The First Battle of Ypres occurred from October to November 1914 during the first few months of World War I, fought between the Entente armies of France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom on one side and the German Empire on the other. The battle concluded the Race to the Sea, with the Allies beginning to form a front line in the Flanders region of southern Belgium. The Germans assaulted the Ypres salient, and the Allied troops succeeded in halting the German attacks. However, the Allies failed in their own counterattacks, and the two sides launched failed assaults on each other as a war of attrition began. By November, both sides had suffered heavy losses, their morale had collapsed, and they had run out of ammunition, and the exhausted armies finally broke off from battle. The Germans nicknamed the battle Kindermord ("slaughter of the innocents"), as 30% of the German troops engaged in the battle were student volunteers in the Imperial German Army; some false reports claimed that as many as 75% of the troops were volunteers.
Background[]
Between August and September 1914, it became clear that plans drawn up before the war had failed to work. Fresh offensives were improvised by generals still seeking a quick victory.
A series of attempted outflanking movements known as the Race to the Sea carried the fighting northward from the Aisne to Flanders. The BEF was moved by train to Flanders, where it fought the Germans at La Bassee from 10 October. The Belgian Army, retreating from Antwerp, defended a coastal strip at the Yser. The British rushed troops to Flanders, including elements of the British Indian Army.
Battle[]
French commander-in-chief Joseph Joffre regarded the area around the Belgian city of Ypres as the gateway through which Allied forces would advance to liberate northern France and Belgium from German occupation. To German Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn, it was the route by which his forces could seize the English Channel ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne - Britain's links to the battlefields. Falkenhayn succeeded in assembling superior forces to the Allies, partly through calling on corps of enthusiastic young volunteers, many of them still students, who had joined up in the early days of the war. These reservists - whose numbers included the young Adolf Hitler, an Austrian enrolled in the Bavarian forces - had received only two months of military training.
By this stage in the war, the British were able to field seven infantry divisions plus three cavalry divisions, which fought dismounted, alongside the foot soldiers. After some initial fighting, the main German offensive was launched on 20 October. Because of Allied inferiority, the battle turned into a desperate Anglo-French defense of a salient around Ypres, with British troops holding positions in front of the town and the French defending the flanks.
Heavy losses on both sides[]
The British and French improvised defensive positions, digging shallow trenches and exploiting the protection of stone walls, ditches, and village houses. The British were chronically short of heavy artillery and machine guns, but their rapid rifle fire, which the Germans persistently mistook for the fire of machine guns, imposed heavy losses on the massed German infantry.
The slaughter og German troops marching into gunfire while singing patriotic songs at Langemarck, near Ypres, on 22 October became one of the best-known German stories of the war. In fact, this was a half-truth, since the troops were singing only to identify themselves in the morning mist.
By late October, the Allies had ceded ground, but the initial German offensive had stalled. Falkenhayn then launched a fresh attack toward Ypres along the Menin Road. His expectations of success were high, for the British forces had been severely depleted. When Kaiser Wilhelm came to forward headquarters on 31 October, it was in the hope of celebrating a major victory. In fact, the Germans did achieve a potentially important breakthrough at the village of Gheluvelt on the outskirts of Ypres. Their heavy guns hit a British divisional headquarters at Hooge Chateau, just east of the village, unusually adding staff officers to the lengthening list of casualties.
The Allies lost the vital high ground dominating Ypres, but remnants of half-broken British battalions were assembled to mount a counterattack and, with the help of just a handful of French reinforcements, a line was held. The British were desperately short of soldiers and ammunition. The arrival of forces from India helped alleviate the problem, and a number of Territorial battalions were sent across the Channel for the first time. Nonetheless, the German renewal of the offensive in the second week of November came perilously close to overwhelming the British line.
British counterattack[]
At the climax of the battle, on 11 November, elite Prussian Foot Guards were at one point resisted only by hastily armed British cooks and officers' servants. By the end of that day, however, a counterattack by British light infantry at Nonnebosschen succeeded in driving the Guards back, and Falkenhayn knew the Ypres offensive had ended in failure. Although some fighting continued around Ypres until 22 November, the official date of the end of the battle, the German armies no longer threatened a breakthrough.
For the British, First Ypres was the graveyard of the prewar army - the "Old Contemptibls", so named because of an alleged derisive reference by the Kaiser to their puny fighting strength. The original BEF troops that landed in France in August 1914 had suffered around 90% casualties, with a large proportion of the losses at Ypres.
German setback[]
Strategically, the failed offensive at Ypres was a serious setback for Germany. Falkenhayn informed the Kaiser that there was no further chance of achieving an early victory on the Western Front. The German high command eventually concluded that it was best to create a strong defensive trench system on the Western Front while taking the offensive against the Russians in the east. Irrepressible in his pursuit of the offensive, General Joffre continued to order his troops to attack in Champagne and Artois in December, but elsewhere on the Western Front the fighting subsided. Soldiers had dug themselves into trenches as best they could wherever the fighting had come to a halt. As time passed, these trench lines were gradually reinforced, joined together, and extended. Troops on both sides settled in.
As the final weeks of 1914 approached, it was apparent that there would not be a swift victory for the Allies or the Germans. War would certainly not be over by Christmas.
Aftermath[]
The First Battle of Ypres resulted in many casualties. But it was inconclusive, and fighting at Ypres continued for the next four years. Germans remember First Ypres as the Kindermord ("massacre of children"), because of the heavy losses among young volunteers. One victim was the youngest son of sculptress Kathe Kollwitz, who made grieving statues for the war cemetery at Vladslo, Belgium.
The battle left the Allies occupying an exposed salient. Over the next four years, the fighting continued, including Second Ypres in 1915 and Third Ypres in 1917.