German artillery fire had also been highly accurate. One of those involved on 9 October was the battery officer Reinhard Lewald, who, by his own admission, was an uncommonly lucky soldier. He had been sent on a gunnery course shortly before the offensive began (thus missing the heavy fighting on 31 July) and had also received a fortnight’s leave in late September (allowing him to escape the carnage of Plumer’s first three steps). Yet his luck was changing. On the afternoon of 7 October he stepped off a train in Belgian Flanders, before rejoining his battery just in time for Poelcappelle. Although this would be an extremely hard-fought engagement, it was a clear-cut German victory. In the pouring rain, across shell-churned ground, they deployed their guns and were in position on the morning of 9 October, when Plumer’s attack went in. That day the British fired ‘an indescribable barrage’ that heralded yet another major battle. ‘Our losses are heavy, but the enemy breakthrough is destroyed’, he wrote. ‘They can only occupy a strip of muddy terrain.’23
Notwithstanding these encouragements, there was little sense of celebration at Army Group headquarters in Courtrai. Crown Prince Rupprecht worried constantly about his ability to maintain such an exhausting defence and reported to OHL (on the morning of 11 October) how difficult things were becoming. The intensity of operations between 4 and 9 October had put his Army Group under almost intolerable pressure. The contents of twenty-seven ammunition trains had been fired off at Poelcappelle, and Rupprecht worried about the overburdened railway system, which was struggling to keep up with the regular relief and reinforcement of front-line units.24 Moreover, ‘bringing the divisions up to strength was becoming more difficult. Fourth Army must adapt itself to manage with less strength.’ Consequently, it might even be necessary to conduct a significant redeployment; giving up much of the coast and, presumably, the vital railway junction at Roulers. He issued orders that divisions that had not lost more than 1,800 men were to be kept in Flanders for the duration of the battle. For the moment, at least, relief was out of the question.25
The Germans may have successfully held their ground, but the intensity of the fighting wore units down. Group Ypres bore the brunt of the losses. In October its divisions sustained 3,851 dead, 15,202 wounded and 10,395 men missing in action. Of particular concern were the disproportionate losses in officers, with some regiments losing their commander, two battalion commanders and up to nine captains.26 North of Poelcappelle, 18th Division, from Schleswig-Holstein, had failed badly, with none of its regiments being able to counter-attack properly.27 Around Passchendaele, 195th Division suffered over 3,200 casualties between 7 and 13 October.28 ‘You, dear schoolboys who read about deeds of heroism; Germans sitting around tables enjoying a beer,’ wrote Major Ludwig von Menges, the commanding officer of 4/Reserve Jäger Battalion (which had been in support that day), ‘just think of all the blood that flowed; all that had to be performed whenever the Army Communiqué read: “Today, too, our troops beat off all British attacks in the Passchendaele area; their meagre gains of ground were recaptured from them.”’29
The attack on 9 October may have been disastrous, but Plumer’s fifth step would go ahead, as planned, on 12 October. Preparations for what would become the First Battle of Passchendaele were little better than they had been at Poelcappelle. The three-day interlude was in no way sufficient to give the attacking brigades a fighting chance of getting through and the artillery situation remained on the point of collapse. In II ANZAC Corps, most of its field batteries were now ‘operating at half strength or less’, with guns being either out of position, clogged in mud or starved of ammunition.30 On 11 October, Major F. J. Rice’s battery took over new positions in the wasteland about half a mile south of Langemarck. ‘At this time these positions appeared to be undiscovered, but, as always in Flanders, digging down was impossible owing to reaching water so quickly, and the only protection was sandbags and corrugated iron.’ The roads leading up to the position were in a ‘terrible state’, but further on, out towards the front line, they got even worse. ‘Infantry officers told us more than once that they doubted if they could have dragged their way to their objectives even if there had been no enemy, the mud was so deep, and one heard stories of men, wounded and unwounded, being stuck in waterlogged shell holes for more than a day.’31
