by Nick Lloyd
As was perhaps to be expected, Military Operations 1917: Volume II was never to find universal acceptance. When it appeared, it provoked flurries of correspondence, with Frances Lloyd George (née Stevenson) accusing Edmonds of ‘whitewashing’ the Passchendaele campaign.17 The former Chief of the Air Staff, Lord Trenchard, disagreed, calling it ‘exhaustive and accurate’,18 and Sir John Davidson (who had worked at GHQ) said that it was ‘fair and reasonable’ and allowed readers ‘to place Lord Haig’s responsibilities and decisions in a proper perspective’.19 As for Liddell Hart, he was convinced that Edmonds had deliberately presented a more moderate and pro-Haig interpretation of the battle than the evidence warranted, apparently because his official position and his close military friendships meant it was impossible for him to ‘put the hard truth’ into print (which was perhaps why he had been so keen to share his anecdote about the ‘weeping staff officer’).20 Whether this was true or not, Edmonds’s attempt to tell Haig’s side of the story, or at least to banish some of the more outlandish criticisms of the offensive, were destined to fail. Military Operations 1917: Volume II would never be able to shift the dominant perception of Passchendaele that Lloyd George and Liddell Hart had fostered; that high ground had already been taken.21
Even as memories of the battle began to fade, the arguments continued. In the late 1950s the historian John Terraine began what would become a lifelong attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Sir Douglas Haig, who was by now condemned as the chief ‘donkey’. For Terraine, Lloyd George and Liddell Hart had been responsible for ‘a distortion of history’ and a ‘deep injustice’ to those who had planned and fought the battle.22 Objecting to an overly emotional reading of what happened (he would never use the term ‘Passchendaele’, preferring instead the more sober ‘Third Ypres’), Terraine continued along the path Edmonds had sketched out: emphasizing the strategic importance of the Belgian coast, the urgent need to keep the pressure off the French Army, and the terrible effect that fighting in Flanders had on the defenders. The battle may have failed in its grandiose objectives, but it marked the moment when German morale on the Western Front began to collapse. It also, moreover, contributed to the developments in British tactical skill and weaponry that would culminate later in the war, particularly at the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, and which, for Terraine, allowed Ypres to be understood in its proper context as an important milestone on the road to victory.23
Liddell Hart and Terraine argued with each other for years; disputing everything from the reliability of Haig’s diaries to British and German casualty statistics; a debate that was continued by subsequent writers, albeit frequently generating much heat but little light.24 Leon Wolff, a US Air Force officer, wrote one of the most widely read accounts of the battle, In Flanders Fields (1958), which was very much in the mould of Liddell Hart, portraying Passchendaele as a meaningless slaughter conducted by commanders without understanding or imagination. Although Wolff claimed that he had originally intended to write his account with what he called ‘inhuman neutrality’, he admitted that ‘I could not believe what I was writing.’25 Little had changed by the time Lyn Macdonald’s They Called It Passchendaele was published in 1978. Based upon over 600 eyewitness accounts, Macdonald’s book brought the story of those ‘Tommies and Anzacs and Canucks’ who served at Ypres to a whole new generation. Although she generally avoided outright condemnation of either Lloyd George or Haig, she noted that, in places, her book read more like a novel or a horror story than a sober work of military history, and its great popularity helped to solidify further the popular understanding of Passchendaele as being a ‘blood-bath… beyond imagining’.26
By the 1990s, increasing numbers of scholars, from both Britain and the Commonwealth, were beginning to re-examine the performance of British arms on the Western Front and spread the idea of a more positive ‘learning curve’. Yet Passchendaele remained immune from this tide of revisionism. In 1996, the Australian historians Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson published Passchendaele. The Untold Story, but far from rehabilitating the battle, they described an even darker story. While the defenders of Lloyd George and Haig had slugged it out for years, shifting blame and trading blows over responsibility for the battle, Prior and Wilson emphasized both the ‘delusions of the military command’ and the ‘waywardness of the political leadership’. The British Prime Minister was portrayed as a curious amalgam of energy and lethargy, determination and disinterest; a man who grudgingly supported the Flanders campaign, yet who declined to take responsibility for it or grasp the nettle and suspend it as he undoubtedly should have done. Meanwhile Haig was criticized for consistently failing to learn the lessons of previous battles and for an almost pathological over-optimism in the face of stubborn enemy resistance. It was, as the authors concluded, ‘in no sense a pinnacle of the military art’.27
So why a new book on Passchendaele? Despite its iconic status, Third Ypres remains–by the standards of some other Great War battles–relatively underwritten. When researching their own book in the 1990s, Prior and Wilson found historical research on the battle to be ‘astonishingly thin’–and only limited amounts of work have been done to rectify this in the intervening years.28 Most of the recent focus has been on the imperial aspect of the battle and Australian, New Zealand and Canadian historians have added much to our understanding of how far and wide the impact of Passchendaele would spread.29 Nevertheless, important elements of Third Ypres remain to be explored. The German story is the largest omission, with most accounts spending little or no time on how the German Army fought the battle and, in particular, how it adapted to the changing tactical and operational demands that fighting in Flanders presented.30
Passchendaele: The Lost Victory of World War I attempts to retell the story of this infamous battle, considering it afresh with the accumulated knowledge of a century of scholarship. It is based upon a greater array of source material than any previous history, including personal accounts, letters, memoirs, official reports and war diaries from both sides. It aims to present a new account of the battle, what it was like to experience, and what it meant for the overall war efforts of both the Allies and the Central Powers. It provides a fresh discussion of the battle at strategic, operational and tactical levels, and spends considerable time examining the ‘other side of the hill’. About a third of the book deals with the soldiers of the German Army and how they defended their positions in the Ypres Salient. Their story is a remarkable one of courage and ingenuity in the face of almost unimaginable horrors. Indeed, it is only by combining the British and German experiences that we can reassess the battle in new ways and appreciate how near Haig’s forces came to decisive success in September and October 1917. It could even be said that Third Ypres was, in some respects, one of the ‘lost victories’ of the war.
