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The Fifth Battle of Ypres, also called the Advance in Flanders and the Battle of the Peaks of Flanders (French: Bataille des Crêtes de Flandres) is an informal name used to identify a series of World War I battles in northern France and southern Belgium from late September to October 1918.
The French returned to a strategy of decisive battle in the Nivelle Offensive in April, using methods pioneered at the Battle of Verdun in December 1916, to break through the German defences on the Western front and return to a war of manoeuvre (Bewegungskrieg) but ended the year recovering from the disastrous result. The German army attempted ...
The Nivelle offensive (16 April – 9 May 1917) was a Franco-British operation on the Western Front in the First World War which was named after General Robert Nivelle, the commander-in-chief of the French metropolitan armies, who led the offensive.
French infantry pushing through enemy barbed wire, 1915. During World War I, France was one of the Triple Entente powers allied against the Central Powers.Although fighting occurred worldwide, the bulk of the French Army's operations occurred in Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Alsace-Lorraine along what came to be known as the Western Front, which consisted mainly of trench warfare.
The early stages of the war on the Western Front were marked by a war of movement from August to November 1914, during which the cavalry was theoretically able to fulfill its role. At the operational level , it provided intelligence to the command and acted as a flank guard, while at the tactical level , it remained more mobile than the infantry .
On the Western Front, the Battle of Hill 70 was fought by the Canadian Corps against the 6th Army, from 15 to 25 August, forestalling the transfer of fresh divisions to Flanders. On 20 August, the French attacked the German 5th Army at Verdun and in four days, re-took much of the ground lost to the Germans in 1916.
During 1915, the German armies on the Western Front increased the front line from one to three trenches, built a second trench system 1,500–3,000 yd (0.85–1.70 mi; 1.4–2.7 km) behind the front line and developed the defensive use of machine-guns and artillery, to restrict an attack to a bend (Ausbeulung) in the line. The Franco-British ...
A Flanders campaign was postponed because of the Battle of Verdun in 1916 and the demands of the Battle of the Somme.When it became apparent that the Second Battle of the Aisne (the main part of the Nivelle Offensive, 16 April to 9 May 1917) had failed to achieve its most ambitious objectives, Haig instructed the Second Army to capture the Messines–Wytschaete Ridge as soon as possible. [6]