by Nick Lloyd
Further heavy fighting broke out around the bastion of Tower Hamlets, which anchored the German southern flank in Flanders, and had already resisted numerous attacks. 39th Division, deployed about 1,000 yards south of the Menin Road, made ‘rapid progress’ after going ‘over the top’. Although the right half of the division was delayed by poor ground conditions, elsewhere the attacking infantry overran their objectives on time. An after-action report noted that ‘The opposition met with on the Western slopes of the Tower Hamlets Ridge was speedily disposed of. Our troops advanced through Tower Hamlets and over the high ground in its vicinity with but few casualties, and our objective on their Brigade front was gained according to the scheduled time.’ On the right, the boggy ground, combined with enfilade fire from German strongpoints to the south (most notably a position known as the Quadrilateral), ensured that progress came to a halt–and it was necessary to pull back in places and form a defensive flank. Nevertheless, 39th Division’s hold on the high ground was secure; not even concentrated artillery bombardments and two separate counter-attacks could dislodge it. The second, which advanced shortly before 7 p.m., was ‘crushed by combined artillery and machine-gun fire’.13
The second phase of the battle, when the Eingreif divisions tried to launch their counter-attacks, was eerily similar to the events of 20 September. British aircraft had been scouring the battlefield for targets for most of the day, machine-gunning and bombing enemy concentrations, while also watching out for any German batteries that disclosed themselves. Their most important contribution, however, came in the early afternoon, when they began to notice the tell-tale signs of German units moving up: columns of infantry, trucks and horses crowding the roads southeast of Zandvoorde. Probable assembly areas, crossroads and junctions, were then subjected to heavy artillery fire.14 Three formations were ordered forward: 17th Division on the southern sector against X Corps; 236th Division against I ANZAC Corps; and 4th Bavarian Division along the front of V Corps.15
Captain Caspari (II Battalion, 75 Infantry Regiment) was in 17th Division and had been directed to move towards the break-in south of Polygon Wood. His description of how they tried (and failed) to intervene was typical of what happened on that grim afternoon. They received news of the renewed attack at 10.30 a.m. and were immediately ordered forward, but they could only pick their way ‘tortuously and painfully’ because of the heavy drumfire. With communications torn to pieces, it was 1 p.m. before they were in their assembly positions, ready to go forward. Their advance was something out of a nightmare:
Everywhere the explosions of high explosive shells and the effect of smoke shells was reducing visibility, making breathing difficult and stinging our eyes. It was impossible to follow a set route, or to maintain separation between individuals or groups of men. Commanders just led their men stumbling in a westerly direction through the roaring grey-black wall of the barrage, which was periodically lit up with flashes. Watching out for the places where the fire was falling most densely, attempts were made to pass weaker points, skirting wired-off battery positions, swamps and hedgerows, looking for crossing points across swollen streams.
Incredibly, Caspari’s men managed to close with the British positions around Polderhoek Château, but found all the approaches swept by machine-gun and mortar fire. When they tried to get forward, either individually or in groups, they were all shot down. ‘It was beyond human endurance’, he noted painfully.16
Other units fared similarly. 459 Infantry Regiment (of 236th Division) was ordered forward at 12.55, but could make little progress against the Australians. The men crept forward, rifles in hand, each carrying two sandbags full of hand grenades, but came under heavy artillery and machine-gun fire, which rapidly brought their advance to a halt. Courageously they kept going, their faces ‘covered with dust and sweat; for the sun was burning down from the sky’:
