Battle of Loos

Background

By the late summer of 1915 the Western Front was locked in trench warfare. Falkenhayn had sent German divisions east, and Joffre planned a great autumn offensive to break through in Champagne and in Artois, where the French Tenth Army would attack Vimy Ridge. The British were to attack on its left, between Lens and the La Bassée canal.

Sir John French and Douglas Haig, whose First Army would make the attack, disliked the ground. It was flat coal-mining country, dotted with slag heaps (crassiers), pit-heads (fosses and puits) and rows of miners' cottages, all of which the Germans had turned into observation posts and strongpoints; in July the British had found a second German position being dug behind the first. At the Frévent conference on 27 July French failed to persuade Foch to switch the attack further north. Kitchener, alarmed by Russian defeats, told French that Britain must 'act with all energy and do our utmost to help France in their offensive, even though by so doing we may suffer very heavy losses', and on 21 August ordered him to attack.

Short of guns and shells, the British turned to gas. The decision to use it was taken on 3 May, after the German chlorine attack at Ypres. Special Companies of the Royal Engineers under Major Foulkes trained at Helfaut, near St Omer, and on 22 August Haig and his generals watched a chlorine cloud demonstrated there. Haig built his plan around it: if the wind was right, all six assault divisions would attack at once behind the gas.

The armies

Haig attacked with two corps. Rawlinson's IV Corps on the right had the Territorial 47th (2nd London) Division, the New Army 15th (Scottish) Division and the regular 1st Division; Gough's I Corps had the regular 7th and 2nd Divisions and the New Army 9th (Scottish) Division. The official history counts 75,000 men in the assault. French kept the general reserve, Haking's XI Corps with the Guards and the newly arrived New Army 21st and 24th Divisions, under his own hand, well to the rear. The New Army divisions were volunteers of 1914; Loos was the first mass action of Kitchener's Army.

Nearly 5,500 cylinders holding about 150 tons of chlorine were carried into the front line by some 8,000 men. Smoke candles and smoke shells were to thicken the cloud. Every man wore the original smoke helmet, a flannel bag with talc eyepieces that was hard to see or breathe through.

Opposite stood Sixt von Armin's IV Corps and part of von François's VII Corps of Crown Prince Rupprecht's 6th Army: at first only thirteen battalions, 10,000–11,000 men, with about a quarter as many field guns, but plenty of ammunition, deep dug-outs, machine guns and a well-wired second position behind them. Reinforcements could arrive within hours.

The battle

CDB90 treats the whole battle as one engagement, Loos (293).

25 September. At 05:50 the bombardment opened and the gas was turned on along the front from opposite Lens to Givenchy. The wind was light and fickle. In front of Loos and the Hohenzollern Redoubt the cloud carried over the German trenches; in the centre, astride the Vermelles–Hulluch road, it drifted back onto the British; on the 2nd Division front it was turned off almost at once. The engineers had warned against the release, but Gough overruled them. At 06:30 the infantry went over in thin mist.

On the right the 47th Division took the Double Crassier, the Loos Crassier and the chalk pit to form a flank facing Lens. The London Irish went forward kicking a football. Beside them the 15th (Scottish) Division went into the gas to the sound of Piper Daniel Laidlaw of the 7th King's Own Scottish Borderers, who marched up and down the parapet playing until he was wounded. Loos fell soon after 08:00, and the Scots crowded on up Hill 70; some 900 men crossed it towards Cité St Laurent. German reserves counter-attacked from 11:30, and at 13:00 retook the redoubt on the crest. The 1st Division, held up by uncut wire, left the Scots' left flank open.

In I Corps the 9th (Scottish) Division stormed the Hohenzollern Redoubt and Fosse 8, though its left brigade was thrown back by fire from Auchy. The 7th Division crossed the first position, reached the Quarries and Cité St Elie and by 10:00 had men in Haisnes, but could not hold them. The 2nd Division, without gas, failed north of the canal. By night the First Army had lost about 15,500 men and held a ragged salient short of the German second position. The French Tenth Army had attacked at 12:25.

