Our dead were lying in heaps. It was the worst slaughter I have ever seen.
Alexander Birnie1
9–12 October 1917
The success or failure of General Plumer’s next steps would depend upon logistics: in making sure the attacking battalions had everything they needed to take their objectives. Haig wanted the attack to go ahead two days earlier than originally scheduled, but it was only possible to advance the date by twenty-four hours because it started raining again. Between the morning of 7 October and the date of the attack two days later, 25mm of rain fell, which soaked the already slippery battlefield and played havoc with the logistical and engineering arrangements upon which so much depended.2 Postponing the attack would have seemed sensible, but might have had serious repercussions and, in any case, opinion was split. When Haig had tea with Plumer on the afternoon of 8 October, he was told that Sir Alexander Godley, whose corps (II ANZAC) would make the main assault, had ‘specially asked that there should be no postponement’. So there it was; they would go ahead the following morning.3
Roads and tracks had to be driven forward as quickly as possible, while existing ones required almost continuous repair work. The Wieltje–Gravenstafel road was one particularly vital artery and was maintained by field companies of Royal Engineers, who laboured on what seemed an increasingly futile task. Timber–‘green and rough cut straight from the saw’–was brought up and unloaded at the railhead at Wieltje, and then, by whatever means available, taken up to the line. The best method of road construction was to ‘lay on an approximately level prepared bed four or five lengthwise stringers, to which were spiked broad stout beams making a continuous decking’. Planks were then nailed on either side as ‘wheel guards’ to ensure slippery lorries kept on the straight and narrow path. While this certainly helped to keep a steady trickle of movement going, German shelling regularly brought it to a halt. Because the heavier howitzers could only be dragged a few metres from the roads, they made tempting targets, and on several occasions direct hits on their ammunition dumps caused enormous craters to be torn in the surrounding area.4
Given the difficulties of reaching the gun positions, Second Army had no choice but to rely on packhorses. Eight shells were hitched to each animal (four on each side), and they were led up to the front through a treacherous wasteland of mud and death. J. A. Whitehead, a driver with the RFA (temporarily attached to 18th Division), recorded what their daily routine was. Reveille was at midnight, a quick breakfast, before heading off to the ammunition dump, loading up their horses’ packs, and then, in single file (‘with plenty of room in between us, to avoid shells maiming or killing too many horses and drivers’), making the five-mile journey up to the front. Inevitably there were casualties and Whitehead admitted that their only objective ‘was to get more and more ammunition to the guns’, even if it meant rolling dead horses and men out of the way. By the time they returned to their camp, they had to find the energy to clean everything, scrape the mud off their boots and uniforms, and inspect and groom the horses.
The drudgery of such an existence inevitably took its toll on the men’s spirits. ‘How we stood it, day after day, and week after week, I do not know’, he remembered. ‘I do know that I slept hours walking with my horses, or riding, to and from the guns, during those long, weary, sloppy journeys.’ Moreover:
The surprising thing was that hardly any of us had to report sick during this time, but the sick parade increased when things quietened down. Otherwise our view was one huge mass of mud and water, a few remaining trunks of trees, and some duckboards that needed a tight rope walker to keep balanced on, and then mud, mud, and more mud. Many a time we should go plunging on with our pack horses, and, suddenly, either a horse, or one of us would drop into a shell hole up to our middle. We had then to scramble out, shake ourselves like dogs, and carry on.5
‘If I were asked to name the heroes of the Third Battle of Ypres’, wrote the gunner Frank Mellish, ‘my vote would go to the pack horses which brought up the field artillery ammunition… They carried or pulled prodigious weights through country practically devoid of roads or tracks, and more often than not they were up to their hocks, and sometimes their bellies, in sticky mud. When shelling began there was just no means of getting them under cover and they stood patiently until either they were hit or the shelling stopped. They never seemed to panic and yet seemed grateful if anyone stood near them during their ordeal.’6
