Douai in the First World War

Douai, a town in the Nord department on the river Scarpe, about 24 kilometres north-east of Arras, lay just behind the German side of the front throughout the war. The Germans took it for good on 1 October 1914 and held it until 17 October 1918. For them it was a centre of administration, supply and rest behind the Arras front, and the most famous German fighter pilots took off from the nearby airfields. From April 1917 the Allies looked down on it from Vimy Ridge, across the flat plain of Douai.

Summer and autumn 1914

The first weeks of the war brought the town several changes of master. The British chronology records the German capture of Douai under 26 August, although French sources do not confirm it. In early September a small German detachment was briefly billeted in the town and left eastwards after the Battle of the Marne. On 22 September French troops and men of the British Royal Naval Air Service marched in.

They did not stay long. During the Race to the Sea each side tried to outflank the other to the north, and on 1 October 1914 three corps of the German Sixth Army attacked between Arras and Douai. That day Bavarian troops took the town for good. The French had meant to advance on Douai, but in the First Battle of Artois they had to defend Arras, and the front came to rest a dozen or so kilometres west of the town.

The German rear

The Germans turned the town hall of Douai into a regional headquarters. The town, at the northern end of the Arras front and far from the firing line, was a centre of administration and transport. Soldiers who had not been given home leave were sent here to rest. For four years the Germans buried their own soldiers in the communal cemetery, as well as prisoners of war: British, French, Russian, Romanian and Italian. In 1917 they took the old carillon bells down from the belfry to melt them down.

Airfields surrounded the town. In the spring of 1915 the flying unit Feldflieger-Abteilung 62, in which Oswald Boelcke flew, was moved to Douai. On 1 August 1915, after a British raid on the airfield, his comrade Max Immelmann shot down his first aircraft in a Fokker monoplane. The British usually date the “Fokker Scourge” from that day. In April 1917, during the Battle of Arras, Manfred von Richthofen’s Jasta 11 flew from Douai, and on 30 April four squadrons from the local airfields flew over the front together. The British then named them “Richthofen’s Circus”, and the whole month “Bloody April”.

The plain of Douai

The plain is overlooked from the west by Vimy Ridge, from which Lens, Douai and the approaches to Arras can be seen. When the Canadians took the ridge in April 1917, the Germans fell back onto the plain. The way into it was then barred by the Drocourt–Quéant Line, the northern extension of the Hindenburg Line. On 2 September 1918 it was broken by the Canadian Corps of General Arthur Currie.

Liberation

In September 1918 the Germans removed the entire population of Douai eastwards, deep into Belgium. On 5 October a British advance towards the town was halted by ground the Germans had deliberately flooded. When the offensive in Flanders began in the north, the Germans started to fall back along the whole front. On 17 October 1918 two battalions of the British 8th Division entered Douai. According to the British official history a large part of the town was on fire, and there were neither Germans nor inhabitants in the streets. On the same day the Allies entered Lille and Ostend.

The next day sappers of the 8th Division took the German flag down from the prefecture. From 28 October a British casualty clearing station worked in the town. According to French sources the abandoned town was looted for several weeks.