The outstanding performance of the Anzacs in the Battle of Broodseinde had delivered the British their greatest success of the Ypres campaign so far. But that success would only bring disaster.
It led to yet another fatal miscalculation by Field Marshall Douglas Haig. Aware that the Germans had little in the way of prepared positions behind Passchendaele and convincing himself once more that enemy resistance was faltering in the face of General Herbert Plumer’s tactics, Haig returned to his dreams of delivering the long anticipated knockout blow. He ordered his cherished cavalry to move up ready to exploit the expected breakthrough in the next planned attack.
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The Australians were once more to be used in this battle, alongside more wearied British, but the Kiwis were stood down. Haig ordered the attack to take place, despite rapidly deteriorating conditions – heavy rain was pounding down, turning the battlefield into even more of a sea of mud. Author Glynn Harper in his book Dark Journey quotes a relieved Prince Rupprecht, the German commander, writing: “Most gratifying, rain: our most effective ally.”
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Plumer and fellow General Hubert Gough both argued the campaign should now be halted because of the weather. As the New Zealand Culture Ministry’s online history of Ypres says, adherence to Plumer’s five-stage bite and hold timetable without taking account of the reality on the ground of weather and conditions was “a recipe for disaster.” Additionally, Plumer’s tactics rested on absolute preparation, yet Haig was also ordering him to give up that very key success factor and instead bring forward the next attack. Finally, in the face of Haig’s insistence, Plumer buckled and launched his next attack on 9 October. The troops thrown into this assault struggled through deepening mud to get into position. Artillery preparations were hindered also by problems in getting guns forward into the new positions to support this attack. The gunners failed to deliver the necessary barrages, the enemy barbed wire was not cut by the artillery and in the face of strong German resistance, the attack collapsed with heavy casualties.
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12 October - Bellevue Spur
The crater pocked, water logged battle field of Passchendaele, which Field Marshall Douglas Haig expected troops to fight on.
Still Haig refused to see sense. The Culture Ministry site says: “With the failure of the 9 October attack, Haig’s hopes now rested with the last of the five planned hammer blows three days later. Far from calling off the attack, or delaying it to allow adequate preparation, he hoped it could achieve what the previous effort had not — the final dislocation of the enemy defences, which he believed were tottering, despite the 9 October failure. With little time available, the hapless troops made ready for this next effort.”
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And it was New Zealanders called upon to make this foolhardy assault. The 2nd Brigade and the Rifle Brigade, were assigned the task.
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Bert was not involved, but it is important to note what happened on this day because it happened around Bert, he knew about it (his cousin Fred was amongst the Dinks who made the charge against the Germans), and the Passchendaele failure had a devastating effect on the entire NZ force.
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The whole advance was on a 5km front, with two English units and Australians included. The New Zealanders had as their objective that ominous goal, the last and most heavily defended German stronghold, Bellevue Spur and then onto the village of Passchendaele itself.
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The rain had continued and by now the ground was waist high in mud. Men were recorded as drowning under the weight of their fighting kit as they stepped into flooded shell holes.
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The British bombardment which started at 5.20am on 12 October, intended as the creeping barrage to cover the New Zealanders, again encountered problems caused by the weather. With the guns mired in mud, wheels unevenly sunk, and blinded by rain the gunners were unable to get precise range. The shells fell short, devastatingly so – into the advance NZ forces grouped waiting for the signal to attack, and then as they climbed the spur, failing to hit the German lines effectively or heavily enough.
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This meant the advance when it came was all in complete view of German machine gunners safely in strongpoints and concrete pill-boxes untroubled by artillery fire. In addition, the German units which the New Zealanders faced were the Jaegers, the most elite troops of the German army in the sector.
Australian soldiers surge forward in this photo from the Australian War Memorial.
Private Leonard Mitchell Hart, a 23-year-old former Railway cadet, from Nelson, was in 2nd Brigade. Of the 180 who went into action that day from his Company, 148 were lost. In a letter home he described the assault:
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“Through some blunder our artillery barrage opened up about 200 yards short of the specified range and thus opened right in the midst of us. It was a truly awful time, our own men getting cut to pieces in dozens by our own guns. Immediate disorganisation followed. I heard an officer shout an order to the men to retire a short distance and wait for our barrage to lift. Some who heard the order did so. Others, not knowing what to do under the circumstances stayed where they were, while others advanced towards the German position, only to be mown down by his deadly rifle and machine gun fire.
