by Nick Lloyd
It was a similar, depressing story four days later. XVIII Corps attacked again on 30 October, pushing two divisions (58th and 63rd) forward and yet again failing to take its objectives. In 63rd (Royal Naval) Division, an intense enemy barrage fell ‘right in the middle of the attacking troops’, with some companies being ‘practically wiped out’ within the first five minutes. Yet again, gallant efforts were made to get forward. Some companies pushed on about 300 yards, before losing the barrage and then, inevitably, becoming exposed to heavy fire.30 Such an appalling waste of life contributed to a growing sense that British units were simply being sacrificed for no purpose. ‘The result of the battle was a repetition of what has been so frequently experienced when an attack is launched over waterlogged ground and deep mud’, complained the war diary of XVIII Corps. ‘The troops found it impossible to keep up with the barrage and, in fact, did not attempt to do so. Their efforts were mainly employed in endeavouring to extract each other out of the mud… This attack again demonstrated the fact that to expect troops to attack across deep and clinging mud is to expect the impossible.’31 Yet doing the impossible was just what the Canadians were doing. Bit by bit, inch by inch, the Canadians were driving forward at the tip of a narrower and narrower sword. The penultimate attack would begin in seven days. Currie was now just one step away from the village of Passchendaele.
While the Canadians struggled on, momentous events were taking place on the Italian Front. David Lloyd George first heard about what would become known as the Battle of Caporetto on the morning of 27 October. He was at his house at Walton Heath in Surrey when he received the news via a telephone call from Maurice Hankey. After conveying initial reports of the disaster, Hankey said that the French were offering immediate help.32 Soon after, a telegram arrived from Robertson advising that ‘We must not get rattled over this business, but of course we must stop the rot if we can.’33 Although the CIGS was in favour of waiting until the Italian Government formally requested troops, Lloyd George wanted something done immediately. He wired back:
The loss of 650 guns is in itself a serious blow to the Alliance and unless the Italian morale is restored this movement may well end in overwhelming disaster. If we mean to exercise a dominating influence in directing the course of the War we must do so in the way the Germans have secured control i.e., by helping to extricate Allies in trouble.34
Later that afternoon the War Office confirmed that two divisions had been despatched to Italy, to join four French ones that had already started moving. With some luck they would be on the Italian Front in two weeks.35 Finally, the Prime Minister was sending sizeable reinforcements to the Italian Front, although not, of course, in the circumstances he would have wanted. Far from reinforcing a victorious strike at the vulnerable flank of Austria–Hungary, British and French troops were now engaged in a desperate rescue effort.
The true scale of the Italian disaster became clear over the coming days. At a meeting of the War Cabinet on 2 November, Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice read out an official enemy communiqué that boasted of 60,000 troops and ‘great quantities of guns’ being captured by Austro-German forces, which had cut off large parts of the Italian Third Army north of the Tagliamento. Potentially far-reaching changes in Allied command structure, which had been mooted all summer, now took on an added urgency; perhaps with the British taking over the northern half of the Western Front, and French GQG overseeing the rest, right down to the Adriatic, including the Italian sector. Accordingly, it had been proposed that Allied representatives would meet at Rapallo on the north Italian coast, to discuss the new arrangements, and salvage what they could from what seemed like a potentially mortal blow to the Italian war effort. That day, after furious behind-the-scenes negotiations, Lloyd George informed his colleagues that the French Government had accepted a preliminary scheme for the creation of a Supreme Inter-Allied Council, with Sir Henry Wilson being appointed as the British representative.36
The support for some form of inter-Allied council was, at least in part, because each belligerent hoped it would be a mechanism for the achievement of their own aims: for the French, to get the British to take over more of the Western Front; while Lloyd George trusted it would scupper the power and independence of the General Staff.37 The following day, the British Prime Minister, dragging a reluctant Robertson with him, crossed the Channel and headed for Rapallo. Over the course of two frantic days, the arrangements for the Supreme Inter-Allied Council were hammered out. In order to ensure ‘better co-ordination of military action on the Western Front’, the new council would be composed of the Prime Minister and a member of the government of each of the Allied powers, and entrusted with preparing recommendations for overall strategy. ‘Sir William Robertson ostentatiously declined to attend the discussions on the Supreme Council’, Lloyd George wrote acidly. ‘His general sulkiness was apparent to all. He left the room with a flaunting stride… just stopping on the way for an instant to instruct Sir Maurice Hankey to make a note of the fact that he was not present during the discussions.’38 The struggle between Robertson’s immovable object and Lloyd George’s unstoppable force would go on.
