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1917 11 15 The Big Push - Anthony Saunders

The Battle of Passchendaele lasted for four months and ended in November 1917. Nearly a quarter of a million British, Canadian and New Zealand troops died while fighting for control of the ridges to the south and east of Ypres. It was a high price for victory.This outstanding painting depicts men and horses of the Royal Field Artillery, swamped by mud in a desolate, shattered landscape, dragging their 18 pounder field gun towards a new position on 15 November 1917, during the final days of the battle. Whilst the army continues its grim fight on the ground, overhead Sopwith Camels from 45 Squadron Royal Flying Corps tangle in a deadly duel with German Albatros fighters of Jasta 6. Flying the lead Sopwith Camel is the RFC Ace Second Lieutenant Kenneth Montgomery. He scored the last of his 12 victories in this dogfight when he shot down the German Ace Leutnant Hans Ritter von Adam, the Commanding Officer of Jasta 6 with an impressive 21 victories to his name.

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The forty remaining men of the 8th Australian Battalion after an attack at Passchendaele.

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October 30, 1917 - Passchendaele: Canadian Press Attack in Horrible Weather

Pictured - Canadian machine-gunners take cover in flooded shell holes.

The Third Battle of Ypres was not the bloodiest British and imperial battle of the war, but it is the most notorious, particularly its second phase centered on the small village of Passchendaele. Not only was the battle particularly appalling, it also seemed particularly futile.

August rains and the destruction of the local drainage system left the Flanders fields totally flooded. Despite recommendations from some of his commanders that he give up the attack, Haig fervently believed that one more push would do in the Germans. The Canadian Corps had arrived on the 26th to relieve haggered Anzac and British troops. Considered shock-attack experts, the Canadians fought heroically but made little headway.

Another attack on the 30th also stalled in mud and machine-gun fire. The Germans, admittedly, were forced to thin their front to hold back the Canadians, who made it within 450 meters of the village. Four won the Victoria Cross that day. If Haig thought the Germans were breaking, Ludendorff believed the opposite. “The enemy charged like a wild bull against the iron wall.”

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October 9, 1917 - Ypres: Battle of Poelcappelle

Pictured - Australians cross a duckboard path over swampy ground. Torrential rain, artillery shells, and Flanders’ water table combined to flood the battlefield.

The capture of Broodseinde had brought the main objective of the Ypres Offensive within reach. Haig wanted the BEF to launch another push for the town of Passchendaele, which rested on the ridge overlooking Ypres, and the railway network that lay just beyond it. To do so his men would have to take the ridge of Poelcappelle just to the front.

On October 7 Generals Gough and Plumer, commanding the two British armies in the Salient, repeated their request that Haig give up the plan. Their troops were exhausted and rain had made the battlefield a swamp. Bringing up shells and guns was impossible; a number of men and mules had literally drowned in shellholes.

Haig demurred. At 5:00 AM on October 9 British and Anzac troops jumped the bags. Mud and machine-guns made it a slaughter: “It was a nightmare,” wrote Lieutenant P. King. “Often we would have to wait for up to have an hour, because all the duckboards were being blown up, and men being blown off the track or simply slipping off... going down into the muck.” Officers ordered their men not to stop and help those trapped in the mud, but to press the attack. Wounded soldiers who fell into shellholes drowned. Haig insisted the Germans were again on the verge of defeat, but the British army was reaching its limits as well.

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August 16, 1917 - Third Ypres: Offensive Resumes with Battle of Langemarck

Pictured - British soldiers watch an artillery bombardment.

Douglas Haig halted the Third Ypres offensive after a week due to bad weather and stiff German resistance. He resumed it on August 16 with a general attack on the German lines. An Allied smoke barrage gave concealment for tanks to advance, with the infantry plodding along behind. After hard fighting, British and French troops broke through the German lines to make gains, struggling over fields that had been fought over in 1914.

Allied gains, August 16-18.

The as-yet unsolvable difficulties of Great War offensives remained however, with tanks bogging down in mud and the infantry often finding that their artillery support had failed to knock out German barbed wire and pillboxes. Some gains were made, especially by the French on the northern boundary of the Ypres battlefield, by the time the Battle of Langemarck ended on August 18.

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Wounded British troops in a triage center on the first day of the Passchendaele offensive, July 31 1917.

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August 3, 1917 - Third Ypres: Rain and Poor Progress Compel Haig to Postpone Attack

Pictured - Of all the war’s battlefields, the endless mud of Passchendaele may have been the worst.

In a rare piece of wartime history, the newspapers in London, Paris, Washington D.C., Berlin, and Vienna all reported victory on August 1, 1917. That was the first day after the Third Battle of Ypres opened. One French and two British armies had attacked the Germans at Flanders, hoping to finally break out of the Ypres Salient. General Haig’s chief of intelligence, Glaswegian John Charteris, reported only good news back to the government: German armies “visibly cracking,” “Moderately good progress,” etc.

On the ground things looked different. The Germans had not yet even committed their reserves. Meanwhile a horrendous downpour, even by the standards of the Western Front, opened up on July 31 in the afternoon and would hardly relent for the rest of the battle. An English nurse near the front wrote in her diary about the “Soaking hopeless rain, the worst luck that could happen. Poor Sir Douglas Haig...”

Flanders clay turned into mud and bogged down tanks and trucks. Mules sank up to their heads. Bringing up ammo and bringing back the wounded became Herculean tasks. Rifle squads fought over German pillboxes in the quagmire, storming them with grenades and light machine guns. Hand-to-hand fights were frequent. But every time a German position fell, another one right behind it would open up on the conquerors, forcing an endless fight over places with names like Château Wood, which were uniformly just more patches of shell-holes and mud.