Second Battle of Artois, 1915: France's first assault on Vimy Ridge

On the morning of 9 May 1915, for a few hours, the French army did what every general on the Western Front dreamed of: it broke clean through the German lines. By late morning its spearhead stood on the crest of Vimy Ridge, looking down on the plain of Douai. By nightfall it had been pushed off again, and it would take six more weeks and about a hundred thousand French casualties to prove that the moment had passed.²

Background: the spring offensive

By the spring of 1915 the front had set into trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland. In Artois the German Sixth Army of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria held a salient between Armentières and Arras, with the heights of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and Vimy Ridge looking down on the coal basin of Lens. The French had already tried and failed to break in there during the winter, at heavy cost.³

The ground explains why. From the low country around Lens the land rises steeply to the ridge of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, crowned before the war by a chapel that drew pilgrims from the region, and which forms the northern edge of the Artois plateau. A few kilometers to the southeast, Vimy Ridge forms its eastern edge, falling away abruptly to the plain of Douai. Whoever held these heights could watch every move below.⁴

From his headquarters at Chantilly, General Joseph Joffre now planned a much larger blow, with General Ferdinand Foch coordinating the northern armies. The goal was Vimy Ridge. Beyond it lay the plain of Douai: by the British official history's account, taking the crest was to be the first step toward an advance into the plain as far as Cambrai and Douai.⁵ › First Battle of Champagne, 1914 to 1915

Armies and commanders

The attack was entrusted to General Victor d'Urbal's Tenth Army. The French Ministry of the Armed Forces counts six army corps and about 1,000 guns; The British official history, citing the French official account, lists some 780 field guns and 293 heavy guns, which went on to fire 1,813,490 field and 842,372 heavy rounds in the battle.⁶

At the center stood General Philippe Pétain's XXXIII Corps, with the Moroccan Division as its spearhead. Despite its name the division was made up of Algerian and Tunisian tirailleurs, Zouaves and the Foreign Legion, whose 2nd Marching Regiment of the 1st Foreign Regiment counted volunteers from many nations in its ranks: Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Swiss and Belgians among them.⁷

Among the legionnaires were two famous companies of exiles. The Czech volunteers of the Nazdar company went over the top with the Legion on 9 May, and so did the Bayonne company of Polish volunteers, the Bajończycy, formed in 1914 among Polish emigrants in France and named after the town of Bayonne, where they trained. It was the first Polish unit to fight on the side of the Entente.⁸

The battle in phases

Aubers Ridge, 9 May. The British attack to the north, by Sir Douglas Haig's First Army, was meant to tie down German reserves. With the experience of Neuve Chapelle behind them, and short of heavy guns and shells, the British planned a bombardment of only forty minutes, hoping for surprise. It was a disaster. The short bombardment left the German defenses intact, and the attacking battalions were cut down in no man's land. The British lost about 11,000 men in a single day, without gain, and Haig called the attack off.⁹

The breakthrough, 9 May. The French infantry went over the top at 10 a.m. The British official history describes six days of artillery preparation; the French ministry's account dates the final bombardment from six that morning. In the center Pétain's corps overran the German front in one rush. In less than two hours, the British official history records, it advanced some two and a half miles on a front of four miles, and men of the 77th and Moroccan Divisions stood on the crest of Vimy Ridge.¹⁰

The cost of that rush was terrible. German machine guns that had survived the bombardment raked the attacking waves, and the losses mounted with every hundred meters. Small groups still pushed on beyond the crest, as far as the outskirts of Givenchy.¹¹

The gap closes. The breakthrough had come faster than anyone expected. The nearest division of the French Army reserve, the British official history records, was 7½ miles away, while the Germans could bring up reinforcements unseen behind the steep eastern slope of the ridge. The French could not bring up men and ammunition across the shell-torn ground under German barrage fire, German counterattacks closed the gap within hours, and by the end of the day the French had been pushed off the top of the ridge.¹²

Turning point: from breakthrough to attrition

From 10 May the battle became a grinding struggle for the fortified villages and trench systems on both sides of the gap: Carency, Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, Neuville-Saint-Vaast and the maze of trenches the French called the Labyrinth. Carency and Ablain were taken house by house, and on the spur of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette the French finally took the ruins of the chapel and the crest. But every redoubt captured revealed another one ready behind it.¹³

The French attacks went on through May without breaking the German line. Meanwhile the British attacked again at Festubert from 15 May, at Joffre's request, to keep German troops away from the French. The Germans fell back to a new line behind their old front, and an attack by Canadian troops on 24 May, short of artillery support, made little progress. The British attacks cost some 16,000 casualties before they were called off on 25 May.¹⁴

The French returned to the assault in June and by 10 June had taken most of Neuville-Saint-Vaast and the Labyrinth. On 16 June the Tenth Army launched a last general attack on Vimy Ridge, which brought small results; the ruins of Souchez held out. In the June fighting near Souchez the Polish volunteers fought their last battle, and their losses at Arras and Souchez were so heavy that the company was disbanded.¹⁵

Aftermath

The offensive was stopped in the second half of June. The British official history ends it on 18 June; the French ministry says Foch halted it on 24 June, counting the battle from 9 May to 25 June. The French had gained ground, but not the ridge.¹⁶

The cost was immense. The French official figures given in the British official history are 2,260 officers and 100,273 other ranks killed, wounded and taken prisoner; the French ministry gives 102,500. German losses are less certain: the German published casualty lists quoted by the British official history give 49,446. The British added some 11,000 at Aubers Ridge and some 16,000 at Festubert.¹⁷

The lesson was drawn quickly. The British official history saw in the first rush proof that a breakthrough was possible on a wide enough front with methodical artillery preparation, and the fighting in Artois resumed in the autumn of 1915 together with the Second Battle of Champagne and the British attack at Loos. Vimy Ridge stayed in German hands until the Canadians took it on 9 April 1917.¹⁸ › Battle of Vimy Ridge, 1917

Legacy and memory

In March 1916, when the French army left Artois for Verdun, the British took over the sector. After the war the hill of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was chosen as the place to gather the French dead of the Artois front, and the national cemetery there holds some 42,000 to 43,000 bodies.¹⁹

In Poland the Bayonne company became a symbol of the fight for independence. The Polish Army in France took up its tradition, and in independent Poland its name was carried by the 43rd Infantry Regiment of the Bayonne Legion.²⁰ › The Battles That Won Polish Independence

Visiting the battlefield today

The ground of May 1915 is one of the densest landscapes of memory on the Western Front. Beside the national cemetery on the Lorette spur stands the Ring of Remembrance, the international memorial opened on 11 November 2014, which lists in alphabetical order, without distinction of nationality or rank, the names of some 580,000 soldiers of all sides who died in French Flanders and Artois. Below the hill, at La Targette in Neuville-Saint-Vaast, lie a French national cemetery and a Czechoslovak cemetery, where the centenary of the attack was marked in May 2015.²¹