In most previous ice–ship interaction studies involving fluid effects, ice was taken as unbreakable. Building breakable level ice on water domain is still a big challenge in numerical simulation. This paper overcomes this difficulty and presents a numerical modeling of a ship moving in level ice on the water by using a one-way CFD-DEM (computational fluid dynamics-discrete element method) coupling method. The detailed numerical processes and techniques are introduced. The ice crack propagation process including radial and circular cracks have been observed. Numerical results are compared with previous experimental data and good agreement has been achieved. The results show that water resistance is an order of magnitude smaller than ice resistance during the ice-breaking process. Ice resistance shows strong oscillation along with ice failure process, which are affected by ship speed and ice thickness significantly.