Bapaume in the First World War

Bapaume is a small town in the Pas-de-Calais département, where the roads from Albert to Cambrai and from Arras to Péronne cross. During the war it changed hands four times. For two and a half years it lay in the German rear; in 1916 it was the objective of the Battle of the Somme that the British Army never reached; and in 1917–1918 it passed from hand to hand three times without a fight for the town itself. The war left it in ruins.

A town on the road (1914–1916)

The town lies on the so-called Bapaume threshold, a passage between Artois and the Somme valley through which many roads ran. In January 1871, in the Franco-Prussian War, General Faidherbe stopped the Prussians here. On 26 September 1914, during the race to the sea, the town was taken by the Germans advancing from the direction of Cambrai, and the French, fighting south of it at Albert, never recovered it. The front came to a halt a dozen or so kilometres to the west and south-west, and Bapaume became a centre of the German rear, with staff headquarters and depots.

In the summer of 1916 the British were to reach Bapaume in the first days of the offensive on the Somme. On 1 July the attack along the road from Albert failed, and then for four and a half months the British Army took village after village. In October Haig still hoped to break through the defences in front of Le Transloy and Bapaume, but the Battle of the Transloy Ridges bogged down in rain and mud at Le Sars. The Australian official historian Charles Bean compared Bapaume to the hill of Achi Baba at Gallipoli: both were meant to be only a stage of the advance, and in time both became goals in themselves.

The burned town (1917)

Over the winter the Germans prepared a withdrawal to a new position, the Hindenburg Line. The main German garrisons left the trenches in front of the town at 1.30 a.m. on 17 March 1917, and in the morning the Australians entered it with the 30th Battalion. According to German reports the town had been set on fire in 400 places and mined. The historian William Philpott regards the Australians’ entry into Bapaume as the real end of the Battle of the Somme.

The town hall, one of the few buildings left standing, was judged safe once a mine had been removed from its cellars. But the Germans had left a second charge in it with a chemical fuse. On the night of 25–26 March the town hall blew up, burying the Australians sleeping in it and two French deputies from the Pas-de-Calais, Raoul Briquet and Albert Tailliandier.

Lost and retaken (1918)

In March 1918 the war came back. During Operation Michael General Julian Byng’s 3rd Army fell back across the 1916 battlefield and late in the evening of 24 March gave up Bapaume without a fight. German communiqués spoke of its capture “after heavy fighting”, but according to the regimental histories the Germans entered the empty town only around noon on 25 March. The British called the fighting of those two days the First Battle of Bapaume.

In August 1918 the Allies came back. In the Second Battle of the Somme Byng’s 3rd Army closed in on the town, and the Germans filled the ruins with machine guns. The command gave up a costly assault, and on the night of 28–29 August the Germans withdrew of their own accord. In the morning patrols of the New Zealand Division entered Bapaume. The fighting for the hills beyond the town, from 31 August to 3 September, was named the Second Battle of Bapaume.

After the war

Bapaume had been badly damaged by both sides. After the war its ruins had to be cleared of mines in long and dangerous work, and the English city of Sheffield, which “adopted” Bapaume, helped with the rebuilding. Australian, New Zealand and British soldiers lie in the town cemetery and in the cemeteries around the town.