Battle of Passchendaele

11 Key excerpts on "Battle of Passchendaele"

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  Battle Stories — WWI 2-Book Bundle

  Somme 1916 / Passchendaele 1917

  • (Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Dundurn Press

    (Publisher)

  The emotions are warranted. Passchendaele was indeed a battle of grievous suffering and questionable achievements. Yet we must be precise about what we mean by ‘Passchendaele’. It has become a single term for describing what is actually more properly known as the Third Battle of Ypres, fought in West Flanders between July and November 1917.

  The village of Passchendaele itself sat on a strategic ridge to the east of Ypres, and in October–November was the focal point of two major battles at the culmination of the Ypres battle. Such was the horror of these engagements, both in terms of the fighting and the physical environment in which the men clashed, that Passchendaele came to represent more than just its individual actions, but embodied the wider struggle around Ypres in 1917.

  In this book, we will look in detail at both the Third Battle of Ypres and the actions around Passchendaele, making a distinction between the two. The story, as we shall see, is as fascinating as it is tragic. Yet the scale of the suffering and loss experienced in those Flanders fields in 1917 means it is a story that makes repeated demands for its retelling.

  Passage contains an image

  Ypres

  During conflict, it is often the special fate of certain locations to be focal points of unusual levels of prolonged destruction. Between 1914 and 1918, there were several such locations on the Western Front, including the Somme and Verdun, and ranked equally alongside them is the Belgian city of Ypres. An almost permanent battleground over four years of war, Ypres descended from a prosperous commercial town to a blackened, gutted ruin. Five major battles were fought around Ypres, and between those violent episodes shelling and raiding actions rumbled on incessantly.

  Why this is so might not be immediately apparent. Ypres (now properly ‘leper’, its official Dutch-language name, although during the war it was known by its French title) sits in the north-western corner of Belgium, roughly 50 miles (80km) west of Brussels in the Flemish province of West Flanders. Ypres in its fullest definition is actually a municipality, consisting of the city of Ypres itself plus a host of outlying villages.

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  Guiseley Terriers: A Small Part in the Great War

  A History of the 1/6th Battalion, Duke of Wellington's (West Riding) Regiment

  • Stephen Barber(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 13

  The Third Battle of Ypres (Battle of Passchendaele)

  T he Third Battle of Ypres commenced on 31 July 1917 with a combined attack by two British armies. The Second Army attacked on the right and the Fifth Army on the left supported by a French Army Corps to the north. The initial attack was a success and considerable gains were made, but wet weather in August hampered the advance. Dryer weather in September allowed the advance to continue and by the beginning of October, the advance had nearly reached the Passchendaele Ridge which was the last natural barrier between the allies and the interior of Belgium. In ordinary terms, the Passchendaele Ridge was not much of an obstacle. Its highest point is only 60 yards above sea level and its average height is no more than 50 yards, but for the last three years the Germans had been laying thick belts of barbed wire, constructing hundreds of substantial concrete pill-boxes and digging complex trench systems with deep bunkers in anticipation of an allied advance.

  October 1917

  Monday 1 October was fine and sunny and the day was spent cleaning kit and skill at arms training. The 2nd was another fine day and training continued from 9am to 12.30pm. There was an officers’ conference regarding impending operations, and the Adjutant, Major A.B. Clarkson MC, departed for a three-month senior officers’ course at Aldershot. On 3 October 1917 at 7am, the battalion moved out of the billets and marched 13 miles to the town of Watou, 3 miles west of Poperinge, Belgium and were accommodated in billets at Tay Camp. Only two men fell out during the march. At 6.15am on the 4th , in the darkness and rain, the battalion marched 8 miles to Warrington Camp, near the town of Vlamertinge.

