Battle of Passchendaele

"Passchendaele" redirects here. For the 2008 film by that name, see Passchendaele (film)

For the village, see Passendale.

Battle of Passchendaele Third Battle of Ypres
Part of the Western Front of World War I
Australian gunners on a duckboard track in Château Wood near Hooghe, 29 October 1917. Photo by Frank Hurley.
Date 11 July 1917 – 10 November 1917 Location 50°54′1″N 3°1′16″E Passendale, Belgium Result Indecisive
Belligerents
United Kingdom Australia Canada New Zealand South Africa France	German Empire
Commanders and leaders
Douglas Haig Hubert Gough Herbert Plumer Arthur Currie	Max von Gallwitz Erich Ludendorff
Casualties and losses
508,800 dead, wounded, missing, or captured	348,300 dead, wounded, missing, or captured

The 1917 Battle of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres or simply Third Ypres, was one of the major battles of World War I, in which British, ANZAC, Canadian and South African units engaged the Imperial German Army. The battle was fought for control of the village of Passchendaele (Passendale in modern Dutch, now part of the community of Zonnebeke) near the town of Ypres (Ieper in Dutch) in West Flanders, Belgium. The plan was to drive a hole in the German lines, advance to the Belgian coast and capture the German submarine bases there. It was intended to create a decisive corridor in a crucial area of the front, and to take pressure off the French forces. After the Nivelle Offensive the French Army was suffering from extremely low morale, resulting in mutinies and misconduct on a scale that threatened the field-worthiness of entire divisions.

Although the period of the battle saw spells of good weather lasting long enough to dry out the land, Passchendaele has become synonymous with the misery of fighting in thick mud. Most of the battle took place on largely reclaimed marshland, swampy even without rain. The extremely heavy preparatory bombardment by the British tore up the surface of the land, and heavy rain from August onwards produced an impassable terrain of deep "liquid mud", in which an unknown number of soldiers drowned. Even the newly-developed tanks bogged down.

The Germans were well-entrenched, with mutually-supporting pillboxes which the initial bombardment had not destroyed. After three months of fierce fighting the Canadian Corps took Passchendaele on 6 November 1917, ending the battle, but in the meantime the Allied Powers had sustained almost half a million casualties and the Germans just over a quarter of a million. The Allies had captured a mere five miles of new front at a cost of 140,000 lives, a ratio of roughly 2 dead soldiers per inch gained.

Compounding this staggeringly Pyrrhic figure was the fact that the area was not even considered particularly valuable from a strategic standpoint; in March 1918--a mere 4 months later--the Allies abandoned to the Germans every inch of territory gained at such cost at Passchendaele in order to free several divisions to cover more strategically valuable terrain during the German Lys Offensive towards Ypres.

Passchendaele was the last gasp of the "one more push" philosophy which posited that the stalemate of attritional trench warfare could be broken by brute offensive action against fixed positions. The massive and tactically meaningless casualty levels--coupled with the horrendous conditions in which the battle was fought--damaged Field-Marshal Haig's reputation and made it emblematic of the horror of industrialised attrition warfare.

Tactical overview and preliminary battles

By this stage of the war, the commanders-in-chief — Field-Marshal Douglas Haig (British Empire); General Erich Ludendorff (German Empire); and General Philippe Pétain (France) — regarded the Western Front as a single continuous battle which had started with the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Thus, no sooner had hostilities ended in one sector than a fresh offensive started in another. The Allied objective was to keep Imperial Germany, who were also fighting the war on the Eastern Front, under constant pressure. Since the Somme, tactics and counter-tactics had significantly developed on both sides of the line.

The bridge to the north of Ypres had been lost to the Germans in the First Battle of Ypres, creating an allied salient sticking out into the German positions and overlooked by German artillery on higher ground. Haig decided to collapse the salient, break through the front and capture the German submarine bases on the Belgian coast. A successful action would not only put the submarines out of action, but shorten the allied lines and potentially trap a number of German troops behind the new lines. Haig gave General Sir Hubert Gough command of the battle. This is widely regarded as a mistake, as Gough had neither the experience nor the temperament for the task ahead.

The build up of Allied troops in the sector had alerted the Germans to the possibility of an imminent offensive. In response, General Ludendorff sent his strategist, Colonel von Lossberg, to the salient as chief of staff of the German Fourth army who were holding the line. Lossberg moved the German Army out of the trenches into a strong defensive line of pillboxes, designed to resist even very heavy artillery and to provide enfilading fire.

