by Nick Lloyd
It took days, in some cases weeks, to recover all the wounded from the attack on 16 August. Army doctors and nurses at the Advanced Dressing Stations witnessed the worst scenes as men, or what was left of them, were brought in. Captain Martin Littlewood, a Royal Army Medical Corps doctor with 15th (Scottish) Division, was charged with running a dressing station near Potijze Château (on the eastern outskirts of Ypres). It was tiring and dangerous work. On 18 August one of his men was hit in the doorway with ‘a piece of hot shell’. Littlewood’s diary entry for the following day conveys the monotonous horror of daily life in the Salient:
Heavy crumps all round us, some very near. Another man hit in the doorway. This went on from 11.30 a.m. to midnight. Intense barrage of 5.9’s on road. One ambulance car knocked out at noon. Three stretcher dumps round us blown up. Some 70 of them in matchwood [sic]. Three direct hits on building. Amputated leg of Lieutenant Templeton. At midnight a dump set alight 500 yards down road, mostly smoke bombs and Very lights [flares].50
Littlewood struggled to keep his own spirits up, but no matter how bad conditions in the chateau got, he was always amazed at how stalwart were those who were carried in to see him. On 24 August a sergeant in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers was stretchered in, heavily wounded, his uniform plastered with mud. He had lain in a shell hole for nine days. Another Irishman whom he treated had been on the battlefield for eleven days. He had been tending two wounded men, and it was only when they died that he made his way, crawling, back to his lines. Such was the fate of the wounded on the Flanders battlefield.
Given such awful conditions, it is little wonder that morale began to suffer. 16 August was more than just another failed offensive; it seemed to become a tipping point, which badly affected Fifth Army’s mood and dented whatever remaining confidence was left in its commander. The experience of the Irish divisions was particularly heartbreaking. For Philip Gibbs, an official war correspondent, the ‘general opinion’ after the battle was that they had been ‘the victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences’. Moreover he found both officers and men ‘violent in their denunciation of the Fifth Army for having put their men into the attack after those thirteen days of heavy shelling’, and then ‘cast [them] aside like old shoes’.51 Cyril Falls, writing about 36th Division, which had suffered so badly that day, vented similar frustration, contrasting the division’s experience at Messines (when it had been in Second Army), with the operations under Gough’s command.
The system of liaison was practised by the Second Army as in no other. General Harington’s car stopped at every door, and the cheerful young staff officers, who knew every communication trench on the Army front, who drank with company commanders in their front-line dug-outs before coming back to tea with a Brigadier, or with General [Oliver] Nugent [GOC 36th Ulster Division] at his Headquarters, formed a very real link between the Higher Command and the troops… The difficulties at Ypres were infinitely greater than at Messines; that everyone recognised. But in the former case they did not appear to be met with quite the precision, care, and forethought of the latter. The private soldier felt a difference.52
There were other indications too that morale was beginning to suffer. An army postal censor reported in late August that there was ‘a feeling of uncertainty as to the progress of our arms to an ultimate victory, and a growing inclination to believe that military enterprise must give place to political ingenuity’.53
Notwithstanding the growing unease, the offensive–what was left of it–went on. At his conference on 17 August, Gough discussed plans for a new, and hopefully decisive, attack scheduled for 25 August. Before that could take place, it was essential to ‘straighten the line’ and secure all those objectives that had not fallen in the last attack, so a series of minor operations were sanctioned: XVIII Corps on 19 August; II Corps on 21 August; and XIX Corps on 22 August. Once these attacks had been successfully concluded, Fifth Army would then, hopefully, be in a position to mount more decisive operations.54 The mood of Gough’s commanders remains unclear–no dissent was recorded–but there must have been a sense of dreadful monotony about ordering yet more attacks against strongpoints and woods that should have fallen on the first day, but were still resisting strongly. ‘We must be careful not to waste Divisions’, Gough warned his commanders, ‘or we should run short of troops.’ Yet the Fifth Army commander was committing one of the cardinal sins of war on the Western Front, one, moreover, that he had already committed earlier in the year at Bullecourt: ordering attacks on narrow fronts without flanking support and without enough time to prepare effectively. It would be his last chance.