The problems with engineering and logistics would ultimately prove beyond both Fifth and Second Armies. Two tank battalions had been brought in to assist the operations of General Gough, but the awful ground prevented them from getting anywhere near the front, while Plumer–never the Tank Brigade’s warmest supporter–did not even bother to send any up.7 The harassed field companies, working like ants, performed miracles of improvisation throughout October, but it would not be enough. Too few guns could be dragged into range, and those that could were often deployed in the open in extremely precarious positions: half sunk in the glutinous mud, which left their crews foraging desperately for anything–timber, wooden crates, slabs of concrete–that could shore up their gun positions. Without reliable and solid firing platforms, they soon bogged down after a few rounds had been fired, which meant that accuracy suffered and the crews had to laboriously dig them out, reset them and fire again–all under growing enemy counter-battery fire. Ammunition shortages were another problem. While the heroism of the pack mules and their drivers was remarkable, in no way could they possibly meet the enormous demands for shells that a truly powerful preliminary bombardment and creeping barrage would require.8 ‘We dream of nothing else but ammunition in this blessed world’, wrote Stanley Roberts, an NCO with the RFA. ‘Those guns have tremendous appetites. It is impossible to find sufficient food for them, such gluttons are they.’9
For Plumer’s fourth step, II ANZAC Corps would make the main assault, not with Australian or New Zealand units, but two British divisions, 49th and 66th, which had assembled around Frezenberg by the evening of 8 October. It was pouring with rain. They had two and a half miles to go to reach the front line. This should have taken no more than five hours, but some attacking battalions took almost twice as long, before collapsing, exhausted and soaked through, into their jumping-off positions, shortly before the attack began.10 The urgent need to get as many guns as possible forward meant that infantry routes were neglected in the days before the assault, leaving the attacking battalions to rely upon inadequately maintained duckboards that rapidly exhausted the men. Moreover, because priority had been given to the construction of single-track roads that could carry artillery, there were not enough double-track pathways to carry men and materials up and down the line, producing extra delay and what seemed like endless traffic congestion.11
On the other side of the line, the German Fourth Army may have been battered in the three previous assaults, but it still held on to most of the Flanders I Line and could boast strongly wired and heavily fortified positions on the Bellevue Spur, which guarded the western approaches to the village of Passchendaele. Here the defences were well thought out and covered with thickets of barbed wire, up to fifty feet deep in places. Multiple machine-guns were also dug in, mutually supporting and hidden behind the concrete walls of a dozen pillboxes.12 Those divisions that had been in the line on 4 October had been relieved, with fresh units moved up, including 16th, 233rd and 195th Divisions (the latter having been hurried back to Flanders after being earmarked for service in Italy).13 The crucial sector on the Passchendaele Ridge was given to 195th Division, which deployed three Jäger regiments with a reputation as elite troops. As well as being well-rested and motivated, the Jäger regiments also brought with them up to twice the number of machine-guns–both heavy and light–as standard German Army regiments had, meaning that they could produce a formidable volume of firepower should they be attacked. Perhaps on no other place on the battlefield would the British artillery bombardment be of such importance.14
When the strength of the German position was combined with wet weather and an increasingly exhausted attacking force, there was only going to be one outcome. The attack on 9 October (what would become known as the Battle of Poelcappelle) could not have been more different to the victory of Broodseinde; indeed it was reminiscent of the carnage at Langemarck on 16 August. There were no thunderous wall of shellfire (despite some observers being impressed by the spectacle); no impressive gains of ground; no carpeting of German bodies. There were, on the contrary, only patchy artillery support and a weak, tentative attack, as the British infantry slogged forward through a moonscape of mud. ‘I had been frightened sometimes before, and windy; anxious very often’, remembered Neville Hind of 1/Lancashire Fusiliers, who was in one of the attacking divisions that day. ‘But never before, so far as I can now recollect, had I been so stunned, and stupefied, as to lose for some minutes all presence of mind… Earth and air seemed full of death.’ He went on:
The din of the massed artillery behind us, the continuous crash of exploding shells before us, great shoots of fire, and shot in the air above us, the rattle of machine guns in the German line, the bursting of shrapnel shells from the German guns; flashes of flame that seemed to swoop down from the air, as a hawk on its prey, and obliterate the men on whom they descended–it was through this kind of thing that we moved forward, across that desolate waste of mud and water and shell-holes–nothing else.
