by Nick Lloyd
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Nick Lloyd
Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First published in 2017 by Penguin Random House UK.
All rights reserved.
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Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933594
ISBN: 978-0-465-09477-6 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-465-09478-3 (e-book)
E3-20170418-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Abbreviations
Introduction
Prologue: The Nivelle Offensive
1. Manoeuvres of War
2. Haig and the ‘Northern Operation’
3. ‘A Great Sea of Flames’
4. ‘Have We Time to Accomplish?’
5. ‘Under Constant Fire’
6. ‘A Perfect Bloody Curse’
7. ‘Like the Black Hole of Calcutta’
8. ‘A Question of Concentration’
9. ‘An Introduction to Hard Work’
10. ‘A Stunning Pandemonium’
11. ‘War with a Big W’
12. ‘An Overwhelming Blow’
13. ‘The Weakness of Haste’
14. ‘Not Worth a Drop of Blood’
15. ‘Against the Iron Wall’
Epilogue
Photos
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Nick Lloyd
Bibliography
Glossary
References
Index
For Eleanor, Isabel and Louise
The moment I saw the name on the trench-map, intuitively I knew what was going to happen.
Wyndham Lewis
List of Illustrations
NPG = National Portrait Gallery; IWM = Imperial War Museum; AWM = Australian War Memorial; CWM = Canadian War Museum; BayHStA = Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv.
1. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George (NPG: x12475).
2. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the BEF (NPG: x84291).
3. General Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (NPG: x84583).
4. Kaiser Wilhelm II studying maps at the German High Command (IWM: Q23746).
5. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria (IWM: Q45320).
6. General Sir Hubert Gough, commander of the British Fifth Army (IWM: Q35825B).
7. British stretcher-bearers in the ruins of Pilckem, 31 July 1917 (IWM: Q2630).
8. Men of a pioneer battalion getting out of light railway trucks, 31 July 1917 (IWM: Q5713).
9. Pack mules loaded up with shells move forward to the front somewhere near Ypres, 1 August 1917 (IWM: Q5940).
10. British troops moving forward over shell-torn ground near Pilckem, 16 August 1917 (IWM: Q2708).
11. Crown Prince Rupprecht distributing medals in Flanders (IWM: Q52820).
12. Kaiser Wilhelm II pays a visit to Flanders, August 1917 (IWM: Q023728).
13. Wounded German soldiers at the command post of 19 Infantry Regiment, somewhere near Ypres, August 1917 (BayHStA: Bs-III-k-9-d-49-g).
14. Soldiers of 5th Bavarian Division in trenches near Gravenstafel, August 1917 (BayHStA: Bs-III-k-1-a-179).
15. General Sir Herbert Plumer, commander of the British Second Army (NPG: x65455).
16. A shell bursts near a party of British stretcher-bearers and German prisoners near Zillebeke, 20 September 1917 (IWM: Q5973).
17. The view from Stirling Castle, 23 September 1917 (AWM: E01409).
18. The bodies of German soldiers lying outside a group of concrete blockhouses near Zonnebeke, 23 September 1917 (IWM: Q2892).
19. A German bombing patrol, with messenger dog, probably taken in late September 1917 (IWM: Q55558).
20. A German observation patrol, September 1917 (IWM: Q29878).
21. Men of the West Yorkshire Regiment shelter in a captured German pillbox (IWM: Q2903).
22. Royal Field Artillery ammunition limbers moving up the Menin Road, 26 September 1917 (IWM: Q2905).
23. Aerial view of Polygon Wood, 5 September 1917 (IWM: Q058428).
24. German prisoners captured during the Battle of Polygon Wood (IWM: Q3064).
25. A group of German prisoners make their way through the ruins of Ypres, 27 September 1917 (IWM: Q2911).
26. The headquarters of 3rd Australian Division in the ramparts of Ypres (AWM: E01184).
27. 24/Australian Battalion dug in on the Broodseinde Ridge, 5 October 1917 (AWM: E00918).