The idea of ‘decisive success’ or a ‘lost victory’ at Passchendaele seems, at first glance, to be bizarre and counter-intuitive. Yet, looking again at the battle, it is striking how close the British came to forcing the German Army to make a major retreat in Belgium in October 1917. By raising the tempo of operations and inflicting an increasingly unacceptable casualty rate on the German Army, British forces opened up a window of opportunity for significant political and strategic results–maybe even some kind of compromise peace. This story has, in the opinion of this author, never been told fully before and stands in sharp contrast to the dominant perception of the battle as being totally futile and devoid of meaning or purpose. On the contrary, major success was within Britain’s grasp in the summer and autumn of 1917, and had the battle been managed slightly differently, it is not too difficult to imagine that the course of the war could have been transformed dramatically.
Passchendaele has a complex and lengthy history. It took months to emerge and develop; frequently intertwining with other battles and running in parallel with them, before finally becoming the focal point of the war in the late summer and autumn of 1917. Its story begins in the winter of 1916–17 when new
Allied leadership, both political and military, tried to salvage a war effort that seemed to be drifting along dangerous lines. The enormous battles of 1916, at Verdun and the Somme, had not produced decisive results, only added hundreds of thousands of names to French, British and German casualty lists. With the war in France and Belgium frozen into what seemed like a permanent stalemate, major decisions had to be made about how the war was going to be won and what, if any, support would be given to other fronts. In the east, the Russian Army was approaching the limit of its endurance and increasingly unable to hold off the Central Powers, while the Italian war effort was already proving too much for the country to sustain. Out of this tortuous situation would emerge what is, at once, the most frightening, yet most fascinating, battle fought on the Western Front. One hundred years on, the Third Battle of Ypres is still deserving of our attention.
Prologue:
The Nivelle Offensive
We now have the formula.
Robert Nivelle1
16 April 1917
Victory was certain. The new Commander-in-Chief, General Robert Georges Nivelle, had promised as much. Appointed to command France’s northern armies in December 1916, replacing the tired figure of Joseph Joffre (who had held the burden since 1911), Nivelle wanted a more vigorous and active prosecution of the war. For a nation that was urgently seeking a way out of an agonizing attritional struggle, Nivelle seemed the perfect candidate. As an army commander at Verdun in 1916, he had overseen the recapture of Fort Douaumont utilizing the latest artillery techniques–including the much-heralded ‘creeping barrage’–that enabled his infantry to break into enemy positions which had hitherto been regarded as invulnerable. With a new method of coordinating infantry and artillery proving a tactical success, Nivelle believed that he had found the solution to the riddle of trench warfare. He now planned to apply it on a much larger scale. There could be no doubt, he said, confidently and assuredly, this time the Allies would achieve decisive victory.
