100 Years Ago - Passchendaele

TELEPHONE EXCHANGE WITHIN 500 YARDS OF THE GERMANS.

For transmitting orders from observation officers to batteries

THE ADVANCED LINE: ZONNEBEKE IN THE DISTANCE

MULES CARRYING WATER OVER CORDUROY TRACKS THROUGH BOGGY LAND

OFF TO CLEAH. UP THE FLOODED ROADS


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A smashing blow

Every man I saw was coated with mud, some only to the knees, but many to their very throats, and it is to be feared that some wounded must slip into the holes and never get out again

September 21, 1917

Today we have dealt the enemy another of those smashing blows which he must be coming so thoroughly to dread. The long period of waiting, of preparation, and of suspense is over. We have struck, and, so far as can he seen at present, with shattering force and complete success. We did not seek to go far. The extreme depth to which we sought to penetrate was about one mile, but that mile we have overrun, and grasped, and hold. Already the enemy has been counter-attacking. He is counter-attacking now: and will go on, and the more he counter-attacks the better we shall be pleased.
It is rash to prophesy, but I have been this morning where the wounded and the prisoners were coming along the roads and have talked with some scores of our men, and victory is in the air. We have seized what we aimed to seize, and what we have won we shall hold. The advance included as the heart of the attack all that blood-soaked region along the Menin road with the dominating spur on the northern and southern slopes of which are Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse and other high ground beyond.
You already know how the Germans have, and doubtless rightly, held this high ground here to be the supreme strategic point in all this section of the front. As their way is, they have been willing to make any sacrifice to hold that one commanding point. Here it is that, as I have told you before, they have flung no less than 16 divisions. All their divisions have utterly failed to drive us back. We in these last seven weeks have made no, or very little, progress, but we started this morning from slightly in advance of the line to which we won on the first attack, and no praise can be too high for the English troops who have held that ground through these last 50 days. while behind them was maturing the blow which we have just delivered.
STUBBORNLY CONTESTED GROUND.
Since the middle of August alone, on a narrow front here, besides constant minor skirmishes and continuous shelling, the Germans have made seven formal attacks, in which some 24 battalions have been used, and used up. The ground which we have won today was in places literally heaped with their dead. By far the majority of our wounded today were walking cases, and they were the most hilarious and jubilant lot of wounded that I ever saw. Not one of them but knew that the attack, as far as he was able to stay with it, had gone as one man said, “like a blinking charm,” and all knew that when they could no longer follow they had seen our men go romping on. All alike shouted with laughter as they told of the Germans surrendering (”not knowing whether to dance or stand on their heads,” said one) as they streamed out of their concrete shelters.
Today’s operation was on a wide front. Along the Menin road itself we have pushed through lnverness Copse, some 100 yards to the east of it, and on the high ground about halfway to Gueluvelt. North of here we are in the western side of Polygon Wood. Above here again our men swept over all that hideous country studded with fortified farms and concrete redoubts to nearly a mile due east of Frezenberg. This region is crowded with fortresses, which have swept all the ground before our line with their machine-guns, and the garrisons of all those fortresses are now either dead or prisoners in our hands.
Premen and Zonnebeke Redoubts, Schuler Farm, Iberian Farm, Beck House, Borry Farm, Vampire Farm, and Potsdam Redoubt, each one of these with many more have been the scene of fierce action today. Farther south we have rushed all the dreadful country about Dumbarton Lake and Shrewsbury Forest. There is not one of these names which will not be famous in the histories of this war.
It is early yet to make a full category of our gains, but they are ample. How many prisoners we have taken it is impossible to say. I have seen some two or three hundred of the 7th, 60th, 56th, and 15th Regiments from the north and centre of the attack, and of the 19th, 6th, and 395th from farther south. These, however, were only the advance guards, and by tonight they will surely be nearer 4,000 than 200. And everywhere our men were confident that the enemy casualties had been very heavy, while ours, as always in the most successful attacks, were not. The German defence was almost entirely machine-gun defence from concrete fortifications, and, as experience has abundantly shown, the proportion of serious wounds among machine- gun casualties is always small.
MEN’S STORIES.
One sergeant with a tattered band told as a huge joke against himself how when a “pill-box” would not surrender he had slipped up by crawling on his stomach and slipped a bomb through the orifice. “But they sent my hand out quicker than I wanted,” he said, for a machine-gun bullet had torn a finger away. Another man had climbed on top of the pill-box and was sliding down the roof on the other side as the shortest way to reach the back door when a bullet from some unseen place caught him in the shoulder. He seemed to think it funny. Another told how, right at the start, he had been buried by a shell and, according to his tale, he had lain for three hours, being alternately buried and unburied by following shells. He thought 300 shells had fallen within 20 yards. (You cannot help these exaggerations.) But “Lord, Sir, the beggars just could not hit me.” When congratulated on his luck he said, “Luck! Well, I should say I’ve been wounded five times already in this war [which was true] and they can’t kill me.”
