Passchendaele
Page 15
But could the battle continue? Haig was in a typically bullish mood on the morning of 1 August. He sent one of his liaison officers to tell Pétain that his idea of doing ‘nothing serious’ on the Western Front until the Americans turned up ‘suited the Germans admirably’ because it would have allowed them to concentrate all their reserves against Russia. ‘In my opinion now is the critical moment of the war,’ he added, ‘and the French must attack as strongly as possible and as soon as possible so as to co-operate with the British in dealing the Enemy as strong a blow as possible.’ Charteris had given him the highlights from an examination of prisoners taken the day before, with the encouraging news that up to 15 per cent of the total ‘bag’ were from the class of 1918 with a lower morale ‘than any lot previously captured’.59 Buoyed by this news, Haig met Gough and Malcolm at La Lovie the following day. Once again he emphasized the importance of the Broodseinde–Passchendaele Ridge (effectively the high ground on Gough’s right) and told the Fifth Army commander that his ‘main effort’ must be devoted to seizing it. Until this was secured, it would not be possible to push further on with his centre. ‘I also told him to have patience’, Haig recorded, ‘and not put in his infantry attack until after 2 or 3 days fine weather’, to allow enough time for the guns to be brought up and the ground to dry out.60
Yet the rain kept falling. With the exception of 5 August, which saw the skies temporarily clear, rain fell continuously until 6 August, effectively bringing the offensive to a premature halt. ‘Frightful weather. The worst experienced this year. Put a stop to everything except gun fire’, wrote A. H. Roberts, a pioneer with 39th Division, on 3 August. ‘Our Division is going back, which is something to be thankful for’, he noted the following day. ‘The sooner we get out of this the better.’61 Given such appalling weather, it was perhaps inevitable that questions would be asked as to why men were fighting in such aquatic conditions. The weather station at Vlamertinge (just two miles from Ypres) recorded over 21mm of rain on 1 August and nearly 10mm two days later. In the month as a whole, 127mm of rain fell–57mm more than average (with particularly heavy deluges on 14 and 26 August). Although it has been suggested that, to a certain extent, the heavy rainfall could have been foreseen, in reality there was no way such a terrific deluge could have been predicted by Haig and GHQ. It was the most remarkable spell of weather of the whole war.62
By 4 August, with the battlefield inundated, it was evident that any hope for an early resumption of the offensive was premature. That day, owing to the appalling weather, Gough cancelled his orders for the continuation of the attack and began relieving his front-line divisions. It was a decision that no one wanted to take, but it was impossible to keep men in the line, in such atrocious conditions, for any longer. At Montreuil, Charteris was convinced that the rain had saved the Germans from a crushing defeat. ‘Every day’s delay tells against us’, he opined, pacing up and down his office. ‘We lose, hour by hour, the advantage of attack.’ The Germans could reinforce and reorganize, while they, on the other hand, could do nothing but wait. That morning he went up to the front line, his boots squelching into the mud, and found every brook ‘swollen’ and the ground ‘a quagmire’. In spite of this the mood of the men was ‘cheerful, amazingly so’.63 For the British the long journey up to the Passchendaele Ridge was just beginning.
7.
‘Like the Black Hole of Calcutta’
I remember running like a hare and dodging about to avoid shells, which was absurd. You might as well try to dodge the raindrops in a thunderstorm.