Messines Ridge

Main article: Battle of Messines

In order to take the salient, British engineers had been digging under the Messines Ridge and planting a series of nineteen enormous explosive mines. This work did not go unnoticed, and the German forces dug a series of counter-mines in order to block their work. The German efforts were unsuccessful, and the mines were in place by early June. In late May the allies started bombarding the German lines, "softening up" the defenses. Early in the morning of June 7, at 2:50 AM, the shelling ceased, a signal that an infantry assault would begin in moments. The German infantry that had been sheltering in bunkers made ready for an attack, while their shift-change moved up from the rear to relieve them.

Instead of an assault, the mines were exploded right under the newly occupied trenchlines. The mines killed approximately 10,000 German troops. Assaults followed shortly thereafter, and were able to capture the trenches with almost no opposition. German counterattacks on the next two nights were completely ineffectual. The plan was a complete success.

Haig ordered General Plumer, the Second Army commander, to continue the battle, but was persuaded to delay further attacks until preparations could be made and the strategic Messines Ridge could be consolidated. The delay was fatal. Had the British pressed forward they would have found the Germans in disarray and the battle may have succeeded. In waiting to consolidate the British position, Haig allowed the Germans to consolidate their position.

July - August 1917

As a second stage of the action, General Sir Hubert Gough was put in charge of the attacks to secure the Gheluvelt Plateau which overlooked Ypres. Many field guns were moved into the area and started a four-day bombardment, but the Germans recognized the sign of an impending offensive, and moved more troops in to reinforce the defences.

In July the Germans used mustard gas for the first time. It attacked sensitive parts of the body, caused blistering, damage to the lungs and inflammation of the eyes, causing blindness (sometimes temporary) and great pain.

One problem in carrying the offensive forward was the Yser Canal, but this was taken on 27 July when the Allies found the German trenches empty.

British 18 pounder battery taking up new positions near Boesinghe, 31 July

Battle of Pilckem Ridge

31 July

Four days later, the main offensive opened with a major assault at Pilckem ridge, when the Allies gained about 2000 yards. The Allies suffered about thirty-two thousand casualties — killed, wounded or missing — in this one action.

Battle of Langemarck

16 - 18 August

Ground conditions during the whole Ypres-Passchendaele action were bad because the ground was already fought-over and partially flooded. Continuous shelling destroyed drainage canals in the area, and unseasonable heavy rain turned the whole area into a sea of mud and water-filled shell-craters. The troops walked up to the front over paths made of duckboards laid across the mud, often carrying up to one hundred pounds (45 kg) of equipment. It was possible for them to slip off the path into the craters and drown before they could be rescued. The trees were reduced to blunted trunks, the branches and leaves torn away, and the bodies of men buried after previous actions were often uncovered by the rain or later shelling.

September 1917

The strategy known as "bite and hold" favoured by Plumer was adopted for the actions of September and October, after the bad weather in August had contributed to the failures of earlier large-scale attacks. The idea was to make small gains which could be held against counter-attack. Sir Herbert Plumer replaced Hubert Gough in command of the offensive.

Battle of Menin Road

20 - 25 September

By now, 1,295 guns were concentrated in the area, approximately one for every five yards of attack front. On 20 September at the battle of Menin Road, after a massive bombardment, the Allies attacked and managed to hold their objective of about 1,500 yards gained, despite heavy counter-attacks, suffering twenty-one thousand casualties. The Germans by this time had a semi-permanent front line, with very deep dugouts and concrete pillboxes, supported by artillery accurately ranged on no man's land.

Australians of 45th Battalion wearing Small Box Respirators (SBR) at Garter Point, 27 September

Battle of Polygon Wood

26 September - 3 October

Further advances at Polygon Wood and Broodseinde on the south-western edge of the salient accounted for another two thousand yards and thirty thousand Allied casualties. The British line was now overlooked by the Passchendaele ridge, which therefore became an important objective.

October - November 1917

Battle of Broodseinde

The New Zealand Division (part of II Anzac Corps) made its first attack on 4 October 1917. Its role was to provide flanking cover for an Australian assault on the Broodseinde Ridge. The New Zealanders’ objective was Gravenstafel Spur, the first of two spurs from the main ridge at Passchendaele (the other was Bellevue Spur). Once again artillery played a big part in the success of the attack, which was made by 1st and 4th brigades.