28. Senior German officers meet some of their men after the Battle of Broodseinde (AWM: C01090).
29. A German soldier takes the opportunity to snooze in the entrance to a blockhouse (BayHStA: Bs-III-k-6-51-g).
30. German troops and transports in the village of De Ruiter, southwest of Roulers, sometime in the autumn of 1917 (IWM: Q55191).
31. British 60-pounder guns firing in the mud near Langemarck, 12 October 1917 (IWM: Q3140).
32. Dead and wounded Australians in a cutting along the Ypres–Roulers railway, 12 October 1917 (IWM: E(AUS) 003864).
33. Captain Clarence Jeffries, awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his actions (AWM: P09373.001).
34. Troops of 10 Australian Brigade drying their clothes (IWM: E(AUS) 00943).
35. Sir Arthur Currie with his staff at the headquarters of the Canadian Corps at Poperinge (CWM: O.2235).
36. Canadian pioneers carrying trench mats pass German prisoners on the Passchendaele battlefield (CWM: O.2207).
37. Wounded Canadians take cover behind a pillbox, November 1917 (CWM: O.2211).
38. ‘The worst place in the world’. A Canadian soldier attempts to cross the Flanders battlefield (CWM: O.2249).
39. The Cloth Hall, Ypres, lit by moonlight (CWM: O.2165).
40. View of Passchendaele church in the summer of 1917 (BayHStA: Staudinger-Sammlung 2591).
41. ‘The defenders cowered in their water-filled craters without protection from the weather, hungry and freezing, continually exposed to the overwhelming enemy artillery fire’ (BayHStA: Bs-III-k-3-a-135).
42. Tyne Cot CWGC Cemetery (author’s collection).
List of Maps
1. The Western Front, Spring 1917
2. The ‘Northern Operation’
3. The Planned Advance, 31 July 1917
4. The Opening Assault, 31 July 1917
5. Langemarck, 16 August 1917
6. The Battles of 19–22 August 1917
7. The Fight for Inverness Copse, 22–25 August 1917
8. Menin Road, 20 September 1917
9. Polygon Wood, 26 September 1917
10. Broodseinde, 4 October 1917
11. Poelcappelle and First Passchendaele, 9–12 October 1917
12. Second Passchendaele, 26 October–10 November 1917
13. Final Line, 17 November 1917
Abbreviations
AIF: Australian Imperial Force<
br />
ANZAC: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
AWM: Australian War Memorial, Canberra
BA-MA: Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg
BEF: British Expeditionary Force
CAB: Cabinet Office files
CIGS: Chief of the Imperial General Staff
C-in-C: Commander-in-Chief
CLIP: Canadian Letters and Images Project
CMR: Canadian Mounted Rifles
CWM: Canadian War Museum, Ottawa
DTA: Deutsches Tagebucharchiv, Emmendingen
GHQ: General Headquarters (British Expeditionary Force)
GOC: General Officer Commanding
GQG: Grand Quartier Général (French High Command)
IWM: Imperial War Museum, London
KA: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abteilung IV: Kriegsarchiv, Munich
LAC: Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
LHCMA: Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London
MG: Machine-gun
NCO: Non-Commissioned Officer
OHL: Obersteheeresleitung (German Supreme Command)
PPCLI: Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry
RFA: Royal Field Artillery
RFC: Royal Flying Corps
TNA: The National Archives, Kew
WO: War Office files
Introduction
‘Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?’