Nivelle proposed that the massive Allied offensive, now scheduled for April 1917, would usher in a shattering defeat of German forces on the Western Front. After British and French troops had conducted preliminary attacks around Arras on 9 April, his Reserve Army Group, comprising nearly forty divisions, would strike the decisive blow along the River Aisne a week later. Once they had cleared the enemy defences along the Chemin des Dames, French troops would manoeuvre the remaining German units into the open and then, in Nivelle’s defiant phrase, ‘destroy the principal mass of the enemy’s forces on the Western Front’. If everything went to plan, he reckoned this decisive phase would occur within 24–48 hours of the beginning of the attack. It was nothing short of breathtaking.2
A wave of optimism swept through the country. ‘Never had the Army been in more magnificent shape’, reports noted. ‘The closer the launching of the offensive became, the greater hopes were raised. People talked about French troops going on to Laon and Mézières. They dreamed of the march of the Allies, victorious on the Meuse.’3 Yet whatever qualities Nivelle may have possessed, he was unfortunate that the one element Napoleon had prized above all others–luck–deserted him. A month before his offensive was to go in, the German Army began a pre-planned withdrawal from its over-extended positions between Arras and Soissons, occupying a specially constructed rear line known as the Hindenburg Line. The redeployment began on 16 March and, over the next three days, four armies pulled back on a front of over 100 miles, leaving a torn and ravaged wilderness in their wake. The aim was to deprive the enemy of anything that might be of use in the evacuated zone–railways, roads, bridges, and houses to billet troops–and the German Army went about its task with ruthless application. It was, as one senior officer noted grimly, ‘an orgy of dynamite’.4 By occupying the Hindenburg Line before Nivelle could strike, the defenders pulled off an immense strategic coup. Their front had been shortened by nearly fifty kilometres, freeing up thirteen divisions and fifty heavy batteries, thus providing the German High Command with a readily available strategic reserve.5
The changed situation did not, however, prompt any modification in Nivelle’s plans. Conscious that so much seemed to be riding on his offensive, the French commander decided to persist with his existing strategy, convinced that the attack must go ahead, and unwilling to admit that his guns had already been spiked. Even worse, his plans were now known to the German High Command, who had managed to get their hands on copies of corps and army orders weeks before the attack (Nivelle’s headquarters being notoriously relaxed about secrecy). In contrast to Nivelle’s frozen optimism, growing numbers of field commanders, both British and French, began to suspect that something was terribly wrong. In March the French Premier, Alexandre Ribot, interviewed three of his Army Group commanders, who all expressed reservations about whether they would be able to achieve Nivelle’s grandiose objectives.6 Yet their warnings went unheeded; Nivelle was allowed to go ahead and march the French Army to its destiny on the Chemin des Dames on the morning of 16 April 1917.
When the attack finally went ahead, the result was a disaster; a shambles of flesh against steel as French infantry, heavily encumbered with food and supplies, found their dreams of reaching open ground dying in front of their eyes. The appalling experience of 10th Colonial Infantry Division in the Sixth Army was typical of what French, and frequently Senegalese, infantry faced on that cold, deadly morning. The ground was the first obstacle. There had been ‘an almost complete absence’ of proper observation over the German lines prior to the attack. Most of the defenders had access to underground shelters (known as creutes) that were impossible to pinpoint, while the French artillery had only limited room to deploy. The weather did not help. Out of a total of nine days’ preliminary bombardment, only twenty-one hours of uninterrupted fire had been possible because of the low cloud and rain. ‘Their artillery’, on the contrary, ‘fired back infrequently but with deadly accuracy on the French batteries literally piled up in the ravines…’7
The awful weather seemed to get even worse in the hours before the attack, with wind, rain and snow battering against the huddled lines of infantry waiting to go over. The colonial soldiers from Africa had never experienced such conditions and were, in places, up to their waists in water. When the order to attack was given, 10th Division was almost immediately stopped in its tracks. The men were supposed to advance at a rate of 100 metres every three minutes–the speed of Nivelle’s famous ‘creeping barrage’–but this was much too quick. When units came up against obstacles and their pace slowed, they lost their artillery support. Disaster was now inevitable:
The enemy, allowing them to pass, came out of their underground tunnels and killed the infantry at their leisure without suffering any losses themselves… Heavily laden with three days’ supplies, in expectation of a ‘certain’ advance, [and carrying] only two or three grenades, the men took only a few minutes to get rid of their rations and the grenades that were exploding in their haversacks. Jammed, clogged machine-guns proved useless and were thrown away. The Senegalese lost their officers, clustered together and were decimated.8
A report on the action concluded that beforehand the morale of the men had been higher than ever. ‘Right through the ranks there was an absolute certainty of success. Higher up, there was a certain unease but they still had faith. They thought that the High Command’s assessment was such that the operation was necessary and certain to succeed.’9
Sadly, the tragic story of 10th Division was not unique on that fatal 16 April. The French divisions battered themselves in vain attempts to get forward; columns of frightened poilus, sheltering from the rain under their dull horizon-bleu coats, were bowed as if walking through a hailstorm, as German shelling and dug-in machine-guns tore bloodied holes in their ranks. Whole battalions were wiped out in the storm of shellfire, while the few French tanks that had been able to reach the starting line soon became magnets for enemy gunfire. A British liaison officer, Major Edward Spears, tried to get to the front to see what
was happening, only to be met by columns of wounded coming back and hundreds of men on stretchers, all ‘covered with mud and blood’. One man, thoroughly broken in spirit, muttered to him:
‘It’s all up, we can’t do it, we shall never do it. C’est impossible.’
That night the rain, which had fallen all day, turned to sleet and then froze, covering the battlefield, the huddled corpses and the dead horses in a silvery cloak of white snow. ‘On the German side’, Spears noted, ‘great bouquets of blood-red flowers grew and fell slowly with exasperating regularity.’ At one point, he stumbled across a campfire, around which a few poilus sat smoking. The men ‘had the blank faces and staring eyes of extreme fatigue’ and the scene struck him as being one of the most dejected and disillusioned sights he witnessed during the whole war. He continued on his lonely journey, trying to return to the rear lines, every so often glancing back over his shoulder at the smouldering front to the north.