Battle Story: Ypres 1914-1915 E-Book

Will Fowler

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 196

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Ypres was a medieval town known for its textiles; however, it became infamous during the Great War with trench warfare, poison gas and many thousands of casualties. As the German Army advanced through Belgium, it failed to take the Ypres Salient. On 13 October 1914, German troops entered Ypres. On looting the city, the Germans retreated as the British Expeditionary Force advanced. On 22 November 1914, the Germans commenced a huge artillery barrage killing many civilians. In 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres commenced making it an exceptionally dangerous place to live. In 1918, a German major offensive was launched, but the British held firm. Ypres was finally safe in late September 1918 when German troops withdrew from the Salient. Today the battlefields of Ypres contain the resting place of thousands of German and British soldiers. This book explores the first and second battles of Ypres through narrative, eye-witness accounts and images.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Timeline

Historical Background

The Armies

The Commanders

The Soldiers

The Kit

The Tactics

The Days Before Battle

The Battlefields: What Actually Happened?

First Ypres

Gheluvelt

The Wider Battle

The Langemarck Legend

Nonnebosschen

Relative Quiet

Second Ypres

Gravenstafel

St Julien

Frezenberg

Bellewaarde

The Salient

After the Battle

The Legacy

Further Reading

Orders of Battle

First Ypres

Second Ypres

Copyright

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

All illustrations are from the Author’s Collection, unless otherwise stated:

1The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing.

2Winter sunlight picks out the concrete structure that was the dressing station at Essex Farm north of Ypres where Canadian doctor Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae composed the iconic poem In Flanders Fields.

3The shrapnel-pocked gate of the Cloth Hall at Ypres in 2011.

4The 1839 treaty, guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality.

5Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War.

6German troops advancing along the road in 1914. (The Book of History –The World’s Greatest War, Vol. XIIII, The Grolier Society, New York, 1920; www.gwpda.org/photos)

7This card showing ‘A street in Flanders’ was produced to raise funds for the British Committee of the French Red Cross to provide clothes, furniture, seeds, implements and children’s food for French refugees displaced by the war.

8Belgian and British troops fighting alongside each other in Ypres. (The War Illustrated Album DeLuxe, Vol. 1, Amalgamated Press, London, 1915, Courtesy of the Great War Photo Archive: www.gwpda.org.uk)

9In 1914 there was optimism and enthusiasm for war when men left for France. By the latter years, when the rush of volunteers had dried up and conscription had been introduced there was grim acceptance that the departure for the Western Front might be a one way trip.

10A sergeant with his load carrying equipment, rifle and bayonet stowed in the training manual positions.

11The British 18 pounder deployed during an exercise in Britain.

12At the outbreak of the First World War artillery was still seen as a close support direct fire weapon and so shrapnel and case shot would be used against infantry and cavalry.

13Erich von Falkenhayn.

14Field Marshal Sir John French watches troops who are going ‘Up The Line’.

15Preserved German trenches at Bayernwald; the use of hurdles to revet the trench walls was a typically German technique.

16A typical British soldier’s equipment.

17The Short Magazine Lee Enfield in the capable hands of a Rifleman who is demonstrating the correct way in which to load a charger (clip) of five rounds.

18A British officer inspects a Lewis Light Machine Gun.

19A painting of Corporal Gibbons of the Royal Engineers constructing jam tin bombs in a frontline position.

20An observation balloon used for spotting the fall of shot for the Royal Artillery.

21A painting of Private Gudgeon of 1st Battalion, Northamptons who was awarded the DCM for his work as a runner and guide in the First Battle of Ypres.

22A postcard showing ‘A British sentry in Flanders’.

23The experience and professionalism of the BEF were demonstrated by Corporal Redpath of 1st Battalion Royal Highlanders (The Black Watch) who won the DCM during the First Battle of Ypres in November 1914.

24Field Marshal Douglas Haig who commanded I Corps at Ypres and would eventually command the BEF.

25The first man from the Indian sub-continent to be awarded the Victoria Cross, Sepoy Khudadad Khan.

26German prisoners carry a wounded British soldier.

27Cavalry troops patrol along the flooded Yperlee Canal, Ypres. (New York Times, 03/21/1915 Courtesy of the Great War Photo Archive: www.gwpda.org.uk)

28As the only survivor of his machine gun section Quartermaster Sergeant Downs of 1st Battalion, Cheshires manned a gun and beat off German attacks in November 1914 until reinforcements arrived. He was awarded the DCM.

29Lieutenant John Dimmer of the 2nd Battalion, Kings Royal Rifle Corps cleared jams in a machine gun on three occasions but suffered multiple wounds including a round that stuck him in the jaw during fighting on 12 November, 1914 at Klein Zillebeke. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.

30A cross, footballs and a Christmas tree mark one of the places where the Christmas Truce of 1914 broke out spontaneously.