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“At length our barrage lifted and we all once more formed up and made a rush for the ridge. What was our dismay upon reaching almost to the top of the ridge to find a long line of practically undamaged German concrete machine gun emplacements with barbed wire entanglements in front of them fully 50 yards deep. The wire had been cut in a few places by our artillery but only sufficient to allow a few men through it at a time. Even then what was left of us made an attempt to get through the wire and a few actually penetrated as far as his emplacements only to be shot down before their surviving comrades’ eyes. It was now broad daylight and what was left of us realised that the day was lost. We accordingly lay down in the shell holes or any cover we could get and waited. Any man who showed his head was immediately shot.”
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An estimated 842 New Zealanders were killed outright on the muddy slopes and another 3,000 or so injured. In all, almost 4000 men therefore littered the slope, dead, wounded, crying out for help. Such was the casualty rate that even the Germans realised there had been a sickening loss of life and the next day, 13 October, called a truce to allow the New Zealanders to recover their dead and wounded.
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The assault was a failure. The Passchendaele ridge remained in German hands. The New Zealanders and British were in a worse position than before, trying to cobble together a front-line trench system out of shell holes and mud while bullets and shells whipped overhead.
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The Culture Ministry site: “The toll was horrendous. There were about 3700 New Zealand casualties. They included about 950 men who were either dead or mortally wounded; 842 men are officially listed as dying on 12 October, and the rest succumbed to their wounds in field ambulances and hospitals behind the lines in Belgium, France and the UK, some many weeks later. While some of the 842 killed in action may have died on 13 or 14 October — it was impossible to know exactly when wounded men lying between the lines may have died — 12 October is undoubtedly, in terms of lives lost in a single day, the blackest day in New Zealand’s post-1840 existence.”
Stretcher bearers of the 2nd Canadian Division during the battle of Passchendaele
On 16 October Bert and his fellow Aucklanders from 1st Brigade relieved the shattered 2nd and Dinks, replacing them in whatever hastily dug shelter they had, grimly trying to hold the new line. For the next eight days Bert was in and out of the front and supporting line trenches going through hell.
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His diary is filled with his work as signaller through this time and at least one more harrowing close call.
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Oct 16: “Went into the trenches again in the support line. Sleeping in bivvies dug in the side of shell holes.”
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Oct 17: “Fritz shelling pill-boxes and pozzies at intervals. Fixed buzzer and telephone apparatus in my bivvy. Heavy rain at night. Swamped out.
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Oct 18: “Huns shelling us heavily. Wire cut by shells. Fixed wire up and set phone in another dug out.”
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Oct 19: “I had some narrow escapes. Side of my bivvie blown in whilst I was in it. We changed over and went to the front line. Very fatiguing trudging through mud.”
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In a letter written home, probably in a spare moment during these days, he gave a little more detail:
“I am sitting in my bivvy, scribbling this, whilst Fritz’s artillery and ours are pelting lumps of metal at each other, but as long as none of the shells land near me, things are ka nui te pai. Of course stray pieces of shell and shrapnel find their way in this direction, and one piece missed me by inches. Fritz always makes things uncomfortable just at inconvenient times when we are trying to go to sleep, or carrying water or something. Presence of mind may be a great thing, but I prefer absence of body when shrapnel is bursting around me.”
The crater field of Passchendaele
The diary continues:
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Oct 20: “Looking after phone during day. Sent out to strong point to look after telephone instrument. Trench very shallow and muddy. Very cold at night.”
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Oct 21: “Stand to in the early morning under Hun barrage. We dare not move around owing to the observation of enemy planes. Right under the view of pill-boxes.”
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Then on Oct 22, came another close call. Canadians on their right flank were advancing and the German artillery started up once more.
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Oct 22: “Fritz retaliated and blew our trench in, killing seven men and wounding three. Left everything behind and carried wounded to dressing station.”
