Passchendaele
Page 27
The two brothers were among the second wave of attacks. Theo and George moved forward. At around 9 am, they closed on Polygon Wood under heavy German shellfire. Theo took a direct hit, which wounded him in the head, stomach and legs; he died moments later. ‘[Theo] Seabrook was killed by the same shell that wounded me, in fact I fell across him when I was hit,’ Private E. Cooper later told the Red Cross.54
George, standing nearby, saw his brother’s lifeless body but had to keep moving, to survive German shellfire. A moment later, he too lay dead, most likely from a direct hit. The next day, their younger brother Keith succumbed to his wounds. Within a day, the three brothers were dead; their fellow soldiers later described them as popular and ‘good sorts’. Sets of brothers were commonly killed, but rarely all at once, in the same action.
By about 9.45 am, the first day’s goals were almost in Anzac and British hands. They dug in to defend the new front line, reversing the captured German trenches and occupying the pillboxes, where they happily lit up German cigars. None yet thought of victory: every man knew that the real front line lay ahead, in the ruins of Zonnebeke and the plains beyond, where Eingreif formations bristled for action in the intensifying light.
This time, however, the German counter-strike units had to contend with something they had not expected. The creeping barrage kept coming at them, advancing 2000 yards deeper than anticipated, well into their rear positions. They had no answer to this. Their earlier successes had depended on a near-lightning response. Yet the density and depth of the drumfire killed their hopes of a swift counter-blow. The Allies had bought valuable time to fortify their new lines and bring forward the supplies and guns so crucial for the next bite.
The barrage resumed at 9.53 am. Machine guns were brought up to support the last 400 yards, the limit of the day’s attack. The Anzac divisions reached their final goals within half an hour, completing the capture of the Anzac House spur, and digging in. Only the rows of German gunners at Tower Hamlets, atop the spur beyond Bassevillebeek, had withstood the barrage, and continued to pour fire down onto the British attackers.
The northern and southern flanks told their own stories, too numerous to recount. In sum, all along the line the Allies made decisive gains; the German presence on the vital plateau crumbled away. In one amazing example, a company of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers managed to bypass the German garrison huddled in Hanebeek Wood, turn and storm the pillboxes and trenches from the enemy side.55
By noon, English, Scottish, Anzac and South African brigades had taken their allotted objectives, gained 1500–2000 yards and captured more than 3000 German prisoners. In British and Dominion hands now were: Hanebeek, Berry Farm, Potsdam House (whose surviving pillboxes put up furious resistance), key positions in the Zonnebeke valley, and footholds on the Gravenstafel and Poelcappelle spurs. And throughout it all, the heavy guns kept firing away.
Every man, from Plumer down to the youngest private, prepared for the German counter-attack. The forward troops strengthened their lines using enemy wire and laid new telephone lines. In the meantime, runners, flags, messenger dogs and carrier pigeons conveyed their positions back to the rear command centres, so the guns could reorder the targets (the pigeons had proved so effective that sixteen were allocated to each infantry brigade and twelve to the forward observers).56
By 1 pm, the dreaded Eingreif still had not appeared. The British guns kept firing. Many gunners had been laying down constant fire for eight hours, and would continue into the night. At around 2 pm, the barrage paused, the clouds cleared and British aircraft reported thousands of enemy reinforcements moving along the Flandern III line between Menin and Westroosebeke.
By the time they reached the front, the afternoon sun was shining in their eyes, low over Ypres, silhouetting the British positions and casting long shadows up the Salient. The early evening light made any movement on the plain easily detectable to the artillery observers, who relayed the enemy’s position to the guns. The result fell on the German positions with terrible accuracy.
One group of Australians ‘sat down and laughed’ at the effects of their artillery on the counter-attack, an officer recalled. As the Eingreif’s ranks disappeared in distant puffs of smoke, the Australians even felt disappointed: they were looking forward to the battle. Some were reported to have been praying for the Germans to get through. None would. Between noon and 7 pm, the Germans launched eleven counter-attacks, of which ten failed completely and only one managed to make a dent in the Allied lines.57
‘The day drew to a close,’ remembered a German reserve leutnant called Zimmer. ‘As the sun sank … it created a scene of weird beauty and the entire horizon appeared to glow. To our front a wrecked concrete bunker blazed as the flares that had been stored inside shot into the air in a series of red and green streaks.’58
Night fell. The Eingreif withdrew, with heavy casualties. The quiet seemed surreal after hours of deafening noise. Over the next five days, the British and Dominion troops rooted themselves on the Gheluvelt Plateau, for so long a source of despair, now an exhilarating possession.
