THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES

Elated by the Messines success, Field Marshall Douglas Haig determined now was the time for his grand Ypres offensive.

Logic screamed not to launch another massive attack. The first moves of the Russian revolution had already begun, soviet politicians were calling for an end to Russia’s involvement in the war, its armies were being crippled by mutinies and its forces would start dwindling away, leaving German troops to increasingly be diverted to the Western Front. By now the USA had also entered the war - officially on 6 April. A first trickle of troops would begin to swell as the greatest industrial nation in the world geared up for war. Prudent counsel would have been to hold the Western Front and wait until the Yanks were there in numbers. To Haig, this was anathema - he and he alone wanted to beat the Germans. Haig was not to have his grand moment denied him.

So, what was Haig’s glorious plan?

To have the infantry storm up the ridgeline surrounding Ypres, taking it all and driving the Germans back in a day. Having created a gap, the cavalry (oh yes, Haig’s beloved cavalry), would be sent in to rout the Germans, forging through to the coast 50km away. Once the breakthrough was made, the 4th British Army would launch an amphibious assault on the coast. The Channel ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge would be taken within three days of launching the campaign. The German flank would be turned, and it would be a cavalry charge straight to Berlin. Just the like the old days.

The plan flew in the face of the fact no assault had ever managed to so significantly break the German lines, let alone such heavily fortified ones as the Ypres ridgelines and to take 50kms in a day was unheard of.

At a conference on 19 June when he first laid out his vision to the politicians who would need to ultimately sanction it, everyone sat stunned. Historian Leon Wolff says: “This statement was followed by a hush. Even the official historian admits that the ‘outline of the campaign may seem super optimistic and too far-reaching, even fantastic.’ Yet here was Haig stating it as almost an accomplished fact. The self-assurance of the man was disquieting.”

Haig knew he would have a hard time convincing the politicians to allow his offensive, so he gathered every piece of argument he could to insist that his attack must happen.

Asquith, the deposed former Prime Minister, is famously quoted as having once said of the war office: It “kept three sets of figures, one to mislead the public, another to mislead the cabinet, and the third to mislead itself.” Haig blatantly manipulated facts to suit his purposes – he admitted in his diary that not even he really believed everything he threw at the politicians.

In his memoirs Lloyd George says: “We were invited to discuss Sir Douglas Haig’s plans not merely without full knowledge of the essential facts, but with a definite suggestion the decisive facts were quite contrary.”

Haig’s trump card was a complete fabrication, but one which many an historian has since been fooled into believing was the real reason for the Ypres Offensive. The war cabinet was told that German U Boats were wreaking such havoc on supply ships that if they continued, Britain would be forced to surrender within a year. The U-Boats operated out of the Belgian ports such as Ostend and Zeebrugge. Haig’s Flanders campaign was the only way to capture the U-Boat ports. The politicians were astounded. They called in Admiral and Earl John Rushworth Jellicoe of the navy – and he confirmed it.

But it was pure fantasy. In April 1917 one quarter of all British merchantmen leaving the UK were sunk. There was an easy answer however. Winston Churchill proposed the ships should sail in convoys. The Admiralty resisted. How dare a mere politician come up with a solution? But Churchill won, the ships started sailing in convoy. By September the losses were reduced dramatically and continued to lessen month by month. In April 874,576 tons were sunk. In September 351,105 were sunk and only 1 per cent of that was from ships in a convoy. Therefore, the naval significance of Zeebrugge and Ostend had become negligible. However, in June, with Haig pressuring them and the Admiralty sourly trying to deride the Churchill convoy solution and backing Haig, the politicians bowed to pressure. The Flanders campaign was given the go ahead.

Battle begins

The mud of Ypres. This photo from 1917 shows an area called Remus Wood and was once a stand of trees. A pill-box can be seen in the distance.

Command of the main attack of what Haig saw as his inevitable, ordained Ypres victory was given to General Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough and his Fifth Army, a ragtag bag of reservists and divisions mauled and still recovering from the 1916 Somme campaign. Gough also had an incompetent staff renowned for not planning adequately. Putting Gough in charge was one of countless poor judgements.