The bombardment, which began at 6 a.m., caught many Germans in the front lines, causing heavy casualties and disrupting the defence. Although the going was difficult – ‘The mud is a worse enemy than the German,’ divisional commander Sir Andrew Russell complained – the New Zealand troops advanced 1000 metres to secure the spur and consolidate their position. More than a thousand prisoners were taken, but the attack cost more than 320 New Zealand lives, including that of the former All Black captain Dave Gallaher.

The events of 4 October had a tragic aftermath. The British high command mistakenly concluded that the number of enemy casualties meant enemy resistance was faltering. It resolved to make another push immediately. An attack on 9 October by British and Australian troops was to open the way for II Anzac Corps to capture Passchendaele on the 12th.

Battle of Poelcappelle

An advance on 9 October at Poelkapelle (Poelcapelle or Poelcappelle to the British) was a dismal failure for the Allies, with minor advances by exhausted troops forced back by counter-attacks.

First Battle of Passchendaele

Aerial view of Passchendaele village, before and after the battle, demonstrating that the entire village and even the roads were pulverised as combatants shelled all trace of enemy cover or transportation — urban warfare that effectively de-urbanised the terrain.

The First Battle of Passchendaele, on 12 October 1917 began with a further Allied attempt to gain ground around Poelkapelle. The heavy rain again made movement difficult, and artillery could not be brought closer to the front owing to the mud. The Allied troops were fought-out, and morale was suffering. Against the well-prepared German defences, the gains were minimal and there were 13,000 Allied casualties.

On this day there were more than 2,700 New Zealand casualties, of which 45 officers and 800 men were either dead or lying mortally wounded between the lines. In terms of lives lost in a single day, this remains the blackest day in New Zealand’s recorded history.

By this point there had been 100,000 Allied casualties, with only limited gains and no strategic breakthrough.

Second Battle of Passchendaele

26 October - 10 NovemberMain article: Second Battle of Passchendale

Canadian general Sir Arthur William Currie, who led the Canadian Corps in the Second Battle of Passchendaele. Currie correctly predicted that the Canadians would incur from 16,000 to 20,000 casualties if they were to be successful at defeating the Germans.

At this point two divisions of the Canadian Corps were moved into the line to replace the badly depleted ANZAC forces. After their successes at Vimy Ridge and the Battle of Hill 70, the Canadians were considered to be an élite force and were sent into action in some of the worst conditions of the war.

Upon his arrival, the Canadian Commander-in-Chief General Sir Arthur Currie expressed the view that the cost of the objective would be sixteen thousand casualties. While Currie viewed this figure as inordinately high in relation to the value of the objective, Haig was used to casualty figures in the hundreds of thousands after years of huge allied losses, and he ordered the offensive to proceed.

The Canadians moved into the line during mid-October, and on 26 October 1917, the Second Battle of Passchendaele began with twenty thousand men of the Third and Fourth Canadian Divisions advancing up the hills of the salient. It cost the Allies twelve thousand casualties for a gain of a few hundred yards.

Reinforced with the addition of two British divisions, a second offensive on 30 October resulted in the capture of the town in heavy rains. For the next five days the force held the town in the face of repeated German shelling and counter-attacks, and by the time a second group of reinforcements arrived on 6 November, four-fifths of two Canadian divisions had been lost.

Their replacements were the First and Second Canadian Divisions. German troops still ringed the area, so a limited attack on the 6th by the remaining troops of the Third Division allowed the First Division to make major advances and gain strong points throughout the area.

One such action on the First Division front was at Hill 52; the Tenth Battalion, CEF were called out of reserve to assist an attack on Hill 52, part of the same low rise Passchendaele itself was situated on. The Battalion was not scheduled to attack, but the Commanding Officer of the Tenth had wisely prepared his soldiers as if they would be making the main assault – a decision that paid dividends when the unit was called out of reserve. On 10 November 1917, the Tenth Battalion took the feature with light casualties.

A further attack by the Second Division the same day pushed the Germans from the slopes to the east of the town. The high ground was now firmly under Allied control.