If only visibility wasn’t so good and the terrain not so flat and level, allowing the English to see everything over many miles! Advancing on this churned-up ground is becoming slower and slower. But everyone is gritting their teeth. For what is at stake is to bring relief to our embattled brothers ahead. So far losses among the advance party are moderate, but now that they have arrived at the level of Broodseinde, the enemy puts a final protective line of fire in front of our infantry. So the counter-attack has been detected. Geysers the size of houses consisting of soil, metal splinters and rocks erupt everywhere. It is as if giant invisible fists were pounding, clobbering everything without mercy. Everyone who hasn’t been hit yet looks for a gap in the horrible wall of fire, half insane from breathlessness and terror.17
459 Infantry Regiment’s attack failed as surely as all the others had. They lost 550 men in a matter of hours. Likewise, the final counter-attack, made by Bavarian troops, was repulsed in the same brutal manner. ‘The enemy, who appeared to have suffered severely from our artillery fire during their advance, were badly disorganised and were met by our troops in the open with the bayonet and easily dispersed’, recorded V Corps.18
Polygon Wood had been a success, with another 1,200-yard advance, but casualties were beginning to rise. Together Fifth and Second Armies sustained 15,375 casualties on 26 September; about 25 per cent fewer than Menin Road, but as they had occurred on a significantly shorter frontage (8,500 yards compared to 14,500 on 20 September) and within fewer divisions (seven versus eleven), they were proportionally greater.19 The attacking divisions at Polygon Wood sustained about 4,400 casualties per square mile of ground gained–about 15 per cent higher than Menin Road.20 This illustrated not only the diminishing scale of returns that each subsequent ‘step’ would encounter, but also how effective German combat units remained. Moreover, the counter-battery struggle was being lost. German shelling had caused continuous losses throughout the afternoon. The case of 2/5th Lincolnshire Regiment (59th Division) illustrates how intensive some of the bombardments were. That morning they attacked a line of strongpoints on the Wieltje–Gravenstafel road, German troops showing ‘very little fight’ and surrendering in droves as soon as the leading lines closed with their positions. Nevertheless, the Lincolns were subject to heavy and continuous bombardment once they had secured their final objective, particularly around captured pillboxes, which ‘came in for rough treatment’. When they were withdrawn from the fighting, the battalion recorded only ten officers and 275 other ranks fit for duty out of a total strength of twenty-one officers and 563 men–a casualty rate of over 51 per cent.21
The Reverend Edward Tanner, a chaplain attached to 2/Worcestershire Regiment (33rd Division), spent 26 September at a dressing station on the Menin Road and described the heartbreaking scenes as men–those wounded in mind as well as body–were brought in:
All through the day the flow of wounded through the Aid Post had been uninterrupted, and the floor was just one mass of mutilated, writhing humans. It was terrible to look at and I was only too glad that I had my attention taken off it by other things. On one occasion during that afternoon I made a note of what I saw. The bunks on the floor were crowded with some of the worst cases we had had. One young KRR [King’s Royal Rifle Corps] of 19 years had [his] face lacerated and caked with blood. All he could say was ‘Shoot me, Doctor. Shoot me please. Do shoot me.’ He died soon after he left the Aid Post. Just inside the door was a man with a wrist broken and artery pierced by a splinter. Blood was pouring on the ground and a tourniquet had to be applied. Two sitting cases were crouching on the bench near the door. These two had been too frightened to go down the day before on the stretchers and now we could not send them as other cases were of far greater urgency. Another young KRR was lying with one side absolutely lacerated with splinter wounds. His tunic had been almost shot away. One man lay just inside the doorway unconscious. A bullet had pierced his brain.
For Tanner, the most difficult cases to deal with were those who had lost their minds on the battlefield and were suffering from ‘shell shock’. There were a range of different symptoms on display: a Highlander
who was ‘absolutely demented–shouting at the top of his voice the most utter nonsense and waving his arms and legs’; a man too old for active service who ‘hung about all day in the doorway trembling from head to foot’; and two others, young boys, ‘shaking from head to foot and cowering down every time a shell came over’.22 This was the price of Plumer’s advances: shredded bodies and shattered minds.