26 September. French had released the reserves, but orders reached them in the small hours after a long night march. At 09:00 the 45th and 62nd Brigades failed to retake Hill 70. At 11:00, after a feeble bombardment, the 21st and 24th Divisions advanced in the open up a gentle slope for about 1,000 yards towards the second position between Hulluch and Hill 70, against wire four feet high and twenty deep that the guns had not cut. Machine guns from both flanks broke them, and survivors streamed back to the old German front line. The two divisions lost over 8,000 men in the battle, most of them that day. German machine-gunners, sickened by the slaughter, are said to have ceased fire to let the wounded crawl away. Dismounted cavalry reoccupied the Hill 70 trenches by 20:00.

27–28 September. The Germans retook Fosse 8 and the Dump; Major-General Thesiger of the 9th Division was killed there. The Guards Division attacked: the 2nd Irish Guards took Chalk Pit Wood, the Scots Guards were cut down at Puits 14, and at 17:30 the Welsh Guards were stopped on the crest of Hill 70. Second Lieutenant John Kipling of the Irish Guards was posted missing on the 27th. Major-General Capper of the 7th Division was also killed. On 28 September Haig told Foch that the First Army could not attack again.

October. The Germans retook the Hohenzollern Redoubt on 3 October, and on 8 October attacked with five regiments around Loos, losing some 3,000 men for nothing. On 13 October at 14:00, after gas and smoke, the 46th (North Midland) Division assaulted the Hohenzollern Redoubt and lost 180 officers and 3,583 men, mostly in the first ten minutes; a lack of hand grenades ended the attack.

Aftermath

The British kept Loos and a shallow salient, but not Hill 70, Hulluch or the second position. The official history counts about 50,000 casualties in the main attack, over 61,000 with the subsidiary attacks, against about 26,000 German. Some 15,800 British officers and men were killed or missing for good, among them three divisional commanders: Thesiger, Capper and Wing. The gas had done little damage: about 2,600 British soldiers were gassed, very few fatally, and one German regiment reported only 72 gas casualties in hospital.

The argument began at once. Haig, writing to Kitchener four days after the battle began, blamed French for holding the reserves too far back; the historian Winter calls this self-serving, pointing out that laden men could not have arrived in time. French's support in the army and government drained away, and on 15 December 1915 Haig replaced him as Commander-in-Chief. Rawlinson wrote that some divisions had reached the German trenches, 'for their bodies can now be seen on the barbed wire'. Richard Hilton, an artillery observer on Hill 70, thought its tragedy was 'its nearness to complete success'.

The Loos Memorial at Dud Corner names over 20,000 men with no known grave. John Kipling's grave was identified only in 1992, and Rudyard Kipling's grief drew him into the work of the war graves commission. Laidlaw, 'the Piper of Loos', was one of 21 men awarded the Victoria Cross.

Wargaming it

Loos is the first big British set-piece of the war and a good test of any trench-warfare rules. At battalion scale (a stand as a company), 25 September on the 15th and 47th Divisions' front, from the Double Crassier to the Vermelles–Hulluch road, is a manageable table: Loos village, the crassiers, the chalk pit, the Loos Pylons and Hill 70, with Cité St Laurent and Cité St Auguste beyond. The British player has numbers and surprise, the German player a thin garrison, machine guns and reserves arriving from mid-morning.

Gas should be a gamble rolled for each sector: it may carry, linger in no man's land or blow back, and the smoke helmets should penalise the men who wear them. Uncut wire and a short bombardment matter more than the infantry's courage.

The big decision is the reserves. A brigade- or division-scale game can let the British player bring XI Corps up on the morning of the 25th, as Haig wanted, and test whether fresh troops could have broken the second position before German reserves arrived, or whether Winter is right that they could never have got there in time. The 26th, by contrast, is a near-hopeless attack that makes a grim but instructive scenario. The Hohenzollern Redoubt and Fosse 8 suit company- or platoon-scale bombing fights, where grenade supply decides the day.

Maps and pictures

Pictures from the time

Photographs by the armies' photographers and the press, and drawings made at the time: free-to-use pictures from the battle's category on Wikimedia Commons. Each opens its file page there, with the full caption and source.