8.
‘A Question of Concentration’
The P. M. is obviously puzzled, as his predecessor was, how far the Government is justified in interfering with a military operation.
Sir Maurice Hankey1
19 August–5 September 1917
On the morning of 20 August the Kaiser travelled to Waregem, southwest of Ghent, following an inspection of the defences of Heligoland. Crown Prince Rupprecht, Sixt von Armin and Fritz von Lossberg were there to meet him, standing solemnly in a line as the Kaiser’s entourage arrived. After a troop inspection, Wilhelm II gave what one aide called an ‘excessively long speech… much of which was completely incomprehensible to his audience’.2 At lunch, the discussion turned to the situation at the front and the renewal of heavy fighting in the Ypres Salient. Sixt von Armin admitted that Fourth Army had already lost 84,000 men in the last two months, but the Kaiser ‘did not seem unduly impressed’. Rupprecht, evidently unsatisfied with this response, tried to emphasize how difficult things were becoming. ‘I did not fail to tell him that our losses are very significant in Flanders.’ There were not enough reserves, he said, and those that arrived were of poor quality, meaning that another winter of war was unthinkable. His mood was not helped by the beaming optimism of the Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral von Holtzendorff, who was in the Kaiser’s party, and assured Rupprecht that the U-boat campaign would force England out of the war by the end of October. At this point, Rupprecht just smiled. ‘The men of the navy are dangerous optimists!’3
According to Rupprecht’s Chief of Staff, Hermann von Kuhl, the repulse of the renewed British attacks in mid-August marked the end of the first stage of the battle. ‘The British target was quite clear’, he remarked. ‘It was their intention to take the high ground east and north of Ypres as a spring-board for a break-through into the Flanders plain.’ This had failed, but the fighting strength of numerous divisions had been worn down to dangerous levels and ‘it was already proving difficult within the entire area of Crown Prince Rupprecht’s Army Group to replace them promptly’ with fresh troops. By 20 August, seventeen divisions had been exhausted by the fighting in Flanders and in order to hold the front, they had to engage in an increasingly frantic balancing act, moving worn-out units to quiet sectors, while their replacements were shunted north. However, as the battle dragged on ‘such an exchange became ever more difficult, especially when it became necessary to back each division in the Flanders line with a counter-attack division’. Moreover, the Canadian assault at Lens, which sucked in five extra divisions, meant that Rupprecht’s plans to relieve fought-out troops at Ypres had to be scrapped altogether.4
Elsewhere, bad news seemed to be multiplying rapidly. On the day the Kaiser visited Belgium, the long-awaited French operation at Verdun took place, with attacks on both banks of the River Meuse. Utilizing nearly 1,800 guns and almost unlimited stocks of ammunition, four French corps were involved in the attack, which aimed to retake Hill 304 and Mort Homme. Although the fighting was hard, and the terrain was hilly and wooded (thus reducing the effect of artillery), the operation achieved its objectives with ‘only’ 14,000 French casualties. German losses were probably roughly equal–including over 10,000 men taken prisoner. On 29 August, President Poincaré visited Pétain and bestowed upon him the Grand Croix of the Légion d’honneur, thanking him for ‘re-establishing our military
position before Verdun’. Gradually, but inexorably, the French were recovering their offensive spirit. Morale remained fragile and in need of constant management, but it was clear the French Army was once again able to conduct limited, and effective, military operations.5
The Italians were also on the offensive. A day before the French attack at Verdun, General Luigi Cadorna, the Italian Commander-in-Chief, pushed his divisions forward on the Isonzo–the river that ran along the Austrian and Italian border where they had fought each other since 1915. The battle–the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo–marked, up till that point, the culmination of Italy’s war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Italian forces blew a hole eight kilometres deep across a sixteen-kilometre front and captured 30,000 prisoners and 145 guns.6 Austrian losses were over 100,000, leaving the Chief of the General Staff, Arz von Straußenburg, with no option but to plead for German help. Although both Hindenburg and Ludendorff were initially loath to send German troops to bail out the Austrians, they eventually agreed that a proposed counter-attack on the Isonzo was feasible, and a number of difficulties could be overcome, if sufficient time was allowed for preparation. Because the terrain was so mountainous, troops would need special training, pack animals, and enough time to get into their deployment areas. Hindenburg ordered the creation of a new army, Fourteenth Army, and scraped together seven divisions for the proposed operation; now scheduled for sometime in the middle of October.7