John Nettleton1
6–18 August 1917
It was not until 6 August that the rain finally stopped and the sun appeared through the banks of dark cloud, shining wanly upon a landscape that was almost indescribable. Brown earth turned up like newly ploughed fields; broken coils of wire; clumps of dead bodies; scattered bits of equipment, rifles, helmets, and shell fragments. Across it were hundreds of silver moons–reflections of the dull sky from the shell holes that pockmarked the landscape. ‘The ground very much resembled that of the Somme, every yard being churned up by shells, the only difference was that many of the holes were a good deal bigger. Both sides had evidently been using an extraordinary amount of big stuff’, remembered Private G. Carter, who moved up to the front with his field ambulance on 6 August. ‘Fritz’s lines were unrecognisable as trenches for they were merely a line of shell holes with an occasional bit of sand bagging or riveting showing. At intervals along the support lines, Fritz had built strong block houses of reinforced concrete and these stood comparatively unharmed.’2
Troops moving up to the line could now only do so via a thin network of duckboard tracks that had been laid across the sodden landscape. German gunners already had most of the major lanes and crossroads marked out, and their aerial observers quickly spotted the duckboards that looked like thin white ribbons of a spider’s web from the air. Moving along these narrow, precarious wooden paths became one of the enduring memories of the battle for British and Imperial soldiers: conveyor-belts of fear and terror that took them from the (relative) safety of the rear lines, all the way into the front, where there was no possibility of sleep or rest, only uncertainty and, inevitably, sheer terror. For Lieutenant John Nettleton of 2/Rifle Brigade (8th Division) there was always something ‘particularly nerve-wracking’ about ‘plodding along a duckboard track in the middle of a long file of men and hearing the Boche shelling the track a few hundred yards ahead. You couldn’t stop–there were always more troops coming up behind you–and you just had to go on, praying fervently that the shelling would stop before you had to walk into it. It always made me feel as though my stomach had fallen out.’3
The rain may have caused a temporary halt to Fifth Army’s operations, but General Gough was determined to capture those objectives that had eluded him on 31 July. At a conference on 7 August, it was agreed that II Corps would try to secure the Black Line in the next day or two, depending on the state of the ground.4 Two divisions would make the assault: 18th Division striking towards Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood; while 25th Division, on its left, pushed into the village of Westhoek. Conditions for the infantry were–to use the Official History’s euphemistic phrase–‘most trying’. It had been extraordinarily difficult to move up enough guns to support the attack and no counter-battery fire had been possible for several days owing to the persistent rain. Gough’s intelligence officers were also warning that the enemy had reinforced their lines–another division had been spotted along the Roulers railway. Moreover, the two attacking divisions had already been at the front for the best part of a week, after taking over the line between 1 and 4 August. The troops were tired, wet through and thoroughly exhausted.5
Getting enough men and supplies to the front line, and making sure routes across the battlefield were kept open, was a logistical problem of the highest order. Because everything had to be brought up from the rear lines, there was almost always a shortage of food and water. British troops were thus forced to live on what Kenneth Page, a battery officer, called a ‘very unpleasant diet’ of bully beef, hard biscuits and stale bread. What water that did make it up the line was usually housed in two-gallon petrol tins, which inevitably tasted of petrol, and was a source of constant complaint.6 Brigadier-General C. Godby, the Chief Engineer of II Corps, recorded the constant struggle to keep everything moving in his daily progress reports. On 3 August most of the main roads in his sector were closed for lorries for twenty-four hours because of the ‘continual rain’. The route to Westhoek was ‘said to be little better than a mud road’. Over the following week he marshalled a small army of engineers and Chinese labourers on what seemed like an endless list of jobs: the filling in of shell holes; the construction of shelters and dugouts; the maintenance of pumping installations and water tanks, and so on. By the week ending 4 August his corps workshop at Busseboom had constructed 2,100 trench boards, 312 yards of mule tracks, ten latrines, over 8,000 pit props, and ten bridges that could
take heavy artillery. Whenever time could be spared, Godby also directed the salvage and recovery of ditched tanks, but in this case bad weather ‘rendered operations nearly impossible’.7