31A modern sculpture of an Australian miner in Vierstraat, Wijtschate.

32Hill 60. This bunker constructed by the Australians is built on top of an existing German structure that had disappeared into the ground following mine blasts and shell fire.

33The savage fight in the south-east corner of Hill 60 on the night of 20 April 1915.

34Looking like strange rodents in their P Helmets or Tube Helmet gas masks, a ration party of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps is directed by 2nd Lieutenant Edward Allfrey to move through a gas saturated area.

35Later in the war canaries were used to detect poisonous gases. (Birds and the War, Skeffington & Son, London, 1919; www.gwpda.org/photos)

36Towering over the road junction at St Julien the statue of the Brooding Soldier is a powerful memorial to the heroic fight put up by Canadian troops of the CEF in the first gas attack of the war.

37The statue shows a soldier with arms reversed - the soldier has his head lowered and his hands resting on the butt of his rifle – the drill position adopted by troops lining the route of a funeral.

38Rifleman F. Hamilton of 8th Rifle Brigade mans a Vickers machine gun during fighting near Hooge in July 1915.

3940-year-old Jemadar Mir Dast of the 55th Coke’s Rifles (Frontier Force) would win the VC in fighting on 26 April 1915 in the Second Battle of Ypres.

40A British infantry shelter in Ploegsteert Wood in 2011.

41In an almost Napoleonic scene near Shell Trap Farm – aka Mouse Trap Farm – men of 1st Battalion, Royal Lancaster Regiment led by 2nd Lieutenant R.C. Leach launch a counterattack and capture a German flag on 24 May 1915.

42February 1918 – the war has only nine more months to run as this weary stretcher party walks along a duckboard track in the pulverised terrain at Ypres.

43A grim but evocative name for a little Commonwealth War Graves cemetery near Ploegsteert Wood, a shell-shattered wood known as ‘Plug Street’ to British soldiers.

44The caption to this card reads ‘Scotties have a clean up after a spell in the trenches’. The reality was that men stank, their clothing and bodies had lice, and it could be an effort to stay clean shaven, let alone clean.

45Pack mules loaded with shells are led off a ‘corduroy road’.

46A bunker integrated into the German trench system at Bayernwald.

47Photographed in 1917, Ypres has become a shell-shattered ghost town – however the cellars still provided cover for troops transiting through the town. The Cloth Hall can be seen framed by the ruins in the foreground.

48An observer in a balloon took this picture of Ypres in 1917.

Front cover: A photograph of troops marching to Ypres, taken in 1917 by photographer Ernest Brooks, depite being taken later in the war this has become an iconic image of the entire Ypres campaign. (Crown Copyright)

INTRODUCTION

At 8pm every day a simple ceremony takes place at the Menin Gate Memorial in the town of Ieper (Ypres) in Belgium. For a few moments before 8pm the noise of traffic ceases and stillness descends over the memorial. On the hour the regular buglers drawn from the local volunteer Fire Brigade step into the roadway under the memorial arch. They sound Last Post, followed by a short silence, followed by the Reveille. This ceremony has been carried on uninterrupted since 2 July 1928, except during the German occupation in the Second World War, when the tradition of the daily ceremony was kept alive at Brookwood Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Surrey, England. On the evening of 6 September 1944 as the Polish 1st Armoured Division was still fighting to clear parts of the town, men from the volunteer Fire Brigade took post at the Menin Gate and in a salute to liberation the ceremony was renewed.

The massive war memorial at Menin is dedicated to the commemoration of British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient during the First World War and whose graves are unknown. The memorial is cut into the ramparts at the eastern exit of the town, where a fortified gate once stood, and marks the starting point for one of the main roads out of the town that led Allied soldiers to the frontline. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and built by the British government, the Menin Gate Memorial was unveiled on 24 July 1927.

1. The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing. During the First World War this was the shell-shattered gap in the ramparts at Ypres through which many of the men who defended the Salient marched out to the trenches.

Its large Hall of Memory contains the names, cut into vast panels, of 54,896 British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in action. In order that the names at the top panels could be read from the ground an arbitrary cut-off point of 15 August 1917 was chosen and the names of 34,984 missing after this date were inscribed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing.

Nearly eight-five years after the Menin Gate was unveiled the memorial and the ceremony still attracts large crowds of visitors throughout the summer. At other times, on a weekday or in winter, the pavements under the memorial can be empty – though that is becoming rarer now. Whatever the day and whatever the weather, every evening the busy road through the memorial is closed to traffic shortly before the ceremony.

Central to the ceremony is a verse from the poem For the Fallen written by Laurence Binyon in 1914. It is now known as The Exhortation:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Binyon was too old to serve as a soldier but in 1915 he volunteered to work as an orderly at a British hospital for French soldiers, Hôpital Temporaire d’Arc-en-Barrois, Haute-Marne, France. He returned in the summer of 1916 and took care of the wounded from the Verdun battlefield.

