Start of the First Battle of Mount Kemmel

On 17 April 1918, the ninth day of the Battle of the Lys, the Germans tried to decide the fighting in Flanders with one powerful blow. From the south, General Friedrich Sixt von Armin’s Fourth Army and the right wing of the Sixth Army attacked the range of hills with the Kemmelberg, Mont Rouge and Mont Noir, the last obstacle between the Lys plain and the roads to the Channel. At the same time, north of Ypres, the Guard Corps struck at the Belgian army from Houthulst Forest. According to documents later captured from the Fourth Army, the two attacks, sharing the code name “Tannenberg”, were to squeeze the Ypres salient from two sides and force the British to abandon it. By evening it was clear that they had failed all along the line.

Before the attack

After taking Bailleul on 15 April, the Germans stood at the foot of the Flanders hills. General Herbert Plumer’s British Second Army had meanwhile shortened its front, giving up without a fight the Passchendaele ridge, won in the autumn of 1917 at the cost of enormous losses. On 16 April, in fog, the Germans took Meteren and Wytschaete (PL) together with the mine craters of June 1917, and the joint Anglo-French counter-attack announced for the evening failed, because the French 28th Division, which had just arrived to help, had no time to get ready.

Now the OHL, the Supreme Army Command, wanted to seize the moment. The attack from Houthulst Forest, planned for 20 April, was brought forward by three days, although of the eight divisions earmarked for it some were already following the withdrawing Allies and others had not yet finished detraining. The Kemmelberg itself was not to be taken by frontal assault, as it was considered too difficult. The heaviest blow was to be struck by the left wing of the Fourth Army, which intended to outflank the hill from the west via Mont Noir and Mont Rouge. Facing it stood tired British divisions, nearly all of which had already been through the March battle on the Somme, supported by arriving French units.

The Belgians at Merkem

The day began in the north. At dawn a violent bombardment fell on the whole Belgian line, and at 8 a.m. the German infantry went forward to storm the sector of the Belgian 10th and 3rd Divisions, from the Ypres–Staden railway near Langemarck to Lake Blankaart. The Belgians had held this ground only for a short time. It was a crater-torn part of the 1917 battlefield, without the protective inundation that further north had shielded their front since the autumn of 1914. According to the Belgian historian Rob Troubleyn, a German order of 14 April predicted that the Belgians would be driven out before they realised what was happening.

On the right wing, near Bikschote (PL), the attack of the German 58th Division stalled after taking a few outposts under the fire of the Belgian artillery, supported by British batteries. Things were worse on the left wing. Germans of the 1st Landwehr Division and a naval regiment took the hamlet of Kippe east of Merkem and began to roll up the Belgian line to the south, with the 6th Bavarian Division entering the fight behind them. By about noon they had driven in more than a kilometre on a front two kilometres wide. Two strongpoints held out, however, and reserves and survivors from the front line occupied the rise behind the village and poured fire into the Bavarians, who were attacking in dense waves.

Then the Belgians went over to counter-attacks. They were led largely by young officers who made decisions on the spot, while the artillery, untouched by the German bombardment, laid down fire where it was needed. At about 1.30 p.m. Kippe was back in Belgian hands. All afternoon one lost position after another was retaken. By evening the Germans held out only in the concrete shelter of Jezuïetengoed. Corporal Van Os crawled up to it from behind with four soldiers and pelted it with grenades. At about 9.30 p.m. the garrison surrendered, and the whole Belgian line was back with its defenders. According to the British official history, 20 German officers and 759 men were taken prisoner; according to Belgian sources, 779 or 789. The Belgians lost 619 men according to Belgian studies, and nearly a thousand according to the British official history. The British official historian awarded them “the palm” for the day.

The Australians at Meteren

On the western wing, between Meteren and Strazeele, at 9 a.m. sudden hurricane fire fell on the rear of the 1st Australian Brigade. The German gunners hit everything they had on the map: villages, farms, crossroads, even hedges. The front line hardly suffered. At 10 a.m. the German infantry went forward in short rushes, but Australian rifle fire stopped it at once, and further attempts were broken up by the artillery. The Australians thought this so harmless that they reported the attacks only in the evening, and until dusk their snipers hunted Germans slipping between the ditches. Alongside, in the sector of the 98th Brigade, the Germans approached in columns to within less than a kilometre, but under fire had to lie down, and before noon they withdrew. In the evening they took a farm on the road to Flêtre, defended by French chasseurs, but a Franco-British counter-attack immediately threw them out.