Aftermath

The Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing and the Tyne Cot Cemetery

Passchendaele could be regarded, if anything, as a re-play of the Somme; an offensive mounted by the British and French Forces designed to make large gains in terms of territory. Instead, after three months of fighting, the Allies had crawled forward 5 miles (8 kilometres), and had incurred massive casualties of a little over half a million men, of which around 140,000 had been killed in action. Also reminiscent of the Somme were the colossal artillery barrages which failed to destroy German defenses. Ultimately, with heavy losses on both sides, and little in the way of territorial gain, the outcome was stalemate.

Because of the Third Battle of Ypres there were insufficient reserves available to exploit the Allied success at the Battle of Cambrai, the first breakthrough by massed tanks, that restored somewhat the shaken confidence of the British government in the final victory. The politicians were reluctant however to fully replace the manpower losses, for fear the new troops would be sacrificed also. This made the British Army vulnerable to a German attack.

The major German offensive of 1918, Operation Michael, began on 21 March 1918, and a supporting operation which became the Battle of the Lys, began on 9 April. This regained almost all of the ground taken by the Allies at Passchendaele, with the Germans advancing about 6 miles. This meant that every inch of ground (that had taken 450,000 casualties and 5 months to take) gained in the offensive was lost to the Germans, in a space of about three days, further proving the point of many historians that the Ypres salient was "not the most strategically significant area on which to wage a major campaign".

These battles, and those British Empire soldiers who gave their lives, are commemorated at the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, the Tyne Cot Cemetery and Memorial to the Missing, the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world with nearly 12,000 graves.

More than any other battle, Passchendaele has come to symbolise the horrific nature of the great battles of the First World War and the uselessness of the tactics employed. The Germans lost approximately 260,000 men, while the British Empire forces lost about 300,000, including approximately 36,500 Australians, 3,596 New Zealanders and 16,000 Canadians — the latter of which were lost in the intense final assault between 26 October and 10 November; 90,000 British, New Zealand and Australian bodies were never identified, and 42,000 never recovered. Aerial photography showed 1,000,000 shell holes in 1 square mile (2.56 km²).

Quotations

"I died in Hell

(they called it Passchendaele); my wound was slight

and I was hobbling back; and then a shell

burst slick upon the duckboards; so I fell

into the bottomless mud, and lost the light"

― Siegfried Sassoon

The horror of the shell-hole area of Verdun was surpassed. It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering. And through this world of mud the attackers dragged themselves, slowly, but steadily, and in dense masses. Caught in the advanced zone by our hail of fire they often collapsed, and the lonely man in the shell-hole breathed again. Then the mass came on again. Rifle and machine-gun jammed with the mud. Man fought against man, and only too often the mass was successful.

— General Erich Ludendorff

I stood up and looked over the front of my hole. There was just a dreary waste of mud and water, no relic of civilization, only shell holes… And everywhere were bodies, English and German, in all stages of decomposition.

— Lieutenant Edwin Campion Vaughan

"Good God! Did we really send our men through that?" The man beside him, who had been through the campaign, replied tonelessly, "It's worse further on up."

— Lt. Gen. Sir Launcelot Kiggell , also quoted in (Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields. The 1917 Campaign) © Leon Wolff, 1958.

Note: This is an apocryphal anecdote used to illustrate the myth of British "chateau" generals.

Passchendaele was just a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible place. We used to walk along these wooden duckboards — something like ladders laid on the ground. The Germans would concentrate on these things. If a man was hit and wounded and fell off he could easily drown in the mud and never be seen again. You just did not want [to] go off the duckboards.

— Private Richard W. Mercer (911016)

I fell in a trench. There was a fella there. He must have been about our age. He was ripped shoulder to waist with shrapnel. I held his hand for the last 60 seconds of his life. He only said one word: 'Mother'. I didn't see her, but she was there. No doubt about it. He passed from this life into the next, and it felt as if I was in God's presence. I've never got over it. You never forget it. Never.

— Harry Patch, last living survivor of Passchendaele, 12/07/2007

Some of the boys buried here are the same age as me, killed on the same day I was fighting. Anyone of them could have been me. I didn't know whether I would last longer than 5 minutes. We were the Poor Bloody Infantry and we were expendable. What a terrible waste.

