Germans take Bailleul

On 15 April 1918 the Germans took the Ravelsberg ridge east of Bailleul, and during the night the British abandoned the town itself. It was the third day of the fighting for the hills on the northern flank of the German breakthrough on the Lys. On 13 April the British IX Corps had given up the salient in front of Bailleul, and on 14 April the village of Neuve-Église, but on the new line, from the outskirts of the town over Mont de Lille and the Ravelsberg to Crucifix Corner, it had repulsed every attack. That night General Cecil Nicholson’s exhausted brigades were relieved by two brigades of the 59th Division, which had been shattered on the Somme in March and refilled largely with young soldiers who were to come under fire for the first time. In the dark they took over a front nearly 5.5 kilometres long.

General Herbert Plumer, commander of the British Second Army, knew that the line in front of Bailleul had no tactical value, but did not want to give the town up without a fight. He was just withdrawing his troops from the Ypres salient and feared that if the Germans saw a simultaneous retreat from Bailleul, they would regain their belief in victory. On the German side, after the failed attacks of the previous days, the sector was reorganised. The three divisions facing Bailleul were placed under the headquarters of the Guard Reserve Corps, freshly arrived from Russia, and came under General Friedrich Sixt von Armin’s 4th Army. The Crown Prince of Bavaria, Rupprecht, commanding the army group, ordered the town to be taken in a pincer: the 4th Army was to outflank it from the north and east, and the 6th Army from the south and west.

At noon a very heavy bombardment fell on Crucifix Corner, and at 2 p.m. it spread to the whole front of the 177th Brigade. At 2.45 p.m. the infantry advanced. Battalions of the Lincolnshire and Norfolk Regiments twice threw the Germans out of Crucifix Corner. When the enemy renewed the attack, however, he took Mont de Lille just east of the town, where one officer and three men were left of a North Staffordshire battalion. A counter-attack retook the hill, but by 5 p.m. it was in German hands again. At about 4.30 p.m. Crucifix Corner fell, and the Germans turned along the road to the Ravelsberg and began to roll up the British line from the flank. According to the commander of the 59th Division, the front “crumbled”. By 7 p.m., as Field Marshal Douglas Haig wrote, the whole ridge was in German hands. The battalions of the 176th Brigade, defending south of Bailleul, withdrew through the town after dark for fear of being cut off.

At about 8 p.m. officers of the 34th Division stopped several hundred stragglers on the roads north of Bailleul and formed them into a line. Behind them, on a hastily prepared position from Meteren to Kemmel, stood Nicholson’s six bled-white brigades, numbering about 7,000 men in all. The neighbouring divisions drew back their flanks, so that by morning there was a continuous line behind the lost front. Haig wrote in his dispatch that the German infantry broke into Bailleul at about 9 p.m. German regimental histories, however, agree that the Germans entered the town only late at night or on 16 April, when patrols found that the British had left it. The British official history accepts that Bailleul was evacuated on the night of 15–16 April.

Bailleul, which had had more than 13,000 inhabitants before the war, had been one of the largest British centres behind the front at Ypres since the autumn of 1914. It had already been heavily shelled in the April fighting, and once it was in German hands it was battered by British artillery and aircraft. According to local sources, in November 1918 only one house was left standing in the town. The British returned to the ruins at the end of August. The loss of Bailleul and the hills east of it brought the Germans closer to the chain of the Flanders hills with the Kemmelberg, but their attack was weakening. On the same day Haig learned that General Ferdinand Foch had received the title of commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in France, and Foch, who the day before had refused to relieve the exhausted British divisions, kept repeating that the Battle of Hazebrouck was over.