Hazebrouck in the First World War

Hazebrouck, a small town in French Flanders between Lille and Saint-Omer, was throughout the war one of the most important railway junctions behind the British army. The lines from the ports of Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk met here, carrying supplies for the troops in the Ypres salient. From the autumn of 1914 to the spring of 1918 it lay behind the front, housed hospitals and railheads, and in April 1918 it became the objective of a German offensive. The Germans then came within about 8 kilometres of the town, but did not take it.

Autumn 1914

In the first half of October 1914, during the Race to the Sea, German cavalry roamed the plain along the Leie (Lys). The IV Cavalry Corps passed through Ypres on 7 October and through Bailleul the next day, and set off for Hazebrouck. Near the town it ran into French territorial troops and on 9 October turned back. The British chronicle of the war recorded under that date the capture of the town by the Germans, but the sources do not confirm that they entered it. The cavalry corps of General Edmund Allenby secured by 11 October the line from Merville to Hazebrouck, meeting only weak resistance.

The British army moved up from the Aisne then passed through the town. On 12 October the British set up a field hospital in the local college, and on 19 October the last to detrain between Saint-Omer and Hazebrouck was General Douglas Haig’s I Corps, which marched from here towards Ypres. On 22 October the Indian Lahore Division set off for the front from near Hazebrouck, and in February 1915 the Canadian division went into billets east of the town.

Behind the front (1915–1917)

From October 1914 to September 1917 British casualty clearing stations, field hospitals that received the wounded from the nearby front, were posted at Hazebrouck. During the war a camp of Chinese labourers brought to work in France was also set up here. From 1914 the mayor was the priest Jules Lemire, deputy for the Nord department, who in February 1917 was made a knight of the Legion of Honour.

From the autumn of 1917 Hazebrouck itself came under fire. The Germans shelled it and bombed it from the air from September 1917 to September 1918, so that hospitals could no longer work there safely. Every day the inhabitants fled into the fields from the afternoon shelling, and in 1917–1918 a large part of the town was destroyed.

April 1918

As early as the autumn of 1917 the chief of staff of Rupprecht’s army group, General Hermann von Kuhl, had proposed a spring attack between the La Bassée Canal and Armentières towards Bailleul and Hazebrouck. After the failure of Operation Michael, Erich Ludendorff returned to a reduced version of this plan. On 9 April 1918 the German 6th Army opened the Battle of the Lys, routed the Portuguese in a few hours, and on 11 April took Armentières and Merville. Had the Germans taken Hazebrouck, or merely held it under fire, the British would probably have had to give up the whole Ypres salient.

On 12 April the Battle of Hazebrouck began. The Germans made two breaches in the front of the exhausted British divisions and came within about 8 kilometres of the town, and Haig called on his soldiers to fight with their “backs to the wall”. On 13 April the 4th Guards Brigade held out all day at Vieux-Berquin and was almost wiped out, but it gave time to the 1st Australian Division, brought by rail from near Amiens, to take up a line in front of the Nieppe forest. In the forest itself stood the fresh British 5th Division, brought from Italy. On 14 and 15 April the German attacks broke against this line.

The town remained in British hands, and the Germans shifted their effort northwards, to the hills of Flanders. On 25 April they took Mount Kemmel, but on 29 April they called off the offensive. The British official history rejects the legends that Hazebrouck was saved by the French or by the Australians. The Australian official historian Charles Bean acknowledged that the German advance was stopped here by the 1st Australian Division, but together with the British 5th and 33rd Divisions.

Summer and autumn 1918

Through the summer the Germans held a flat wedge on the Lys, shelled from the surrounding hills. After their defeat at Amiens on 8 August they began to abandon it: on 18 August the British took the Outtersteene ridge, on 19 August they entered Merville, and on 30 August Bailleul. The front moved away from Hazebrouck, and in September and October 1918 a hospital worked here again, the British No. 9 Red Cross Hospital. After the war the town was awarded the Croix de Guerre.