15th September 1914, Near Sottegem
The attack by the 2nd London Division was led by the 4th Brigade, they had lost the London Scottish to the Camerons and Seaforths brigade of the Highland Division. But they had gained a battalion of Territorials from the Queens Royal Regiment (West Surrey), whilst they lacked the social cachet of the London Scottish who required its members to pay a subscription, they were a competent and well lead group of men.
The attack was to be led by the 4th Brigade with the 5th Brigade following through once the first wave objectives were captured, the 6th was to provide the reserve for the division.
Waiting for the breakthrough was every armoured car and truck available within the 3rd Army area and the Yeomanry of the 1st Mounted division.
The artillery support for the London Division consisted of 3 brigades of guns equipped with the old 15 pounder, 1 brigade of howitzers with the obsolete 5” and one heavy battery of 4 4.7” guns. These were an old naval piece mounted on the so called Woolwich Carriage, this gun had a 12” stroke recuperator of limited effectiveness, some of the recoil was still transmitted back to the gun requiring it to be relaid after each shot.
The Army Service Corps and the Army Ordinance Corps had been working hard to bring forward supplies for the attack, with sufficient shells for 2 days of heavy firing brought forward from the Magazines in Britain and stockpiled for action. The had been loaded from the magazine in Woolwich onto ships which had carried them into Ghent then carried by canal and horse drawn wagon forward to the guns positions. Additional shells were also being moved for both the regular and the reserve units of Third Army.
The Third Army was facing III Reserve Corps of the First Army, the two reserve divisions were spread thin, holding a longer than ideal frontage. They had been under considerable pressure from the various British units facing them, but with every man committed to the attacks on Lille and Namur the only reinforcements coming forward had been some Landwehr units brought onward from Germany itself. These elderly soldiers trained in the long past were of limited utility and so had been put to the task of garrisoning the various Belgian towns and villages.
With such a long frontage the Germans did not have a continuous front line as such, rather they had used the many well built farmhouses as strong points tying them together with what limited barbed wire they had. The Germans had small listening posts forward of this line but these were weakly held by small numbers of troops and were intended more as a trip wire who could raise the alert than as a deterrent to the attack.
The static nature of the line had provided both sides with advantages, the Germans took advantage of the relative peace of the line to hold it lightly tying down larger numbers of British troops with only small numbers of their own.
Third Army had used its time in place to train the territorial units, infantry, gunners and yeomanry had either been in the line or training. Judicious transferring of regular officers and NCOs had taken place. Likewise Territorials had been transferred to regular battalions to learn on the job. This had caused a degree of unhappiness on all sides but General Plumer was adamant that the terriers would be brought up to standard.
Using the 2nd London Division for the attack was also determined by the strengths and weaknesses of the territorial system, their morale was excellent, the Territorials served with their battalions and regiments by choice, those in France and Belgium, had volunteered a second time for overseas service before deployment. On the other hand with only one drill night a week and an annual camp each year their training and fitness was necessarily less than that of the regulars. Going into the attack would required less military skill than the subsequent advance to contact by the follow on forces.
The fitter regular troops and the mounted division would advance through the breach in the thin German line won by the sacrifice of the Territorials. The regular artillery better equipped and trained would be more capable of providing support to their divisions, than the territorial gunners.
The attack was at dawn, all along the line held by the 3rd Army the various artillery units fired a heavy barrage at the German lines, limited aerial reconnaissance had allowed the identification of a small number of targets, a brigade headquarters, an artillery regiment and a number of supply dumps. Those received the attention of the limited number of heavy guns available, closer in the patrolling by various infantry, yeomanry and even armoured car units had identified the locations of strong points which threatened to hold up a general advance. Those positions drew the attention of the 15 and 18 pounder guns. The barrage started 30 minutes before dawn, high explosive in the main, the shrapnel shells were felt to be more useful once the attack was underway and so they were preserved.
Already only a month into the war there were grave concerns as to the stock of ammunition for the guns, the limited number of factories for shell filling were working double shifts 7 days a week. The manufacture of shells was skilled work and the lathes and mills for the manufacture of shells and fuzes were in short supply, leaving little room for easy expansion. Lloyd-George was more than aware of the challenge and he and his people were at work on a solution, but that would be in the future. For now necessity demanded a short preparatory barrage and that was what was to be fired. The guns fell silent at dawn, immediately the sounds of whistles being blown as the subalterns and company commanders of the 13th, 15th and 16th battalions of the London Regiment and the Battalion of the West Surreys advanced from the start line. As was the practice for the British army at this stage of the war the companies and platoons advanced in rushes using fire and movement tactics. Tactics learnt the hard way against the Boers in South Africa, here and there there was a scattered fusillade of fire as the listening posts were encountered and silenced.
Soon however heavier fire was heard maxim guns and larger numbers of troops firing from the strongpoint line. Casualties began to mount among the leading companies, unfortunately for the German defenders they only had a small number of machine guns and they were outnumbered 4 to one at the point of the attack. A number of the strongpoints were ill situated, positioned such that hedges or small woods screened them from their neighbours preventing mutual support. These strongpoints were the first to fall, with a number of penetrations in the strongpoint line the fifth brigade moved forward to carry on the attack whilst the 4th brigade widened the breaks in the line by attacking the strongpoints from the rear and the flanks. Soon frantic communications were on their way to corps headquarters that the British had Broken the lines.