by Nick Lloyd
When the time came. Gough and Plumer could perhaps be forgiven for acquiescing in Haig’s renewed optimism, knowing full well that a breakthrough was not imminent. They had seen this before: a limited success that had been based upon exhaustive preparation and phenomenal firepower causing Haig to find new faith in dramatic breakthrough operations. As they already knew, it was best to nod in agreement and get on with the job in hand. At Second Army Headquarters, General Plumer continued in his usual style; what Tim Harington likened to that of a director of a ‘large corporation’. In the spirit of a board of directors’ meeting, Plumer would sit at the head of a large table, which could be extended out a considerable length, in order to accommodate as many commanders and staff officers as possible. Before their plans were finalized, Plumer always asked whether everyone was in agreement. Harington remembered one meeting, just after Polygon Wood, during which ‘there had been a long series of arguments, covering a good part of the morning between corps commanders, their general staff officers and artillery generals, as to boundaries for attack and overlapping barrages and responsibilities concerning adjoining formations’. According to Harington:
The conference had temporarily broken up into small groups, but after a time it became obvious that they were ready to report and all re-assembled around a long table. General Plumer, from his seat at the head, sitting erect with his back to the main window, could see by the attention and the expressions on the faces of his corps commanders and staff officers that unanimity had been reached on the last of the points in question. He then said, ‘Have you reached an agreement that is satisfactory?’ and after a rather general expression he proceeded deliberately to take an individual poll of his corps commanders.
For Harington, this was why Second Army received such ‘extraordinary co-operation and determined adherence to plans agreed upon, and unswerving loyalty and cheerful support for all of those in responsible places in his Army’.41
As Cassel buzzed with staff officers and reverberated with the sound of telephones, a mass movement of men was underway. 3rd Australian Division, the lead element of Sir Alexander Godley’s II ANZAC Corps, marched into Ypres on the evening of 29 September. They made what was by now a familiar journey through the ghostly streets, passing the ruins of the Cloth Hall, before marching out to the trenches. ‘The night was dull and cloudy and obscured the young moon, the roads were congested with heavy traffic, ammunition and ration limbers, an occasional field gun or howitzer, together with moving troops made frequent stops a necessity’, recalled Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Goddard, Commanding Officer of 35/Battalion. As the long lines of infantry passed the shells of buildings in silence, Goddard could only wonder at the scale of its ‘pre-war beauty’, now smashed by enemy artillery. ‘It made us feel that War with a big W was in progress and that it meant Work with a bigger W before the job of knocking out the Hun would be complete.’ They passed the ramparts of the town, crossed the moat, and then headed off, on the Zonnebeke road, up to the line.42
Ypres had been bad enough–particularly as the column narrowly escaped a bomb thrown from a passing German aircraft–but once they left the (relative) safety of the town, the sense of being exposed to enemy guns became overwhelming. Indeed, as if in some kind of Dante-esque nightmare, the further the Australians descended into the Salient, the worse it got. Goddard went on:
We passed that well known spot Hell Fire Corner, nor did we linger in passing. It was very noticeable how the drivers of the mule teams as they neared this spot whipped up their mounts and cleared it at breakneck speed. The country, or as much as we could see, presented a miserable spectacle. What trees remained were blasted and the debris of overturned wagons and other vehicles as well as the few battered houses were sufficient evidence of what had occurred through the whole length of this road.
Two guides led them, by platoons, towards their positions. ‘Mud, mud, mud, we sank over our boot-tops, then to our knees, and being heavily leaden with packs, etc., our progress was sadly impeded.’ Machine-gun bullets occasionally whistled overhead. The smell of rotting flesh and bodies crept into the nose and made men gag. Their trenches were hardly worthy of the name, being shallow, badly sighted ditches with no wire or shelters of any kind. They would need their wits about them when daylight came.
Their divisional commander, Major-General Sir John Monash, set up his headquarters in the town. ‘I am writing in a dugout, in the eastern ramparts of Ypres, close to the Menin Gate’, he told his wife on the evening of 1 October. ‘For three years it has been dying a lingering death, and now there is nothing left of its fine streets, its great square, its Cathedral, the historical Cloth Hall, its avenues, and boulevards of fine mansions’, only ‘a charred collection of pitiable ruins’. Although Monash’s living quarters were certainly more comfortable than the trenches, they were hardly luxurious:
It is in every respect like the underground workings of mines, narrow tunnels, broadening out here and there into little chambers, the whole lit by electric light, run by my own portable electric plant. It is cold and dank and over run by rats and mice, and altogether smelly and disagreeable, but here I shall have to stay for nearly 3 weeks. Myself, A.D.C.’s Staff, clerks, signallers, cooks, batmen and attached officers are tucked away all over the place, in little cabins, recesses, and dugouts.
Monash’s mess was in a small cabin (he described it as being akin to a tramp steamer), with very little room to move and always noisy from the constant traffic. ‘It is one enormous medley of military activity’, he noted, comparing it to the traffic on Elizabeth Street in Melbourne, ‘for an hour after the last race on Cup Day, multiplied ten fold’.43 He had just three days to prepare his division for their biggest battle since Messines Ridge.
