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.