Haig was delighted. His generals were euphoric. For once, the German counter-attack had failed. His forces had taken a bite out of the toughest section of the German front, and held it. All along the line, they had broken von Lossberg’s system. The barrage had won the day. ‘Excellent – the best ever put up,’ said an Australian officer later.59 The density of the explosive curtain was the main cause of defeat, Prince Rupprecht himself acknowledged, because it wiped out the German communication lines and created havoc. Bean concluded: ‘the advancing barrage won the ground; the infantry merely occupied it …’60
Bean’s ‘merely’ seems unfair given the infantry’s huge sacrifice: total British and Dominion casualties that day were about 21,000 – for the capture of 5.5 square miles, or 3800 casualties per square mile, according to Prior and Wilson’s calculations. In fact, Plumer had lost more men per square yard gained than the much-maligned Gough, whose forces had suffered 27,000 losses for the capture of eighteen square miles, or 1500 men per square mile.61 Some units were decimated. The South African brigade had lost almost half its strength: 1255 of its 2576 men were killed, wounded or missing. Their sacrifice nonetheless achieved a ‘brilliant advance’, wrote Jan Smuts.62 The survivors were relieved from combat duties.
Success led to hubris. They had gained one and a half miles, the first of Plumer’s terrible steps towards Passchendaele. Bean rapturously concluded that the Allies were now using their supremacy in men and weapons ‘in a way which, granted fine weather, made success certain’.63
Spirits rose everywhere except at home, where the Cabinet and the public could not imagine the cost in blood and bombs needed to capture a small slice of front. The politicians fastened on the casualty lists and failed to appreciate this milestone in the coordination of infantry and artillery. ‘We have done a good offensive, which is much appreciated,’ Lord Bertie, the British ambassador in Paris, wrote in his diary. ‘But will it lead to anything really important.’64 In London, Robertson reported Haig’s ‘excellent progress’ to an under-whelmed War Cabinet: ‘We had succeeded in gaining a ridge which included Inverness Copse, a point of great importance,’ for which the casualties were ‘about 5,000’.65
The men rested and smoked, and prepared for the next bite. Rations, supplies and small-arms ammunition arrived on mule-back. The heavy guns were hauled up over the steaming earth. Stretcher parties under Red Cross insignias fanned out across the brown land. ‘Suddenly I saw flags,’ recalled Kotthoff, ‘Red Cross flags! Slowly they came, stretcher after stretcher … What an amazing, overwhelming sight!’66
The Germans also regrouped in new positions, and dug in. Their headquarters conducted a post-mortem, and reached the wrong conclusion. ‘All that was left to the enemy,’ according to an Order of the Day at Group Ypres headquarters on 23 September, ‘were small territorial gains in the form of a shell-shattered crater field. His intention of breaking throu
gh our line has failed utterly with heavy casualties.’67
Plumer, of course, had not intended to break through; only to bite off a valuable chunk. The next bite would start on 26 September, precisely in line with his schedule. It planned to capture all of Polygon Wood. A victory here would haul the British front to within striking distance of Broodseinde and Gravenstafel, just shy of Passchendaele Ridge. Only two to two-and-a-half miles of gently rising plain separates Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, a pleasant few minutes’ bicycle ride in peacetime. Over this little slice of territory, the world’s mightiest armies now prepared to unleash all their available firepower.
Polygon Wood had once been a densely forested area; it was now a scrawny, unnatural landscape of gnarled stumps and ‘thin stubble of sapling stalks barely breast high’,68 pocked with muddy ditches and corners of damp, mouldering vegetation in which German machine guns and pillboxes lay wedged and refused to yield.