Intelligence soon began to filter in of the changes that the Germans had made to their defensive tactics. Lieutenant Charles Carrington (1/5th Royal Warwicks, 48th Division) led his company up to their assembly positions at dusk on 3 October. He was ‘miserable beyond belief’, likening the feeling to that which must ‘envelop criminals in the condemned cell’ before their execution. ‘There was much routine work to be done,’ he remembered, ‘which I did in an unreal mood as if it were a game, a piece of play-acting. My true self had been filled with the presentiment that this was the end, that I was marked to die or be crushed in the military machine…’ He had been handed the latest intelligence reports just as he was about to leave, which left him cold. ‘Two German companies were now holding the front I was to attack with one’–an indication of how the Germans were thickening up their front line after Polygon Wood. The company eventually reached their assigned sector in the darkness–somewhere past what had once been the Langemarck–Gheluvelt line.44
Carrington was only one of thousands of officers and men moving up to the front that evening; each one having to deal with his own fears and worries. At Zero Hour the following morning (timed for 6 a.m.), Second Army would go, once more, into battle. Four corps would make the assault from the Tower Hamlets Ridge to just north of Gravenstafel (a total frontage of 9,700 yards). I and II ANZAC Corps would make the main assault against the Broodseinde Ridge, while X Corps advanced deeper into the Gheluvelt Plateau and Fifth Army covered the flank in the north. Whereas the Battle of Menin Road had been preceded by several days’ heavy bombardment, there would be no such preparation before Broodseinde. Although an intensive effort was made to silence enemy gun batteries, a massed barrage would open the assault at Zero Hour, hoping to gain the element of surprise.45 What happened the following day would be the climactic moment of the Flanders campaign: a brutal attack that would smash up the German defence and raise the prospect, distant though it had once seemed, that Haig might actually achieve his objectives.
12.
‘An Overwhelming Blow’
He is staggering, and we are all praying for the weather to keep up; so that we can keep on hitting him… everything depends upon the rapidity with which we can bring up the guns.
Sir John Mo
nash1
4–8 October 1917
4 October 1917 dawned with another of those miserable rain-filled mornings, filled with anxiety. The ground was wet and slippery; visibility was low; and a thick drizzle saturated the air. By 5.30 a.m. most of the assaulting brigades were in their assembly positions, the men lying out in no-man’s-land behind their jumping-off tapes, bayonets fixed.2 All seemed to be well, but at twenty minutes to Zero, German batteries began firing–in support of their pre-planned spoiling attack–and shells started falling on the forward positions of the Australian divisions around Zonnebeke. While this could have caused panic and chaos, the men stayed firm: hugging the ground as closely as possible; doing what they could for those who had been hit; and praying that the shelling would pass. In some sectors, battalion commanders ordered their men to move forward, out of their assembly positions, to avoid the worst of it, as they waited for the moment to attack.3
At 6 a.m., when the British artillery opened fire, it appeared to eyewitnesses that ‘a wall of flame’ had descended on the German trenches.4 Behind the explosions, and the plumes of dirt, the attacking infantrymen got up and moved out, no doubt lighting a cigarette as they did so. The barrage was ‘of such weight and density as to belittle anything we had seen on the Somme’, wrote Lieutenant Charles Carrington, who had gone into the line the previous evening convinced he was going to die. The chief difficulty, he noted, ‘was to identify any place whatever on the ground, even after days spent studying large-scale maps, air photographs, and the “Corps Model”’. It was almost impossible to be certain of your location, or where your objective was, amid ‘a lunar landscape of shell-craters, one touching another, filled with water or with sludgy clay that could almost wrench the boots off your feet’. His men struggled to keep direction, veering off to the left and taking a neighbouring battalion’s objective. For Carrington, writing in his retirement, it was with some amazement to find that historians had elevated the battle (known as Broodseinde) ‘into a tactical masterpiece like Messines’. For him, ‘it was just all-in wrestling in the mud’.5
On the frontage of I and II ANZAC Corps, the men moved out, often in sections, walking carefully in single file along the lips of shell craters, while covered by a screen of skirmishers. ‘Through the roar of the guns and bursting shells could be heard the whining of bullets going over from a line of Vickers guns not far behind us’, remembered Private H. G. Hartnett of 2/Battalion (1st Australian Division). ‘In no time the battalions in front of us were forming a line and were moving off to attack. Strange to say very few casualties had been sustained around us, despite the heavy shellfire.’ Soon afterwards they met batches of German prisoners coming in and quickly relieved them of any weapons or souvenirs they might have been carrying. ‘As soon as they were released they ran to the stretchers on which lay our wounded and stood in pairs at the end of each.’6 After encountering only ‘slight’ opposition, his brigade reached their final objective at 9.45 a.m. and busily started digging in.7
The most difficult task of the day fell to II ANZAC Corps, with 3rd Australian Division and the New Zealand Division having to secure the Gravenstafel and Zonnebeke Spurs, the last area of high ground before the Passchendaele Ridge. Here, the infantry went forward as quickly as they could. The New Zealanders had to cross the Hanebeek, a small stream that had been turned into a broad swamp, which slowed them down and left them exposed to German artillery. Fortunately the ground was so soft that many of the shells buried themselves before exploding; showering the men in freezing cold, smoking water, but luckily saving them heavy losses.8 Soon fire started coming from the blockhouses and pillboxes that remained intact; the intermittent sound of machine-guns filled the air as the attackers went through their routines: suppressing fire; hurling off flurries of rifle grenades or trench mortar bombs, while designated teams worked around the obstacles and silenced them, often at the point of the bayonet.
Eight Victoria Crosses were won that day, including those of two Australians, Lance Corporal Walter Peeler and Sergeant Lewis McGee (of 37 and 40/Battalions respectively). Both men showed enormous courage in taking on enemy blockhouses and pillboxes singlehandedly. McGee’s company were just 100 yards from their final objective when they came under heavy fire from a German position known as Hamburg Redoubt. ‘This pillbox contained a number of the enemy, who had their machine-gun in a recess on top of the fort, and were firing straight at B Company, the machine-gun bullets cutting the tops of the shell-holes where our men were taking cover.’ McGee sprinted fifty yards and ‘in the face of certain death’ shot the crew with his revolver.9 His counterpart, Walter Peeler, showed the same single-minded determination. As his battalion went forward, they came up against small teams of German machine-gunners and snipers who could have wreaked havoc on the Australian infantry. Peeler killed about thirty of the enemy as he darted from shell hole to shell hole, firing his Lewis gun from the hip. ‘I never saw the faces of those I killed’, he later admitted. ‘They were just men in an enemy uniform. It was simply them or me.’10
It would be, in the main, an infantry and artillery battle. The RFC could only assist in limited ways, with the high winds and low clouds, which were down to 400 feet in places, meaning that only forty-nine ‘zone calls’ were made (as opposed to 394 on 20 September). Although these resulted in twenty-six targets being destroyed, much more could have been achieved had the weather been better.11 As for the tanks, 4 October was undoubtedly encouraging, albeit as only a handful of machines had been parcelled out across the front, there was a limit to what they could do. Most notably, eleven machines of ‘D’ Battalion, I Tank Brigade, cooperated with XVIII Corps in its advance towards the ruined village of Poelcappelle. The tanks helped the infantry to get forward, using their 6-pounders to smother pillboxes and demolish the few farm buildings still standing, before withdrawing, largely intact. The attack was also noticeable for the close cooperation with the infantry and the high standard of tank driving, which enabled objectives to be seized without heavy loss.12
For the embattled defenders, the situation was desperate. In places German troops surrendered; in others they fought hard and had to be snuffed out one section at a time. Both 6th Bavarian and 10th Ersatz Divisions (deployed around Poelcappelle) were seriously understrength, with reports that the average company contained as few as between fifty and 100 rifles (as opposed to 200 men at full strength). Although they were able to offer strong resistance as the British struggled to cross the Stroombeek, elsewhere they were unable to stem the advance and had to fall back.13 Walter Rappolt, an NCO with 1 Guard Foot Artillery Regiment, spent the morning with his battery in constant action, firing ‘annihilation’ and ‘blocking’ barrages without stopping; having to shout to make himself understood. He remembered seeing a German soldier stagger back from the front line about 6.30 that morning, ‘looking more like an animal than a human being, with a grey face… eyes wide open, barefoot, trousers and jacket torn, heavily bleeding from a wound in his arm’. They took in the straggler, bandaged his wound, and gave him a cup of coffee. After a while the man began to open up and explain what had happened. ‘Gradually he is regaining his senses and gives us the shocking news that most of his comrades were taken prisoner and that there is scarcely anything in front of us. They had repulsed three waves of the British. The fourth broke through…’14
As for those Prussian units that had been assigned to retake the higher ground southwest of Zonnebeke, they found themselves in the worst possible place at the worst possible time. Their attack had been scheduled to go ahead at 6.10 a.m., but as they were about to go forward, they were engulfed in a nightmare of dust, smoke and shell splinters as Second Army’s opening bombardment streaked down from the sky. According to the history of 4th Guard Infantry Division:
At 5.55 a.m., shortly before our infantry was due to march in, a firestorm unlike any previously experienced erupted. The whole earth of Flanders shook and seemed to be on fire… What were the horrors of Verdun and of the Somme in comp
arison to this hugely increased exertion of force? The powerful thunder of battle could be heard in the most remote corners of Belgium. It was as if the enemy wanted to tell the whole world: we are coming, we will force victory! But they did not defeat us! They misjudged us! Even if they bombarded our troops with millions of shells from thousands of batteries… so that mathematically not a single speck of land was left that hadn’t been hit, they failed to destroy one thing: the courage of our front-line troops.15
The brutal truth, of course, was that courage could be vaporized as easily as men’s bodies in the ensuing maelstrom. 212 Reserve Infantry Regiment, which was supposed to lead the attack, was torn to pieces. It sustained over 1,000 casualties that morning, with reports indicating that some of the assaulting companies lost 95 per cent of their effective strength. It was little wonder that German bodies carpeted whole sectors of the battlefield.16