Meanwhile in Flanders, Gough’s ‘line-straightening’ operations commenced on 19 August with a dashing raid by seven tanks along the Saint-Julien to Poelcappelle road, which was still, just about, passable. Under the cover of a smoke screen, the tanks were able to silence a number of strongpoints that had previously held up an entire division, capturing crowds of Germans as they did so.8 What became known as the ‘Cockcroft action’–named after one of the pillboxes that had been captured–was a remarkable exercise in ingenuity and imagination. ‘It seemed a big gamble as to whether the Tanks would be heard approaching the Steenbeek at Saint-Julien, crossing the Steenbeek, and getting into position at the Starting Point by Zero Hour’ (within 400 yards of the enemy), recorded an after-action report. Machine-gun and artillery fire, as well as low-flying aircraft, had been ordered for two hours before the attack to drown out the noise of the approaching tanks and it seemed to work. Making straight up the Poelcappelle road, G.43, the tank commanded by Second Lieutenant Coutts led the attack into heavy machine-gun fire. As he reported later, they ‘replied vigorously, and after ¼ hour between 30 and 50 of the enemy ran out from the buildings of the Cockcroft: killed a good many, got badly ditched on side of the road…’9
The success on 19 August energized morale in the flagging Tank Corps, but it did little to increase any lingering enthusiasm they had for operating in Flanders. As early as 2 August, as he watched the rain come down, Brigadier-General Hugh Elles suggested to Fifth Army that their remaining tanks should be withdrawn and used together in a surprise assault on better ground. The following day, Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. C. Fuller also reported that, from ‘a tank point of view’, the battle ‘may be considered dead’. Furthermore, to continue to use tanks in such circumstances would ‘only lead to good machines and better personnel being thrown away’.10 By this point, staff officers in the Tank Corps were devising a plan for a major tank raid–what would eventually become the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917–and were understandably chafed at being asked to work in such soggy conditions. What they wanted, they told GHQ time and again, was good firm ground, not torn to pieces by endless shelling, and the element of surprise. Give them that and they would really show what tanks could do.
Renewed attacks by XVIII and XIX Corps on 22 August were able to gain several hundred yards of ground, but German pillboxes and ruined farmhouses were proving, in places, almost impossible to dislodge. Their names are now largely forgotten, but then they were infamous, dark places reeking of death and misery: Potsdam, Vampir, Borry and Gallipoli Farms, Hindu Cott and Hill 35 to name a few. Despite the ground being ‘practically a swamp’, eighteen tanks were scraped together for the attack. Four machines of ‘C’ Battalion tried to drive down the Frezenberg–Zonnebeke road, but it had been so heavily shelled as to be almost indistinguishable from the surrounding mud. One tank was hit by shellfire, and the remaining three all ditched. Although six tanks from ‘F’ Battalion were able to assist in cleaning up some snipers and machine-guns, it had been yet another sobering day for the Tank Corps.11
The battle was now deteriorating into a brutal attritional slog: lone groups of infantrymen slipping and sliding across a squelching sea of mud as the rattle of German machine-guns pattered out and another attack went to ground. Symptomatic of the deadlock was the struggle on the Gheluvelt Plateau, which by the last weeks of August had distilled into a series of vicious battles surrounding Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood (two shattered woods off the Menin Road that had already resisted a series of major British assaults). On 22 August, Major-General V. A. Couper’s 14th (Light) Division led a renewed attempt to seize control of this shattered ground. Over the next three days, Couper’s division found itself engaged in one of the most brutal, seesawing struggles of the entire battle, as it became clear that the German Army was not going to give up without a fight.12 The problem that Couper encountered was a familiar one: his division did not contain enough combat power to take and hold ground in such difficult conditions–particularly when their flanks were ‘in the air’ and they were under constant pressure from machine-guns on the higher ground around Glencorse Wood.