The attack on 12 October should never have gone ahead. While Haig and his commanders could, perhaps, be forgiven for ordering their divisions forward on 9 October–flush from the success of Broodseinde–there was no excuse for trying again just seventy-two hours later.32 Haig, optimistic as ever, needed little encouragement to urge his generals on, and his diary for this period contains wildly inaccurate information on the results of the attacks. Even the offensively minded General Gough–whose Fifth Army continued to offer flanking support–thought that Second Army’s objectives for the next offensive were ‘too far distant’. When he warned Haig, the Commander-in-Chief was unimpressed, telling him bluntly that ‘the enemy is now much weakened in moral[e] and lacks the desire to fight’.33 Sadly, further down the chain of command, there was a similar, depressing lack of realism. While Birdwood at I ANZAC Corps counselled Plumer against any further advances, others seem to have had few concerns, with over-optimistic reports about how much ground had been taken doing much to cloud the issue. Alexander Godley, the commander of II ANZAC Corps, suffered from what the historian Andrew Macdonald has called a ‘Passchendaele fixation’: an obsession to take the high ground, safe in the knowledge that it was what Haig wanted, and its capture would surely result in his promotion. He told Sir John Monash, the commander of 3rd Australian Division–which would make the main assault–that it was his ‘sacred duty’ to fly the Australian flag from the ruins of the village.34
For his part, Monash was much less enamoured of the prospect facing him. ‘Things now rushed. No time to prepare, refer to orders as we go along’ was one instruction he dashed off to his brigadiers.35 Not only was it almost impossible to bring up the number of guns and tons of ammunition they would need, but they also had to attack more formidable positions than had been the case on 4 October. It was evident that if the New Zealand Division failed to capture the Bellevue Spur on their left, the Australians would be exposed to deadly enfilade fire and cut to pieces (as had happened to 66th Division). On 11 October, Monash pleaded with his superiors for a delay, perhaps just twenty-four hours, to give them more time to get ready for the assault. But it got him nowhere. Godley was all for pushing on, confident that his divisions would take the high ground. As for Plumer–for so long the Apostle of order and method on the battlefield–he was convinced that conditions were favourable and turned Monash’s request down. They would attack, as scheduled, on 12 October.36
The role that Plumer played in this tragedy remains curious. He must have known that conditions were steadily deteriorating and that there was not enough time to prepare attacks properly. He had requested three weeks to mount his push on the Menin Road on 20 September, but now he was sanctioning attacks with intervals of five days and then, incredibly, just three days. Why he did not tell Haig, as he had done before, that there was no use pushing divisions forward without artillery supremacy and until all preparations had been completed remains unclear. He left no personal papers or memoirs, and, in any case, Tim Harington insisted they had done the right thing.37 Possibly confusion or incomplete intelligence was to blame–it would have taken days to clarify exactly which positions were held and where units were situated–and it has been suggested that he was ‘swept along by the tide of false optimism’ that emanated from GHQ in its urgency to take the high ground.38 Yet Plumer had never been one to take anything for granted. He had always been a ‘soldier’s general’, steady and clear in his own mind about what needed to be done and fully aware of the lethality of the modern battlefield. So his failure to stand firm on the timing of the attacks, and the essential need for more preparation, can only have been down to a temporary and fateful loss of nerve; a tragic character flaw. Harington never admitted as much, but he was always highly sensitive to any accusation that they had been at fault at Third Ypres, which perhaps betrayed a lingering sense that something had gone wrong. So in those crucial, rushed days, their principles–which had proved so successful all year–were abandoned; trampled in the mud by a Commander-in-Chief who would simply not let go. Far from mounting considered and organized ‘bite-and-hold’ attacks, Haig had once again cast them aside in his elusive, quixotic quest for a breakthrough.