  The 147 Brigade became the Corps reserve and orders were received that the battalion had to proceed 4 miles east to the area of Wieltje to relieve a brigade from the New Zealand Division. This news must have come as a bit of a surprise as there was a rush to issue ammunition and rations. A lot of the men would have been familiar with the area, as Wieltje is only a mile north-east of Ypres. At 12.05am on 5 October the battalion moved off in the pouring rain, marched 8 miles east, and crossed the Yser Canal on the northern outskirts of Ypres. Unpleasant memories from November and December 1915 must have been at the forefront of a lot of the men’s thoughts.

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  Voices of Silence

  The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry

  • Vivien Noakes(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  SEVENTEEN

  Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele)

  The missing and the dead, burials and the horrors of no man’s land, rain, winter 1917, fatigues and carrying parties, horses and mules, bombing behind the lines, the end of the Battle of Passchendaele

  The third Battle of Ypres, known as the Battle of Passchendaele, was planned for the summer of 1917 with the objective of breaking through the German lines north-east of Ypres. Haig believed that the heavy casualties suffered by the enemy at Verdun and on the Somme had weakened the German willingness to fight, and that with careful planning a new attack would overwhelm them and bring an end to the years of stalemate on the Western Front.

  One thing that Haig could not plan was the weather. The heavy preliminary bombardment, which could again be heard in southern England, destroyed the drainage system that had redeemed the flat, waterlogged countryside round Ypres, and then – the day after the British went over the top on 31 July – the rain started to fall. The attacking forces faced a growing quagmire and strong enemy defences. The Germans had built small concrete redoubts, nicknamed by the Tyneside soldiers ‘Tyne cots’ since they reminded them of cottages at home: some of these have survived to this day and give their name to Tyne Cot, the largest British cemetery on the Western Front.

  The battle, which lasted for three months, was fought in some of the worst conditions of the war. As the front line inched its way forward, wooden tracks and duckboards were laid across the morass, but one slip or false step meant that men and horses could drown in liquid mud. Going in and out of the line, or bringing up supplies, was carried out under heavy shellfire, for the German guns had the roads and tracks ranged precisely. The exposed road leading out of Ypres towards Menin, along which men and horses must travel, acquired a fearful reputation. At the beginning of November the battle came to an end with an advance of 5 miles and the capture of the village of Passchendaele.

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  Before Endeavours Fade

  A Guide to the Battlefields of the First World War

  • Rose E. B. Coombs, Karel Margry(Authors)
  • 1976(Publication Date)
  • After the Battle

    (Publisher)

  Opened on Anzac Day (April 25) 2004, the new museum gives an excellent chronologi-cal overview of the war in this corner of the Salient, focusing on the tragedy of Third Ypres, the 100-day Battle of Passchendaele (July 31-November 10, 1917) in which almost 500,000 men were killed, wounded or missing for a gain of just five miles. The permanent exhibition starts on the first floor. Using a very fine collection of uniforms, weapons, equipment, maps, photographs, models and battlefield relics, it describes the 1914 battles and 1914/15 deadlock, the Allied technical efforts to break out of the Salient — artillery barrages, mine warfare, etc. — and the Ger-man defence techniques, moving on to a very detailed day-by-day account of Third Ypres and the horrors of Passchendaele. A film on the battle is shown on a large video screen. From the first floor, steps lead down to the château’s basement where the visitor is taken through ‘The Dugout Experience’, a very authentic reconstruction of a front-line dugout with excellent life-size dioramas of a command post, sleeping quarters, communi-cation room and first aid post. The last room on this floor presents information on battle-field archaeology in the area, several recent excavation projects being illustrated with photos, films and recovered artefacts. The ground floor is used for temporary exhibi-tions. (Open February 1 - November 30, Mondays to Fridays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., week-ends and bank holidays 2 to 6 p.m.) Continue through the village on the N322 heading downhill for Frezenberg. A little way outside Zonnebeke, on the right, rises the Zonnebeke brickworks — previously the Vanbiervliet Steenbakkerij, today part of the Wienenberger concern. The clay for the bricks is excavated from a huge quarry at the rear. In 1983, the diggers found a large sub-terranean dugout here, an L-shaped complex with provision for over 120 men with bunks in three tiers and an officer’s quarter.

