Ostend in the First World War

Ostend, a port and seaside resort on the North Sea, was in 1914 one of the ports through which Belgium kept in touch with its allies, and for a few days the seat of its government. On 15 October 1914 it was taken without a fight by the Germans, who, together with nearby Zeebrugge, made it a base for U-boats and torpedo boats. For four years the town was a target for British warships and aircraft, and in 1918 for two raids meant to close its port. The Germans left it on 17 October 1918.

An Allied port (1914)

On 27 August 1914 a brigade of Royal Marines landed at Ostend, and with it came Charles Samson’s squadron, the first unit of the Royal Naval Air Service on the Continent. It was only a demonstration, and on 31 August the marines re-embarked. In early October the British 7th Division and the 3rd Cavalry Division came ashore at Ostend and Zeebrugge, sent to help Antwerp.

The help came too late. On 7 October the Belgian government left the besieged fortress and moved to Ostend, and after the fall of Antwerp the town also became army headquarters for a few days. But the exhausted Belgian divisions were falling back to the Yser and could not defend the ports. On 12 October King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth left Ostend, and the ministers sailed on the ferry Pieter de Coninck and reached Le Havre on 13 October. Panic broke out in the town: according to the diary of a local railwayman, Charles Castelein, 22,000 people fled it on 14 October.

A German base (1914–1918)

On 15 October at 10.20 German uhlans entered the deserted town, followed by infantry of the corps of General Hans von Beseler, which was pursuing the Belgian army and had orders to reach the sea. The coast was taken over by the naval division of Admiral Ludwig von Schröder, expanded at the end of 1914 into the Marine Corps Flanders, with its headquarters at Bruges. The Germans set up powerful coastal batteries on the shore. One of them, the Aachen battery near Ostend, survives to this day and is the only German coastal battery of this war of which enough remains to understand its structure.

Ostend and Zeebrugge were the outlets to the sea for warships from the port of Bruges, linked to them by canals. U-boats began to use them in 1915. In March that year U-28, which sank the Dutch steamer Medea, sailed from Ostend. The Germans built U-boat shelters and new dry docks here. According to uboat.net the U-boats of the two Flanders flotillas sank 2,554 ships. Destroyers also returned to Ostend and Zeebrugge after night raids in the Strait of Dover, and in November 1916 the aircraft that first bombed London took off from the airfield at Mariakerke near Ostend.

Bombardments, barrages and raids

British warships shelled Ostend many times, and in April 1916 the Dover Patrol laid off the coast a barrage of mines and nets meant to stop the U-boats from Flanders. In 1917 taking the bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge from the Germans was one of the aims of the Third Battle of Ypres, but the offensive stalled far from the sea.

On St George’s night, 23 April 1918, Vice-Admiral Roger Keyes attacked Zeebrugge and Ostend at the same time. Off Ostend the blockships Brilliant and Sirius, misled by a buoy that the Germans had moved about a mile to the east, ran aground far from the entrance and sank under the fire of the batteries. On the night of 9–10 May Keyes tried again, with the cruiser Vindictive as the blockship. The ship entered between the piers in fog, but her captain was killed and the wreck settled at an angle, closing at most a third of the channel. Smaller craft, U-boats among them, still passed by it.

Liberation (1918)

In October 1918, after the Battle of Kortrijk, the Germans gave up the whole Belgian coast. They had begun recalling the U-boats home as early as the end of September, and on 5 October they scuttled the unseaworthy UB-40 at Ostend. On 16 October explosions could be heard from the coast as they destroyed the port installations and depots. On 17 October the Belgian 5th Division entered the abandoned town.

That same day Keyes was the first to arrive from the sea, bringing King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth to Ostend on a torpedo boat. The port was mined, and while it was being cleared the minesweeper Plumpton and the monitor M21 struck German mines. The wreck of Vindictive was raised in August 1920, and her bow was set up in Ostend as a memorial.