Meanwhile, as the rattled Allied leaders gradually coalesced on the need for unified command, the Flanders offensive was left to stagger on. Maurice Hankey, who had long ago warned Lloyd George to face up to his responsibility for the Ypres offensive, claimed that the Prime Minister let the battle go on in order to discredit Robertson and Haig and other so-called ‘westerners’. If the battle continued, and so obviously failed to achieve its stated objectives, then Lloyd George–so he reasoned–would be strengthened in the coming battle over Allied command.39 If that was true then it amounts to a gross abandonment of those who found themselves in the Salient, tasked with getting on to that blasted ridge, through the mud, rain, filth, darkness and endless shellfire. For his part, Currie just got on with it, arranging with General Plumer for Second Army to simulate attacks up and down the line on 6 November, while ordering preliminary barrages and surprise bombardments by all available guns and howitzers in the days leading up to the attack.40
After 30 October the weather improved, although a clinging mist continued to hamper the on-going search for German batteries and the ground remained as bad as ever. Inevitably guns were ‘continually smothered in mud from bursting shell’, and special care had to be taken to cover them up when not firing and keep working parts cleaned and oiled. Indeed, it was remarkable how well the field artillery stood up to repeated firing in such trying conditions. The Canadians found that almost all the wooden platforms disintegrated, sooner or later, in the cloying mud, although no effort was spared in trying to hold them together. It was found that a raft of 3-inch planks spiked to sleepers and supported on piles driven deep into the earth worked as well as could be expected, although when no wood was available, batteries had to make do with laying down a bed of sandbags, covered with a sheet of corrugated iron.41 Shelter for the men who serviced the guns was, as might have been expected, rudimentary in the extreme. For Lieutenant H. L. Sheppard of 39th Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, they had to make do with scraping a shallow trench in the ground, building up a wall with sandbags filled with mud, and then stretching a tarpaulin across the top. ‘You ate your meals in there and slept in there and it was only big enough, with three or four of us in there, if one fellow crawled over to get over to his side, the mud dropped off his boots into the other fellow’s tea and it was almost unbelievable.’42
1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions moved up to the front on the night of 5/6 November, with orders to take the Green Line, which included the village of Passchendaele and the small hamlets of Mosselmarkt and Goudberg at its northern edge.43 The conditions were as bad as ever. ‘The whole countryside was a complete morass’, wrote Magnus McIntyre Hood of 24/Battalion (2nd Division). ‘It was impossible to move any artillery in the deep mud, because horses sank in it right up to their necks and had to be abandoned. For our infantry, the approach to the line had to be alon
g duckboards of slats laid on top of the mud. They provided fairly secure footing, but to step off into the mud was fatal. Men fell into the morass and just disappeared.’44 Given how treacherous the ground was becoming it was difficult to see how operations could proceed for much longer. ‘The Belgian Front is the worst I have seen so far’, remembered a stretcher-bearer, Private Andrew Coulter. ‘Shell holes without number merge into one another and are so close together that walking among them is almost impossible. Nearly all are full of water of a green colour or tinged red with blood. Roads, except those kept in repair to bring up supplies, are completely obliterated.’45