12 October dawned with high winds and a forecast of rain, which came in later, deluging the already sodden battlefield. Most of those at the front knew it was going to be a difficult day. Brigadier-General G. N. Johnston, artillery commander in the New Zealand Division, was so frustrated with the tiresome delays in getting men and material forward, and in deploying his guns, that he reported to both corps and division on 11 October that ‘they could not depend on the artillery for the attack on the following day’.39 Patrols had also discovered that the enemy defences were much less damaged than had been anticipated. At 5.30 a.m. on 11 October–just twenty-four hours before Zero Hour–Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Smith, Commanding Officer of 2/Otago Regiment, despatched a worrying report to his brigade warning them of the strongly held blockhouses and swathes of barbed wire that confronted his battalion. Here the enemy held the high ground and manned (on his sector alone) six pillboxes, and no-man’s-land was ‘three parts filled with water’. He urgently requested a heavy artillery bombardment to clear the way, but this only went ahead during the afternoon, and then with negligible results.40
What followed on the morning of 12 October was a brutal lesson in warfare. A combination of poor artillery support, awful ground conditions, exhausted infantry and a formidable defence stopped the attacks just as effectively as they had on 9 October. The left flank of the main assault was supposed to be secured by men of 9th (Scottish) Division of XVIII Corps, but they progressed barely further than their start line. An after-action report listed a range of sobering conclusions. ‘Brigades attacked on a much wider front than they have been accustomed to lately. The consequence was an increased difficulty in forming up correctly and in keeping correct direction.’ Because the ground was so treacherous, the waves of infantry became strung out and ‘lost’ the barrage, thus suffering the ‘usual consequences’ of attacking without artillery support. Throughout the day communication almost entirely broke down. ‘Wires were cut and visual [signalling] was difficult owing to gun flashes. Pigeons could not fly against the wind and the men in charge of the dogs became casualties.’ Runners–those that were not killed–took hours to get from the front-line battalions to brigade headquarters, but the main problem, and one that other divisions noted, was the ‘thinness and raggedness of the barrage’:
Batteries, moved forward since the last attack, encountered great difficulties and had many guns stuck in the mud. The exhausted state of some of the Brigades owing to casualties and severe weather undoubtedly militated against a good barrage. The lesson seems to be that too much stress cannot be laid on the necessity of constructing roads and railways expressly for the guns.41
Yet, in Flanders in October 1917, this was easier said than done. Across the front that day similar horrifying scenes were recorded and similar damning conclusions were drawn.
The main assault of II ANZAC Corps was to seize the highest part of the ridge, with Monash’s 3rd Division taking the village while the New Zealanders, on their left, attacked the blood-soaked Bellevue Spur. Incredibly their orders demanded an advance, in places, of around 2,500 yards, and included those objectives that had been assigned on 9 October and which should have already been captured by 49th and 66th Divisions. They were supposed to push forward in three bounds: 1,000 yards to the Red Line; another 550 yards to the Blue Line; and a final advance of between 500 and 900 yards to the Green Line (which would take them to the outskirts of Passchendaele). The infantry were to be covered by a creeping barrage moving at an initial rate of 100 yards every four minutes, before slowing down, but even this would be too quick. As had been the case with most of the attacking units, preparations were sketchy and incomplete. In 9 Australian Brigade, for example, no buried cable had been laid further than brigade headquarters (over 2,000 yards from the firing line); there were no forward dumps of food, water and ammunition; and no operation orders had been written, leaving everything to be done face to face and at the last minute.42
In such appalling conditions, that the attack failed was hardly a surprise, more a foregone conclusion. The worst scenes were witnessed in front of the Bellevue Spur, where the New Zealand Division found itself unable to cross broad belts of barbed wire that had been left largely untouched by the bombardment. Given how wet the ground was, many of the shells sank into the soft mud, which dissipated the force of their explosions or prevented them from going off entirely. The New Zealanders had to pick their way over the detritus of the fighting of 9 October–including dead bodies, broken equipment, and the wounded–and do so while dodging their own shells, which frequently fell short and went off among their own struggling lines of infantry. When they had crested the main rise, they were met with vicious bursts of unsuppressed machine-gun and rifle fire, which cut down scores of men. The barbed wire, still uncut, was an impenetrable obstacle, leaving the survivors, alone and exposed, in a death-trap. ‘Hun machine guns and snipers play havoc’, recorded Private Ernest Langford of 2/Otago Regiment. ‘Absolute Hell… Brigade practically wiped out.’43
Amid such awful carnage, acts of enormous courage and valour were commonplace. In 1/Otago Regiment, Second Lieutenants J. J. Bishop and N. F. Watson were both killed while throwing grenades through the loopholes of pillboxes; Captain C. H. Molloy was cut down as he led his company in a forlorn hope; while Second Lieutenant A. R. Cockerell managed to singlehandedly capture a pillbox and take forty enemy soldiers prisoner. Joined by one of his men, he kept going–head down, revolver in hand–and managed to silence another enemy blockhouse, taking another thirty-two prisoners.44 But it was all to be in vain. Two supporting battalions, 1 and 2/Canterbury, tried to move up, but ran into the same nightmare of machine-gun and sniper fire that rapidly brought any forward movement to a dead stop. ‘Party after party made the attempt from either flank,’ recorded the regimental account, ‘and though some got as close as fifteen yards from the pill-boxes, none succeeded in reaching them.’45
As for the Australians, things were little better. According to the war diary of 34/Battalion:
The general condition of the terrain over which the men had to attack was one of the two primary causes for the non-success of the operation. This was in many cases, particularly on the left flank, a marsh across the whole front, a succession of water-filled shell-holes, which not only reduced the rate of advance, but bunched the men together, endeavouring to find a track around the shell-holes. This gave the enemy splendid opportunities for his machine-gun fire.46
Lieutenant G. M. Carson of 33/Battalion was one of those who went forward that day. ‘I nearly got blown to pieces scores of times’, he remembered:
We went through a sheet of iron all night and in the morning it got worse. We attacked at 5.25 [a.m.] and fought all day at times we were bogged up to our arm pits and it took anything from an hour upwards to get out. Lots were drowned in the mud and water. The Bosch[e] gave us Hell but we managed to hold on to the little we had taken till night when we dug in.