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Months later, in January 1918, with the benefit of time to dull some of the sharper edges of experience, he writes to his sister Nellie of that incident:
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“I was in a trench, and there were a few new chaps amongst us, there happened to be a ‘strafe’ on at that time, and it was not a very pleasant situation. Well it ended up in a shell lobbing in the trench, which by the way was an outpost, and resulted in about eight chaps being killed and 3 wounded. The concussion of the shell knocked me silly for a few minutes and when I came to my senses, I happened to see a chap jump out of the trench and go for his life, and he was soon a blur on the landscape. Well after a war council, amongst the few of us that was left, we decided to leave everything behind, which was half buried, and take the wounded down to the dressing station. We tied our field dressings around our arms to signify that we were stretcher bearers and carried the wounded to the dressing station after scrambling over shell holes and swamps. Fritz could have wiped us out, but he respected the stretcher bearers, because we do not fire on his.”
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Eventually on 23 October the Aucklanders were themselves relieved altogether by those fresh Canadians troops and were pulled far back to reserve camps to recover.
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By now Bert has experienced the full realities of war. He has seen bodies lying on muddy battlefields, smelt the stench of death, lost comrades, hunched in dirt holes as shells rained down, tasted the foulness of gas in his mouth, been exhausted by fighting yet continued to lie frozen to the bone in the middle of the night waiting for the inevitable attack on his position to come, and screwed his own courage to the point where he could charge into the teeth of enemy fire to do his bit. His performance under extreme stress during the Battle of Broodseinde led Coates to promote him permanently from platoon signaller up to “company sigs,” a recognition he was rightly proud of.
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And by the end of October this has all left its mark on him. A year and a half since he enthusiastically enlisted in Hamilton he is no longer that young man:
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“I am feeling like an old soldier now.”
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In totality for the New Zealanders, it had been a devastating month. With sickness and battle casualties, both the dead and those so wounded they had to be hospitalised, the New Zealanders lost 7,500 men in just that one month of October in the Ypres Offensive. It was so disastrous the New Zealanders could no longer field four Brigades and eventually had to dismantle 4th Brigade entirely.
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Kiwi historian Nicholas Boyack says: “The New Zealanders would never recover from Passchendaele; their morale plummeted and although they would continue to acquit themselves well, their hearts would never again be in it. One of the side effects of Passchendaele was that it discouraged diarists. Men no longer had the desire to record what had become a living nightmare.
“Because of the huge number of casualties and the resulting destruction of the New Zealand Division, Passchendaele must be considered the most important event in New Zealand military history.”
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Burton also talks about the on-going effect of Passchendaele on morale in the grim months that followed as the Kiwis had to continue holding the line in Ypres through the rest of the year, with no time to recover from the disaster: “There is a limit to human endurance and during the winter of 1917-18 this limit was very nearly reached. At no other time was the morale of the British Army so low. At no time was the war so nearly lost. It is impossible to fight once the will to victory has gone and during this winter hope and faith in the final triumph almost died away. The terrible disaster before Passchendaele and the fearful price which had finally to be paid for it had disheartened so many.”
The rubble of the church at Passchendaele.
It was the Canadians who were hurled into the final assault on Passchendaele on 6 November - a last 500m lunge up the remaining slope of mud and blood. By 7.10am the Canadians made the top and began fighting rearguard Germans down the main street. As the fighting slowed, they looked around at this ultimate prize.
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This is how historian Leon Wolff describes it: “Passchendaele had once been an archaic little cross roads village, a few dozen cottages and shops clustered along the main road that straggled north to Westroosebeke. Years ago, another narrow country road had intersected it. At the north-east corner a simple church had stood, built of white stone and reddish brick. For three years British soldiers had watched Passchendaele gradually vanish under shell-fire. In time nothing stood but the church and this too was half ruined when the third battle of Ypres began. Soon the only distinguishable ruins became blurred; but the soldiers staring upward through the drizzle and mist could still identify a vague scribble of stones several feet high. This they continued to call the church. The Canadians smoking cigarettes and trailing their rifles as they walked over the site could hardly grasp that it had once been a town. The cobblestones and dirt roads had disappeared, and in their place was a muddy maze of German army trails. Not one building remained other than the feeble remnant of the church. An aerial photograph shows not a ruined town, but only pill-boxes and shell holes.”
Ypres summary - triumph or tragedy?
