First Battle of Ypres

The First Battle of Ypres was a battle in the opening months of World War I, fought from approximately October 19 to November 22, 1914, around the city of Ypres (Dutch and Flemish: Ieper) in the Flanders region of western Belgium. It directly followed the Race to the Sea of September and early October, in which the allied British, French, and Belgian armies and the forces of Imperial Germany had each attempted to turn the other's northern flank, but had failed and were now compelled to resort to frontal attacks in order to gain an advantage.

Fought in several phases around the city of Ypres itself and along the Yser River to the north and south, the battle chiefly involved the German Fourth and Sixth Armies against the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), the French 8th Army, and units of the Belgian Army. Consisting largely of massed infantry attacks against increasingly fortified defensive positions, backed by artillery and machine guns, it resulted in very heavy casualties on both sides, but especially for the Germans, who did the majority of the attacking. This, and the inability to break through the lines of the western Allies, would be a factor in the subsequent decision of the German leadership to avoid seeking a decisive battle and instead focus on a strategy of attrition; thus cementing the shift to trench warfare on the Western Front.

Background

Following the First Battle of the Marne in early September 1914, in which the Franco-British armies checked the German advance toward Paris, neither side held a clear strategic advantage: the Germans' attempt to quickly win the war in the west with a knockout blow against France had failed and they were now on the defensive, but the Allies had suffered heavy casualties in the battle and were able to advance only slowly. The German armies retreated a short distance to the Aisne River in northeastern France, where they entrenched and repulsed Allied attacks in the First Battle of the Aisne (September 13–28).

By this point, it was clear to both sides that a frontal assault against fixed enemy positions could only succeed at great cost to themselves; therefore, they began attempting to turn each other's northern flank, in the open country of northern France and western Belgium between the Aisne and the North Sea. The Race to the Sea, as this period of maneuvering was called (inaccurately: the goal was not to reach the sea before the enemy, but to take advantage of the undefended terrain in between), unfolded between late September and late October in a series of pitched battles, as the armies extended their lines farther and farther northward to protect their own flank and search for a weakness in that of the enemy. These efforts ultimately proved fruitless, however; by mid-October, the front lines extended almost all the way to the sea. The last stretch of open country was plugged by the Belgian army around October 17–19 as it retreated from Antwerp, marking the effective end of the "race."

Prelude

The emergence of a continuous front, spanning the entire distance from the North Sea to neutral Switzerland, meant that the armies were without room to maneuver further, and thus had no choice but to return to frontal attacks. The eastern half of the front, south of the Ardennes mountains and in Alsace-Lorraine, had been stripped of troops during the Race to the Sea, and neither the Germans nor the Franco-British armies considered major offensives in those regions at the moment. The northwestern sector, by contrast, in the region of Flanders, seemed more promising; the lines there were still solidifying, and the flat, low-lying terrain seemed more favorable for an advance. (In reality, however, the dense network of towns, industrial facilities, and farmers' hedgerows, coupled with the waterlogged soil, often served as major impediments to infantry operations.)

For these reasons, both sides hoped to achieve a breakthrough in the Flanders region, near where the Race to the Sea had ended. The German armies, led since September 14 by General Erich von Falkenhayn, sought an opening that would allow them to plunge westward, gain control of the coast along the English Channel, and be in a position to threaten Paris from the north. For their part, the Allied armies had as their objective an eastward drive that, if it did not roll up the German right flank entirely, would at least allow them to regain the major French manufacturing city of Lille (which had fallen to the Germans on October 12).

Most of the fighting in Flanders by the Germans up to this point had been conducted by the Sixth Army, under Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria (nearly all of its troops being Bavarian as well), along with significant cavalry formations. In mid-October, however, Falkenhayn reinforced it with the Fourth Army under Duke Albert of Württemberg, itself backed by several reserve corps arriving from Germany and from Antwerp. Its task (with the Sixth Army providing support farther south) was to cross the Yser River in extreme western Belgium, advance across the French border, and cut the Allies off from the ports of Dunkirk and Calais.