The Menin Gate and Tyne Cot are extraordinary memorials – the number of names seems overwhelming, however today any visitor to the Ypres Salient cannot help but be moved by the number of smaller cemeteries dotted throughout the area. Some are obviously the sites of regimental aid posts or casualty clearing stations – the distinctive white headstones are clustered and not in neat lines – the men lie where they were buried, moments after they died, and exhausted doctors and medical orderlies turned to the next wounded soldier and struggled to keep him alive. In some there are headstones with the words ‘buried somewhere in this cemetery’. The doctors and orderlies had written down the names, but the bodies were lost in the mud and chaos of war as artillery fire destroyed both the living and the dead alike.

2. Winter sunlight picks out the concrete structure that was the dressing station at Essex Farm north of Ypres where Canadian doctor Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae composed the iconic poem In Flanders Fields.

One of these men who fought to keep wounded soldiers alive was a Canadian Army surgeon. Lieutenant Colonel John ‘Jimmy’ McCrae MD of Guelph, Ontario was working at a dressing station close to a canal north of Ypres. During heavy fighting in the Second Battle of Ypres his commanding officer recalled that:

Headquarters were in a trench on the top of the bank of the Ypres Canal, and John had his dressing station in a hole dug in the foot of the bank. During periods in the battle men who were shot actually rolled down the bank into his dressing station. Along from us a few hundred yards was the headquarters of a regiment, and many times during the battle John and I watched them burying their dead whenever there was a lull. Thus the crosses, row on row, grew into a good-sized cemetery.

from The papers of Edward W. B. Morrison

That cemetery would later be known as Essex Farm.

McCrae was not only a dedicated surgeon – and a veteran of the war in South Africa – he was a poet. It was after a particularly grim day that looking out over the crosses marking the graves of the men who had died at the dressing station he wrote the powerful poem In Flanders Fields, immortalising the image of fields ‘where the poppies blow’ marking the burial sites of thousands of young British, German, French and Belgian men who died throughout the Western Front.

Creating the poem may have been an act of catharsis, for the story has it that having written it he crumpled the paper and threw it to one side. A medical orderly recovered it and it would later be published in the popular British magazine Punch on 8 December 1915.

Now, the crosses have gone – replaced by neat headstones – but the power of the poetry has remained, commemorated by the poppy worn in buttonholes and made into wreaths for 11 November, when we commemorate Armistice Day, and on Remembrance Sunday. A testament to the fact that the sacrifice of Ypres remains with us even today.

TIMELINE

1914

October 1914

The Allied frontline extends from the towns of Langemarck, Zonnebeke, Gheluvelt, Zandvoorde, Messines to Armentières. The British Expeditionary Force holds the eastern and southern sectors, while the French are on their left and the Belgian Army to the north

7 October

German troops enter Ypres for just a short time as Allied troops are arriving in force

12 October

The Battle of Messines commences (ending on 2 November)

13 October

The Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars arrive at Ypres. In the previous day they have seen action in Bruges, becoming the first British Territorial Force unit to do so in the First World War

Battle of Armentières commences (ending on 2 November)

14 October

A larger British and French force reaches Ypres. The British force, IV Corps, is led by the 7th Division.

14 October

IV Corps headquarters is established at a convent in Poperinge, while its advance headquarters is at the Hotel de Ville in Ypres. The lack of space there meant that part of the town’s Cloth Hall is also used. General Henry Rawlinson, commander of IV Corps, is billeted in Ypres

19 October

The First Battle of Ypres commences (ending on 22 November 1914)

21 October

Battle of Langemarck commences (ending on 24 October)

22 October

The Germans begin their concerted attack on Ypres

29 October

The frontline contracts towards Ypres, with villages like Zonnebeke falling to the German advance

Battle of Gheluvelt commences (ending on 31 October)

31 October

The Germans are pushed out of Gheluvelt

1 November

The Germans capture the strategic Messines–Wytschaete Ridge

2 November

The British I Corps and French XIV Corps hold off a major German attack on Gheluvelt

10 November

The Germans begin their second major artillery bombardment of Ypres

11 November

Battle of Nonnebosschen

22 November

The historic Cloth Hall and St Martin’s Church are badly damaged by shelling

First Battle of Ypres ends

1915

January

The frontline runs through Bikschote, Langemarck, St Julien, Broodseinde, Hooge, Zillebeke, St Eloi, Wytschaete and Ploegsteert. Despite almost continuous fighting in the winter months, the line has barely moved

March

The civilian population of Ypres start to return to the town after the previous year’s artillery bombardment

14 April

The Second Battle of Ypres commences (ending on 25 May 1915)

The Germans launch a renewed artillery bombardment of Ypres, lasting nearly a month during which most of the town is destroyed