The task of taking it fell to I Anzac, many of whom relished the chance. Others were less pleased to serve once more as Haig’s battering ram. Some jeered at the news; the officers of one battalion resigned en masse when their commander called the men ‘dopey’, forcing an apology, according to the account by the Australian Captain Albert Jacka VC MC (with bar).69 The whole front was just 8500 yards wide (compared with 14,500 yards in the first stage); the offensive was entering a bottleneck. The Australians would be spread across 2100 yards at the start, broadening to 2750 yards at the objective – the line between Zonnebeke and Gheluvelt village. They were to advance just 1200 yards, because enough guns could not be brought forward in time to support a deeper attack. ‘So in a continuing display of sanity,’ write Prior and Wilson, ‘the infantry plan was reduced to what could be supported by the artillery.’70 Gough’s battered Fifth Army would capture the ruins of Zonnebeke, to the north. If the Tommies seemed less enthusiastic about this than their Antipodean comrades, they drew on deeper, bitter experience of the enemy’s shock troops, the full ferocity of which the Anzacs were yet to experience.
To bring the guns up, the engineers laid new plank roads, a light railway, mule-tracks and even a short, experimental length of monorail71 – all in a week. Daily, 240 tons of elm and beech plank were sent to Australian engineers, to build roads over what had been ‘Menin Road’ and other barely discernible tracks between Hooge and Birr Cross Roads.72 Eighty lorries and 120 horse-drawn wagons, moving through the nights, transported the planks from the rail-head at Ouderdom to the working parties. Long mule trains carried the ammunition and rations. Enemy artillery targeted these files of mules: a direct hit forced the drivers and animals to linger in the open while stretcher parties cleared the casualties, and the able-bodied fixed the track.
A shock came early on the 25th: German troops launched a powerful counter-attack, with artillery and mustard gas, serious enough to disrupt the engineers’ work and breach the line on the Menin Road. It struck at the worst possible time: just when fresh British troops were relieving an exhausted division. The Highland Light Infantry were sent forward to crush the breach, with dreadful results. ‘Many of the platoons … disappeared forever,’ a witness wrote.73 The German offensive was repelled, at heavy cost, mauling several Allied battalions. The losses brought total British casualties between 20 and 25 September to 20,255, of which Plumer’s Second Army accounted for 11,460 (of whom 1774 were killed) and Gough’s Fifth Army 7923 (1317 killed).74
Mustard oil lingered in the craters and pools, blistering the engineers’ skin as they resumed their work. Notwithstanding these awful conditions, the engineers laid the planks, and enough guns were brought forward in time. Throughout the night of 25–26 September, the troops silently waited in the trenches and shell holes for dawn to arrive and the second bite to begin.
Meanwhile, at Montreuil-sur-Mer, Haig and his staff were fastening on the bigger picture should the Germans crumble and withdraw from Flanders. Every Allied unit in France and Belgium was poised to exploit this ‘turning point’, thought to be imminent after recent successes. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army would attack across the Yser, near the Belgian coast. Reinforcements were preparing to land, if possible, at Ostend and Middelkerke. And Haig’s five beloved cavalry divisions were marshalling in the rear, champing to charge and complete the enemy’s destruction on the plains rolling away from Passchendaele.
At 5.50 am on the 26th, the first waves of Australians rose behind a renewed barrage – five belts of heavy explosive, 1000 yards deep – and poured over the top. ‘[T]housands of shells screamed through the air and burst in a long straight line of flame and destruction about 200 yards ahead of the waiting infantry’, said one witness. ‘Released simultaneously from the bonds that had held them silent and motionless, the 4000 men of the six attacking battalions dashed forward at a run.’75
The sun had dried the field, and the drumfire slammed into crumbling mud, raising ‘a dense wall of dust and smoke’ that headed for the German lines ‘like a Gippsland bushfire’.76 Geysers of dry, dusty soil spouted in fountains where the shells burst. Little balls of shrapnel tore about the air like neutrons in search of a home. Behind this monstrous creation, the men raced forward in broad waves, a few tanks blasted into view over the ridges, cannons thundered and recoiled, and biplanes buzzed among the flares and smoke, vying for control of the sky.