The Allied armies had less unity of command, being divided between British, French, and Belgian units. At the beginning of October, Marshal Joseph Joffre, the French overall commander, and Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the BEF, had agreed that the BEF would be sent north into Flanders, to shore up the Allied flank there and to provide the British forces with more direct communication to the Channel ports and Great Britain. Its component units (the I, II, III, IV, and Indian Corps, plus cavalry and air-reconnaissance units) arrived between October 8 and 19, concentrating along a line that stretched from the town of Langemarck, south along some low ridges a few miles east of the city of Ypres, and on to the La Bassée canal. The BEF was joined by units of the French 8th Army under General Victor d'Urbal and, to the north, some 60–80,000 survivors of the Belgian Army under King Albert I. BEF commander French and General Ferdinand Foch, who had overall charge of French units in Flanders, agreed that the primary objective was to repulse any German attack in the vicinity of Ypres, but both hoped to follow this up with a counteroffensive that would liberate Lille and perhaps all of western Belgium.

Battle

The First Battle of Ypres unfolded along a front some thirty-five miles in extent, stretching well to the north and south of Ypres proper. Because of this, and the fact that it is reckoned to have lasted slightly over a month, it is usually divided into smaller components: an opening action at the town of Langemarck, directly northeast of Ypres; battles at La Bassée and Armentières near the southern end of the line; renewed fighting around Ypres and especially at Gheluvelt to the east; and a final German offensive against the northern sector, at Nonne Bosschen, followed by some minor, local operations. Many of these "sub-battles" merged with one another in practice, though, so any such division is of limited utility. British veterans of the battle simply referred to it as "First Ypres" without further distinction. A corporal serving in a Bavarian Regiment, Adolf Hitler, was temporarily blinded in a British gas attack.

Battle of Langemarck

By October 19, troops from the XXVI and XXVII Reserve Corps of the German Fourth Army were advancing towards Ypres, pushing the British IV Corps back from its initial positions along the low ridges east of the city back towards Ypres itself. The BEF's ability to hold the city at all was seriously threatened until the 20th with the arrival of the I Corps under Lieutenant-General Douglas Haig. That same day, the Fourth and Sixth Armies began an offensive all along the Ypres front, which reached its climax between October 21 and 24, with the heaviest blows coming against the IV Corps at Langemarck.

The BEF was heavily outnumbered, having on hand only seven divisions (three of them cavalry fighting dismounted) against fourteen German infantry divisions, and lacked sufficient artillery; however, the British were far better at delivering fast and accurately-aimed rifle fire, while the German attacks were poorly coordinated and delivered in large part by newly trained troops advancing over open terrain in large, dense masses. Spearheaded by the 7th Division, the British defenders at Langemarck were able to repulse attack after attack, inflicting very heavy casualties in the process—the advancing waves of German infantry suffered casualty rates of upward of 70 percent. The greatest danger to the Allied line came on the northern flank, where French cavalry were pushed back to the Yser River by the XXIII Reserve Corps, which thus threatened to envelop the BEF's left; however, the line held until it was reinforced by the French IX Corps on the 23rd. The following day, these fresh troops, joined by the British 2nd Division, launched a counterattack from the Yser that relieved some of the pressure on Langemarck and Ypres, and this brought the most intense phase of the battle to an end, though active combat continued another two days.

Battle of Gheluvelt

In response to the Fourth Army's offensive stalling, General Falkenhayn detached portions of it and the Sixth Army, approximately six divisions altogether, to form a new temporary force, dubbed Armeegruppe Fabeck after its acting commander, General Max von Fabeck. Its purpose was to launch an attack on a narrower front, from the town of Menin northwest toward Ypres.

Backed by some 250 pieces of heavy artillery, Armeegruppe Fabeck began its attack on October 29, moving along both sides of the road from Menin to Ypres and pushing the BEF I Corps back throughout the day. The most significant fighting that day occurred around the crossroads hamlet of Gheluvelt, roughly halfway between the two towns, which the Germans seized along with a number of British prisoners and by nightfall had come within two miles of Ypres. Bitter fighting ensued over the next two days, as the BEF, their formations broken up by the assault, assembled makeshift collections from motley units to repulse further German attacks. The Germans nearly broke through again near Gheluvelt on October 31, but a counterattack by the 2nd Worcestershire Regiment restored the line, while Foch sent some French units to stabilize the general situation. Though the front lines had been pushed back westward toward Ypres, there still had been no German breakthrough.

