Passchendaele

by Nick Lloyd

  Had Passchendaele been lost with a month or two of the fighting season remaining it would have produced a significantly greater impact in Army Group headquarters in Courtrai than it actually did. Instead of being the beginning of a series of breakthrough operations, it only marked the final, stuttering phase of an offensive whose flame had gone out long ago. Fourth Army reported the news in typically sober style. ‘After heavy and fluctuating fighting, Passchendaele remained in enemy hands in the evening. Faced with an extremely strong counter-attack by enemy infantry and artillery, our counter-attack was unsuccessful… Otherwise, our line is unchanged by yesterday’s fighting.’63 At Courtrai, Crown Prince Rupprecht acknowledged its loss, but doubted whether it was worth the trouble to recapture. After being told that he could not be supplied with fresh troops, he accepted that the line would have to remain where it was for the time being.64

  The ridge may have fallen, but among German troops in the line, there was understandable pride in how hard they had fought. ‘Today was another day of major combat across a vast front’, wrote Reinhard Lewald. ‘The fighting raged from early in the morning until late in the evening. Again, the English failed to break through our Flanders front. But in our divisional sector, where the heaviest fighting took place, the enemy finally managed to seize the high ground of Passchendaele and the village itself.’ Lewald, whose divisional artillery had just won a special commendation, comforted himself with the thought that the enemy had suffered ‘extremely heavy losses’, and only made gains owing to ‘vastly superior numbers’.65

  For Sir Douglas Haig, the capture of Passchendaele and the securing of the ridge was the cause of a great deal of relief, albeit with a sense that the battle was still unfinished. ‘Today was a very important success’, he wrote in his diary. ‘Passchendaele was taken as also were Mosselmarkt and Goudberg. The whole position had been most methodically fortified. Yet our troops succeeded in capturing all their objectives early in the day with small loss–“under 700 men”!’ Yet whatever pride he felt must have been tempered by the knowledge that his offensive was now at an end and he had run out of time. GHQ had received orders to send General Plumer to head Britain’s deployment to Italy the day after Passchendaele had fallen. ‘Was ever an Army Commander and his Staff sent off to another theatre of war in the middle of a battle?’ Haig asked incredulously.66 He installed Sir Henry Rawlinson in Plumer’s place for the concluding operation on 10 November, when Currie’s forces would strengthen their hold to the north of Passchendaele up to Hill 52, the highest point on the ridge.67 As for Plumer, he seems to have taken the news stoically.

  ‘You and I have got the sack,’ he is said to have told Tim Harington, who would remain at his chief’s side during their sojourn in Italy.68

  Plumer called into Poperinge on the morning of 9 November to say farewell to Currie. The old man evidently found it difficult to remain composed. ‘Was very much and visibly moved’, wrote the Canadian in his diary.69

  It was sometimes said that the Canadians had been given ‘the almost impossible to do, and did it’.70 But the cost, as always, had been paid in blood, in shattered bodies, and in families torn apart. Canadian losses in Flanders had been just as Currie had predicted–just shy of 16,000 battle casualties.71 Whether the capture of the ridge justified the effort became a topic of almost immediate debate, although Currie tried to put a brave face on it in his reports back home. ‘We were brought to this part of the battlefield for a special purpose’, he wrote to Sir William Hearst, the Conservative Premier of Ontario, on 14 November:

  It was absolutely necessary to gain certain ground, and in order to make sure of it the Commander-in-Chief sent for the Canadians… The year 1917 has been a glorious year for the Canadian Corps. We have taken every objective from the enemy we started for and have not had a single reverse. Vimy, Arleux, Fresnoy, Avion, Hill 70 and Passchendaele all signify hard fought battles and notable victories. I know that no other Corps has had the same unbroken series of successes. All this testifies to the discipline, training, leadership and fine fighting qualities of the Canadians. Words cannot express the pride one feels in being associated with such splendid soldiers. The only regret one has, and it is a very sincere one, is that one has lost so many gallant comrades, men whom a young country like Canada, or in fact any country, could ill afford to lose.72

