The First Battle of Ypres

The History of the Indecisive World War I Battle That Produced a Stalemate Along the Belgian Coast

By: Charles River Editors

Narrated by: Jim D Johnston

The enduring image of World War I is of men stuck in muddy trenches, and of vast armies deadlocked in a fight neither could win. It was a war of barbed wire, poison gas, and horrific losses as officers led their troops on mass charges across No Man’s Land and into a hail of bullets. While these impressions are all too true, they hide the fact that trench warfare was dynamic and constantly evolving throughout the war as all armies struggled to find a way to break through the opposing lines.

The arms race before the war and the attempt to break the deadlock of the Western and Eastern Fronts by any means possible changed the face of battle in ways that would have previously been deemed unthinkable. Before 1914, flying machines were objects of public curiosity; the first flights of any account on rotor aircraft had been made less than five years before and were considered to be the province of daredevils and lunatics. By 1918, all the great powers were fielding squadrons of fighting aircraft armed with machine-guns and bombs, to say nothing of light reconnaissance planes.

Tanks, a common feature on the battlefield by 1918, had not previously existed outside of the realm of science-fiction stories written by authors like H.G. Wells. Machine guns had gone from being heavy, cumbersome pieces with elaborate water-cooling systems to single-man-portable, magazine-fed affairs like the Chauchat, the Lewis Gun, and the M1918 BAR.

Needless to say, the First World War came at an unfortunate time for those who would fight in it. After an initial period of relatively rapid maneuver during which the German forces pushing through Belgium and the French and British forces attempting to stymie them made an endless series of abortive flanking movements that extended the lines to the sea, a stalemate naturally tended to develop. The infamous trench lines soon snaked across the French and Belgian countryside, creating an essentially futile static slaughterhouse whose sinister memory remains to this day.

Until the war of maneuver returned in 1918 and led to a decisive outcome for the war, the nexus of this horror lay in the rainy, sodden levels and low ridges of Flanders, near the medieval town of Ypres. In this tiny fragment of Europe, half a million men died over the course of three major battles and the times of attrition between, perishing in a squelching pit of mud, blood-tinged water, and rotting human flesh.

The First Battle of Ypres: The History of the Indecisive World War I Battle That Produced a Stalemate Along the Belgian Coast analyzes one of the Great War’s first major conflicts, and how it was emblematic of the stalemate that came from new technology and trench warfare.

©2018 Charles River Editors (P)2018 Charles River Editors