Men of one battalion were joyfully proud to tell how they had been led clear through by their colonel. Two Germans were running away along the railway line, and the colonel took a rifle from a man and “dropped ‘em both as pretty as you ever saw.” Those men were evidently proud of their colonel, who, said one, “was still going when I left all right.” One hopes he is going yet, to get the honour which he deserves.
A man who is fairly new to this front, having served in the German South-East African Campaign, had his life saved by his pocket-knife, which he carried most illegitimately in his gasmask slung on his chest. The knife was dented nearly double, and he opined that in hospital (for he had another bullet in his arm, of which he thought little) they could take his watch, or his money, or anything they pleased from him, but they were not going to have that little souvenir knife.
But one can tell as many tales as one pleases about these men, and nothing will ever give the real picture of their courage, their temper, and the stoutness of their hearts.
THE ATTACK
The attack was delivered shortly before 6 o’clock this morning. After a bright but windy day yesterday, clouds blew up in the afternoon, and about 9 o’clock at night it began to rain. It seemed incredibly cruel that the rain should interfere with our attack, and happily, though it rained more or less all night, the ground was surface-dry and no great harm was done. The rain stopped before the hour of attack, though the sky remained black and overcast, so that it was darker than it ought to have been, and none too easy going among the shell-holes. All shell-holes are full of water. Every man I saw was coated with mud, some only to the knees, but many to their very throats, and it is to be feared that some wounded must slip into the holes and never get out again.
The ground was worst among the woods, where the fighting had already been savage and the shelling very heavy, but everywhere it was hard travelling. Yet, in spite of it, the attack at every point swept on even faster than the anticipated time, so that our foremost positions were seized and firmly held before 10 o’clock this morning. All the men speak in terms of the utmost admiration of our artillery work, both before and during the attack.
In my message yesterday I hinted as much as discretion would allow at the splendid work our guns have done during the last five or six days, so that by hurricane counter-battery work and with gas shells they had fairly smothered the enemy’s guns wherever they could be reached, which was in as few places as the enemy could manage. The result was that, while our preliminary bombardment this morning was terrific and the barrage behind which our men advanced most admirable, the German artillery reply was generally feeble. We know that he was not entirely surprised. Prisoners tell us that at one point in his lines a regimental order came down at one o’clock this morning that an attack was imminent. About that time, or a little later, he shelled parts of our line fairly heavily, but with little effect, and when the time came our men went over in the grey dawn in splendid spirits. Our aeroplanes have during the last few days done magnificent work, and their observation during the battle, in spite of the thick air in the earlier part of the day, has been very good. A curious story comes of a new German trick of camouflaging, or somehow disguising, their aeroplanes so as to be almost invisible.
DOG MESSENGER’S MESSAGE
A detail of the battle is that this morning we caught a German dog messenger with a message tied round its neck, with instructions to the guns to prepare to cover a counter-attack. At the last reports one counter-attack had been delivered on part of the line, and had been repulsed, and elsewhere the enemy troops were massing anew. Though our men were irresistible, and tell most comic tales of the terror of the Germans when they surrendered, yet it is evident that at many places the enemy fought in his concrete shelters to the very last. Many concrete pill-boxes were found shattered by our big shells, but only a direct hit from the largest guns, 12in or upwards, is effective.
The great majority of shelters survive the bombardment. The German now has these shelters grouped in geometric patterns making strong fortified positions. As for instance seven pillboxes in two parallel lines of three, each running straight away from our advance lith one midway in the middle. This was intended to prevent our men from going round and reducing them from the rear, but it is only a question of going a little farther round and these clusters are reduced en bloc, and in cases which I heard of this morning from ten to twenty prisoners came from each.
I heard many stories of very young prisoners not more than 16 years old, but I saw none. Those I saw were all mature, especially the Prussians, though they were not first-class material.
It is too early yet to mention individual troops engaged in the attack, but they were from all parts of the British Isles, with some oversea contingents, and they have all done magnificently. The preparations for the attack and our information as to the enemy troops appear to have been beyond criticism, and at the moment the victory seems complete.



