the German trenches on the ridge, while their neighbours to the north took Voormezele (PL) and the fortified Lankhof Farm on 31 August – 1 September. German machine-gun nests resisted stubbornly and the fighting for the Vierstraat ridge lasted until 2 September. The 53rd Brigade of the 27th Division alone lost more than five hundred killed and wounded in it.

The loss of Kemmel closed the spring offensive in Flanders as though it had never happened. By 6 September the German salient on the Lys had disappeared, and the Germans halted on the Messines ridge and near Armentières, roughly on their old lines of 1915. For the British, recovering the heights from Bailleul to Kemmel was important ahead of the planned offensive in Flanders, which began at the end of September.