THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES 1917 – PART FOUR
Planning for a British offensive out of the Ypres Salient had been going on since 1915, but so far coalition politics and lack of resources had prevented it happening. Now, with the absolute urgency of taking the pressure off the French while their army was restored to its allegiance, the time had come. Before anything could happen in the Salient itself, Messines Ridge had to be dealt with. This was a ridge of land running south from the Salient which had been held by the Germans since 1914 and which dominated much of the Salient itself. In order to move the troops and pre-position the stores and artillery ammunition necessary to mount a breakout this dominance would have to be negated. General Plumer had long planned to do just that, with twenty-one enormous mines totalling one million pounds of explosive laid under the ridge by tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers.
The attack was preceded by an artillery bombardment of seventeen days, with three and a half million shells fired in the last seven days. During the bombardment, aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service ensured that no German aircraft could get near enough to identify the build-up for the attack, which came on 7 June when nineteen of the mines were exploded and nine British and Empire divisions, supported by seventy-two Mark IV tanks attacked the ridge over a five mile front. Tactics were much more sophisticated than they had been on the Somme a year earlier, and the Mark IV tank was a much improved version of those earlier models that had been tried, mostly to little effect, on the Somme. The infantry and the tanks had trained in operating together, and by midnight the ridge had been taken with the Germans pushed back three miles at a cost of 23,000 casualties, including 7,300 taken prisoner, and the loss of 154 guns, 218 machine guns and sixty mortars. Total British casualties were 24,562 and eleven tanks hit or broken down, a much better record than that of a year before. It was a resounding victory.
Now was the time to strike out of the Salient, while the Germans were off balance and not yet recovered from being knocked off Messines Ridge, but there were not enough British assets to be positioned for two major offensives simultaneously. There was therefore a pause while artillery was re-positioned, ammunition stocks replenished and the troops practised on mock ups of the German positions. Command of the breakout phase from the Salient was entrusted to General Sir Hubert Gough, Commander Fifth Army, and thought to believe in more daring tactics than Plumer’s more cautious approach. The plan was for a series of hammer blows all around the Salient, to begin on 31 July. It was unfortunate that the weather broke the day before, and when nine British divisions attacked at first light on the 31st they did so in driving rain and mist. Nonetheless, considerable success was achieved in the north where the British advanced two and a half miles beyond Pilkem Ridge. The Germans had been learning too, however. They now depended on defence in depth with successive lines made up of concrete strongpoints linked by trenches, the whole depending on reducing the strength of the attackers by the friction of having to fight through line after line, until they were exhausted and could be counter-attacked by specially trained and equipped counter-attack divisions. The weather worsened, and it was the wettest winter for the seventy-five years since accurate records had first begun to be kept.
As the weather got worse and worse the drainage system in the Salient, developed over centuries but which had already begun to break down due to constant shelling, now ceased to function at all, and the water had nowhere to go. Movement became more and more difficult, particularly with the artillery when the gun wheels sank in the mud and even the efforts of the six horses for each 18 pounder field gun could not prevail, with shifting the heavier guns almost impossible. Even the tanks, with a much better cross-country capability than anything on wheels, had problems and were reduced to having an officer walking in front with an ash plant walking stick to measure the depth of the mud[*]. By 22 August the offensive had bogged down, in some cases literally, and Haig ordered a pause while he handed the battle over to Plumer and his Second Army. The rain had started to ease off, and the meteorologists were forecasting a period of dry weather, so Plumer ordered a pause while the ground dried out to restore movement. He intended that tactics would change. Instead of attacking and then advancing as far as possible until held up, limited objectives would be targeted, captured and put into a state of defence before the inevitable counter-attack, which would be beaten off before the next objective was tackled. It was what Plumer called ‘bite and hold’ and steadily it began to work.
On 26 September Polygon wood was taken and on 4 October an advance of one and a half miles captured Poelcapelle, Zonnebeke and Broodseinde. Frenzied counter-attacks came in from the much vaunted German counter-attack divisions which had been allocated the latest equipment and special rations, but they were all beaten off with huge losses. The British were now consuming German divisions faster than they could be replaced: Ludendorff called 4 October 1917 ‘the black day of the German army’ – there were a number of occasions which German commanders announced as ‘black days’, but this was one of the blackest.
Now the British were poised to take the Passchendaele Ridge. Once they could take that they would be out of the low lying Salient onto good well-drained high ground and for the first time it would the British overlooking the Germans, rather than the other way round. Then the weather broke again and the rain lashed down, once again creating mud, floods and near impossible conditions. Had there only been British interests at stake Haig would almost certainly have closed the battle down and waited for the spring to attack Passchendaele, but Petain still needed time before the French army could become fully operational once more, and the offensive had to continue. That decision – to continue the offensive – was the tipping point, for if it had not been taken the Germans would have been able to redeploy up to sixty divisions to attack a weakened French army and almost certainly break through and scatter it, with the British forced to withdraw to the Channel Ports and home.