The attackers may have sustained significant losses, but the defenders found Polygon Wood to be far from comfortable. Indeed, the success of Plumer’s methods produced yet more anxiety at Fourth Army headquarters. Counter-attacks had been launched, but had regained little ground, and casualties, as always, had been heavy. German losses between 11 and 30 September amounted to over 38,500 men, including 9,700 who were listed as missing (many undoubtedly being captured).23 Some regiments had been hit particularly hard. The history of 229 Reserve Infantry Regiment, which fought just north of the Menin Road, recorded that its time at Polygon Wood was the heaviest fighting it experienced during the war. Between 19 and 28 September forty-three officers and 1,109 NCOs and other ranks were killed and over 1,000 wounded.24 Two regiments of 4th Bavarian Division, which had counter-attacked around Zonnebeke, had fared equally badly, losing forty officers and 1,300 other ranks in a single day with nothing to show for it.25
In some units, morale seemed to be breaking down. Against the Australians, 3rd and 50th Reserve Divisions had sustained heavy losses, with the former suffering a number of desertions prior to the battle. On 26 September, one platoon surrendered as a whole unit, while another company refused to go forward into the line (with Allied intelligence estimating that this was probably due to a high percentage of Landsturm men and pressed Polish troops in its ranks).26 Observing the battle from his bunker in Group Wytschaete, Albrecht von Thaer was almost beside himself with grief. ‘We are living through truly abominable days’, he wrote in his diary on 28 September. Studying reports from the battlefield, bent over a dozen maps, he was beginning to understand how effective Plumer’s attacks were, and how limited their response could be. His account was one of the clearest and most powerful descriptions of what ‘bite and hold’ was really like for those German commanders tasked with defeating it:
I no longer have any idea of what should be undertaken against the English. They set themselves a fairly limited objective for their attacks: to advance only by about 500 to 1,000 metres, albeit across quite a wide front. In front of this area and deep into our zone, there is such devastating English fire that no being can survive in it. Then, under the protection of this fire, and without sustaining many losses of their own, they simply move into the field of corpses and quickly install themselves there. Our counter-attacks must first get through the rapid wave of fire, and then behind it they find a fixed phalanx with machine guns, and they collapse in ruins. The last few days have brought us the bitterest losses of life here. Early in the day before yesterday, when one of our divisions was severely attacked, I immediately ordered a fresh new division from the rear to carry out a counter-strike and provide relief. Even when advancing through the terrible fire, it lost a great number of men, and afterwards it could not go one step farther forward. Of course, the English have also suffered losses, but probably not as many in this process. This is primarily an artillery battle. The English have three times as many guns and six times the quantity of ammunition. So our dear soldiers die off. One constantly keeps thinking: if we deploy more men at the front from the start, then these personnel will obviously also be annihilated; but having a thin front line and strong reserves coming from the rear–which is our current approach–will no longer do, either.27
Thaer was left to pray for ‘good, inventive ideas’; anything that would help them cope with the situation they were facing, now that the English, as he put it, ‘have given up their famous penetration tactics’. The only hope, he felt, was for the mass employment of tanks, but the German Army had none of them. ‘Lossberg does not really know what to do, either’, he lamented. ‘Ludendorff will be coming tomorrow morning, and he wants to talk to us, but he will not know of any panacea, either.’28
Ludendorff, overseeing things at the Supreme Command, may not have been as squeamish as Thaer, but he was also at a loss as to how they should respond to Plumer’s tactics. On 30 September he reported to the General Staff that the ‘latest British attacks–artillery barrage, smoke and machine-gun fire against our massed divisions on a comparatively narrow front–are almost irresistible’.29 He was so worried at these new developments that he returned to Belgium and met with senior officers to discuss what could be done. ‘Our defensive tactics had to be developed further, somehow or other’, he wrote. ‘We were all agreed on that.’