On 16 July the British bombardment began and went on for 15 days. By the 22nd it was the heaviest bombardment ever seen in the world up to that time. Artillery guns were lined up wheel to wheel - one gun to every 5 metres of front line. The pounding could be heard in London.

Here was a further fatal flaw. Conventional wisdom would have it that a heavy barrage to break the barbed wire and destroy the pill boxes was essential. It had worked at Messines. But here, directly in front of Ypres, the terrain was critically different. Flanders is only 65 metres above sea level and the ground is almost pure fine-grained clay with a crust of sand on top of a thin coating of loam. In some places there is no topsoil. These clay fields are at their worst around Ypres. Because of the impervious clay the rain cannot escape and tends to stagnate over large areas. The ground remains perpetually saturated. Water is reached at an average depth of 30cm. Only the shallowest, puddly trench can be dug. Ypres was in plain fact a swamp which only stayed above water due to a complex drainage and canal system.

The British army hurled 4,283,550 shells into that reclaimed bogland of Ypres during the entire four months of the offensive and thus created for itself its biggest obstacle, the nightmare of the mud. Ypres clay plus water equals sticky, gluey mud. Bert described it as plasticine. Men became mired in the mud, dragged down by the weight of their equipment and in an alarming number of cases smothered to death.

But that horror was still before the infantry men who began to be moved into position for the launch of the offensive in July. It took three evenings of plodding for all the troops to reach the front in readiness for zero hour. Haig’s cherished mounted cavalry were placed in position in the rear ready to charge through to reach the Channel Ports.

Haig’s GHQ staff had listed objectives which were to be taken by the infantry and the general timing for their gain. Lines were drawn on the maps of the front. The army was to reach ‘Black Line’ by X hours and then move on to red, green and the like.

Mist and, worst of all, rain, descended. The battle ground ahead began to turn to mud and flood.

Bert, at this time still in the Hill 63 sector, and in and out of the trenches, comments in one letter: “It is now late summer, but to look at the weather, one would think that it was winter, as it has been raining steadily for the last week, and the ground is in an awful state. The trenches are little better than ditches filled with water and everything is a sea of mud.”

But nothing could deter this juggernaut.

At 3.15am on the 31st July 1917 the Fifth Army went over the top. Thus did the Third Battle of Ypres begin.

And by 10am the whole grand plan (sweeping the Germans from the Ypres ridge, charging to the Channel and onto Berlin) had collapsed.

After seven hours, the entire main attack division had managed to make their way forward just 450 metres. Not even the first objective was achieved. While the barrage had broken the drainage systems, it had left German pill-boxes still intact and their machine guns causing mayhem. Warned by the June Messines offensive that a major British attack in the Ypres Salient was likely, the German commanders General Erich Ludendorff and Crown Prince Rupprecht had spent the few weeks since then accelerating the building of pill-boxes in the Salient and moving more men into place. Winston Churchill, in his history of the war, said the German-held ridgelines had been “fortified with every resource of German science and ingenuity.”

German pillbox 1917.

It is worth taking a moment to look at the pill-boxes because they were such a dominant feature of the Ypres battles. Low, squat, with concrete rooves two metres thick, they were miniature, modern day medieval fortresses. And that German ingenuity had them seated on cushions of steel rails which gave them elasticity, so they would buckle but not break if hit by shells. Only a direct hit from a heavy calibre gun would crack one open. Well camouflaged, they were difficult to spot. And garrisoned by between 10 and 50 men they were a lethal means to repulse British infantry assaults.

As Burton says, in Ypres “two things saved the German Army – first the bad weather, and second the pill-box system. There were literally thousands of these concrete forts, which as long as any considerable number of them remained intact, rendered a position impregnable to infantry attack.”

Adding to British woes, practically every telephone wire had been severed in the maelstrom of their own attack and no commander could make head or tail of what was happening. Entire battalions became confused, lost and headed in the wrong direction or simply bleakly took shelter in shell holes where they were. By 10am the three main assault brigades had suffered 70 per cent casualties.

By the afternoon and with rain pouring, the battle ground flooding, men clinging to shell holes as machine guns rent the air above, Haig, who would not admit he was wrong, declared it a “great success” and sent a note to the war cabinet saying the first day’s operations were “highly satisfactory and the losses slight for so great a battle.”