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  Fighting the Great War

  A Global History

  • Michael S. Neiberg, Michael S. NEIBERG(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Rain returned in October, dooming a rapid advance on Plumer’s third step, the town of Broodseinde, just south of Passchendaele. Heavy downpours continued with no end in sight throughout the month, adding to the misery of the campaign. The battle had lost all strategic significance, but the symbolic goal of Passchendaele village, supposed to have been taken on day four, remained in German hands. On October 30, the British and Canadian forces took 2,000 casualties to move the line a mere 500 yards. Plumer continued his slow and bloody advance toward Passchendaele, finally taking it on November 4. By then it had become an insig-nificant prize that augured no further British gain. It had become, in the words of one British general, “a really untenable position” in a dangerously exposed salient. 19 The Battle of Passchendaele stands as a symbol of futility. In the words of officer and historian Basil Henry Liddell Hart, it became a “synonym for military failure.” 20 The British lost an esti-mated 275,000 men killed, wounded, and captured for negligible gains. As one veteran accurately summarized it, Passchendaele represented the seemingly pointless waste of men: “the Ypres battlefield just represented one gigantic slough of despond into which floundered battalions, brigades, and divisions of infantry without end, to be shot to pieces or drowned, until at last and with immeasurable slaughter, we had gained a few miles of liquid mud.” 21 Passchendaele had cost the Germans terribly as well. Their to-tal casualties amounted to 200,000 men. The Germans had ro-tated 73 divisions through Passchendaele, but had surrendered no strategically significant territory. 22 More significantly, the German submarine pens remained secure. 269 . the Battle of Passchendaele .

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  Veteran Volunteer

  Memoir of the Trenches, Tanks & Captivity, 1914–1919

  • Jamie Vans(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7

  The Third Battle of Ypres, 31 July 1917

  T he opening, or Zero, day of this battle was 31 July and it lasted, roughly speaking, till November 1917, with the capture and consolidation of Passchendaele Ridge east of Ypres. It was a battle which cost the British Army terrific casualties for we were the attacking force, but the enemy also suffered enormously in losses of men and, still more important, in loss of morale.

  The start on the opening day was a bad one for us and only the first line of objectives, instead of three lines, was taken. A few days later it was officially announced that a sergeant of ours, Sergeant Phillips, who had been captured by the enemy, or who had deserted, about a week previous to the opening day, had divulged the day of attack and much other valuable information to the enemy1 . This meant that the German was absolutely ready and expectant.

  B Battalion was on the extreme right flank of the battle front and, added to the frontal fire of artillery, came in for heavy enfilading from our right.

  Owing to the configuration of the ground, we had only two ways of getting to the enemy, (1) through the Hooge Gap, and (2) between Sanctuary Wood and Armagh Wood. The Hooge Gap was wider but the gap between the two woods was only about 150 yards across and this was so wet and low that it was nearly impossible to move a tank through, apart from any shelling that might be going on.

  The enemy, of course, was acquainted with these two gaps and, consequently, directed all that day an appalling barrage of heavy artillery on them. A tank had to go through the gap and its barrage to get into action and, after being in action, with so many chances of being knocked out by shellfire, it had to come through the same gap and the same barrage to return home. It is not surprising that B Battalion was butchered that day. Out of the ten tanks that went into action only two returned, in a damaged condition.

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  Architect of Victory

  Douglas Haig

  • Walter Reid(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Birlinn

    (Publisher)

  19

  THIRD YPRES . PASSCHENDAELE . CAMBRAI

  Douglas Haig has been characterised, above all, as an unimaginative tactician, stubborn and even stupid, doggedly persisting in a discredited and blinkered commitment to attrition. He was not stupid and far from committed to attrition, and Third Ypres, the only phase of the Great War that was wholly his concept, was imaginative. It failed precisely because it was too bold and imaginative, a flamboyant project in the tradition of continental wars of another century, but fatally flawed because it rested on a determined belief that Germany was about to crack. The objective of pushing through to the Belgian coast in a dash of combined operations was never remotely possible, and it was in the light of that impossibility that Churchill, who had rejoined the government after his Dardanelles humiliation, painted this dark and brooding picture in The World Crisis :

