The German Army at Ypres - 1914

507 Pages·2011·8.35 MB·English

by  Jack Sheldon

With love to my daughter Alison and my son-in-law Jim
as a new and exciting chapter of their lives opens.
By the same author:
The German Army on the Somme 1914–1916
The German Army at Passchendaele
The German Army on Vimy Ridge 1914–1917
The German Army at Cambrai
The Germans at Beaumont Hamel
The Germans at Thiepval With Nigel Cave:
The Battle for Vimy Ridge 1917
Le Cateau

First Published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright © Jack Sheldon 2010
ISBN: 978 1 84884 113 0
ePub ISBN: 9781844681563
PRC ISBN: 9781844681570
The right of Jack Sheldon to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Author's Note
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1 Preliminary Skirmishing around Ypres October
Chapter 2 From Antwerp to the Ijzer
Chapter 3 Bloody Fiasco at Langemark
Chapter 4 The Battle for Beselare, Geluveld and the Menen Road
Chapter 5 Diksmuide
Chapter 6 The Attempted Breakthrough by Army Group Fabeck
Chapter 7 Endgame at Langemark
Chapter 8 Stalemate on the Menen Road
Postscript
Maps
Fourth Army Advance to 19 Oct 14
Eyewitness Locations Chapter 1
Eyewitness Locations Chapter 2
Eyewitness Locations Chapter 3
Eyewitness Locations Chapter 4
Battle for the Menen Road 28 Oct – 9 Nov 14
Eyewitness Locations Chapter 5
43rd Division Attack Diksmuide 10 Nov 14
Eyewitness Locations Chapter 6
26th Infantry Division Attack Messines 31 Oct 14
Eyewitness Locations Chapter 7
46th Reserve Division Attack Langemark 30 Oct 14
9th Reserve Division Attack Langemark 10 Nov 14
Eyewitness Locations Chapter 8
Eyewitness Locations 11 Nov 14
Final Situation
Appendix I German-British Comparison of Ranks
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
First-hand German accounts of the fighting on the Western Front in the First
World War are dramatically (an adverb of particular force in this context)
different from those written by British participants. Very often conveyed in
the historic present tense, their sentences are short and direct, devoid of the
convoluted and passive constructions so beloved of more academic German
prose of the same vintage. Using pathos, they cast the dead as heroes, putting
direct speech into their mouths and not infrequently closing their observations
with an exclamation mark for added and rhetorical effect.
For British readers these German accounts can seem ‘over the top’: rarely
have they been taken seriously by those few Anglophone historians anxious to
explore the ‘other side of the hill’. They have been given equally short shrift by
their German counterparts. The products of the 1920s and ‘30s, they are seen as
tainted by fascism and encrusted with the ‘stab in the back legend’ so fervently
promoted by German militarists. But the consequence of such superciliousness
has been to rob us of an enormously rich and extensive primary source. The
German army produced a vast body of regimental histories after the First World
War, the best of them incorporating first-hand accounts and most of them written
by participants in the actions they described. True, some of them took their tone
from the more hyperbolic volumes of the series, Schlachten des Weltkrieges, or
‘battles of the world war’, of which Ypern 1914, written by Werner Beumelberg,
is – as Jack Sheldon points out in this book – one of the more egregious
examples. Sponsored by the Reichsarchiv, the body responsible for the German
official history, Schlachten des Weltkrieges was designed to appeal to a more
popular market, but some of the series undoubtedly rose above the expectations
of the genre – just as did some of the regimental histories.
These points matter because in 1945 the Royal Air Force destroyed the bulk
of the Prussian military archives, leaving subsequent historians much more
reliant on the published materials of the inter-war period than would otherwise
have been the case. To dismiss the accounts so wonderfully exploited (and
fluently translated) by Jack Sheldon in The German Army at Ypres 1914 is
wilfully to deepen our ignorance and lack of understanding of an institution
central to modern military history. Moreover, the German Sixth Army – one of
two Bavarian armies mobilised in 1914 – took a major part in the fighting at
Ypres. Unlike those of Prussia, the Bavarian archives were not destroyed in the
Second World War, and so Jack Sheldon has been able to work in some
unpublished material of particular force: look at the revealing memorandum
printed in chapter 6 and issued on 30 October 1914 by Krafft von
Dellmensingen, the Sixth Army’s chief of staff and himself no mean historian of
the war.
The German Army at Ypres 1914 is a tactical narrative of German operations
at the regimental and battalion level. That was the significance of 1st Ypres: it
was the moment when the generals of 1914 confronted the end of manoeuvre,
when corps-level movements and aspirations to higher strategic control were
confounded by the tactical constraints of positional warfare. Flanders had long
been one of the richest areas of Europe – agriculturally, commercially and
(increasingly) industrially. It had enabled the armies of the French revolution to
march on their stomachs, and the Germans followed Napoleonic precepts in the
autumn of 1914. They scratched Belgium’s fertile soil for winter root crops,
turnips, beet and mangel wurzels, in order to compensate for the collapse of
supply. The German cavalry played an effective part in the opening stages of the
battle (contrary to the reputation accorded them in British accounts) but found
their movements hampered by hedged and fenced fields, by railway lines and
urbanisation. Such a landscape was particularly well adapted for defence, and all
the allied armies – Belgian, French and British – proved themselves in their
exploitation of the opportunities it presented. But the consequences were
horrific: it can be argued that proportionately the casualty levels at 1st Ypres
outstripped those of the Somme and Passchendaele, and with them the ‘old’
armies of 1914 ceased to exist.
Many of the accounts used by Jack Sheldon refer to the effectiveness of
sniper fire: German soldiers removed the tell-tale spikes from their Pickelhaube
helmets, and officers put their swords to one side and picked up rifles to make
themselves less conspicuous. But the big killer was field artillery, particularly
the French 75 mm gun firing shrapnel over open sights at ranges of less than
1,000 yards. German reserve artillery could not compete: deficient in training, it
too often fired short and it was under-equipped. According to Jack Sheldon, one
officer, lacking telephone line to speak to his guns let alone to other formations,
had to use a whistle to give fire control orders, and another had to collocate his
guns with the infantry so that he could communicate.
The first battle of Ypres became the stuff of legend in post-war Germany.
The fighting at Langemark, characterised as a Kindermord, a slaughter of the
innocents, was portrayed as a heroic and self-sacrificial action by German
student volunteers, advancing into battle with patriotic songs on their lips. Plenty
of the accounts cited by Jack Sheldon testify to the role of music in sustaining
German morale, and General Berthold von Deimling announced that musicians