The British know this as the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, because that was the one area they enjoyed comparative success.

In reality, no major ridgeline was captured, the main German line was not even reached, let alone broken. The channel ports still lay undisturbed 50kms distant.

Soldiers, dead and alive, during the attack on Pilckem Ridge.

Throughout a rainy August the British continued to launch sporadic, small attacks across the mud, never gaining headway, and the Germans counter attacking. It culminated in another large British push, the second of the eight official Third Ypres battles, between 16 and 18 August known to history as the Battle of Langemarck. Corpses continued to pile up. The decay and refuse of millions of men, alive and dead, sank into the soil and seeped in blackened water throughout the plain. Always the Germans were “visibly cracking” the war cabinet was told. The debacle which was unfolding was hidden.

As the weeks had worn on, with the planned breakthrough of the German lines now in tatters, the Channel ports were quietly forgotten and instead Haig transformed the rationale for his offensive to one of simply inflicting more casualties on the Germans than the Allies were suffering. It was to be a grim, brutal struggle of attrition; allegedly weakening Germany so it could no longer sustain its war effort. As New Zealand historian Glyn Harper has said: “Haig all too willingly settled for more dead and wounded Germans than dead and wounded Allied soldiers.”Apologists for Haig have sought to trumpet this as sound justification for Flanders. But this argument was as fatuous as the U-Boat menace.

By late August, following the failure of the Battle of Langemarck to secure the break through, Gough had become disillusioned and was resisting Haig’s demands for more huge assaults. He could see it was doomed. He continued to make a series of small attacks on 19, 22, 24 and 27 August, but they too did little to advance the British and simply broke the spirit of the Fifth - Glyn Harper refers to the Fifth Army by this stage of the offensive as the “shattered Fifth” and says of its 22 Divisions, 14 effectively had to be restructured and new men drafted in, such were the losses sustained.

Haig responded by removing Gough from command of the offensive and replacing him with General Sir Herbert Plumer, who was far from thrilled at being thrown such a disastrous operation. Plumer, as seen with Messines, preferred meticulous preparation, and managed, as the incoming commander, to buy himself some time to consider his approach.

In early September it stopped raining and began to dry out. If the offensive was to continue, this would have been the time for it. But Plumer spent the first three weeks of September planning his tactics.

He decided to abandon Haig’s massive all out assaults and instead settled on a cleverly conceived concept of a series of limited pushes – attack a comparatively short distance, dig in, hold and repeat; a tactic known as ‘the bite and hold.’ There were to be five staged ‘bites’ in the operation. It all hinged on a more sophisticated use of artillery to support and protect the infantry. The attacking depth of each ‘bite’ was dictated by the range and reach of artillery. The infantry were never to attack beyond the range that artillery could shelter them. The key element of this artillery support was that alongside the standard creeping barrage, where a protective curtain of bombardment could be targeted metres in front of British infantry and advance before them towards the enemy lines, once his men had gained the objective that Plumer had stipulated and signalled they were dug in, he would have the artillery gunners lay down more fire just beyond the newly dug in lines, aimed at stymying what had become the main German tactic in response to British attacks – a massive counter attack which would push the British back. And the timing of the next bite was then determined by how fast the artillery could heave their guns further forward to new positions to support a further bite into enemy territory. To give his ‘bite and hold’ even more impact, Plumer compacted the number of men and guns of Gough’s entire previous operation into a tighter zone. These were to be meticulously planned and overwhelmingly powerful assaults.

Polygon Wood after the battle - Plumer's first success.

As British military historian John Terraine said it was “a model of forethought and precision.”

Plumer had one more change. He would bring in the Anzacs under his command, renowned for their willingness to drive forward, to bolster the sagging British troops.

From late August the NZers had been pulled back to the rest camps and specialist training areas of northern France to ready them for deployment in the Ypres attacks. For almost all of September they were drilled in taking pill-boxes, counter attacks, night attacks, full “battalion attack movements,” even how to fight amongst trees – the Ypres Salient had small stands of woods. Bert took part in all this training as well as also being required to undergo intensive schooling in signals. It was a punishing routine.