  As Currie had predicted, the losses sustained in taking the ridge would always overshadow the Canadian Corps’s achievement of November 1917. Currie would even have to endure regular post-war criticisms that he had been too eager to sacrifice Canadian troops for dubious battlefield honours. His near-mutiny on being sent to Flanders, as well as his unyielding insistence on time and preparation before he attacked, was then either unknown or too operationally sensitive to be widely publicized. He even won a libel case in 1928, suing a Canadian newspaper for allegations that he had wasted the lives of his men in the final days of the war.73

  The Canadian Corps would reach its peak operational effectiveness in the late summer and autumn of 1918, when it spearheaded the BEF’s Hundred Days campaign and took a starring role in an unbroken series of victories that brought the German Army to the verge of total defeat.74 Yet what the Canadians achieved at Passchendaele arguably surpassed anything they would do in 1918. According to the historian Daniel Dancocks, Passchendaele was ‘at least the equal of any other victory they won on the Western Front’.75 The ground at Third Ypres was, without doubt, the worst they would ever encounter; the enemy much stronger than they would face in 1918. Private Kenneth Foster, who served with 62/Battalion, felt that Passchendaele was ‘without exception, one of the toughest engagements that the Canadian Corps ever went through’, primarily because of the conditions in which it was fought. ‘The battlefield was just one sea of mud and water’, he remembered, ‘which made it exceptionally difficult for all ranks, especially the Artillery Corps.’ Moreover, guns and horses, as well as men, would simply disappear beneath the surface and never be seen again, ‘for there were no trenches, just shell holes full of water’. For him, Passchendaele came ‘top of the class’.76

  Epilogue

  History must give its verdict.

  Sir Tim Harington1

  On 11 November 1917, a day after the final attack at Passchendaele had petered out, a top-secret conference was held at the German Supreme Command (which had now moved to Mons in Belgium). The meeting had been called to discuss operations for the following year. The Bolshevik seizure of power in St Petersburg, or Petrograd, on 7 November meant that Russia had now, for all practicable purposes, exited the war, leaving German territorial ambitions in the east unopposed. The question remained about what could be done in the west; whether Germany should settle for a compromise peace–and the great shock this would be to a people who had been nourished on stories of victory for years–or strike a decisive blow. As might have been expected, the German military opted to stay true to its traditions. Hermann von Kuhl, who was present at the meeting, noted afterwards that ‘There was no other choice.’2 Germany would stake everything on a massive attack in the west, aiming to destroy the Allies before the Americans could intervene in strength. The U-boats had failed. Now Germany, once again, would place her fate in the hands of her Army.

  The Spring Offensive, which finally opened on 21 March 1918, through a thick morning fog, was one of the worst days in the history of the British Army. The spearhead of Ludendorff’s vast attack, comprising upwards of seventy divisions, spread across three armies and supported by over 6,000 guns, battered against the British line in a day of unremitting terror. Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army, which had been given the unenviable task of holding the southern sector of the front around Péronne, found itself being overrun. Of the twenty-one divisions that held the front line that day, nineteen had seen action at Third Ypres and had lost, in the words of the official historian, ‘a large proportion of their best soldiers whose places had been filled, if filled at all, by raw drafts and transfers’.3 Although Gough had been warn
ing for months about poor defences and too few reserves, the collapse of his position demanded a scapegoat, and on 3 April Haig told the Fifth Army commander that he was being dismissed and must return to England immediately.4

  It did not take long for the magnitude of the disaster, and the sheer scale of the German assault, to cause an urgent rethink about whether a renewed British offensive from Ypres would be possible. Sir Herbert Plumer, now back at Second Army after a winter in Italy, surveyed the British positions on the scarred Passchendaele Ridge, indefensible at the best of times, and wondered what they should do. When Tim Harington suggested that they withdraw, Plumer walked out of the room.