With the capture of Passchendaele, the Flanders Offensive ground to a halt. There had in total been eight official battles that made up the Third Ypres Campaign:
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31 July – 2 August – Pilckem Ridge
16-18 August – Langemarck
20-25 September – Menin Road
26 Sept-3 Oct – Polygon Wood
4 Oct – Broodseinde
9 Oct – Poelcapelle
12 Oct – First Passchendaele
26 Oct-10 Nov – Second Passchendaele
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In all, according to official figures released in 1922, total British and Commonwealth casualties between July and December 1917 were 448,614. This doesn’t include the French who fought in support on either flank. In comparison the Germans lost 270,710. There is some skepticism as to the accuracy. The loss of life had been so great from the British side that there were inevitably attempts to doctor casualty figures. Lloyd George in his memoirs notes that “an elaborate effort was made to gerrymander the casualty returns” to make it look more favourable.
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The New Zealand forces alone, when they were finally withdrawn from the Ypres salient in early 1918, had suffered more than 18,000 casualties — including around 5000 deaths — and won three Victoria Crosses for bravery. In terms of lives lost, 1917 was the costliest of the NZEF’s three years on the Western Front.
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Was the casualty toll worth it – had the campaign achieved anything substantive?
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Clearly the original promises of taking the channel ports never materialised. Haig’s much-loved cavalry never rode to Berlin. As for the argument that the war of attrition favoured the Allies, that though the offensive may have cost more British lives, Germany could less afford to lose the soldiers it did, this is true. But, the offensive did not weaken the Germans so much that they could no longer sustain the war. That point was clearly shown in March 1918 when the Germans far from being exhausted launched a major attack which very nearly won them the war – the Ludendorf attack, which was to be so fateful for Bert. British historian John Buchan says of the Ludendorf attack that it was a “true intellectual effort to rethink the main problem of modern war.” An approach in stark contrast to Haig’s mulish decision making which created the miseries of 1917.
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Further underlining how tactically bankrupt Haig and his closest HQ commanders were, was the fact that when others were allowed to act independently, there were huge successes. At Cambrai Sir Julian Byng, commanding Third army, against Haig’s wishes, authorised a mass tank attack. He did not bring up artillery to start pounding days in advance. Instead he opted for surprise. On 20 November 381 tanks lumbered out and breached the Hindenburg line. Five kilometres were gained in five hours. Ypres had taken four months to achieve that. They took 10,000 prisoners and 200 artillery pieces. They suffered 1500 Allied troop casualties. But all this was lost again within a week because Haig had so drained the armies through the toll at Ypres, there was no one left to secure the gains. On 30 November therefore, the Germans counter attacked and retook all the ground.
British soldiers stand on top of a pillbox after the battle.
There are of course revisionist histories which take a contrary view of Haig’s competence and approve of his conduct of the war, or at least argue he has to be seen within the context of his time when generals of all nations were struggling to understand how to cope with an emerging modern warfare. Such apologists claim that there was no one else capable of providing any better leadership – British generals were all cut from the same cloth. (Hardly a resounding argument in Haig’s favour.) One aspect often put forward in his support is that the British Army transformed itself hugely between 1914 and 1918 by mechanizing – from tanks to air support to improved artillery with more powerful munitions and precision. But it can equally be said that technological advancement is a necessary response in every society living on a long-term war footing, which has happened throughout history regardless of individual commanders.
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A more objective view is to look at the fundamentals of the warfare Haig oversaw. Anyone who presided over such staggering loss of life in one battle, and then repeated this again and again in subsequent engagements, clearly lacked the tactical or strategic imagination and innovation of a truly great military leader. Haig was simply not up to the task, and sadly it was the men of the armies under his direction who were the ones that paid the price.
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The final argument of the Haig apologists is that he was right to keep pushing at Ypres because the French were so weak after their failures earlier in the year and that if the Germans learned this they would have attacked and crushed the French. Ypres then, is claimed to be how Haig kept the Germans occupied. But that is an argument made from afterthought. Haig’s own diaries show he had planned his grand attack in Ypres from as far back as 1915 well before the French debacle.
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So, if the grand strategic aims were never achieved, was there a small tactical aim achieved? Remember at the beginning of the year the Allies were in a desperate salient exposed to fire. They were losing 7,000 men a month. The campaign had indeed burst out of the Ypres Salient. But it had ended by creating a new salient on the ridgeline, less deadly than Ypres but still exposed to flanking fire.