As the first of Plumer’s new style of attacks launched on 20 September, with I Anzac Corp in the vanguard, made up entirely of two Australian Divisions, the skies however once more ominously opened. As a greater bombardment than seen even in July rained down, twice the fire power that Gough had used, the heavens too poured. This attack is known to history as the Battle of Menin Rd.

Despite the weather, Plumer’s limited objectives were gained. The troops, moving behind five belts of protective fire – three of high explosive, one of shrapnel and one of machine guns laying down cover – shoved the British line forward almost one kilometre. But at huge cost – 22,000 British casualties lay in the mud.

It was followed on 26 September by a second bite on the same model – the Battle of Polygon Wood, which ground on until 3 October. Again, Australians were used and again the British front line was edged a foothold further up the ridge, but again, it was hard won. However, Plumer’s stratagem of guarding his new lines and troops with a curtain of heavy artillery barrage was also shown to be lethally effective. It caught German troops out of their pill-boxes and trenches as they massed for nine repeated counter attacks, dealing them heavy losses. On the official New Zealand Ministry for Culture and History website for the Ypres campaign, it was said to have caused “much anxiety among the German defenders, who scrambled to develop a response to Plumer’s tactic. Their reliance on immediate and well-organised counter-attacks to dislodge attacking troops from their gains had been proved to be disastrous in the face of effective artillery support.”

But still nothing strategically important had been achieved – the Germans still dominated the heights. The Ypres Salient was still exposed to deadly German strafing. And it was all being undertaken at enormous cost. The two bites so far had cost 36,000 dead and almost 150,000 wounded to advance 2.5 kilometres – with the Passchendaele ridge still 4km away.

Now in October the time had come to stop. With the weather once more miserable, with a battlefield of gruesome proportions, with water filled shell holes and drowned corpses, the groans of wounded no one could risk rescuing, more Germans than ever defending the Ypres ridges, Haig’s own generals having lost any faith they might have had in his schemes and the morale of the armies sunk as deep into the swamps of the battle fields as their boots, there were only two rational options for the British. They could stop and try to hold on to what they had. This would be nightmarish. The extreme front-line infantry, protected though they were by Plumer’s artillery, were clinging to the rims of shell holes in the most lethal battle zone in history. The second option would be to retreat to a decent line that could be defended. It would mean writing off nearly 200,000 casualties for nothing but would have saved adding to them. Haig though, blind to the cost in lives, deaf to any counsel about the sense of pulling back, was buoyed by the successes of Plumer’s bite and hold attacks. It lead to a surge of optimism amongst his close staff that they had at last found the way to proceed. So, Haig told Plumer he wanted him to continue – and to finally take Passchendaele.

As historian Leon Wolff says: “What Haig still hoped to achieve that day of decision in early October and what he was trying to prove are perhaps questions more appropriate to a psychiatrist than to the student of military science.”

Plumer dutifully proceeded. But this next bite was to have one further key change. He would double the number of Anzacs – on 1 October II Anzac Corp, which included one more Australian Division and the New Zealand Division, had been ordered into the line. It would be the first and only time that four Anzac divisions would be attacking shoulder to shoulder and they were to take on the main thrust of the attack. A solid phalanx of colonials.

1st Auckland Battalion, Bert in its ranks, marched into their new battle sector – the Ypres line itself, the heart of the dreaded Salient.

Ormond Burton includes his own first-hand observations in his regimental history. He recalls looking out on the area as the Kiwis moved into position: “The battlefield of Ypres! It is a dreadful place, hideously bare of all comfort, with no beautiful or decent or pleasant thing anywhere to be seen. It is a field of agony and death. No place on earth has been so desecrated by slaughter, no place save Calvary, so consecrated by sacrifice.”

Another soldier is quoted by New Zealand historian Glyn Harper in his excellent book Dark Journey: “The ground is covered with shell holes as close together as pebbles on the beach; the dead from the last two pushes were being buried at half a dozen places en route, but were still lying about the battle front in large numbers, a dreadfully gruesome sight, and the smell struck one forcibly when at least two-and-a-half miles away.”

Now it was the turn of the Kiwis to play their part in the bloody history of Ypres.