Ghent in the First World War

Ghent, one of Belgium’s largest cities and the capital of East Flanders, went through the war without a major battle but almost entirely under occupation. The Germans entered it without a fight in October 1914 and left only on 10 November 1918, the day before the armistice. For four years the city lay behind the front on the Yser and at Ypres. Airships and bombers that attacked England took off from the airfields around it, and Ghent itself became a centre of German policy towards the Flemings.

Covering the retreat (1914)

In early September 1914, when German troops first approached the city, the burgomaster, Emile Braun, met a German general at Oordegem. In return for deliveries of oats, bicycles, beer and cigars the Germans then spared Ghent and did not occupy it. A month later the city lay in the path of the Belgian army, which began to withdraw from besieged Antwerp on the night of 6–7 October.

The retreat was covered at Ghent by the Belgians, the French naval fusiliers of Rear Admiral Pierre Ronarc’h and part of the British 7th Division, brought here by rail from 9 October. The heaviest fighting took place on 9 and 10 October at Melle, on the south-eastern outskirts. Once the Belgian columns had passed to the west, the Allies left their positions on 11 October, and on 12 October German cavalry rode into the city, followed by infantry. Ghent offered no resistance and escaped destruction.

A city behind the front (1914–1918)

Ghent lay in the German rear-area (Etappe) zone, under military rule. One of the occupier’s first measures was to take all cameras from the inhabitants, while the Germans ran their own photographic service in the city. Braun held office for most of the war and tried to protect the inhabitants from the occupier’s demands, until in April 1918 the Germans deported him to a camp in Germany. Prisoners of war from the armies of the British Empire who died in captivity were buried in the city cemetery.

The surroundings of the city became an important air base. In March 1915 airships took off from Gontrode near Ghent for the first raid on Paris. On 7 June 1915 Reginald Warneford, a pilot of the Royal Naval Air Service, bombed the airship LZ 37 over Ghent, and it fell in flames on a convent in Sint-Amandsberg.

In 1917 the bomber squadron Kagohl 3 was based at the airfields of Sint-Denijs-Westrem and Gontrode, and on 13 June it bombed London in broad daylight. From September 1917 the giant bombers of Riesenflugzeug-Abteilung 501 also flew from here over England, and in May 1918 the bomber squadron from the airfields near Ghent carried out the last raid on London.

The Flamenpolitik and the university

Ghent was one of the centres of the Flamenpolitik, the German policy of favouring the Flemings, which was meant to divide the Belgians. Before the war the Flemish movement had demanded that the city’s French-speaking state university switch to Dutch. On 15 March 1916 Governor-General Moritz von Bissing issued a decree on the matter, and at the end of October the university reopened with teaching only in Dutch. Its critics called it the von Bissing university. It divided the Flemings themselves, and the Belgian government in exile condemned it.

The best-known opponents of the change, the professors Henri Pirenne and Paul Fredericq, had been arrested and deported by the Germans as early as March 1916. In the academic year 1916/1917 the university had 138 students and in the next 407, whereas before the war the state university had admitted more than 1,200 students a year. It ran for two years and fell together with the occupation in November 1918. Ghent University became Dutch-speaking only in 1930.

Liberation (November 1918)

In the autumn of 1918 Ghent was one of the objectives of the Flanders Army Group of King Albert I. After the Battle of Kortrijk its armies moved off on 20 October towards the Lys and the Scheldt. On 2 November the Germans fell back behind the Ghent–Terneuzen canal, and on 10 November their last units left the city and the Belgians entered it. The departing Germans blew up the railway bridges and wrecked the port installations.

The socialist Edward Anseele took over the duties of burgomaster, because Braun was still in deportation. The joy of freedom had a dark side: inhabitants looted the houses of the activists, Flemish campaigners who had collaborated with the Germans. On 13 November King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth made their state entry into Ghent and took the salute of Belgian troops on the Kouter square. That day the banker Émile Francqui handed him, in Ghent, a request from the Brussels city council to send troops to the capital as soon as possible; the King entered Brussels on 22 November. From 15 November the deportees, among them Braun and Pirenne, began to return to Ghent.