17 April

The British capture Hill 60

22 April

The first poisonous gas attack of the First World War launched at Bikschote against French troops. Belgian and Canadian troops help the French secure their line

Battle of Gravenstafel commences (ending on 23 April)

24 April

Battle of St Julien commences (ending on 4 May)

25 April

The Germans start their main attack against British positions

May

Heavy fighting occurs throughout the month and both sides suffer heavy casualties

5 May

Hill 60 attacked by the Germans and British are pushed back

8 May

Battle of Frezenberg commences (ending on 13 May)

24 May

Battle of Bellewaarde commences (ending on 25 May)

25 May

Second Battle of Ypres ends

22 July

British forces advance along the Menin Road, near Hooge

29 July

The first recorded use, by the Germans, of a flamethrower

7 August

A German gas attack on Allied forces at Hooge takes place

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The town of Ypres has a long history. There are reports that a community on its site was raided by the Romans in the first century BC. It was in the Middle Ages that Ypres became a prosperous city with a vigorous linen trade with England and a population that grew to 40,000. Wealth and prosperity had its drawbacks and the hostile attention of jealous neighbours and rampaging armies made it necessary to fortify the city. Parts of the early ramparts, dating from 1385, still survive near the Rijselpoort (Lille Gate). Work on the famous Cloth Hall that would become a landmark in the First World War began in the thirteenth century. Over time, the earthworks were replaced by sturdier masonry ramparts and a partial moat. Ypres was further fortified in the 17th and 18th centuries while under the occupation of the Hapsburgs and the French. Major works were completed at the end of the 17th century by the French military engineer Sebastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban.

It was the First World War that would bring the city to prominence. The town had been held against German attacks in 1914 in the First Battle of Ypres and like Malta or Stalingrad in the Second World War, it became of symbol of defiance. Ypres was the last major town in Belgium that had not been occupied by the Germans and so, to the Belgian people, it represented the last part of their homeland that was free.

Prior to the First World War the neutrality of Belgium had been guaranteed by the major powers, including Britain, through an 1839 treaty and so Germany’s invasion of the country brought the British Empire into the war. However, Ypres was a strategic position during the First World War because it stood in the path of Germany’s planned sweep across the rest of Belgium and into France from the north. The Allies and particularly the British wanted to hold it because it was a key site to protect the Channel sea ports and associated shipping lanes, and a good point to advance from to seize Ostend and prevent the Germans using this port as a U-boat base.

3. The shrapnel-pocked gate of the Cloth Hall at Ypres in 2011 – a small survivor from the ancient building. Little of the original building survives – the structure that stands over the market square was built in the 1920s and ’30s.

The Schlieffen Plan, the initial German attack on France through neutral Belgium, had ended in failure at the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. This had forced the Germans to retreat and dig in on the line of the River Aisne where French and British attacks were unable to breach well-sited defences and fighting seemed to descend into a deadlock. In an effort by both parties to regain the initiative, French and German forces made progressive moves northward in vain attempts to outflank and envelop each others’ armies – this push north and west became known as ‘The Race for the Sea’, and eventually it reached its destination, with barbed wire entanglements being constructed to the water’s edge in Belgium. Repeated failures to outflank the enemy ensured the gradual extension of opposing trench lines as combatants sought cover from machine gun and artillery fire. By the end of 1914 the trenches would stretch from the North Sea to the Swiss border.

4. The 1839 treaty that Britain, Austria, France, Prussia and Russia signed to guarantee Belgium’s neutrality and which would eventually drag them into the First World War.

THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN

At the beginning of the twentieth century the German High Command knew that if war broke out between Germany and Russia, France, which had treaty obligations with Russia, would declare war on Germany. In 1905 Alfred von Schlieffen, the German Chief of Staff, drafted a plan to knock France out of the war in six weeks before Russia had time to mobilise. It was based on an attack by 90 per cent of the German Army through neutral Belgium and Holland that would hook south and east and take the German armies to Paris. The remaining 10 per cent of the German Army would hold the line in the east as Russia slowly mobilised. Like so many plans it was predicated on assumptions which on the day were not realised. Schlieffen and his successor von Moltke, who modified the plan by not routing the attack through Holland, believed that Belgium would not resist, that Britain would not be drawn into the conflict and finally that France would be defeated in six weeks – in reality Belgium fought, the Russians mobilised in an incredible ten days, the French fought tenaciously and Britain entered the war.

In early October the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) relocated from the Aisne to Flanders, on the extreme left of the Allied line, and was ordered to probe north to Ypres. This coincided with simultaneous German moves westward and a series of confusing encounter battles ensued in which the larger German forces pushed the British back to an extended and thinly held line. It was during the relentless attacks on Ypres and its outlying villages between 19 October and 22 November 1914 that the famous Ypres Salient was created.