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The battle for the ridges

We are now not very far from Zonnebeke, and on our extreme left we are capturing the ruined farms which lie between us and the still distant village of Passchendaele

September 22, 1917

The essential point about the extensive and successful advance of the British Army beyond Ypres on Thursday is that it wrested from the enemy much ground which they were determined never to relinquish. For the Germans there is no question of strategic withdrawals in this portion of Belgium. They are not holding on temporarily with the intention of falling back to another line when they have resisted us long enough. From the sea to Lille they regard their present front as vital, and their troops are ordered to hold all points to the last gasp.
The object of our own Higher Command is clear enough. We are fighting to compel the Germans to loosen their grip upon the strip of Belgian coast which has become the key to their whole scheme of defence in the Western theatre. The heart of their resistance lies in the series of low ridges which run north and south beyond Ypres. We greatly impaired their prospects when in a single day we blew them off the Messines ridge. Thereafter they clung more desperately than ever to the ridges farther north, which are variously named, but perhaps are best known as the Gheluvelt and Passchendaele ridges. These are the last heights left to them in this particular area, and once they have lost them they will be down in the flat and swampy plains.
They have stuck tenaciously to the shattered woods and the endless shell-holes, and have fought with a grim courage which shows the high importance attached by their leaders to all these bloodstained places. They have even invented a new system of defence in which they placed the utmost reliance. All over the ground they have scattered the small but powerful strongholds which our men call “pill-boxes.” These formidable retreats can be held by a few stout-hearted men, of whom the Germans still have a surprising supply. The heaviest artillery fire affects the “pill-boxes” very little, for they offer the smallest of targets and can hardly be wrecked except by a direct hit from a shell of considerable calibre.
Believing in their new methods, and assisted by innumerable machine-guns, the Germans seem to have thought that they were reasonably safe, and that our persistent attacks would take us no farther. Early in August they struggled continuously, and not without temporary success, to maintain themselves amid the broken copses astride the road to Menin. On Thursday and yesterday they learned that their new system of defences was no more impregnable than their elaborate entrenchments on the Somme.
Sir Douglas Haig and his subordinate commanders bided their time and perfected their preparations. After a shattering bombardment, which to some extent represented new principles, our troops advanced on a front of eight miles. The battle went like clockwork. Our Special Correspondent says it was Messines over again. In four hours our victorious battalions had reached every point which was aimed at, and in their exploit they had destroyed another Gennan delusion. They had convincingly demonstrated once more that by patience and valour any German device can be overcome.
It is a relief to know that Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood have been finally taken at last, and that the centre of our attack has reached as far as the western side of Polygon Wood. We are nearer Gheluvelt, and farther south we are appreciably nearer the low rising on which Zandvoorde stood. Northward we are now not very far from Zonnebeke, and on our extreme left we are capturing the ruined farms which lie between us and the still distant village of Passchendaele. Broadly speaking, we have made a good stride towards the eventual clearing of the ridges, and there is no reason to suppose that the operations of which Thursday’s battle form a part are over.
To the superficial it may seem that so fierce and deadly a struggle for the possession of a few low ridges implies a great fight for very little. Those who think thus would probably come to a very different conclusion if they could study an orographical map. The Germans are not expending their diminishing man-power for any light object. They are putting forth their utmost strength to keep these insignificant heights. They know how critical their own position may become when they are driven back, as assuredly they will be.
More is at stake than the ridges, for upon these battered slopes the fate of the German armies in the West is being slowly but irrevocably determined. The true object is not in any sense local, and its attainment will mean another step towards ultimate victory. We should not forget that in battles such as that which began afresh on Thursday the real heroes are our cheerful and incomparable infantry, drawn from these islands and from every part of the Empire.
There were no great mines to demoralize the enemy at the opening of the conflict. The guns were served marvellously well, but, though their work deserves unstinted praise, the infantry arm was again “the queen “of the battlefield”. The “pill-boxes” were overcome chiefly by the infantry, and especially, it would seem, by the bombing detachments. Machine-guns appear to have played a great part. More than ever warfare of the kind we are witnessing before Ypres tends to be dominated by machine-guns. It is the machine-gun which enables the enemy to hold their front line so thinly, and without it they would soon be lost.


