Location

The village of Brebières is about 5 kilometres south-west of Douai and the Cemetery is about a kilometre north of the village, on the N50 towards Arras.

As you turn off the main road you cross a small bridge and the road forks. Take the right hand fork for about 300 metres. The cemetery is on your left at the back of the large depot in front of you.

There is not a great deal of room to turn a car in particular if the ground is wet.

Historical Information

Brebières was occupied by British troops in October 1918, and from the 28th October to the 1st November the 23rd Casualty Clearing Station was in the village.

The British Cemetery was made in October and November, 1918, and further graves were added later from the following cemeteries:

Avelin Communal Cemetery, which contained five British burials.
Beuvry-Nord Communal Cemetery, which contained two British burials of October 1918.
Bourghelles Communal Cemetery, which contained three British burials of October 1918.
Coutiches Churchyard, which contained two British burials.
Hellemmes-Lille Communal Cemetery, which contained two British burials.
Lauwin-Planque German Cemetery (opposite Planque Church), which contained three British burials.
Marchiennes New Communal Cemetery, which contained six British burials.
Nomain Churchyard, which contained one British burial of November 1918.
Raches Communal Cemetery, which contained four British burials (three went to Terlincthun British Cemetery).
Templeuve Communal Cemetery, which contained four British burials.

There are now nearly 80, 1914-18 war casualties commemorated in this site. Of these, a small number are unidentified.

The cemetery covers an area of 355 square metres and is enclosed by a low brick wall.

Monument to Capitaine Madiot - air pioneer

In the field immediately behind the cemetery you will see a monument that is accessible by a rough laneway which you passed to reach the cemetery.

The monument is dedicated to Captain Louis-Gabriel Madiot, the first of France's military pilots and only the 106th Frenchman to have received a pilot's licence.

On Sunday 23rd October 1910 Madiot was killed in a Breguet aeroplane in this field.

The monument informs us that he was killed when his machine crashed at this location - a casualty of science. Mort pour la Patrie 1867-1910.

The British Cemetery in the distance

Madiot had become noted for his work at producing military kites - one design of which had been powerful enough to get him off the ground. Reports in the press after his death suggested that aeronautical engineers were of great value and was it really a good idea to let them expose their lives to danger in the contraptions they were inventing !

Madiot had arrived at La Brayelle Airfield to collect a Breguet II aircraft. He had already been up in the aircraft a number of times with the inventor and Breguet had decided to let Madiot fly solo. He had reached a hundred metres and was on his landing approach when he lost control and the plane nose dived into the ground with such force that it took two horses to pull the wreckage clear.

Louis-Gabriel Madiot

A military inquest into his accident suggested that a new helmet that he had been wearing was interfering with his ability to properly control the aircraft. The draft from the propeller was getting under the helmet. Not being able to untie the helmet Madiot would appear to have ripped it off and a witness stated that he saw the helmet thrown to the ground immediately before the crash. In his desire to discard the helmet Madiot must have momentarily let go of the controls.

The monument was inaugurated on the 2nd May 1912 in the presence of Madiot's family. It originally had a surrounding fence which has sadly disappeared.

La Brayelle, Breguet and Richthofen

If you look from the monument towards the British cemetery you have the large Renault Works in front of you. Slightly beyond that on the edge of Cuincy and Douai was La Brayelle Airfield; Madiot's destination the day he crashed.

The modern aerodrome at Vitry which you may have noticed next to Brebières would, after the Second World War, replace La Brayelle in importance as it was better suited to modern aircraft.

In 1902 the two brothers Jacques and Louis Breguet decided to turn their factory at La Brayelle into an airfield. Their company produced electric motors and dynamos and a longtime friend; Charles Richet, who was already smitten by the idea of flight convinced the brothers to turn their attentions towards aircraft.

By 1905 Louis had become Chief Engineer and had created a wind tunnel to observe the effects on flying machines. Three years later together with Richet he created the Breguet-Richet Aircraft Manufacturing Company. They produced what they called a gyroplane a four rotered precursor of the helicopter. It achieved the first ascent of a vertical-flight aircraft with a pilot on the 21st August 1907.

The airfield became famous in July 1909 when the first ever International Air Meeting took place over a three week period. On the 9th July it is said that 20,000 people including the Russian Duma (Parliament) came out to watch the races.

Although Breguet produced an aircraft for the meeting he could not get it to fly, however Louis Blériot had a great deal of success with his Mk XII over a number of events. On the 3rd July he managed 47km around the circuit despite suffering serious burns when the insulation around the exhaust worked loose.

Blériot was preparing for his cross channel flight on the 25th and was flying at various meetings in the run up to that historic flight.

Louis Paulhan was also present at the event and flew for an hour in his Voisin Octavia III aircraft, only being forced down when he ran out of fuel. On the 18th July the last day of the event Paulhan broke Wilbur Wright's height record of 110 metres when he overflew a balloon tethered at 120 metres at an estimated altitude of 150 metres.

At the very outset of the war in 1914 the French aircraft were removed from the airfield in the face of the advancing Germans who would take control of Douai for the next four years.

The Germans increased the number of hangars at the aerodrome whilst the British bombed them on a number of occasions.

Jasta 11

The word Jasta is an abbreviation for Jagdstaffel (Fighter Squadron) and Royal Prussian Jagdstaffel 11 was formed on the 28th September 1916 and mobilised at La Brayelle on the 11th October. This was part of a reorganisation of the German Air Service which was, as were its counterparts, in the throws of a rapid expansion.

The Jasta's first commander was Oberleutnant Rudolf Lang who does not appear to have had any great impact on the unit. However, on the 14th January 1917 he was replaced and two days later the position was taken up by the 24 year old Rittmeister (Cavalry Captain) Manfred von Richthofen.

Jasta 11 was transformed and over the next six weeks claimed 36 victories.

The Arras front was only 20km away and when the Battle of Arras opened on the 9th April 1917 Richthofen's Jasta continued its tally of victims. That month, which became known to the Royal Flying Corps as Bloody April, Jasta 11 claimed 89 enemy aircraft destroyed out of the month's total of 298.

They would go on to be the most successful of all the Jastas with a final score of 350 (of which Richthofen himself added 64 of his final 80).

On the 15th April the Jasta moved out of La Brayelle to a new airfield a few kilometres away to the east at Roucourt

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Arras 1917
The Arras Flying Memorial