First Battle of The Aisne - Race To The Sea

Race To The Sea

For a three-week period following the unexpected development of trench warfare, both sides gave up frontal assaults and began trying to encircle each other's northern flank. The period is called "Race to the Sea." As the Germans aimed for the Allied left flank, the Allies sought the German right wing.

The western front thus became a continuous trench system of more than 400 miles (640 km). From the Belgian channel town of Nieuport, the trench lines ran southward for some hundred miles, turning southeast at Noyon continuing past Reims, Verdun, Saint-Mihiel and Nancy; then cutting south again to the northern Swiss border twenty miles (32 km) east of Belfort.

The BEF, left exhausted by the Aisne battle, remained relatively inactive. It was mainly the French who engaged the Germans in the "Race" but the British grew increasingly alarmed as the Germans advanced towards the coast. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, determined to prevent the Germans from capturing other channel ports which could be used as bases to attack English shipping. In late September, he arrived in France to arrange the transfer of the BEF to the north. By October 10 all but one corps had reached their staging areas in the Saint-Omer–Hazebrouck area, where the last camouflaged move was not detected by air reconnaissance until October 8, too late to muster adequate forces against the British.

Meanwhile, the Belgian Army became a growing threat to German communications as the battle shifted northward. The Germans made plans on September 28 to capture the port of Antwerp and crush the Belgian forces. This important maritime city was encircled by an obsolete fortress system that could not withstand even 6-inch shells. An outer ring of eighteen forts ranged from seven to nine miles from the city, an inner ring from one to two miles. Each fort was armed with two machine guns, but lacked telephone communications and means for observing gunfire. One 6-inch gun poked out at each mile, none of these forts had high explosive projectiles or smokeless gunpowder and several thousand surrounding acres had been cleared to provide unobstructed fields of fire.

At daybreak on September 29, General Hans von Beseler, called from retirement at the age of sixty-five, arrayed six divisions in an arc facing the outer ring of forts. The heavy siege howitzers that had destroyed the defenses of Namur and Liège had been placed well beyond the range of Belgian artillery. Aided by aircraft spotting, German gunners quickly found their targets. Belgian guns belched dense, black smoke puffs revealing their exact location and the fields cleared by the defenders deprived the forts of any concealment. Two of the forts were quickly reduced to rubble; the others fell in methodical succession. Without waiting for the outcome, the Belgian government and 65,000 troops departed from Ostend that night, leaving an army of 80,000 to hold off the enemy. Next day the entire outer ring collapsed, prompting a mass evacuation of civilians to neutral Holland. A British Royal Marine Division joined the defending troops during the attack, but even this combined force was unable to stem the German drive. After six days of stubborn fighting, the remaining garrison retired across the Scheldt River to the southern border of Holland, while the rest of the Belgian army retreated to the South, subsequently attaching itself to General Foch's Ninth Army.

Many of those killed at Aisne are buried at Vailly British Cemetery.

There were two later battles on the Aisne; The Second Battle of the Aisne (April–May 1917) and the Third Battle of the Aisne (May–June 1918).