Carson would win the Military Medal for his bravery in taking a German pillbox. ‘I waddled up and couldn’t get near it because it was held very strongly and it took one and a half hours to surround it. There were six guns and 30 Bosch[e] in it. I eventually got there but stayed only a few hours as we were compelled to get out.’ He returned from battle with only two of his men still alive, and both of them were wounded.47
The Australians did what they could. 10 Brigade, on the left, only managed to reach their first objective along the Ravebeek Valley, but 9 Brigade, on the right, was able to advance all the way to the Blue Line, on the outskirts of Passchendaele. Showing enormous fighting spirit, three battalions were able to reach the second objective–a march of over 1,700 yards–against heavy resistance.48 Here, on the highest part of the ridge, the 22-year-old commander of ‘B’ Company, 34/Battalion, Captain Clarence Jeffries, won a posthumous Victoria Cross for leading an attack on a series of pillboxes at Hillside Farm. Accompanied by Sergeant James Bruce (who had been a colleague of Jeffries’ father back home and who had promised to keep an eye on the young officer), Jeffries organized a bombing party and outflanked the enemy position (capturing four machine-guns and thirty-five prisoners in the process). Later that day they did the same, running forward, almost into the teeth of German machine-gun fire, to capture a bunch of forty prisoners on the outskirts of Passchendaele. But in this final assault Jeffries fell to the ground, mortally wounded with a bullet in his stomach.49
Sadly 9 Brigade’s heroics could not be maintained. The curse of communications meant that the advance was unknown to brigade headquarters for a number of hours. There was no buried cable and visual signalling was impossible in the smoke and mist, which left the battalions dependent upon their runners and a handful of surviving pigeons. It was impossible to hold on to the Blue Line without fresh and timely reinforcements, leaving the surviving officers in charge with an ominous decision. Their position on the forward slope of the ridge left them exposed to enemy machine-gun and artillery fire for most of the afternoon, including lethal enfilade fire from the Bellevue Spur; and, with no reserves in sight, eventually the order was given for the Blue Line to be given up. 9 Brigade’s casualties had been appalling: forty-nine officers and 915 other ranks had been killed or wounded in the attack on Passchendaele.50
It did not take long for word to spread of the horrors that had befallen the Anzacs. Alexander Birnie of 12th Field Company Engineers (4th Australian Division) was one of those who was wounded that day. He wrote to his parents on 26 October telling them his story:
My dear Mother and Father, here I am once more in England in peace and comfort with a bullet hole through my neck. If it had been an inch closer in I would now be lying out on the bloody Passchendaele Ridge with many hundreds of our good fellows who went West on that day–but you see it didn’t so let me try and give you an account of how 750 men went over the top and less than 50 came back.