Between 4 and 12 October Tyne Cot was taken across a sea of mud. In the entire month of October there were only seven days without rain, and they were overcast giving no chance for the ground to dry out. Conditions were appalling and just getting food to the advancing troops became a nightmare of struggling through collapsing communication trenches, often knee deep in water. On they went, however, with the rain still pouring down and temperatures rarely above ten degrees Celsius, and it was three weeks before the Canadian Corps at last captured Passchendaele Village and the British were at last out of the Salient and on to the high ground.
Petain was now able to report that the mutinies, which had continued until August, had stopped, conditions had been greatly improved and courts martial of the ringleaders were in full flow. Petain was very different from his predecessor. Of peasant origin, he was stolid, steady, and methodical. He believed in harsh treatment for the ringleaders and forgiveness for the rest. He had already a reputation of caring for men’s lives from his presence at Verdun, and he now toured units, talking to the men and explaining that he understood their grievances and was endeavouring to put things right. Courts martial were convened and 476 men were sentenced to death, although only thirty were actually shot. French military law required that all sentences of death had to be confirmed by the president, but in a decree of June 1917, when the mutinies were in full flow, the president rescinded his power and henceforth the final decision would be in the hands of the army. Ostensibly this was to speed things up, in reality it was the politicians ensuring that if things went wrong it would be the army that got the blame and not them. In practice there was still a political dimension as many deputies (members of parliament) were reserve officers and lobbied on behalf of their constituents or of their men. The French generals were convinced that the ringleaders were professional agitators, anarchists, communists or German agents, but in reality they appear to be ordinary soldiers or junior NCOs with no political affiliations and hitherto clean records. There was no common thread of occupation or place of origin to link them, and the most common pre-war occupation was that of cultivateur or peasant farmer. Various commissions set up to enquire into the disturbances found that the causes were partly the dashing of expectations that the Nivelle offensive would produce dramatic and final results, but mainly a spontaneous reaction to the age old soldiers’ gripes about pay, rations and leave, born of a long tradition of compulsory military service for a relatively short period, thus making any planning for long term welfare provisions seemingly unnecessary.
Politically too heads had to roll. Emile-Joseph Duval, the editor of the Communist newspaper Bonnet Rouge, was arrested and charged with treason when it was discovered that his paper was subsidised by German money. He was found guilty and executed by guillotine. Louis Malvy, the minister of the interior, who had inexplicably been unable to curb anti-war agitation or to shut down desertion agencies, had actually been found to encourage them. He too was arrested and sentenced to five years’ banishment. The director of the Sûreté, the French intelligence agency, was found to have covered up for Malvy and he was imprisoned. The President of the Chamber of Deputies, the equivalent of prime minister, Ribot, was forced to resign, being replaced first by Painlevé and then by Clemenceau. The French army was once more able to assume its responsibilities, although morale remained brittle to the end.
With the taking of Passchendaele the Battle of Third Ypres came to an end. In much of British mythology Third Ypres is seen as an unnecessary and unthinking slaughter when uncaring generals, divorced from the realities of battle threw more and more men against impenetrable German defences in appalling conditions of mud, rain and cold. It is certainly true that the cost was very great: a quarter of a million casualties of which 53,000 were killed. It gave rise to the largest British military cemetery anywhere, Tyne Cot with 12,000 graves. British casualties might have been less were it not for the dithering of politicians as to whether the offensive should happen at all, and if so when. Prime Minister Lloyd-George only consented reluctantly, and the delay between the taking of Messines Ridge and the start of the breakout battles did not help. But, expensive though it was, the British were in a much better position after the battles than they were before. They were at last out of the low-lying and marshy Salient and considerable ground had been taken. There were far more German casualties, including 25,000 prisoners taken, than British and the German army saw it as an unmitigated disaster. The offensive had drawn in eighty-eight German divisions, over half of their total on the Western Front, and they had taken a severe mauling. Overall, therefore, the Battle of Third Ypres has to be seen as a British victory, but it was far more than that.
By June 1917 the French army was in no state to withstand even a modest offensive by the Germans. Units riven with discontent encouraged by agitation at home would have broken, refused to fight or put up only token resistance. Those few divisions that remained untainted would have pulled back to defend Paris. If the French army had broken, which it almost certainly would have, the British could not have held the whole of the front by themselves and the BEF would have had to withdraw to the Channel Ports to be evacuated by the Royal Navy. Germany would now have had control of all of mainland Europe, the few untrained and unready American troops in theatre could have done little and would probably have withdrawn with the British. In that event the sizeable pro-neutrality element in the USA might quite possibly have persuaded President Wilson to withdraw from the war, but even if he had not, the USA was in no position to invade Europe. It was the British decision to mount the Third Ypres offensive, and to keep it going when many thought it should be halted, that prevented the Germans from taking advantage of French weakness and quite possibly winning the war on land. Third Ypres was the tipping point of the war on the Western Front.
[*] To this day officers of the Royal Tank Regiment carry ash plants, although it is no longer necessary to use them to measure the depth of the mud.
Interesting tidbit about the ash plants and a search quickly found some good images.