Le Havre in the First World War

Le Havre, the great port at the mouth of the Seine in Normandy, was for almost the whole war the main base of the British army in France. Soldiers, horses and supplies arrived here from England and went on to the front by rail, while ships carrying wounded left the port for England. From October 1914 the government of Belgium, driven from its own country, sat in suburban Sainte-Adresse. On the approaches to the port and on the route to England, German mines and submarines sank several ships carrying wounded.

Base No. 1 (1914)

Before the war the British and French had agreed that Le Havre would be the main base of the British Expeditionary Force. The base staff arrived from Southampton on the night of 9–10 August 1914, and the French, for the sake of secrecy, had learned of their arrival only four days earlier. Le Havre became, alongside Boulogne and Rouen, one of the main ports of disembarkation. From the quays, depots and transit camps the soldiers went by train through Abancourt and the Amiens area towards the front.

During the retreat from Mons the situation changed. When the German advance threatened the Channel ports, the order came on 29 August to move the base to Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic. More than 22,000 men, 3,500 horses and about 65,000 tons of supplies had to be shipped away. The evacuation was chaotic, and some of the stores were looted. By 5 September the port was empty, but by mid-September the British judged that the danger had passed and decided to return. In October 1914, as Le Havre was once again becoming their main base, the first German submarines appeared on the route from Southampton.

A town of camps and hospitals

From then on Le Havre and neighbouring Harfleur filled with camps, depots and base depots for reinforcements, through which soldiers from the whole Empire passed. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, at the end of May 1917 there were three general hospitals, two stationary hospitals and four convalescent depots here. One of the hospitals was housed in the Palais des Régates by the sea at Sainte-Adresse. Ste Marie Cemetery holds 1,690 Commonwealth dead of this war. In April 1916 700 German prisoners were also shipped here to unload ships in the congested port.

Allies from distant fronts also reached France through Le Havre. On 13 July 1918, after a voyage from Murmansk, General Józef Haller landed here; the Polish National Committee soon chose him as commander of the Polish Army in France.

Belgium’s capital in exile

On 13 October 1914 the Belgian government, which a few days earlier had escaped from Antwerp to Ostend, sailed for Le Havre on the ferry Pieter de Coninck. It settled in Sainte-Adresse, a small seaside resort on the outskirts of Le Havre, full of hotels and villas. The ministries took over an imposing building put up by the Parisian businessman Georges Dufayel, and France granted the buildings of the Belgian authorities extraterritorial status. A Belgian post office worked here using Belgian stamps. King Albert I did not come to Sainte-Adresse, as he stayed with the army on the Yser.

From Sainte-Adresse the government conducted Belgium’s wartime diplomacy. On 14 February 1916 the guarantor powers made a declaration here that they would not end the war without restoring Belgium’s independence, and on 29 April they assured her that she would keep the Congo. In nearby Graville the Belgians built munitions works. On 11 December 1915 an explosion at one of them killed, according to the Long, Long Trail, about 110 people, almost all of them Belgian workers.

The government remained at Sainte-Adresse almost until the end of the war. It was from here that in September 1918 it rejected a German peace offer. In October it moved to liberated Bruges, and in November it returned to Brussels.

The route of the wounded

Small German submarines from Flanders regularly laid mines on the approaches to the port, and the wounded from the front travelled across the Channel to Southampton. On 28 October 1916 the hospital ship Galeka struck a mine off the port, and 19 medical orderlies were killed. On 10 April 1917 the Salta sank on a mine at the entrance to Le Havre, and with her, depending on the source, between 86 and about 130 people. In both cases the mines had been laid by UC-26.

A week later submarines torpedoed in the Channel the Lanfranc and the Donegal, sailing with wounded from Le Havre, and on 3 August 1918 the ambulance transport Warilda, on which 123 people died. The victims of the Salta and the Galeka whose bodies were never found are commemorated by a memorial in Ste Marie Cemetery.