The attack finally went ahead in the early hours of 10 August; a heavy downpour several days earlier causing yet another delay. 18th Division found the enemy waiting for them, putting down a heavy barrage as they went over the top. ‘The waves at the extreme end shrivelled under the intense rifle and machine-gun fire that burst out in front and on the flank’, wrote the divisional historian. ‘Few men escaped unhurt. Those who did sheltered in scattered shell-holes, and trickled back eventually to our original front line.’8 The chief success of the day was the capture of Westhoek by 25th Division, which managed to hold on to their gains against fierce counter-attacks. Communication was particularly difficult that day. Smoke and dust from the shelling made visual signalling almost impossible; runners were frequently killed or wounded; and captured pillboxes regularly came under direct artillery fire. It was, wrote one witness, ‘like the black hole of Calcutta’.9
Given the severe handicaps the British were operating under, the results of 10 August were, in some respects, quite encouraging. Yet Fifth Army would find restarting the attack in anything approaching favourable conditions to be almost impossible. The rain and wet, combined with the strength of the German defensive position, meant that by mid-August the British had, effectively, been stopped in their tracks. The weather continued to play havoc with Gough’s plans, and he could only look up at the dark sky and curse their atrocious luck. The Fifth Army commander originally wanted major operations to resume on 13 August, but, after a request from Claud Jacob for more time to consolidate his position on the Gheluvelt Plateau, Gough agreed to a twenty-four-hour postponement. Yet rain, and more rain, kept coming down: 18mm fell on 14 August, another 8mm the following day, leaving Gough with no choice but to delay the attack until daybreak on 16 August.10 The basic outline for the attack (subsequently known as the Battle of Langemarck) was for II and XIX Corps to push on to the German Third Line between Polygon Wood and the Zonnebeke Spur. This would entail an advance of about 1,500 yards. The northern flank would be secured by XVIII and XIV Corps, which would make a shorter advance to Langemarck. On their left, the French First Army would push on towards Langewaade and Merckem.11
Preparations for the attack were inevitably far from ideal. The ground was sodden and torn up by the almost continuous shellfire, which meant that in places proper forming-up trenches could not be dug, leaving the infantry exposed in no-man’s-land. Moreover, the ground was so wet that tanks could not be deployed, so the attacking companies would be on their own. Indeed, in most places, just getting up to the front line was trial enough. For John Nettleton, serving on the staff of 8th Division in II Corps’s sector, 16 August was ‘a bad day’; one of the worst he ever lived through. He was given responsibility for guiding an attacking battalion (2/Royal Berkshires) to their jumping-off position in time for Zero Hour at 4.45 a.m. The battalion had to be led from Birr Crossroads up Bellewaarde Ridge and then up on to the high ground at Westhoek. But this would not be easy:
Even at home, in peacetime conditions, troops moving across country in single file in the dark almost always lose touch. Here, with the broken ground and under shellfire most of the time, keeping touch was an impossibility. The delay caused by one casualty, or even by men ducking and falling about when a shell comes near, is enough to break the line and once it is broken it is extremely difficult to catch up. The slightest check is cumulative and, even on a road, the back of a column can be running and still be left behind. And here you couldn’t run, even if you wanted to.
Nettleton did his best. He stationed teams armed with red-light torches on the reverse slope of Westhoek Ridge to act as markers (with strict instructions to flash their torches from 11 p.m. till the battalion turned up). He was allocated sixteen guides (one per platoon) and told the commanding officer how important it was ‘that every man should keep in touch with the man in front of him’. Yet the battalion still got lost. Despite leading the column as slowly as he dared, with frequent pauses, it took Nettleton most of the night to reach their destination (the red-light teams having given up long ago). When they finally reached Westhoek Ridge, Nettleton found that only one company had followed him. He retraced his steps, splashing through the mud and sludge, and eventually found the ‘missing sheep’ with twenty minutes to go before Zero Hour.12
Nettleton’s account of the difficulties of getting the attacking battalions into the correct positions was mirrored across the front of that dripping wet night of 15/16 August. The sheer logistical challenges posed by the battlefield made even simple deployments incredibly taxing. Brigadier-General G. H. B. Freeth, commander of 167 Brigade (56th Division), made a number of urgent representations to higher command for the attack to be postponed because of the grave difficulties he was having in getting his brigade into position. Not only was the ground ‘almost impassable’, but one of his supporting units (3/London) had already been ‘on the move’ for three nights. Moreover, the two attacking battalions ‘would have less than 24 hours to study the ground–a matter of great difficulty at any time owing to the continuous shelling, the lack of thorough reconnaissance, time for arranging details and studying orders, and the absence of efficient means of communication in the forward area’. As a prelude to a major attack, things could hardly have been worse.13