Currie undoubtedly found the strain of seeing his corps put through such an ordeal to be deeply troubling, yet he persevered with his usual tenacity. ‘The Australians tried to take it, the British tried to take it and now they had called on the Canadians’ was how one veteran remembered a speech that he gave in the run-up to the attack.46 Every night, after dinner, he would hold a meeting with his staff, who reported on how operations were proceeding. His leadership style was reminiscent of General Plumer’s: professional and deeply consultative. According to Colonel William Rae, who worked at Canadian HQ, after listening to the reports Currie would then ‘express his own views and his intentions for the future and it was open to anyone to put forward views, either in amplification or possibly, on some occasions, in criticism of the Corps Commander’s own views’. After everything had been thrashed out, Currie made his final decision and ‘left no one in any doubt whatever about what he wished to be done’.47
Despite the deteriorating situation, Currie was in no doubt that his men would take the ridge. ‘It has got to be done’, he told William Griesbach’s 1 Brigade, standing on a table, with the battalions formed up in a square. ‘It is going to be your business to make the final assault and capture the ridge. I promise you that you will not be called upon to advance–as you never will be–until everything has been done that can be done to clear the way for you.’48
Currie was as good as his word. In contrast to the artillery barrages that had preceded the attacks on 26 and 30 October, the creeping barrage on 6 November was a fearsome spectacle; a roaring typhoon of shells that blocked out the ridge in drifting smoke and smothered the German batteries around the Salient. For the assault that day, Currie managed to scrape together an 18-pounder for every eight metres of front and a howitzer for every 32 metres.49 Together with batteries of heavy machine-guns, the artillery was organized into a formidable barrage consisting of seven layers–up to 700 yards in depth–that would fall in front of the attacking infantry. Moreover, because of the softness of the ground, it was decided that a significant percentage of shrapnel shells (with percussion fuses that detonated on contact) would be adjusted to explode in the air, hopefully just above the ground, where they would be more effective.50
At Zero Hour (6 a.m.) the barrage came down about 150 yards in front of the leading lines and began churning up the ground 100 yards every eight minutes–the by now standard speed of the creeping barrage at Third Ypres. On the left, 1st Division was to clear the northern part of the ridge. Griesbach had told his men that ‘success lies always in snuggling up close to Brother Boche’ and they did not let him down, clambering out of their trenches and following the creeping barrage as closely as they dared.51 Major A. W. Sparling, commanding officer of 1/Battalion, reported that ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ Companies ‘experienced very little resistance from the enemy until the first objective was reached’, only isolated groups that were ‘quickly disposed of’. There were no enemy wire and no major trench works to speak of, so most of the defenders had to make do with thin scrapes in the ground, just covered over with camouflage, and these were swiftly overrun. In Mosselmarkt the garrison could shelter in a series of cellars, but they seem to have been caught by the creeping barrage and were mostly wiped out.52
In 2nd Division’s sector, the enemy’s response was equally fitful. North of Passchendaele the men of 28/Battalion (Northwest) found the German counter-bombardment to be ‘extremely heavy but erratic’–as if unsure of the battalion’s location–while the soft state of the ground ‘greatly localised’ the effects of the shells, which plunged into the mud and water and frequently bogged down before exploding. ‘On that particular day… it was safe to say that there wouldn’t have been anybody come out of that show if the ground had been hard’, remembered Private W. McCombie-Gilbert of 31/Battalion.53 About 500 yards from their objective, the attackers were met with bursts of heavy machine-gun fire, but pressed on, slipping over the ground to outflank the defenders. The ground was ‘strewn with dead’, including a large number of Germans who had evidently dropped their weapons and fled at the first sight of the Canadians. The ‘greater majority were found lying in heaps’–presumably killed by the bombardment.54
The capture of Passchendaele had been entrusted to 27/Battalion (City of Winnipeg). Private W. E. Turner was one of the soldiers who would make the assault. ‘We were at the foot of the ridge and right in absolutely nothing but mud and water and nothing was dry at all’, he remembered.