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The fresh advance in Belgium

The Germans are throwing in their reserves with a recklessness which suggests that they are drawing freely on their Russian front

September 28, 1917

Although in the last two or three days the fighting in Belgium has probably been fiercer than at any period in that area since the first battle of Ypres, the renewal of the struggle has resulted in definite and valuable progress. On Thursday of last week our troops advanced on a front of eight miles east and north-east of Ypres, and finally won Inverness Copse and the woods to the north, the village of Veldhoek, and many fortified points in the more open country lying east of St Julien. They made a long stride forward on the Gheluvelt ridge, and drew considerably nearer to the vital Passchendaele ridge.
The enemy counter-attacked with much violence, particularly along the Ypres-Menin road, and they fought at intervals with desperation to retain their hold upon the little Tower Hamlets elevation south of the road and west of Gheluvelt. On Tuesday morning at dawn they anticipated our impending fresh advance by an exceptionally powerful counter-attack on a front of about a mile between Tower Hamlets and the southern end of the Polygon Wood. At two points they penetrated our lines, but though the struggle seems to have lasted most of the day, they were driven back in the course of the afternoon. A couple of companies of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were cut off in this encounter, but held their own during the night and were relieved from a perilous position on Wednesday.
Our own attack on Wednesday morning was made on a front of six miles, from Tower Hamlets to the ground east of St Julien, and it met with substantial success. The broad result of Wednesday’s conflict is that the enemy have lost all save the last extremity of the Gheluvelt ridge, on which stand the ruins of the village of that name, while, what is perhaps even more important, Zonnebeke is ours and our troops are at the foot of the western slope of the main Passchendaele ridge. In the right of the attack the Tower Hamlets position was carried by English regiments, and was found to command the isolated Zandvoorde height farther south.
Just north of the Ypres-Menin road English and Scottish battalions had some of the hardest fighting of the day, for after they had attained their objective the Germans counter-attacked repeatedly until night fell. In last night’s bulletin Sir Douglas Haig says there were seven such counter-attacks. The Australians, who had been for some days on the western edge of Polygon Wood, swarmed across the racecourse and cleared the whole wood, establishing themselves well beyond it. Our Special Correspondent, in the dispatch we publish to-day, speaks of the ease with which they thrust the enemy out of the sector allotted to them, and mentions that they took six hundred prisoners. Zonnebeke was gallantly stormed by English, Scottish, and Welsh battalions, who advanced nearly a mile. This was the longest advance of the day.
There was much tough fighting around the little Hill 40, north-west of Zonnebeke, which is still so heavily shelled that it is not completely won. North Midland men and London Territorials carried the line forward on the left of the attack, and our Correspondent refers with enthusiasm to their admirable work. On the whole, it was a fine and satisfactory day’s fighting, and it brings us much nearer the completion of the task of clearing the last of the ridges.
There is much more in all this stubborn and incessant fighting than the relation of local successes may seem to imply. It has clear and definite objects, but, as in the Battle of the Somme, we must wait for the completion of the operations in order to realize fully all that our men are aiming at. Meanwhile the best evidence of the stake involved is found in the determination with which the enemy are resisting our advance. They know very well the kind of winter they are likely to spend in the flat plains beyond the ridges, and we know it even better, for our troops stood for three trying winters in the low ground around Ypres.
The enemy commanded our approaches, but if all goes well we shall very soon command theirs. They will not yield lightly, however, and our Correspondent warns us that there is perhaps even more desperate work ahead. The Germans are throwing in their reserves with a recklessness which suggests that they are drawing freely on their Russian front. Some of the public are, we gather, rather puzzled by the frequency and violence of the counter-attacks, in view of the constant assertions that the German rank and file show signs of deterioration. The explanation is, however, fairly simple. About a third of the German forces are probably as good material as any we have yet encountered. These are the stout men who hold most of the “pill-boxes,” and who are thrown in when a counter-attack is delivered. The rest of the enemy’s troops are of inferior quality, and they are the units who so often surrender or break before the impetuous onslaught of our regiments.
It is not safe to draw too large deductions from the undoubtedly authentic stories of the easy overthrow of particular bodies of the enemy. It will be time enough to generalize about beating them when we see them turning back to the land which they should never have left. So long as the Germans, from whatever cause, can maintain such resolute opposition as they are showing this week, we must continue to take them seriously, and not jump to the conclusion that they are at the end of their resources.