First Battle of Ypres - Background

Background

The Ypres campaign was the culmination of the first year of the Great War. After four months of heavy fighting and casualties (750,000 German and 995,000 French), the German and Allied armies attempted one more breakthrough operation to win a decisive victory in 1914. In August, the Imperial German Army implemented the Schlieffen Plan. It invaded Belgium in an attempt to outflank the large French Army forces on the German-French border, capture Paris and encircle the French via an advance to the Swiss border. Unfortunately for the Germans, poor strategic planning had induced Great Britain into joining the war on the side of the Franco-Russian Entente. From the British perspective, the German invasion of neutral Belgium meant German capture of the Belgian channel ports, which would threaten British naval supremacy in the English Channel, North Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, Britain had a tradition of fighting wars on the continent to maintain the balance of power. A German victory over France (and the Russian Empire) could not be tolerated. As a result, Britain declared war.

The War Cabinet committed its British Expeditionary Force, under the command of Field Marshal Sir John French, to guard the flanks of the French Army by advancing into Belgium and checking the German invasion. Fortunately for the Entente, the Germans underestimated the Belgian Army. Serious Belgian resistance and scorched earth policies slowed down the German advance considerably, contributing to the failure of the German plan. Nevertheless, German numbers succeeded in gaining victories during the Battle of the Frontiers, forcing the Allies to abandon their original offensive strategy in the Alsace and Belgium. Owing to German failures in logistics, and the difficulty of command and control at that time, the French were able to pull their forces out of the potential trap, and redeploy them in time to defeat the Germans at the First Battle of the Marne. Unable to drive each other back, the Allied and German forces conducted a race to the sea in an effort to outflank each other and achieve a decision. The race continued north until the opposing forces reached Ypres, a city inside the Belgian border.

Ypres was strategically vital. It was the last geographical object protecting the Allied ports at Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer. The loss of these ports would have denied the shortest logistical supply route to Allied forces on the Western Front and would have had decisive strategic consequences. For the German Army, Ypres was also vital. The collapse of its Ypres front would allow the Allied armies access to the flat and relatively traversable terrain of Flanders. Beyond the Ypres position, the Germans had no significant defensive barrier to protect the huge Ghent-Roeselare rail network axis, vital to German strategic and operational mobility in Belgium and the entire northern flank of their front. Such a collapse would also allow the Allies to target the German-held Belgian ports Ghent and Ostend.