We were told to rest the best we could until time for jump off. I was so exhausted that I lay there right in that mud and I went sound asleep until the sergeant major came along and he shook me. He said, ‘Come on, time to go.’ We got just ahead of the front line fellows when the barrage started and it was really a wonderful barrage. Our training for Passchendaele had called for us to get right up close to it and we sure did. I don’t know, we must have had some casualties but it was dark at the time and I don’t know who was hit. You never know in a job like that what’s going on any more than a few yards from you. Anyone who has had front line service will tell you that.55
As soon as the Canadians went forward, the defenders fired off their SOS flares, but the resulting barrage only came down after the attackers had cleared their jumping-off positions. ‘Our men followed the barrage evenly and were well controlled by their leaders’, recorded the battalion war diary. ‘It was found that the enemy had been occupying a line of shell holes less than fifty yards in advance of our jumping off trench. The effectiveness of our barrage was shown by the fact it immediately put out of action the enemy MGs in his outpost lines.’ The battalion pushed on across the flooded ground, advancing ‘in lines of sections in single file’ (rather than waves in extended order), which tended to reduce casualties and allow for greater control. ‘The spirit and fighting qualities shown by the men was magnificent and the supervision and leadership exercised by the officers was of the highest standard’, it was noted. ‘All ranks made the assault with great dash.’56 Under heavy machine-gun fire, they pushed on into the village of Passchendaele, clearing cellars and bayoneting any Germans who refused to surrender.
Against the Canadians was 11th Division, which had moved up to the front several days earlier, and would be all but destroyed in the subsequent fighting. A prisoner said that the attack ‘was so rapid that they did not come into action, being captured in a concrete dugout’. Another said that the Canadian barrage was too heavy.57 German dead were everywhere, particularly around the church, where a cluster of seventy-eight bodies was later recovered.58 Despite brave and determined resistance, the Germans had no choice but to gradually fall back through the village. The men of I Battalion, 51 Infantry Regiment, met the attackers with ‘lively machine-gun and rifle fire’, but after being outflanked, they were forced to retreat. With heavy artillery fire blocking them off from their supporting units, it was almost impossible to mount a properly coordinated counter-attack. The problem was finding out what was going on. All telephone wires had been ‘shot to shreds’ and it was not even possible to be sure the village of Passchendaele remained in German hands. It was decided to organize small patrols, led by officers, to push on through the ‘curtain fire’ and find out for themselves. They soon ran into Canadian troops east of Passchendaele, confirming that it had fallen.59
By 8 a.m. reports were coming into Canadian Corps HQ that its me
n were established in the village. Private Turner, whose company pushed on through the battered, shell-torn streets, saw a bedraggled group of German soldiers retreating in panic, only to get stuck in a swamp at the far side of the ridge. ‘We shouted to them to come back’, he remembered, only for the Germans to ignore them and continue struggling through the mire. ‘Things weren’t too rough at the time and we weren’t feeling too bad about it and we shouted for them to come back and they wouldn’t, so there was nothing we could do, we had to finish them off.’ Turner was in no doubt that they had no choice. ‘The next day them fellows were up against you and you couldn’t have any qualms about things like that under the circumstances.’60
German resistance in the village may have been snuffed out, but sporadic artillery fire continued for several hours, with shells plunging down and snipers’ bullets whistling overhead. Consolidation was a slow, time-consuming and exhausting business, particularly in such an exposed position, and the Canadians suffered casualties for most of the afternoon. ‘The utter hopelessness of our position was devastating’, remembered Magnus McIntyre Hood; ‘we lay there, in shell holes half-filled with water, and just waited for whatever would happen.’ Suddenly there was a ‘great crash, and blackness’ as a shell burst a few feet from where he was crouched. He would wake up hours later in a hospital bed with spinal injuries.61 Others were not so fortunate. Private Peter Robertson (27/Battalion) won a posthumous Victoria Cross for his outstanding bravery that day: rushing a machine-gun nest during the attack and then bringing in two wounded men under fire. Just as he was about to return with his second casualty, he came under ‘a veritable storm of bullets’ and was killed.62 Yet the Canadians held on. Currie had done it.