Actions of the Bluff, 1916 1916
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
Key facts
| Year | 1916 | Wikidata P585 (point in time) |
|---|---|---|
| Era | World War I era (1914–1918) | derived from year |
| Location | Belgium | Natural Earth (modern borders) |
| Continent | Europe | Natural Earth |
| War / conflict | World War I | Wikidata P361 |
| Coordinates | 50.8139, 2.9244 | Wikidata P625 |
About the battle
The Actions of the Bluff were local operations in 1916 carried out in Flanders during the First World War by the German 4th Army and the British Second Army. The Bluff is a mound near St Eloi, south-east of Ypres in Belgium, created from a spoil heap made during the digging of the Ypres–Comines Canal before the war. From 14 to 15 February and on 2 March 1916, the Germans and the British fought for control of the Bluff, the Germans capturing the mound and defeating counter-attacks only for the British to recapture it and a stretch of the German front line, after pausing to prepare a set-piece attack.
The fighting at the Bluff was one of nine sudden attacks for local gains made by the Germans or the British between the appointment of Sir Douglas Haig as commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), and the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. The BEF was at a tactical disadvantage, on low boggy ground, easily observed from German positions. A retirement to more defensible ground was impossible but rather than conserving manpower and resources with a tacit truce, the British kept an active front and five of the German local attacks in the period were retaliation for three British set-piece attacks.
The Germans had better weapons and with a homogenous army, could transfer troops and equipment along the Western Front easier than the Franco–British.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Actions of the Bluff, 1916 (revision 1370104232), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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