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The Passchendaele Salient, which now replaced the Ypres salient, furnished target practice for German guns for the rest of the year and the men in it suffered heavy losses for absolutely no advantage.
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In short, there can be no sound argument to support the worthlessness of the few muddy kilometres of ground captured at Passchendaele.
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Haig had derided the French Aisne offensive as a ‘failure’ Yet his campaign gained less ground, took fewer prisoners, lost three times the men and he called it a resounding success.
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This failure to acknowledge reality was a dismal feature throughout Haig’s command of the British armies. It afflicted all his general HQ staff, some of whom were astoundingly cloistered from reality throughout the war. While the campaign at the front was mired by mud, Haig’s headquarters was mired by ignorance of the actual conditions they were forcing the humble foot soldiers to endure. This was most graphically illustrated by historian Basil Liddell Hart in his 1930 book The Real War (one of the first books to detail the worst aspects of the war and called by later historian Nick Lloyd an “explosive expose”) when he claimed that one of Haig’s key senior officers only set foot on a front-line battlefield once during the war. On November 7, the day after Passchendaele was finally taken, the improbably named Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell sallied forth from GHQ to survey the victory. As his staff car lurched through the swampland and neared the battleground Liddell Hart said Kiggell burst into tears muttering: “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?” He was not even at the actual battle zones where it was truly bad. Liddell Hart said it “revealed on what a foundation of delusion and inexcusable ignorance” that the Ypres offensive had been based. (While the precise details of this anecdote are debated, and the quote was almost certainly ‘improved’ by Liddell Hart, it is widely accepted Kiggell’s visit and reaction are a truthful account.)
A British and German soldier share a cigarette after Passchendaele.
But the full and public realisation of the woefulness of the campaign was yet to come. In the immediate aftermath of the putative victory of his Flanders Campaign, Haig reassigned his two front line generals to sideline them and reduce the likelihood of them causing him bother by bringing up unpleasant facts. Plumer, despite the fact he had performed the best of all the commanders at Ypres, was reassigned to Italy to get him out of the way. Gough and the Fifth were in disgrace and posted to France, in what was assumed to be a quieter area of the front. Haig and his high command couldn’t hide what had happened altogether though. Kiggell was replaced. Others were also removed. When the Americans arrived, they effectively took over the running of the war from Haig.
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The sad futility of it all was made appalling clear the next year when the Germans launched their own major assault in Ypres, as part of a series of massive attacks they conducted through 1918. Codenamed Operation Georgette, in less than one month, from 9 to 29 April the Germans retook Passchendaele and Messines.
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Once the war was over, Haig moved to Scotland and assumed a faintly indignant air that historians starting to probe for the truth should dare to question his decisions. And despite the critical voices which began to emerge in the 1920s, life after the war was good for Haig and his fellow senior officers. Haig was made a baron and given a grant of 100,000 pounds, innumerable decorations by various countries, joined the boards of companies and in January 1928 died of a heart attack. His fellow HQ officers were also handed a myriad of awards and well-placed assignments around the globe.
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Looking back, Ypres was a campaign instigated by one man’s stubborn belief that he was right, no matter what the evidence to the contrary. It was a campaign bolstered by manipulation of information and downright lies. It was spurred by jingoistic arrogance. So not unlike most conflicts.
And Haig doesn’t stand alone in bearing blame. He is flanked by the King for being a specious fool who backed a friend over talent and creating a political situation where it was difficult to remove Haig; Admiral Jellicoe for being such a weak fool he lied for Haig and gave the original excuse needed to justify the campaign; and Lloyd George for being too interested in his own political position to stand against that toxic triumvate. All Lloyd George did as the campaign went on, was to try to starve Haig of men, refusing to send reinforcements. That might have saved lives in Flanders, but it meant Haig had skeleton armies by 1918 which were unable to withstand the major German offensive when it struck.
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The greatest epitaph for the Ypres campaign is Passchendaele, or Passion Dale, what in English would be called the Easter valley. It had become a Calvary of blood and misery for all those men who had clawed their way towards the summit of this ridge in ghastly mimic of Christ’s walk to the cross and it is forever known as a brutal, bloody waste of life, a byword for needless slaughter.