— Harry Patch 29/7/07

Cultural references

• The British Heavy metal band Iron Maiden wrote the song "Paschendale" for their 2003 album Dance of Death as a homage to the battle. The song vividly describes a soldier's vision of the battle.
• The Swedish Heavy metal band Sabaton's new album, The Art of War, has a song called "The Price of a Mile", which is about Passchendaele. It describes the slaughter and cruelty of it all quite well.
• Edward Elgar's Cello concerto was written in 1919 at his home in Sussex from where he had earlier heard the artillery of the war in Flanders, possibly from the Battle of Passchendaele.
• British rock-pop band The Men They Couldn't Hang included "The Crest" on its album Waiting for Bonaparte. The lyrics describe a military family in which the grandfather survived Passchendaele but went insane, and ends with advice by the father to the son to discard the old medals, "sacrifice tradition and save your family".
• Irish singer Chris de Burgh wrote the song "This Song for You", which describes a British soldier in Passchendaele who writes a letter to his 'darling' the night before the attack. It appears on the album "Spanish Train and Other Stories". This was sung by him at the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006.
• Indie band GoodBooks wrote "Passchendaele" (released July 16, 2007), a song which tells of a man "born towards the end of the 19th Century" who goes off to fight, and die, at Passchendaele, "fighting for the cause, in a war to end all wars".
• The poem In Flanders Fields.
• Playwright Howard Barker's The Love of a Good Man is set in Passchendaele; the play centers around the aftermath.
• A Canadian feature film entitled Passchendaele is currently being filmed in Alberta and is due for release in November 2008. It is being directed by Canadian actor Paul Gross.
• In the Final Episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, the Final Scene shows Capt. Blackadder, Pte. Baldrick, Lt. George and Capt. Darling killed by Machine Gun fire in the first few seconds of The Battle.

See also

• Trench warfare
• Hedd Wyn
• Harry Patch

Further reading

• Edwin Campion Vaughan's Some Desperate Glory, Diary of a young officer, is often cited as one of the five best books on war.
• Robertson Davies' novel Fifth Business, in which the main character, a Canadian soldier, is lost on the battlefield of Passchendaele, and is severely wounded.
• Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields (Viking, New York, 1958) is the standard modern history, highly praised by both B. H. Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller
• Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's Passchendaele: The Untold Story (Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1996) ISBN 0300072279 (pbk) ISBN 0300066929 (hdbk) includes the strategy and political dimension leading up to the battle.
• Philip Warner, Passchendaele, Pen and Sword Books Ltd, 2005, ISBN 1844153053. A very fine history, very critical of General Haig, written by a Senior Lecturer at Sandhurst Academy. Generally a well-balanced and harrowing story, with many quotations from the memoirs of soldiers who were there.
• Glyn Harper, Massacre at Passchendaele — The New Zealand Story, Harper Collins, 2000, ISBN 1-86950-342-2. Describes the battle of Passchendaele from the New Zealand perspective.
• Winston Groom, A Storm in Flanders - The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002, ISBN0-87113-842-5. World War I Account of Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front written by an American author.
• Nigel Cave, Passchendaele,Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 2007, ISBN 0850525586. Illustrated maps and then and now photographs to appeal to those visiting the area as well as armchair historians.

Dramatizations

• Passchendaele, a film by Paul Gross

Oral histories

• "Passchendaele" in Oral Histories of the First World War: Veterans 1914-1918 at Library and Archives Canada

External links

• The Battle of Messines
• Canadian Perspective on the Battle
• Zonnebeke Tourist Information, including the location of cemeteries and memorials.
• Battles: The Third Battle of Ypres, 1917
• In Flanders Fields museum — Ypres
• Westhoek -, The great war in Flanders Fields — A war and peace experience.
• Edwin Campion Vaughan Author of Some Desperate Glory (Memorial Site)
• 2/Lieut. Robert Riddel, Military Cross, 10th Btn. Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, Passchendaele, October 12. 1917
• AWA; Website with information about excavations of World War 1 sites related to the battle of Passchendaele
• Color photographs from the Battle of Passchendaele
• Experiences of an English Soldier An ordinary soldier who took part in the battle of Messines ridge and Passchendaele, as recounted in his letters home
• To Flanders Fields 1917 — Australian War Memorial exhibition blog
• Passchendaele: fighting for Belgium (NZHistory.net.nz)
• Passchendaele at Deutsch Wikipedia (in German)
• Passchedaele 90th Anniversary Website
• Guernsey students re-trace a soldier's journey to Passchendaele for Radiowaves (2007)