Hind pushed on with his battalion and managed to take one of the pillboxes that were holding them up, before suffering a ‘terrific punch on the back’. He slid into a shell hole, shivering with shock, and realized that he had been hit by a sniper’s bullet. Fortunately it had not punctured any major organs and he was soon evacuated to a casualty clearing station behind the line.15
Neville Hind was one of the lucky ones. He had a prized ‘blighty’ wound that would take him out of the war, but for thousands of others on that dark morning of 9 October, there would be no escape. 49th Division, which had somehow managed to get its attacking battalions into position via a single duckboard track (No. 5 track south of the Wieltje–Passchendaele road), marched into a killing zone. Attacking infantry failed to notice the artillery lifts every fifty yards (an indication of how unimpressive the creeping barrage was), while the German defenders were not forced to shelter in their dugouts, meaning that they could hold their shell holes in strength. The main obstacle across the front–the Ravebeek–was waist deep and impossible to cross under heavy fire. Rifles and Lewis guns were rendered ineffective by the liquid mud; communication to the forward battalions broke down; and effective German sniping caused a great deal of demoralization among the attackers.16
On the right, 66th Division experienced similar problems, with the approach march taking, in places, up to ten hours. When the attack finally went ahead, the division managed to get forward further than the units on its left, but the unsuppressed German defences on the higher ground at Bellevue, which had torn 49th Division’s attack to pieces, began to enfilade its lines and cause heavy loss.17 ‘The whole world seemed to have erupted like a volcano: one had to fix one’s mind on the necessity of going forward to reach the objective at all costs’, wrote P. R. Hall, a private in 2/6th Manchesters. ‘The whizz of bullets was startling but you knew that the ones you heard had already gone past. Shells one could hear coming and judge roughly how close they were–if very close just duck and carry on. The Minenwerfers were the worst. We did not hear them coming and they seemed to explode almost beneath one’s feet.’18 Although elements of the division managed to secure the Blue Line (the second objective), with parties even making it as far as the village of Passchendaele, local counter-attacks forced a retirement to the first objective by the early afternoon, leaving II ANZAC Corps with virtually nothing to show for such an enormous effort. Total casualties for the attacking divisions had been over 5,700 men–virtually destroying them as fighting formations.19 Although the attack had met with more success in the north, with XIV Corps and the French First Army advancing, successfully, towards the southern outskirts of Houthulst Forest (where the ground was much less cut up by shellfire), elsewhere the attack had stalled. This was not ‘bite and hold’; it was more like rush and grab.
German morale rose after the events of 9 October–the first real victory the Army had achieved since late August. Its defence had been thoroughly planned and ruthlessly executed, with the reintroduction of tried-and-tested tactics being totally vindicated. Indeed the events of the day offered further evidence that a more cautious approach offered the best chance of conserving German strength in the face of the numerical superiority of the enemy.20 The defenders had to endure days of harassing fire, little food or water, and the risks of exposure and exhaustion in the cold, wet weather, but when they got their chance they extracted a terrible revenge. On the northern sector, 86 Fusilier Regiment (18th Division) found itself coming under intense attack, so three heavy machine-guns were hoisted on to the top of a bunker and loaded with ammunition. From there they could enfilade the whole line of advance. After waiting until the attacking infantry closed to within 500 metres of their positions, they opened fire, driving apart the attacking lines and forcing them to take cover in no-man’s-land. In the course of the day those three machine-guns fired almost 16,000 rounds.21
Elsewhere there was close combat as the attackers broke into the main German position. West of Passchendaele, the men of 5 Jäger Regiment (195th Division) were in the line, desperately trying to hold off a furious onslaught. ‘The weak line of defence in the section of the battalion is almost completely shot to pieces’, noted its history. ‘The assault of the English infantry surges across it in a rapid succession of waves… Isolated groups penetrate through the large gaps in the security line but are then stopped by autonomous and automatic fire from the infantrymen and machine-gunners that operate from the main line of defence. The coordinated attack dissolves into fierce fighting. All company sections battle with great tenacity.’ In such a confused battle, it was essential that reserves were moved up quickly, but heavy harassing fire had all but isolated the front-line battalions, severing all telephone connections to the rear. Fortunately, after the heroic efforts of a signal section at the regimental command post, which had managed to flash out an emergency message before smoke obscured the whole battlefield, supporting units were able to move up and reinforce this crucial sector, sealing off any enemy penetrations.22