When Zero Hour came the attack verged, in places, on a fiasco, and Freeth’s warnings about the lack of time for preparation were proved perfectly sound. The southern and central attacking corps, II and XIX, achieved almost nothing. For 56th Division, supposed to form a southern defensive flank, the initial advance progressed smoothly, with small holding parties of the enemy fleeing before the attacking brigades, but when they ran into a ‘broad belt of mud’, about thirty yards across and up to five feet deep, the attackers ‘lost’ their barrage. Isolated German strongpoints remained in action and held up repeated attempts to get forward. At a brigade inquest several days later, the reasons for the failure were spelled out bluntly. ‘The time available for preparation and reconnaissance was insufficient. There was not time to get objectives etc., fully into the heads of officers, NCOs and men, and the assembly prior to the assault was carried out with some difficulty in consequence.’14
It was even worse in the centre, where H. E. Watts’s XIX Corps was to push forward across a mile of open ground towards Gravenstafel. Attacking side by side, 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions, were to fight their way through a forbidding maze of mutually supporting pillboxes and ruined farms. Yet the attacking divisions were already well below fighting strength on the day of the assault, having been in the line for a fortnight (during which a considerable proportion of their manpower was occupied in carrying parties and manual labour).15 Cyril Falls, the Ulster divisional historian, noted grimly that ‘The story of the attack, alas! is not a long one.’ As soon as the men went ‘over the top’, they were met with heavy machine-gun fire from a number of key strongpoints across the front, including Gallipoli Farm, Schuler Farm, Hindu Cott and Border House. These ‘seemed to be entirely unaffected by the pounding of many weeks’ and were, in some cases, considerable fortifications in their own right, containing up to six different compartments. ‘The ground was a veritable quagmire’, Falls continued. ‘The “mopping-up” system was found to be impossible. The concrete works had to be fought for; they could not be passed by and left to “moppers up” in rear.’16
British and French divisions had fared better on the left sector of the attack, pushing forward across the flooded Steenbeek and taking Langemarck, but the cost had been disastrous–over 15,000 casualties, proving, yet again, how dangerous the German Army remained.17 On this northern part of the battlefield, Lieutenant-Colonel R. J. Clarke’s battalion, 1/4th Royal Berkshires (48th Division), were in action. He described what happened in a letter to his mother several days later:
The attack pushe
d on in spite of all the difficulties. The Hun chief defences here are a series of concrete gun-pits and shelters, very strongly made, and well scattered, so that each helps the others, and the MG fire was heavy. One of them was surrounded with water and marsh except one pathway to it. They will keep out all but the largest shells and hold about 20/30 men each. We found them very useful after we had taken a few! The Brigade did well and especially the Bucks. We were in reserve, though some of the companies got in for part of the fighting and did well. We found the Bavarians opposite us and they fought well, there was none of that low moral[e] that you read about. We had never met it yet in any of our fighting though the Division who were in the line 3 days previously were a different lot from all accounts. The ground was so bad that the tanks could not move to help us. If they had, we should have taken all our objectives.18
For the Germans it was an entirely different story. The defenders had undoubtedly suffered badly from the wind and rain and slushy conditions, but when the attack came, it was easier to lie in shell holes or crouch in bunkers and pick off the attacking waves than it was to try and cross the flooded battlefield. The British attack had been heralded by an ‘extremely violent’ barrage that crashed down upon their positions, followed shortly thereafter by the infantry trailing in its wake. ‘On both sides of the Staden–Boesinghe railway they broke into the German positions’, recorded the German Official History. ‘North of the railway they crossed the Steenbeek up to Bixschoote and pushed German troops back from the east bank of the Kortebeek. South of the railway they took Langemarck, claimed parts of St Julien and even penetrated into Poelcappelle.’ In the northern sector, German units were unable to push the attackers back, and although there was fierce fighting for the village of Langemarck, the British were able to hold on.19