  ‘I won’t have it’ was all he could say.

  Shortly afterwards, the general returned, laying his hand on Harington’s shoulder.

  ‘You are right,’ he said, with a heavy heart, ‘issue the orders.’

  Plumer hated to do it. ‘It was a scene which I shall never forget’, recalled Harington. ‘There was the man, who by sheer determination and pluck had held the Ypres Salient for years against all comers and who had gained Messines and Passchendaele, being forced to withdraw.’5

  That night British troops slipped silently off the Passchendaele Ridge. The ground that had been won at such cost was now left to the Germans–if they wanted it–while Second Army returned to its familiar haunts closer to the battered city of Ypres, where they were once again overlooked by those ghostly ridges. The loss of Passchendaele without a shot being fired seems, in many respects, to sum up the futility and utter pointlessness of the whole campaign at Ypres in the summer of 1917. In the end credits for Paul Gross’s 2008 feature film, Passchendaele, a line of text notes how ‘On October 26, 1917 the Canadian Corps entered the Battle of Passchendaele. Within a week they captured the ruined village at a cost of 5,000 lives… An enemy offensive the following spring recaptured the hard won ground in less than a week…’6 If the ridge that had cost so much blood to conquer could be abandoned so quickly, then what was the point of it? Surely it would have been better not to have taken it in the first place?

  Such a damning judgement on Third Ypres remains commonplace: the utterly futile ending to a thoroughly depressing and miserable campaign. But this question should be considered carefully–it would certainly not have been the view of those German commanders who had seen for themselves what the ridge meant. Although the battle was not particularly controversial in Germany, it was generally recognized as one of the worst ordeals of the war. In his order of the day, issued on 5 December 1917, Crown Prince Rupprecht hailed all those who had taken part in ‘the most violent of all battles fought to date’. Eighty-six divisions had been rotated through Flanders, including twenty-two that had completed two tours, while most artillery units had been engaged at one time or another. For Rupprecht the outcome was an unqualified victory for the Fatherland. ‘Despite the employment of immense quantities of men and materiel, the enemy achieved absolutely nothing.’ The Army’s courageous defence in Flanders allowed German units to conduct devastating blows against the Russians and Italians and stand on the brink of complete triumph.7 Lossberg agreed, calling it ‘the most formidable defensive battle of the war’, and taking pride in the heroism of the German Army that ‘fought doggedly’ in a swampy crater field under the eyes of enemy aircraft for months on end.8

  The story of a successful defensive battle that had all gone to plan (and which German memoirists were keen to propagate) should not deflect from how enormously difficult Third Ypres was for the German Army. Historians have tended to concentrate on the mistakes and weaknesses of the British High Command, and have sometimes downplayed the awful experience of the ‘Flanders bloodbath’ for the defenders.9 Yet it should not be underestimated how sorely pressed the German Army became, particularly during September and October 1917. The sapping effects of operating in the open in such wet weather were bad enough, but the German soldier had to cope with the perils of seemingly endless drumfire, poison gas and low-flying aircraft, while surviving on what little food and water could be brought up to the front. Even the best units could be reduced to a shambling, lice-ridden bunch of stragglers after a few days on the battlefield. When 465 Infantry Regiment (238th Division) came out of the line on 30 October, no company was more than thirty strong. The sight of these ‘emaciated, battered and filthy’ men was almost too much for a Major Wilcke, who watched the thin columns trudge by. Shaking, with tears in his eyes, Wilcke took his helmet off with both hands and paid tribute to what he called the ‘Helden von Passchendaele’–the heroes of Passchendaele.10

  There were few battles as mentally and physically challenging to the German Army as Flanders was in 1917. German tactics were highly effective in the early stages of the battle, when Gough’s attempt to drive deep into the German line perfectly suited the use of the Eingreif divisions, but Plumer’s adoption of limited ‘bite-and-hold’ attacks in September and October 1917 was much more difficult to resist. The significant challenges that faced German commanders in this phase of the fighting has, for too long, been either unknown or largely ignored by English-language writers, thus distorting our understanding of the battle. German-language sources (whether unit reports, personal diaries or published accounts) make it abundantly clear how difficult it was either to resist Plumer’s attacks or to make any kind of meaningful dent in the British positions once they had been consolidated. Passchendaele thus revealed how the tactical advantage, which had been so clearly with the defenders since 1914, was now moving over to the attackers.