  Meanwhile the British offensive against Passchendaele unrolled its sombre fate. The terrific artillery pulverised the ground, smashing simultaneously the German trenches and the ordinary drainage. By sublime devotion and frightful losses small indentations were made upon the German front. In six weeks at the furthest point we had advanced four miles. Soon the rain descended and the vast crater fields became a sea of choking fetid mud in which men, animals and tanks floundered and perished hopelessly. The few tracks which alone could be preserved across this morass were swept with ceaseless shellfire, through which endless columns of transport marched with fortitude all night long.1

  The preliminary bombardment began on 15 July and continued until 31 July. Even ten days earlier, Charteris had wondered whether the season was too late to advance to achieve their objective. The choice of Gough for a pivotal role in the battle was criticised by Terraine: ‘Haig’s greatest and most fatal error.’2

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  Deborah and the War of the Tanks

  • John Taylor(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  PART II THE Battle of Passchendaele CHAPTER 8 Ray of Sunshine In mid-August the British finally began the next phase of their great offensive in the Ypres Salient, now generally referred to as the Battle of Passchendaele, and the full brilliance of the German defensive strategy was revealed. Unable to construct a conventional trench system in the swampy terrain, they had opted for a flexible system of defence in depth, with the front positions held by isolated units whose job was to disrupt the advance, and their main forces further back, beyond the range of most artillery fire and ready to counter-attack when the time was right. To create a series of forward outposts, they had transformed the farmhouses that dotted the area into a network of concrete bunkers which were the only truly solid features in this liquid landscape. Since these seemed all but indestructible, even by artillery, their machine guns now held fearful dominion over the blasted plain across which the British had to advance. Three-and-a-half miles (or five-and-a-half kilometres) north-east of Ypres, near the central axis of their offensive, the British had seized what had once been a village called St Julien, 1 through which flowed what had once been a stream called the Steenbeek. The village had been more or less blown off the face of the earth, and the Steenbeek had disappeared just as completely, though its filthy waters still skulked through an ever-shifting morass of shell craters

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  Reporting from the Front

  War Reporters During the Great War

  • Brian Best(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Yet another effort was made on 9 October to cut the distance to Passchendaele when the French First Army and the British Second and Fifth armies advanced on a 13,500 yard front. The Battle of Poelcapelle was fought in heavy rain and glutinous mud. The German counter-attacks pushed back the advance and prevented a breakthrough but at a high cost. The Germans were finding it harder to replace their heavy losses.

  Three days later, another attempt was made to reach Passchendaele and again heavy rain and mud made movement difficult. It was becoming increasingly hard to bring up supporting artillery to support the infantry. It was recorded that it took six hours to move an artillery piece 250 yards. In this attack, the Allies lost 13,000 men including 2,735 New Zealanders, the greatest daily loss in its history. Finally, even haig and his commanders agreed that the attacks should stop until the weather improved and supply lines were extended.

  The Canadian Corps played a key role in the so-called Second Passchendaele battle. General Kiggell, haig’s Chief of Staff, advised him to send them to Plumer’s Second Army and not to Gough, as he was extremely unpopular with them. After a series of three attacks, what remained of the village of Passchendaele was finally entered by the Canadians on 6 November. Philip Gibbs reported in the Daily Chronicle dated 7 November:

  ‘It is with thankfulness that one can record today the capture of Passchendaele, the crown and crest of the ridge which made a great barrier round the salient of Ypres and hemmed us in the flats and swamps. After an heroic attack by the Canadians this morning they fought their way over the ruins of Passchendaele and into the ground beyond it. If their gains be held the seal is set upon the most terrific achievement of the war ever attempted and carried through by British arms.