Mont Noir and Kemmel

In front of Mont Noir and Mont Rouge, General Nicholson’s six exhausted brigades, dug into shallow trenches without wire, beat off four successive attacks. The Germans managed to take only a copse with forward outposts. The defenders were helped by French horse artillery, and French cavalry divisions already stood in the rear.

At Kemmel itself the German heavy artillery pounded the summit and slopes of the hill from 6 a.m. The hill, which from the German lines looked like a squat pyramid rising from the plain, was an excellent target, but the shells fell behind the British front line. At 8.30 a.m. the German infantry began to come down in extended lines from the low ridge near Lindenhoek, and then approached in ones and twos. At 10.50 a.m. it launched a general assault on the 178th Brigade and two brigades of the 19th Division. The fire of artillery, rifles and machine guns, shooting from the slopes over the heads of their own infantry, stopped it a few hundred metres short of the line. The Germans took only Donegal Farm, of whose garrison an officer and eight sappers survived, and came up to the huts at Aircraft Farm. In the afternoon two battalions of the French 99th Infantry Regiment closed the gap, and another regiment of the 28th Division occupied the neighbouring Scherpenberg. An evening attack was easily beaten off, and during the night the French retook Donegal Farm. They themselves, however, could advance no more than two hundred metres in a counter-attack on Spanbroekmolen.

Over the battlefield the Allied air forces had the upper hand. The Royal Air Force flew 61 patrol and reconnaissance sorties and dropped more than 10 tons of bombs, although from 11 a.m. low cloud hung over Flanders. German regimental histories later wrote that the waves of the attack were mown down by machine-gun fire from the flank, and the survivors lay all day in their jumping-off trenches while British aircraft circled overhead and bombs tore through their ranks.

Evening at headquarters

On the German side the evening brought dejection. The commanders of three corps reported that they could not attack further without relieving their exhausted troops. The Fourth Army’s chief of staff, General Fritz von Loßberg, argued over the telephone with the chief of staff of Rupprecht’s army group that without at least five fresh divisions there could be no question of taking Kemmel and Mont Noir, and that if the Guard Corps did not succeed the next day, the attack on the Belgians would have to be broken off. There were no new divisions. Erich Ludendorff put off the decision by a day. Rupprecht wrote in his diary that very little had been gained at Kemmel and that everywhere else the attack had come to a halt, and concluded: “Both army commands report that the attack cannot be continued.”

On the Allied side the day was full of conferences. In the morning the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Henry Wilson, proposed to Ferdinand Foch, for three days now Allied commander-in-chief, a gradual withdrawal in Flanders as far as the line of inundations from Aire through Saint-Omer to Veurne. Foch refused. In the afternoon he and President Raymond Poincaré visited King Albert I of the Belgians, and in the evening he ordered two more French divisions sent north. Philippe Pétain decided to combine all French forces in Flanders into a separate Army Detachment of the North under General Antoine de Mitry. Douglas Haig meanwhile toured the headquarters in Flanders. The commander of IX Corps, General Alexander Hamilton-Gordon, told him that his men were so tired that, according to battalion commanders, some had no strength left to fire their rifles, but that the day was going well. Plumer, in a report that Haig forwarded to Foch, wrote that he needed six fresh divisions for an effective defence, although he trusted the endurance of his men, who “had fought well and held their positions”.

Significance of the day

The British official history calls 17 April a day of “completely successful resistance”. It was not only that the Germans gained no ground. Their grand plan to take the Flanders hills and cut the Belgians off from the British collapsed within a single day, and the failure almost led to the whole Flanders offensive being broken off. For the Belgians Merkem became a source of pride: for the first time since the Battle of the Yser in 1914 their rebuilt army had so clearly beaten the Germans in open combat. Mount Kemmel remained in Allied hands, and in the following days its defence was to be taken over by the French.