The words of Sir Launcelot Kiggell, a senior staff officer at British GHQ, upon visiting the Passchendaele battlefield, are some of the most notorious in the history of warfare. Sharp, to the point, shot through with horror and shock, they seem to encapsulate perfectly the appalling way in which battles were conducted between 1914 and 1918; by almost criminally negligent ‘chateau generals’ with no idea of the conditions on the front, who sent a generation of young men to squalid, terrifying deaths. The story first appeared in Basil Liddell Hart’s The Real War, which was published in 1930, and was an explosive exposé of the Great War written by one of Britain’s foremost military thinkers. Kiggell himself was not named (something Liddell Hart would only reveal after Kiggell’s death in 1954),1 with Liddell Hart referring instead to a ‘highly-placed officer from General Headquarters who was on his first visit to the battle front’:
Growing increasingly uneasy as the car approached the swamp-like edges of the battle area, he eventually burst into tears, crying, ‘Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?’ To which his companion replied that the ground was far worse ahead. If the exclamation was a credit to his heart, it revealed on what a foundation of delusion and inexcusable ignorance his indomitable ‘offensiveness’ had been based.2
For Liddell Hart, the Flanders campaign of 1917 was the perfect illustration of the myopia that British High Command suffered from and its terrible consequences. Passchendaele has become, he wrote, ‘like Walcheren a century before, a synonym for military failure–a name black-bordered in the records of the British Army’.3
Whether Kiggell ever made these remarks has been regularly disputed, with a number of historians casting doubt on the veracity of the incident and questioning whether Liddell Hart–a notorious gossip–could really be trusted on such an issue.4 Others have argued that there was simply no way that British commanders could have been as ignorant of front-line conditions as Liddell Hart claimed.5 The story originally seems to have come from Sir James Edmonds, who was then working on the multi-volume official history of the war. Liddell Hart regularly corresponded with Edmonds, sending him drafts of his books, and the two would often meet up over lunch and discuss old times. Contained in Liddell Hart’s papers is the note he made after a talk with Edmonds in October 1927, which sketched out the incident, albeit with a slightly different quotation (‘Did we really order men to advance over such ground?’). It must have resonated with Liddell Hart because he included it in The Real War, after of course conveniently redrafting Kiggell’s words to enhance their dramatic effect. Thus a legend was born.6
The story of the ‘weeping staff officer’ has become firmly established within the popular memory of the war. Kiggell’s words have found their way into collections of military quotations and psychology textbooks, and are a ready-made soundbite for commentators eager to spark an emotional response.7 Indeed, to some, even if not strictly accurate, Kiggell’s story reveals a larger truth. When the literary scholar Paul Fussell examined the quotation, he felt that it sounded ‘too literary to be quite true, as if originally either conceived or noted down by someone who knew his Greek tragedy and perhaps Shakespeare’s history plays’, but it was nonetheless ‘true in spirit’.8 This book is, in a sense, an investigation into Kiggell’s haunting words; an attempt to unearth the reality of one of the most infamous battles of the twentieth century. Why was it fought? How was it even possible? How could men fight and die in such awful surroundings and for what seemed like such pitiful gains? The questions over Passchendaele, why and how it was fought and what it meant, remain to be answered, or at least considered afresh, one hundred years on.
The battle took place between 31 July and 10 November 1917, a few miles east of the town of Ypres–the place where the great German advance of 1914 had come to a halt–and left a legacy of carnage and bitterness that was still palpable decades later. In four months of intensive fighting, upwards of 500,000 men were killed or wounded, maimed, gassed, drowned or buried here in this small corner of Belgium. As the poignant Memorial to the Missing at the Menin Gate in Ypres reminds us, many of the bodies were never found; they just disappeared into the thick, glutinous Flanders mud. Indeed, in a war that came to symbolize futility, Passchendaele stood out as the ultimate expression of meaningless, industrialized slaughter. According to the historian Dan Todman, the battle has become ‘a cultural reference point that sums up everything bad about war–what it does or does not mean, how it is fought, and above all the risk of a disconnection between ends and means’.9