Hugging the barrage, the Australians reached the first stage with little resistance. ‘[S]o closely did the Australians follow the dust cloud,’ wrote the official British historian, ‘that most of the German machine gun detachments were rushed or outflanked before they could fire a shot’.77 ‘The barrage,’ wrote Bean, ‘was the most perfect that ever protected Australian troops.’78
They paused in the captured holes, strewn with enemy corpses, and waited a few minutes for the barrage to lift. Some men kept running, straight into the inside edge of the exploding shield, to their deaths. Their officers, it seemed, had not properly synchronised their watches with the timing of the lift. Albert Jacka and others tried to steady the men, most of whom ‘restrained themselves’. They paused and lit up: ‘Hundreds of matches flickered feebly along the line in the misty grey dawn, and keen eyes watched the barrage as second after second of its three minute wait ticked away.’79
The attack resumed, and victory was swift. The Anzacs quickly outflanked and emptied the pillboxes. Most of the little garrisons surrendered. Lines of ashen-faced German men in field-grey uniforms came blinking into captivity with their hands up, mumbling ‘Kamerad, Kamerad’. ‘From some came whimpering boys, holding out hands full of souvenirs.’80
By 9.45 am, all of Polygon Wood was in Anzac hands, largely due to the driving attacks of Pompey Elliott’s 15th Brigade, who overturned a near-desperate situation at Hooge and drove the enemy off. By 11 am, they had dug into excellent positions overlooking the Polygonebeek valley. The captured German observation bunker (now the site of the Polygon Wood memorial obelisk) offered a crowning view of the surrounding area. Another line on the map had been bitten off and held. The British units on the flanks had also reached their goals. ‘The men were full of confidence’ and even started lighting fires to boil pots of tea.81
The Eingreif appeared on the plains beneath Passchendaele at about 4 pm, spotted by British aircraft. These were not the usual fleet-footed shock troops; they edged forward, dazed, and in disarray, through a storm of artillery. Their officers led them stumbling westward through the fiery wall of the barrage, searching for weak points, skirting wired-off swamps and hedgerows, testing the streams for crossing points and picking their way towards the front.
They made a few perfunctory lunges before Allied shellfire broke them up: ‘the counter attack … did not materialize’.82 Many were seen running back to their starting lines, shocked by the wall of bombs, gas and machine-gun fire. The Anzacs amused themselves again, by taking pot shots at low-flying German aircraft, and even brought down a plane, which crashed near their trenches.
Leutnant Heider tried to rally his men. In desp
air, he appealed to God: ‘The hour has come when I have to trust each and everyone of you … I shall go first and you must follow me … We shall meet up again in the front line. Go forward with God!’ A young runner took him at his word, sped off shouting ‘Praised Be the Lord Jesus Christ’, and collapsed, mortally wounded.83
German grenadiers who attempted to retake Polygon Wood were so badly shot up they lost all sense of orientation, falling into trenches and wandering off in confusion. Two officers were killed and twelve wounded, with severe casualties among the rest. The commander of another Eingreif unit reached the front by moonlight, only to find:
an officer with some tens of men looking up at me with blank, white faces from the shell hole where they were huddled. The company commander, utterly exhausted and apathetic, talked in a confused manner about defensive fire and men being buried alive; responding to my questions concerning how? and why? with ironic, stupid giggles. The poor wretch was at the end of his tether. He could give no information about his position, the situation to his left or right, or concerning the enemy.84
There were frequent reports of extraordinary German courage, of gunners who had chained themselves to their guns, of infantry dragging the wounded to aid posts under fire, of stretcher-bearers racing onto the battlefield to disinter soldiers who’d been buried alive, and officers quietly trying to reassure men on the brink of insanity. An obergefreiter (lance corporal) called Kolmich tried to raise morale by playing his harmonica as the shells fell around his men.
Another German counter-attack had failed, and a rattled Ludendorff phoned von Kuhl and von Lossberg at German headquarters: how would they respond to the new British tactics?85 Ludendorff was already in a dreadful state after the loss of his eldest stepson, a pilot, shot down over the Channel. He had also suffered a railway accident in which his carriage overturned. Now this: the German Army was being forced to fight the war on Allied terms. Their failure that day would forever trouble Ludendorff, who was still brooding years later: ‘[T]he enemy managed to adapt himself to our method of employing counter-attack divisions.’86 ‘The Eingreif divisions,’ concluded a German history, ‘… in the face of the British barrages, took 1½ to two hours to advance one kilometre, their formations broken and their attack-power lamed.’87