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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, fought by British, ANZAC, and Canadian soldiers against the German army. The battle was fought for control of the village of Passendale, (Belgium-French Passchendaele on maps of that time), near the Belgian town of Ypres in West Flanders. The plan was to drive a hole in the German lines and advance to the Belgian coast and capture the German submarine bases there. It would have created a decisive corridor to be opened in a crucial area of the front, and it would also take pressure off of the French forces. After the disastrous Nivelle Offensive the French Army was suffering from extremely low morale, which resulted in such an increase in cases of mutiny and misconduct as to threaten the field-worthiness of entire divisions.
The land on which the battle took place was 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. The town of Passendale was finally taken by the Canadian forces, but the combined casualties of the allies was almost a quarter of a million men, with about the same number of men lost by the Germans.
Passendale is the modern Dutch spelling of the village, and the old name of Passchendaele is now used only to refer to this battle. This term should properly apply only to the later actions of the battle in October–November 1917, but has come to be applied also to the entire campaign from July 31. After three months of fierce fighting, the Canadian Corps took Passchendaele on November 6 1917, ending the battle. In the history of World War I, the term 'Passchendaele' has become a symbol of the extreme brutality of industrial warfare.
Passendale today forms part of the municipality of Zonnebeke, Belgium.
Messines Ridge
Main article: Battle of Messines
The ridge to the south of Ypres had been lost to the Germans in the First Battle of Ypres, creating an allied salient sticking out into the German position and overlooked by German artillery on higher ground. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the allied chief commander, decided to 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.
Engineers from both sides had been tunnelling under the Messines ridge since 1915, and by the spring of 1917, the British had placed 21 huge mines totalling 450 tonnes of the high explosive Ammonal. At zero hour at 03:10 on 7 June 1917, after the most intense bombardment of the entire war, nineteen of the allied mines were detonated, killing an estimated ten thousand German troops in moments. The explosion was said to be audible as far away as Dublin, and was possibly the loudest man-made noise made up to that date. Of the two mines which failed to detonate, one exploded during a thunderstorm on 17 July 1955. The 21st mine is believed to have been found in recent years, but no attempt has been made to remove it.
Following the detonation of the mines, nine allied infantry divisions attacked, supported by 72 Mark IV tanks. They achieved the initial objectives due to the effect of the huge mines and the fact that the German reserves were too far back to intervene. 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.
July 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. Huge numbers of guns were moved into the area and started a four-day bombardment, but the Germans recognised 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 July 27 when the Allies found the German trenches empty. Four days later, the offensive proper opened with a major action at Pilkem ridge, with allied gains of up to 2000 yards. The Allies suffered about thirty-two thousand casualties--killed, wounded or missing--in this one action.
Ground conditions during the whole Ypres-Passendale action were atrocious. 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
A new strategy known as "bite and hold" was adopted for the actions of September and October, after the awful 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.
1,295 guns were concentrated in the area, approximately one for every five yards of attack front. On September 20 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.
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. An advance on October 9 at Poelkapelle (Poelcapelle) was a dismal failure for the Allies, with minor advances by exhausted troops forced back by counter-attacks.
First Battle of Passchendaele
The First Battle of Passchendaele, on October 12 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 tired, and morale was suffering. Against the well-prepared German defences, the gains were minimal and there were 13,000 Allied casualties.
By this point there had been 100,000 Allied casualties, with only limited gains and no strategic breakthrough.
Second Battle of Passchendaele
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 comparison to the objective, Haig was used to high casualty rates after years of allied losses in the hundreds of thousands, and he ordered the offensive to proceed.
The Canadians moved into the line during mid-October, and on October 26 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 October 30 resulted in the capture of the town in blinding rain. 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 November 6, four-fifths of two Canadian divisions had been lost.
Their replacements were the Canadian First and Second 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
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 March 21 1918, and a supporting operation which became the Battle of the Lys, began on April 9. This regained almost all of the ground taken by the Allies at Passendale, the Germans advancing about 6 miles.
These battles, and those British Empire soldiers who gave their lives, are commemorated at the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing, and at the Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world with nearly 12,000 graves.
Passchendaele has come to symbolise the horrific nature of the great battles of the First World War. The Germans lost approximately 270,000 men, while the British Empire forces lost about 450,000, including 36,500 Australians and 16,000 Canadians - the latter of which were lost in the intense final assault between October 26 and November 10; 90,000 British and Australian bodies were never identified, and 42,000 never recovered. Aerial photography showed 1,000,000 shell holes in 1 square mile.
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"
- "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
- The man beside him, who had been through the campaign, replied tonelessly, 'It's worse further on up.'" — Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields
- "Passchendaele was just a 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 * go off the duckboards." — Private Richard W. Mercer (911016)
Music
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.
Heavy metal band Iron Maiden wrote the homage song "Paschendale" for their 2003 album Dance of Death. The song vividly describes a soldier's vision of the battle: "Laying low in a blood filled trench, killing time until my very own death. On my face I can feel the falling rain, never see my friends again. In the smoke, in the mud and lead, smell of fear and feeling of dread. Soon be time to go over the wall, rapid fire and the end of us all."
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."
British 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".
Indie band GoodBooks wrote "Passchendaele", a song which tells of a man "born at the end of the 19th Century" who goes off to fight, and die, at Passchendaele, "fighting for the cause, in the war to end all wars".
New Zealand celtic band Wild Geese included the song "Ridge of Messines" on the 2002 CD "Promises to keep". It tells of the New Zealand Division's part in the 1917 Battle of Messines in which this unit captured the village of Messines. Bass player Neil Frances wrote the song in memory of his grandfather who took part in the battle.
See also
Further reading
- 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
- Philip Warner "Passchendaele" Pen and Sword military classics, Barnsley 1987, 2005 is 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.
- Robertson Davies' novel Fifth Business, in which the main character, a Canadian soldier, is lost on the battlefield of Passchendaele, and is severely wounded.
Dramatizations
- Passchendaele, a film by Paul Gross depicting the experiences of his grandfather, who fought with the 10th Battalion, CEF in the battle.
External links
- Sanctuary Wood Museum
- The Battle of Messines
- 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
Battles of Canada | Battles of the Western Front (World War I) | Passchendaele
Dritte Flandernschlacht | Triesma Ypres-batalio | Derde Slag om Ieper
"Passchendaele"