Battle of Nonne Bosschen

Following the climax of the fighting around Gheluvelt, and the arrival of French reinforcements, another relative lull ensued during the first week of November. Many battalions in the BEF had been reduced to fewer than a hundred effectives each, while the German Armeegruppe Fabeck had averaged losses of 3500 men per day since it became operational. Smaller-scale attacks continued north of Ypres, first with an attempted offensive by Foch on November 6, then with a renewed German push to the Yser River on November 9; none of these, however, significantly altered the general situation.

On November 10, this "lull" was broken by another large-scale German offensive against the BEF positions near Ypres, the brunt of the assault (delivered by Armeegruppe Fabeck and additional units from the Fourth and Sixth Armies) along a line extending from around Gheluvelt northward through a small patch of forest dubbed "Polygon Wood" by the British soldiers, to another small wooded area north of the Menin-Ypres road, known as Nonne Bosschen ("Nun's Wood" or "Nun's Copse"). By far the most serious fighting occurred on the 11th; massed rifle fire from the BEF defenders broke up German assaults in the Polygon Wood sector, but along the Menin road, the Prussian Guard and the German 4th Division advanced on the Hooge chateau, only two miles from Ypres, and were just barely driven back by hastily-armed service personnel from the rear and by fragments of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Though subjected to heavy artillery fire that day and the next, Allied soldiers nonetheless held the line once again, and by November 13, with rainy weather setting in and obstructing infantry advances, the German threat had been largely contained.

Over the next week, the intensity of the fighting receding once again, Foch and French reorganized the Allied defensive line, dividing it into distinct sectors. On November 17, the Fourth Army ceased its attacks, and several German units were shortly thereafter detached for service on the Eastern Front. Though skirmishing continued, as elsewhere along the front, the First Battle of Ypres is generally considered to have ended on November 22, when active operations on both sides terminated.

Aftermath

By mid-November, attempts by either the Allies or the Germans to score a major breakthrough at Ypres had failed, and the various high commands had recognized that an open flank on the Western Front no longer existed. This had been emphatically demonstrated not only by the situation map in Flanders, and the increasingly elaborate fortifications thrown up on each side, but by the appalling casualties that resulted from attacking those fortifications. British losses from mid-October to late November have been reckoned at 55–60,000 men, French losses at 50–85,000, Belgian losses at 20,000+, and German losses at 135,000. These numbers come from the entire Western Front, but it is certain that the majority were incurred at or near Ypres. In the most severe fighting at Langemarck in October, individual units of the German reserve corps attacking the BEF defensive positions suffered casualty rates of up to 70 percent. Many of these reservists were student volunteers ages 18–20, and the large number of deaths among them led Germans to dub Ypres a Kindermord--"Massacre of the Children" or "Massacre of the Innocents."

The high number of German casualties, and the failure to break through the Allied defensive line, has been widely credited as a testament to the courage and tenacity of the British soldier. Although often outnumbered two to one, and suffering very heavy losses themselves, the BEF units nonetheless successfully held out. This has been attributed to their ability to improvise functioning battle groups from decimated formations, the cohesion and strong historical identity of the British Army units, the quiet determination and devotion to duty of the individual soldier, and especially to their superior marksmanship in infantry rifle fire. So notorious did the BEF become for its rapid and well-aimed fire that a later legend grew that the Germans had mistaken the sounds of its rifles for machine guns.

Though experiences at the First Battle of the Marne and the individual clashes during the Race to the Sea had indicated the strength of defense over offense, it was only at Ypres that high-ranking army commanders accepted this lesson. Sheltered trenches for the infantry, backed by artillery and machine guns, with barbed wire and other obstructions in front, made it difficult at best for attackers to dislodge them, and virtually impossible to do so without sustaining very heavy casualties. The evolution of the trench warfare that would thereafter characterize the war on the Western Front was especially marked at Ypres.