The only thing was, it was so infinitely difficult to hit on the right remedy. We could proceed only by careful experiment. The proposals of the officers on the spot tended rather in the direction of our former tactics; they amounted to a slight, but only a slight, reinforcement of our front lines, and the abandonment of the counter-attack by the counter-attack divisions, local counter-attacks being substituted for this. These local counter-attacks were to be brought close up and spread over a wide front, before the enemy’s attack began. So, while the front line was to be held rather more densely once more, in order to gain in power, the whole battle-field was to be given more depth than ever.30
However, in order for this to work, OHL would need to supply more men, in the form of a second division behind every front-line division, which Ludendorff called ‘an unheard-of expenditure of force’. It was agreed to bolster the front-line garrisons, move support and reserve units closer in–so they could intervene more quickly–and deploy extra machine-guns in the forward zone to try and break up any attack in its early stages.31 It was also arranged that a spoiling attack would be mounted on the morning of 4 October, to try and secure important observation points southwest of Zonnebeke.32
The truth was that there were no perfect solutions to the ‘bite-and-hold’ tactics they were coming up against. Putting more men in the trenches was hardly ideal, but given that British artillery fire was now falling deeper into the German defensive zone, there may have been no alternative.33 Fourth Army orders, issued on 30 September, urged the importance of forcing the British to place more men in the trenches, so they could be targeted by German artillery.34 Yet how to deploy the Eingreif divisions remained the great question. Because it took them some time to get assembled, they tended to deploy on the battlefield only after the British had been given a chance to dig in, which was usually by the afternoon. As had been seen on 20 and 26 September, if the British were allowed enough time to get organized, there was very little the Eingreif divisions could do about it. Therefore, it was agreed to hold them back until a day or two later and then make a more systematic and better-organized counter-attack where, it was hoped, these handicaps could be avoided. While this was not an outright rejection of defence-in-depth, it was an acknowledgement that modifications were required if the Fourth Army was to stand any chance of defeating Plumer’s limited advances.35
Accordingly, orders were issued to the front-line units updating them on the need to adapt their defensive organization. For example, 5th Guard Infantry Brigade (4th Guard Division), which went into the line around Zonnebeke, was issued with orders on 29 September warning them of further British attacks:
At the Commanders’ conference today, mention was made on all sides of the fact that the counter-attacks of reserve and storm divisions usually come too late in cases of a hostile attack with a limited objective, and that the losses caused in this way are out of proportion to the success gained. In many cases the counter-attack hardly reached the front line then held; heavy casualties were suffered and the whole thing was a failure, as our enemy contented himself with the objective already gained. His gain in ground was secured by his numberless machine guns, which he immediately built in, and by his protective waves following close behind the attackers, who dug themselves in under the latter’s p
rotection.
Therefore, defending units were ordered to strengthen their front-line garrisons and, if possible, mount quick spoiling raids as the enemy was preparing to attack. Eight companies would hold the front, while the rest of the regiment were moved ‘outside the principal zone of fire’, ready to intervene whenever possible. Whether this would work remained unclear–only time would tell.36
Given the events of 20 and 26 September, everyone knew that a renewed assault was only days away. On the British side of the line, a series of major reliefs took place as reinforcements came up. II ANZAC Corps occupied the line from the Ypres–Roulers railway, on the left of I ANZAC, up to where it met XVIII Corps. At a conference on 28 September, Haig urged his generals to prepare to exploit success after the next attack, which would go in on 4 October.37 They were to take the eastern edge of the Gheluvelt Plateau, including the important village of Broodseinde. ‘I am of opinion that the enemy is tottering,’ he told them–his voice betraying more emotion than usual–‘and that a good vigorous blow might lead to decisive results.’ He anticipated that should they destroy or interrupt the junction at Roulers for up to forty-eight hours, there might be a debacle ‘because the enemy would then have to rely on only one railway line for the supply of his troops between Ghent and the sea’.38
Were the British on the verge of a major breakthrough? Was there a possibility that cavalry could now be employed in masses? Notwithstanding the success of the last two attacks, both Plumer and Gough were not so sure and expressed their reservations to Haig in the days after Polygon Wood. Although happy with the success so far, they were of the opinion (correctly, as it turned out) that the high ground at Passchendaele along to Westroosebeke would have to be secured before any further exploitation could take place, and this would entail perhaps two or three further ‘steps’ of 1,500 yards each. And, of course, after each step it would be necessary to rebuild the roads and tracks, move the artillery forward, and bring up more reinforcements, which would all take precious time.39 Haig–perhaps reading these notes with a furrowed brow–met them at Second Army Headquarters on 2 October and ‘pointed out how favourable the situation was and how necessary it was to have all the necessary means for exploiting any success… should the situation admit’. ‘Both Gough and Plumer acquiesced in my views’, Haig went on to say, ‘and arranged whole-heartedly to give effect to them when the time came.’40