The British would officially call it the Third Battle of Ypres. For the Germans it was the Flandernschlacht (the Battle of Flanders). Yet it has become more commonly known as Passchendaele, named after the small hamlet that marked the apex of the British advance that year. This village, pulverized by shellfire into a muddy smear, came to symbolize the lost hopes and pitiful achievements of an offensive that the British Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, hoped would have a decisive effect on the war. Originally conceived as a mass offensive that would break through the German line, liberate much of Belgium and seize the enemy’s submarine bases along the coast, by the time operations came to a halt in November 1917, the British had advanced just five miles. If the Somme of 1916, particularly its ghastly first day, has become a metaphor for a kind of innocence lost, when a generation of Britons faced the awful reality of total warfare, then Third Ypres is a slough of despond; a descent into the perils of Dante’s Inferno with no possibility of redemption. As the historian A. J. P. Taylor once wrote: ‘Third Ypres was the blindest slaughter of a blind war.’10
With hindsight it would seem almost prophetic that the war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘open letter’, in which he spoke out against the war, appeared in The Times on the day the offensive began. Sassoon’s ‘wilful defiance of military authority’ called into question whether the war had become one of conquest and was being ‘deliberately prolonged by those who had the power to end it’.11 Sassoon never fought at Ypres, but he would pen one of the most moving poems about the battle–‘Memorial Tablet’–with its barren description of death in the Salient:
Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight
(Under Lord Derby’s Scheme). I died in Hell–
(They called it Passchendaele); my wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back, and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duckboards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.12
It was little wonder that the battle has become defined by mud. Britain
’s wartime Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, would call it ‘the campaign of the mud’ in the second volume of his War Memoirs, which was published in 1936. Lloyd George excoriated what he saw as Haig’s myriad blunders in the battle (‘one of the greatest disasters of the war’), and accused both him and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, of misleading the War Cabinet on several vital issues, including the condition of the French Army, the (apparently) inferior numbers of the enemy, and the state of the ground. ‘Victories were much overstated. Virtual defeats were represented as victories, however limited their scope. Our casualties were understated. Enemy losses became pyramidal… All disconcerting and discouraging facts were suppressed’, while ‘every bright feather of success was waved and flourished in our faces’. Haig had ‘completely lost his balance’ and ‘persevered stubbornly with his attacks’ rather than admit his failure. Third Ypres was a ‘senseless campaign’ that ‘imperilled the chances of final victory’.13
Lloyd George’s wholly negative account of the battle was heavily influenced by Liddell Hart (who had been employed as an adviser on War Memoirs) and directed squarely at his enemies in the General Staff. Yet he did not have it all his own way and there were always those–including senior commanders and military historians–who argued that the campaign was both worthwhile and necessary. One of those was the Conservative MP Duff Cooper (author of a biography of Haig in 1936), who tried to push back against this tide of ‘mud and blood’, emphasizing both the logic and rationale behind fighting in Flanders–undoubtedly Britain’s most vital sector of the Western Front–and the need to take pressure off the French Army. For Cooper, the battle was certainly fearful, but by the time it ended the British had improved their positions around Ypres, their French Allies had recovered, and the German Army had ‘been given no respite in which to heal their wounds or to produce new plans’.14
It was not until after the Second World War that the official account of Third Ypres was published, by which time the battle lines were already deeply entrenched. Of all the volumes of the British Official History, none were more troublesome than or went through such a tortuous birth as Military Operations 1917: Volume II. Work began in September 1939, but it proceeded at a slow pace, suffering from frequent rewrites and disagreements over content.15 It was eventually published in 1948–the last of the British official histories to be completed. Its author, Sir James Edmonds, tried his best to dispel some of the myths that had grown up around the battle, particularly ‘the mud legend’, which had been peddled by what he called ‘eminent civilian critics with the ear of the public’–an unmistakeable shot at Lloyd George and Liddell Hart. Although Edmonds did not shy away from criticizing the Commander-in-Chief–particularly over the choice of General Sir Hubert Gough (GOC Fifth Army) to command the main assault–he was broadly supportive of Haig’s conduct of the campaign, including the choice of battlefield and its objectives. In the conclusion he returned to one of the major themes of his work: the lack of preparation for a major continental war before 1914 and its inevitable, baneful results in wartime. ‘A nation cannot expect great and immediate victories’, Edmonds warned, ‘unless it supplies the means, the men and the material.’16