Battle of Loos (1915): Britain's First Use of Poison Gas

The Battle of Loos was a British offensive fought from 25 September to 8 October 1915 near the mining town of Loos-en-Gohelle in northern France. It was the largest British attack of 1915 and the first in which the British Army used poison gas. Despite early gains, the offensive failed at a cost of about 59,000 British casualties, among them the son of the writer Rudyard Kipling, and it led to the replacement of the British commander-in-chief.

Background

In 1915 the French commander Joseph Joffre planned a great autumn offensive, with French attacks in Champagne and Artois. He asked the British to attack alongside the French Tenth Army in Artois, on the coal-mining plain around Loos. British commanders, including Sir John French and General Sir Douglas Haig of First Army, disliked the ground: it was flat, overlooked by slag heaps and pit-head towers, and strongly fortified by the Germans.

Political pressure from the French and the need to support Russia, which had suffered heavy defeats that summer, overrode those doubts. Britain also had a shortage of heavy guns and shells, as the Battle of Neuve Chapelle had shown. Haig hoped that gas could make up for the lack of artillery.

The gas attack

Five months after the German chlorine attack at the Second Battle of Ypres, Britain was ready to reply. Special companies of the Royal Engineers placed about 5,000 cylinders, holding roughly 140 tonnes of chlorine, along the front.

At dawn on 25 September the wind was light and uncertain. Haig ordered the release anyway. In some places the gas drifted over the German lines as intended. In others it hung in no man’s land or blew back into British trenches, causing about 2,600 British gas casualties, most of them mild.

What happened

Six British divisions attacked on 25 September after a four-day bombardment. In the south, the 47th (London) Division took the Double Crassier slag heaps, and the 15th (Scottish) Division captured the village of Loos and pushed on to Hill 70. Piper Daniel Laidlaw of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers won the Victoria Cross for playing his bagpipes on the parapet to encourage his comrades after the gas had drifted back on them.

Further north the 9th (Scottish) Division stormed the Hohenzollern Redoubt, a strong German position, but other attacks failed with heavy losses. Behind the first German position lay a second line that was still intact.

The reserve, the inexperienced 21st and 24th Divisions, had been held well back under Sir John French’s control. They reached the front only after long night marches, tired and hungry. On 26 September they attacked the German second line between Lens and Hulluch in broad daylight, across open ground and through uncut wire. Machine-gun fire caused thousands of casualties in a few hours; German accounts later called the slope the “field of corpses of Loos”.

Fighting continued around Hill 70 and the Hohenzollern Redoubt into October. The Germans retook the redoubt, and a final British attack there on 13 October failed with heavy losses.

John Kipling and other losses

Among the dead was Lieutenant John Kipling of the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards, the only son of Rudyard Kipling. He went missing near Chalk Pit Wood on 27 September 1915, aged 18. His father had used his influence to obtain him a commission after he was rejected for poor eyesight. Kipling’s grief shaped some of his later writing about the war. In 1992 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission identified a grave as John’s, although some researchers dispute the identification.

Other casualties included Fergus Bowes-Lyon, brother of the future Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, killed on 27 September, and the poet Charles Sorley, killed on 13 October. The poet Robert Graves fought at Loos and later described it in his memoir Goodbye to All That.

Consequences

Loos cost about 59,000 British casualties, including some 20,000 dead, and roughly 20,000 to 26,000 German casualties. The British gained a salient around Loos but no breakthrough.

The handling of the reserves caused a bitter dispute. Haig blamed French, and he and senior figures in London lobbied for change. On 19 December 1915 Haig replaced French as commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force. Many of the lessons of Loos, about reserves, artillery and the limits of gas, were still being learned at the Battle of the Somme the following summer.

Timeline

• 1915, 21-24 September: British preliminary bombardment.
• 1915, 25 September, dawn: Britain releases chlorine gas; six divisions attack and capture Loos.
• 1915, 26 September: The reserve divisions attack the German second line and suffer heavy losses.
• 1915, 27 September: John Kipling and Fergus Bowes-Lyon are killed.
• 1915, 8 October: A German counter-attack is repulsed; the main battle ends.
• 1915, 13 October: A final British attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt fails.
• 1915, 19 December: Douglas Haig replaces Sir John French as commander-in-chief.

Why it matters

Loos showed that gas was an unreliable substitute for artillery and that reserves had to be close and under the right command. Its heavy losses, the Kipling family’s tragedy and the change of British commander made it one of the most significant British battles of 1915.