Race to the Sea and Trench Warfare Begins
The two armies on the western front spent October and November 1914 trying to outflank each other northwards and ran out of ground at the sea. The name is misleading. Neither side was trying to reach the coast; each was attempting to work round the open northern flank of the other, and each attempt was met by a corresponding extension, so the line grew north from the Aisne to the Channel in a series of encounter battles. After the Marne in September, the German advance on Paris had failed and both sides had entrenched along the Aisne, where frontal attack proved suicidal and the only remaining manoeuvre was round the end. The fighting ran through Picardy, Artois and Flanders — Albert, Arras, La Bassée — with railways deciding who arrived first at each new point. The Belgians opened the sluices at Nieuwpoort in late October and flooded the coastal plain, which anchored the northern end. The last of it was the First Battle of Ypres, from mid-October to late November, where the British Expeditionary Force was largely destroyed as a professional army holding the salient against repeated attacks, including German reserve corps of student volunteers whose losses are remembered in Germany as the massacre of the innocents. By late November the line ran unbroken some 700 kilometres from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. There was no flank left to turn, and the war of movement was over for three and a half years. What the four months settled was that neither side could win the war it had planned. Both had built armies for a short campaign of manoeuvre, and both spent the next three years trying to find a way through a continuous line that had no ends.
- Year: 1914 CE
- Category: Military
