Northern detail showing Operation Georgette, the Lys Offensive, from a map of the 1918 German offensives on the Western Front from The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Ferdinand Foch. The white area north of the German advance shows the British strategic retreats of April 15/16 and April 27 that shortened the line of the Ypres salient. © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.
German OffensivesOf Mar. 21 (Picardy)Of May 27 (Aisne-Marne)Of July 15 (Champagne-Marne)Of Apr. 9 (Flanders)Of June 9 (Compiegne)Front and situation of the German Armies March 20, 1918 (on the eve of the offensive)Front at the end of the offensiveScale of miles
"Beginning on the night of April 18 [1918], four divisions in the [French Army Detachment of the North] entered the front lines in the Mount Kemmel sector, north of the Hazebrouck salient. Although the Flanders front remained quiet after the eighteenth, the enemy launched a strong attack on April 25, striking the newly formed Army Detachment and the British to its north. Although some soldiers fought very well, the French lost Mount Kemmel, and the British scathingly criticized them for losing that important observation point. After an attempt to regain Kemmel the following day failed, British criticism of their ally escalated."
The second of German commander Erich Ludendorff's 1918 drives for victory, Operation Georgette, the Battle of the Lys, began on April 9 on the Lys River along the Franco-Belgian border in Flanders. French reserves reinforced the British line after the latter had been driven back with heavy losses, but could not hold Mount Kemmel, adding failure to the criticism that they had moved too slowly to support their ally.
Pyrrhic Victory; French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, page 444, copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2005
1918-04-25, 1918, April, Operation Georgette, Mount Kemmel, Kemmel, Foch Lys Offensive map