  In contrast to Germany, the controversy over what Lloyd George called ‘the campaign of the mud’ has never abated in Britain and her former Dominions. Haig died in January 1928. He was accorded a memorial procession through London and a service at Westminster Abbey–witnessed by thousands of mourners–before being laid to rest in Dryburgh Abbey, near his ancestral home of Bemersyde.11 He was, it seemed, unrepentant to the last, convinced that he had done his best and there had been no other way. When Maurice Hankey gave a small dinner party shortly after the war ended, Haig was invited. During the evening, Hankey repeatedly asked about the fighting in Flanders and whether the decision to attack, and keep on attacking, had been the right one, but Haig never wavered in his responses. Hankey came away from the evening with the certainty that ‘Haig’s mind was so completely free from anything in the nature of self-reproach’.12 For Haig, as he wrote in his despatch on the fighting of 1917, notwithstanding the disappointments of the campaign, ‘the ultimate destruction of the enemy’s field forces has been brought appreciably nearer’.13 Such a conclusion was strengthened by the publication of Hermann von Kuhl’s account in 1929, which suggested that had the British not attacked at Ypres, ‘the Germans would have seized the initiative and attacked the Allies at their weakest place’. Thus the British ‘bridged the crisis in France’, drawing in German reserves and allowing time for the French Army to recover from their collapse of morale in the spring.14

  Haig’s justification of Passchendaele as being an ultimately successful attritional battle was, in truth, entirely predictable; after all, he had said the same thing about the Somme a year earlier. The failure to achieve a breakthrough in 1916–one that Haig had explicitly planned for–was written off as an appropriate and prudent exercise in pre-planning, rather than as a fundamental error in operational thinking. John Terraine, who echoed Haig’s comments on Third Ypres as being a key moment in the ‘wearing-out struggle’, made the same excuse, claiming that the most convincing argument in favour of the offensive was the German reaction to it.15 The only problem was that such a judgement could only be made in hindsight. Haig did not fight in Flanders to grind down the German Army or to secure important ridges–no matter what he subsequently claimed–but to achieve a breakthrough and liberate the Belgian coast. As for Kuhl’s idea that Third Ypres prevented a German attack, this seems unlikely. It is clear that German intelligence knew something was badly wrong in the French Army, but the larger strategic context ruled out a
ny offensive operations against Pétain’s forces; they had, after all, just executed a major withdrawal on the Western Front.16

  Hubert Gough, whose career had been cut short in April 1918, always understood clearly how Haig wanted to fight at Ypres. ‘Haig was always dreaming of cavalry pushing through’, he wrote to Sir James Edmonds after the war. ‘In any battle from Neuve Chapelle in 1915 onwards to the Battle of the Somme he never abandoned this dream.’17 This grand breakthrough, with cavalry in the vanguard, was not just the stuff of fantasy; after all, Haig himself had raised the tantalizing prospect of using ‘cavalry in masses’ at the War Cabinet in June. He fought his battle according to his understanding of war that had been drilled into him at the Staff College, which prioritized bold manoeuvres, decisive offensives and culminating attacks. As the historians Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson have noted, ‘Haig’s overarching determination to exploit the supposed crack in German morale and accomplish a great sweep to the coast distorted the course of action at every stage.’18 It is true that Haig consented to limited operations under Plumer in September and October, but he never wavered from his belief that, sooner or later, the breakthrough would come. Had Haig wanted the battle to be conducted strictly on attritional or ‘step-by-step’ methods–as the War Cabinet had instructed–he could easily have done so.