Four battalions made the initial assault, but such was the level of enemy resistance, and the difficulty of moving through the tangled wasteland, that two more battalions were fed into the mix over the coming days. A subsequent investigation concluded that the initial attack failed to secure all its objectives ‘owing to casualties and the broken nature of the ground’. This meant that the final objective ‘was reached by only small detached parties who were too weak and scattered to resist the immediate counter-attacks made by the enemy on both flanks’.13 An account of what happened was recorded by Captain George Rawlence of 6/Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (14th Division). They started their march to the line, down the dreaded Menin Road, at 1 a.m. on the morning of 22 August. ‘We had an awful time’, he remembered. ‘The Hun was smashing it to pieces and mixing gas shells with the bombardment. I had to order gas masks on and you can imagine what it was like; pitch dark, glass goggles, which continually fogged with the heat of one’s body to look through, great holes in the road and shells bursting all round.’ They made one attack, but then in came the enemy counter-attacks, ‘again and again rushing up his storm troops in motors and throwing them in recklessly, all the while keeping up a terrific artillery fire’.14
Rawlence’s men were eventually relieved on 25 August. ‘We are all absolutely done [in] and one feels in that condition when all the events of the past few days appear like a far away dream’, he admitted.
You see we were on the go at all hours and dropped off to sleep on the floor when opportunity offered. Yesterday [24 August] was the worst day of all… The battle raged backwards and forwards all day and finally finished[,] we having given way about 200 yards, but still holding the crest of the ridge and well over it. Two fresh battalions of ours came up then and pushed through us and on into the line we had held during the morning, finding practically nothing but dead and wounded Boche in front of them.
Yet no matter how hard they fought, 14th Division just could not hold on to Inverness Copse. That day elements of 34th and 32nd German Divisions finally cleared the battered remains of the wood, leaving Jacob’s II Corps with nothing to show for three days of ceaseless, draining combat. It was, in a sense, an apt summation of the Battle of Flanders as a whole.
The loss of Inverness Copse, after so much blood had been spilled, inevitably provoked a bout of introspection. According to Brigadier-General P. R. Wood, whose 43 Brigade had taken the brunt of Briti
sh casualties, the failure was ‘entirely a question of concentration’. For him, the key lesson was the importance of overwhelming force. Where ‘the objective is, though small, of the highest tactical importance and possession is necessary to facilitate future operations, it is wiser and cheaper in the long run to make dead certain of getting it by employing at least 50% greater strength to capture and hold it than would normally be deemed sufficient in the case of an attack forming part of a larger operation on a broad front’. He recommended battalions being deployed in depth, thus ‘ensuring greater driving power’ with enough strength to resist counter-attacks. Moreover, only one brigade (of four battalions) had been initially tasked with the mission, while six battalions had eventually been drawn into the fighting. ‘Had these 6 battalions been available from the first, so that their full weight could have been brought to bear, instead of being thrown into the fight piecemeal,’ Wood noted, ‘I am certain that complete success would have resulted.’15 He had put his finger on something. The British were slipping back into old habits: a lack of preparation; inadequate time for reconnaissance and planning; little or no coordination with flanking units; rushed, penny-packet attacks; heavy losses for little gain. The curse of the Somme was returning.
In stark contrast to the urgent investigations then underway into British failure, there was a recognition that the fighting in late August brought out the best in the German Army. Theodor Oechsler, an NCO with 23 Reserve Infantry Regiment (12th Reserve Division), was personally congratulated by General von Armin after capturing an entire tank crew on 22 August, when he was deployed around Saint-Julien. He described what it was like to come under heavy shellfire and then face the clanking iron monsters that threatened to overrun their position: