by Nick Lloyd
Sir Arthur Currie made no secret of his opposition to fighting in Flanders, but his professionalism and sense of duty meant that, once the orders were issued, he lost no time in getting his corps into the best possible position to launch its assault. Artillery would be crucial, yet the problem of how to get enough guns into position without them being destroyed by German batteries or bogged down in the mud was maddening. When Brigadier-General E. W. B. Morrison, Currie’s head of artillery, inspected the front, he was horrified by what he encountered. There were supposed to be 250 heavy guns (used by the Australians and which the Canadians would take over), but he could only find 227, of which eighty-nine were already out of action. Regarding the field artillery, the situation was even worse. 306 18-pounders were supposed to be deployed within range, yet many of these were sunk up to their axles in mud and at least half were out of action.2 Currie even caused a scene when he was late one day for a meeting with Haig, who was attending a conference at Poperinge. When Currie came in, mud still clinging to his uniform, a sour look on his face, he stared at Haig and demanded to know where his guns were.3
Currie’s uncompromising attitude, combined with his absolute insistence that everything possible was done to ensure success, was commendable and, indeed, absolutely vital. But he could not work miracles. By the time the Canadian Corps launched its attack, it had been unable to get all its guns into position and had suffered heavily from the regular enemy bombing and strafing missions, which went on, with annoying regularity, every night. Mist and rain prevented observation of the battlefield and because the sound-ranging and flash-spotting sections–both of which were crucial for locating enemy batteries–had been unable to keep up with the advance, German guns were not subjected to the kind of intensive counter-battery fire that the Canadians had become used to. As a Canadian artillery report later noted, enemy guns kept up ‘harassing fire on routes of approach, long distance fire on railheads and depots, concentrations on billets, battery areas and forming-up localities’, which caused heavy casualties and continually delayed the work of repair and construction. Indeed, some were left wondering whether the German High Command truly realized how handicapped the attackers were, with British guns cramped in a narrow salient under little or no cover and dependent upon a few well-worn approach routes. Had the Germans made a really sustained effort to bombard the salient, they could have increased British and Canadian losses ‘many fold’ and may even have made future operations all but impossible.4
The first step involved 3rd and 4th Canadian Divisions making an advance of between 600 and 1,200 yards to the Red Line (the first of Currie’s three objectives). On the left 3rd Division would take the high ground at Bellevue, while 4th Division, on the other side of the swollen Ravebeek, would aim for a ‘tangle of shattered tree trunks’ on the Ypres–Roulers railway known as Decline Copse.5 The assaulting battalions moved up several days before–long, thin columns of troops making their way along the corduroy roads and duckboards, slick with rain; a via dolorosa through the trenches. In the sodden wilderness, with major landmarks and most trees having been erased from the surface of the earth, officers and men struggled to locate their positions, although they soon spotted the squat pillboxes, covered with earth or bricks, that blocked their way up the ridge. On 23 October, Lieutenant-Colonel G. F. McFarland, second-in-command of 4/Canadian Mounted Rifles, marched with his battalion to a forward position called Cluster House, where they would relieve Australian troops. ‘The Anzacs were more than delighted to hand it over to us,’ he wrote, ‘because they had had a very dirty time. Cluster House was a series of pill-boxes on a low ridge, and a more desolate, god-forsaken place I never expect to see. The route to it was bath-matted all the way, which alone made it passable. The ground was simply a morass, pitted with shell-holes full of water, and getting off the bath-mat meant sinking to one’s waist in the ooze.’6
One of McFarland’s junior officers was Lieutenant Tom Rutherford of Owen Sound, Ontario. ‘The trench we occupied was hardly worthy of the name’, he remembered; ‘just a broken down ditch with up to six inches of water in it.’ On the morning before the attack, he slithered up and down his sector, binoculars in hand, trying to familiarize himself with the ground over which they would attack:
The right flank of our company was in a little wood relatively much smaller than the Wolf Copse as it is called on the sketch-map in the 4th CMR History. It was elm trees about a foot through and, at that time of year, bare of leaves… Beyond Wolf Farm and the edge of the wood was what appeared to be an enemy pillbox covered on top and in front with broken bricks, apparently from Wolf Farm as the loose bricks had been gathered up around that area. Beyond this and about 300 yards to the right… and on the end of a small spur that dominated the whole area, was another very obvious pillbox.
Rutherford returned to his company headquarters (just ‘a projection cut in the side of the trench and covered with some old boards’) and arranged frontages and attack plans with the other subalterns, flinching as the occasional shell or mortar round exploded around their positions. They settled down that night with just ‘a couple of hunks of bread’ for their provisions and no water.7 It was an inauspicious start to the renewed attack: this was not like Vimy Ridge.
The lack of water in the forward positions–when it lay everywhere around them in muddy pools–only added to the discomfort of the troops and, perhaps, their urgency to get going on the morning of 26 October. At Zero Hour (5.40 a.m.), in the chill dawn, the creeping barrage lifted and the leading lines, stiff with cold, caked with mud and filth, crept forward to their objectives through the drizzle and mist. The rows of barbed wire that had stopped the attacks on 9 and 12 October had now been blown away, but the attack only made slow, grudging progress. 8 Brigade (3rd Division), which pushed on past Wolf Copse, north of Bellevue, recorded that its front-line battalions were ‘heavily and continuously shelled’ during the night prior to the attack. When they went over the top–their helmets painted a dirty brown colour to prevent reflection–the enemy resisted as long as they could, with machine-gun and rifle fire being ‘severe’.8
It was a hard, brutal day’s fighting. 4/Canadian Mounted Rifles progressed just 500 yards in two hours, the men gradually mastering the pillboxes that littered their front.9 ‘At 5.45 the leading companies commenced to move forward, and the first line of pill-boxes was reached on time with the barrage’, remembered Lieutenant-Colonel McFarland, who watched the attack go ahead. ‘Here very serious casualties were inflicted upon our people, particularly among the officers who were picked off by snipers from the pill-boxes. Two garrisons of these strongpoints fought bravely, keeping their rifles and machine-guns in action until they were bayonetted or bombed.’ Once they had re-formed, the battalion tried to push on to a second line of pillboxes, but ‘such a devastating fire was poured upon them that they were completely held up’.10 With units on either flank having been unable to keep pace, the battalion had little choice but to consolidate its gains and hope for the best. As for Tom Rutherford, he fell into a pool of water, three feet deep, and lost most of his equipment, before leading an assault on a pillbox that was blocking a neighbouring battalion. He later explained his success as down to being ‘just crazy’, ‘fighting like a guerrilla’, and being covered in mud, which made him difficult to spot.11
Similar acts of bravery helped the Canadians on to most of their objectives that day. The Canadian Corps would win nine Victoria Crosses between 26 October and 6 November, with three on the first day alone.12 In 43/Battalion (the Cameron Highlanders of Canada), Lieutenant Robert Shankland led his platoon up the Bellevue Spur into a storm of machine-gun and sniper fire. ‘When dawn broke sufficiently our men could be clearly seen moving slowly over the skyline and around the two formidable looking Pill Boxes on the crest of the ridge’, recorded the battalion war diary. Yet progress rapidly slowed, and as the morning wore on, more and more stragglers began to turn up at battalion headquarters, having lost their officers and become shaken b
y the intensity of the shelling. 58/Battalion, on the right, had been held up by a strongpoint, which left Shankland and his men in an exposed and increasingly dangerous position. All the officers of ‘C’ and ‘B’ Companies had been hit and it was unclear whether the battalion would be able to hang on. At ten o’clock Shankland returned to battalion headquarters and reported that he was holding the ridge with about forty men, but they were ‘suffering considerable annoyance from snipers’ and if their ammunition ran out they would be unable to maintain their position. The Canadian advance seemed to be on the point of failure.13
Rallying those men who had retreated back to headquarters, Shankland returned to the Bellevue Spur just in time. They were able to form a defensive flank on the high ground, while a supporting company, ‘A’ Company of 52/Battalion, led by Captain Christopher O’Kelly, took the attack forward. Despite having to make their way through a nest of fortified strongpoints, with flurries of shelling churning up the muddy ground, O’Kelly’s men cleared obstacle after obstacle. By concentrating their fire, from both rifle grenades and Lewis guns, on to each pillbox in turn, they were able to temporarily blind the occupants. While this was going on, flanking parties rushed up to each fortification and threw in a handful of grenades, killing those inside and forcing the survivors to surrender. In this way, O’Kelly managed to take out six pillboxes, and capture 100 German prisoners and ten machine-guns. Without such unfailing dedication to duty, it is likely that the opening attack would have failed. Both Shankland and O’Kelly were awarded the Victoria Cross for their part in taking the Bellevue Spur.14
The conditions were certainly a major handicap, but the German Army deserves credit for what would become a textbook defensive operation: gradually yielding ground whenever necessary; counter-attacking whenever possible; and, most critically, regulating the pace of the battle. To the south of Passchendaele stood 3rd Guard Infantry Division, which had gone into the line on the night of 25 October. When the Canadian barrage crashed down in ‘a fiery sulphurous cloud’, the forward troops put into practice their new defensive doctrine, and began evacuating the Vorfeld, while sending off urgent requests for artillery support. ‘Coloured flames are going up everywhere’, recorded the history of 9/Grenadier Regiment:
The German artillery starts its curtain fire immediately afterwards. Blow by blow, shot by shot. Communication is out of the question. The infantrymen are crouching in their craters, helplessly exposed to the fire. Added to this at all times, the English planes, against which the troops are practically powerless. They are still circling at low altitude above the shell holes, training their machine-guns at any sign of life. In defiance of fire and frequent burials by sliding earth, the infantry lie in their craters without the slightest movement that would give their line away. It is probably mainly thanks to this that the regiment isn’t wiped out completely. Yet the enemy is still not attacking. Only heavy machine-gun fire from the right neighbouring section tells of the battle raging over there. Soon the news arrives that the enemy is advancing on Passchendaele north of the railway.15
At that moment, Paul von Kneussl’s 11th Bavarian Division, which defended Passchendaele, was under heavy attack. It had been sent to Flanders on 20 October and entered the line with orders stating that the ‘focus of the whole defence’ lay in swift and ‘ruthless counterattacks’. After hearing lectures on the latest enemy tactics and the state of the defence, each company was equipped with between two and three MG 08/15s, the lighter variant of the legendary German version of the Maxim machine-gun. Twelve light mortars and fourteen grenade launchers were also distributed per regiment–an impressive array of firepower that was meant to compensate for the declining number of combat soldiers in each infantry battalion (now around 650 men).16 The performance of the Bavarians on 26 October was remarkable. Not only were they heavily outnumbered, but they also inflicted about twice the number of casualties upon their more numerous attackers than they themselves received.17 Afterwards, a soldier called Grießenbeck described what happened: ‘Dearest Father! On the 26th we had a very difficult day. After 3 days of drumfire, the English attacked our positions 4–6 times, overran them in one small section and had to be repulsed in desperate counter-attacks. We held our line without exception. The losses of the enemy are very large, but ours unfortunately no smaller.’18
The German Army may have gradually lost much of the high ground it had been occupying since the offensive began, but this did not necessarily prevent its artillery from being effective. The final stages of the offensive saw German batteries–clustered around Becelaere and southeast of Gheluvelt–employing increasing amounts of enfilade fire. Indeed, the further the British and Canadians pushed into the Salient, the more vulnerable they became to German guns that could flank their whole line of advance.19 Second Army’s artillery batteries shelled known points of concentration, making it difficult for German gunners, but never being able to completely silence the harassing fire, which continued day after day. ‘The enemy assault columns were greeted by us with hellish artillery fire, and despite its vast use of ammunition, the enemy did not manage to silence our batteries’, wrote Reinhard Lewald, whose battery was deployed a few hundred metres east of Passchendaele. That morning they had come under heavy gas bombardment, but fortunately the strong winds rendered it largely ineffective. ‘As hard as it was for our batteries in the firing position in these days, we were not to find any peace in our place of accommodation, De Ruiter, where the relieved teams and horses were staying with limbers. For several days and nights, the place came under heavy fire, and it needed to be vacated.’20
As quickly as German batteries relocated, British aircraft were out trying to spot their new locations. Almost all the intelligence that came into Canadian Corps HQ regarding enemy gun positions and the effectiveness of counter-battery shoots came from aerial observation, although this was not made easy because of frequent engine failures, mist, and the appearance of predatory German Jastas on the lookout for the slower, cumbersome observation aircraft.21 Indeed, the ferocity of the aerial war in the final phases of the battle was as great as ever. On 27 October, following an improvement in the weather, aircraft of the RFC were out in force over the Salient. Over 200 targets were engaged in artillery ‘zone calls’ and nine German fighters were destroyed.22 Unfortunately, that day the RFC was to lose one of its most highly regarded young pilots, Second Lieutenant Arthur Rhys Davids, the diminutive twenty-year-old who had shot down Werner Voss a month earlier. He was out on patrol when his formation spotted a group of six enemy aircraft near Roulers. Never one to shirk a fight, Rhys Davids immediately dived down upon an Albatros D.V, but was never seen again.23
The second phase of Currie’s attack opened on 30 October. The objective was to continue the push along the two main roads to Passchendaele (which occupied slightly firmer ground) from Gravenstafel and Zonnebeke and then on to the Blue Line. They would take on the left, the Goudberg Spur; the houses at Meetcheele, in the centre; and the German strongpoint at Crest Farm, on the right.24 The attack would be, in the main, a repeat of 26 October: an appalling struggle in a wilderness of mud, where survival was dependent upon good training and excellent leadership, but, above all, upon the trusty Lewis gun and rifle grenade. 4th Division took Crest Farm–a dark, brooding strongpoint bristling with machine-guns–with a combination of fire and movement tactics, while 3rd Division could only make grudging progress towards Meetcheele. Enemy snipers picked off officers and men alike from hidden positions, until they too were taken out by riflemen or bayoneted where they lay. Artillery support was hardly worthy of the name. ‘The Field Guns were given an almost impossible task’, noted the war diary of 49/Battalion (which led the assault on Furst Farm). ‘As a result the barrage was short, irregular, and ineffective in preventing enemy retaliation with rifle and machine-gun fire.’ 49/Battalion went into action with a total strength of twenty-one officers and 567 other ranks–by the end of the day just five officers and 140 other ranks remained unscathed.25
The courage of the men of 5/Canadian Mounted Rifles, moving forward into certain death, and then holding on against what must have seemed like futile odds, would be one of the most incredible stories from the entire battle. It would help to turn the tide of what had been a dispiriting day and ensure that the Canadian Corps was now within touching distance of Passchendaele. ‘We advanced again this morning, and present reports indicate all objectives in our hands’, wrote Currie on 30 October. ‘Today’s fighting is very important, and I look for a very severe struggle. We have already broken up several very determined counter-attacks. As usual the flanks are giving us a little trouble.’28 Currie’s reference to ‘the flanks’ betrayed his frustration that the British were not able to keep up and that, once again, the Canadians seemed to be the only ones doing any fighting. On 26 October, Gough’s Fifth Army had attacked on Currie’s left–extending the attack out towards Houthulst Forest–while X Corps pushed further along the Gheluvelt Spur. Yet they met with little success. Together, XIV and XVIII Corps sustained over 5,000 casualties, with their battalions barely advancing further than their start lines. Although the men of 5th Division (in X Corps) were able to capture Polderhoek Château (about a mile southeast of Polygon Wood), they were forced to abandon their gains later that day at the cost of another 3,000 casualties.29