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  The British Army in Battle and Its Image 1914-18

  • Stephen Badsey(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  7 The Press, Propaganda and Passchendaele 1917 with Philip M. Taylor If, as Lord Reith later put it so memorably, news is the shocktroops of propa-ganda, 1 and war reporting has come to provide the ‘first rough draft of history’, then by the summer of 1917 these two ostensibly contradictory axioms were found wanting by the British. Modern warfare has been accompanied by the need to address morale from the battle front to the home front and, as the twen-tieth century unfolded against the backdrop of the communications revolution, governmental propaganda had a profound effect on the media ‘record’ of events such as battles. Third Ypres was an exception, but not in any obvious or straight-forward sense. The official wartime British organizations for the release of news, and thereby for the conduct of official propaganda, had by that time achieved their most important initial objective; namely, the entry of the United States into the war on the Allied side. But, as a result, they were undergoing a major re-organization of both their aims and their structure that was not completed until several months after Third Ypres had ended, and so they were unusually poorly placed to influence public perceptions about ‘Passchendaele’ (as the battle is usually known). Consequently, the media record – which might be assumed to have affected public understanding of the battle down to the present day – in fact says far more about the propaganda performance within the wider political context of the time than it provides a useful historical record of the battle itself. This is apparent only with hindsight. The campaign against American neutrality had been chiefly conducted, with great success, by the clandestine organization based at Wellington House and headed by Charles Masterman, a body that worked under close Foreign Office supervision.

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  The History Of The South African Forces In France [Illustrated Edition]

  • Colonel John Buchan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Verdun Press

    (Publisher)

  The “preparation“ for the battle lasted for the greater part of July, and every part of the Salient was drenched with our fire. On the last day of the month came the advance on a front of 15 miles—from the river Lys to a little north of Steenstraate, the main effort being that of the Fifth Army, under Sir Hubert Gough, on the 7 ½ miles between Boesinghe and the Zillebeke-Zandvoorde road. With the attack the weather broke. Gough’s purpose was to carry the enemy’s first defences, situated on the forward slope of the rising ground, and his second position along the crest. The opening day saw a brilliant success, for everywhere we captured the first line, and in many parts the second. But the weather prevented the series of cumulative blows which we had planned. For a fortnight we were compelled to hold our hand, since till the countryside grew dryer advance was a stark impossibility.

  The second stage of the Ypres struggle began on 16th August, when the Fifth Army attacked the German third position, the Gheluvelt-Langemarck line, which ran from the Menin road along the second of the tiers of ridges which rimmed the Salient on the east. These tiers, the highest and most easterly of which was the famous Passchendaele crest, had the common features that they all sprang from one southern boss or pillar, the point on the Menin road marked 64 metres, which we knew as Clapham Junction, and all, as they ran northward, lost elevation. The attack, which took place at dawn, made a considerable gap in the German third line, but it was very far from attaining its main objectives. That day, indeed, showed at its best von Armin’s new defensive method. The weather was in his favour, for the air was thick and damp, making airplane observation difficult, and therefore depriving us of timely notice of the enemy’s counterstrokes. The ground was sloppy, and made tangled and difficult with broken woods; and the whole front was sown with “pill-boxes,” against which we had not yet discovered the proper weapon. The result was a serious British check. The splendid courage of the Fifth Army had been largely fruitless. Fine brigades had been hurled in succession against a concrete wall, and had been sorely battered. The troops felt that they were being sacrificed blindly; that every fight was a soldiers’ fight, and that such sledge-hammer tactics were too crude to meet the problem. For a moment there was a real ebb of confidence in British leadership.

  Sir Douglas Haig took time to reorganize his front and prepare a new plan. He extended Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army northward, so that it should take over the attack on the enemy front on the Menin road. Sorely tried divisions were taken out of the line, and our whole artillery tactics were revised. The “pill-box“ problem was studied, and a solution was found, not by miraculous ingenuity, but by patient and meticulous care. Early in September the weather improved, and the sodden Salient began slowly to dry. That is to say, the mud hardened into something like the séracs

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