Birnie spent the day as a stretcher-bearer. ‘It was heart breaking work’, he remembered; ‘one could do so little and there was so much to do… We could not carry men away but we dressed them, sometimes we simply had to hide in shell holes, it got so very hot.’ Then he was shot by a sniper. ‘Something red hot shot through my neck and I fell into a shell hole. I don’t remember much more for a while until I heard poor old Steven say “Are you dead, Sir? Are you dead? God help those buggers if they’ve killed you.”’ But incredibly Birnie survived. He continued working among the dead and wounded, dodging flurries of shellfire and the odd burst of machine-gun fire. Despite his injuries he kept going, doling out vials of morphine for those with no chance of survival, and listening, with tears in his eyes, as they uttered their final words. When he eventually reached a dressing station, plastered with mud and blood, Birnie was utterly worn out. As he sat down to have his wound dressed, he remembered a verse from his childhood: ‘It’s not the fact that you’re dead that counts, but only[:] how did you die.’51
Yet again the German defensive position on the Flanders I Line had proved incredibly tough. Exhaustion, fear and shock brought on by the endless bombardments may have shredded the nerves of the defenders, but when the time came, they resisted with every ounce of courage and determination they possessed. The true horror of what happened to the New Zealand and Australian battalions was revealed in the combat report of 6 Jäger Regiment, which held the Bellevue Spur. It recorded that:
Despite the heaviest of losses, the troops were in the best of spirits, probably mainly due to the first-rate impact of their guns and in view of the colossal losses among the English. The day was a particularly great day for the machine-guns. As sufficient ammunition was available, and delivered efficiently all day–during the course of this day alone, more than 130,000 rounds of machine-gun ammunition were delivered–all targets that presented themselves could be taken under continuous machine-gun fire. Some of the machine-guns fired up to 15,000 rounds. The consumption of [small arms] ammunition was very significant too. A corporal reports having fired 700 rounds. As the field of fire was often very wide, and as the English presented the most worthwhile mass targets all day long, the effect of the machine-guns was truly devastating for the enemy. It was probably above all thanks to the machine-guns that, despite an enemy incursion on both the right and the left side of our section, the enemy was neither able to roll up the flanks of the battalion, nor to turn its incursion into a breakthrough towards the back.
Working furiously, the Jäger battalions improvised rudimentary cleaning sections, where muddy weapons could be brought in, cleaned up, and then sent back out to the front line, making sure that the fire never slackened off. As if that were not bad enough, the combat report also recorded how the effect of artillery upon the struggling attackers was ‘absolutely exquisite’. By letting off white flares they were able to direct shells to wherever they were needed, while also launching hundreds of mortar bombs, which caught ‘the often concentrated enemy with direct fire’.52
Such an intensity of defensive firepower produced carnage. It was in front of the Bellevue Spur where some of the worst scenes were played out: doomed battalions slugging forward over heavy ground; lines of infantry getting cut down by brutal machine-gun fire; shell holes filled with brown muddy water, now washed red with blood. Colonel Hugh Stewart, a classics professor from Christchurch and commander of 2/Canterbury Regiment, was appalled at the dire vista in his sector. Over 600 dead New Zealanders lay in front of the German barbed wire at the Bellevue Spur and were strewn, like torn rags, along the Gravenstafel road. ‘They had poured out their blood like water’, he wrote bitterly, summing up the reasons why. ‘As the obstacles were overwhelming, so the causes of failure are easy of analysis.’ Certainly, the whole operation was rushed, without sufficient time to reconnoitre the ground and prepare adequately, but Stewart regarded these as only contributing factors. ‘The reasons for our failure lay rather in the inevitable weakness of our artillery barrage, the nature of the ground, the strength of the machine-gun resistance from the pillboxes, and above all in the unbroken wire entanglements.’53
For Major-General Sir Andrew Russell, the New Zealand commander, 12 October was a bitter reminder of the need never to take anything for granted in war. ‘Attacked this morning at daybreak’, he wrote in his diary, ‘we, and indeed all other divisions, were held up at the start by M.G. [fire]. Evidently the artillery preparation was insufficient, the barrage poor, and it goes to show the weakness of haste–our casualties are heavy.’54 An astute soldier, meticulous and professional, Russell had worked hard to forge his division’s reputation as elite troops who never failed. He visited the front several days later and saw for himself the strength of the German position. He realized that his attack had been rushed, but he still insisted his staff should have known and done something about it.55 In total, Russell’s division suffered 3,000 casualties, including nearly 1,000 dead–the only time in the war that they would not achieve their objectives and the single worst day in New Zealand’s military history.56
Monash wrote to his wife on 18 October, bitter at the latest setback. ‘Our men are being put into the hottest fighting and are being sacrificed in hare-brained ventures, like Bullecourt and Passchendaele, and there is no one in the War Cabinet to lift a voice in protest’, he complained. He wrote again three days later, seemingly in a more collected frame of mind. Casualties were evidently still bothering him and he described in detail the system they had evolved for the evacuation of the wounded from the front lines to the Advanced Dressing Stations–almost as if he wanted to reassure himself that everything possible was being done. The average ‘carry’ from the battlefield was over 4,000 yards, with each casualty requiring sixteen stretcher-bearers to get him home (four relay teams of four). ‘Of course, the whole of this enormous department is, relatively speaking, only a small side show in the running of big battle, but throughout every department of the work, both fighting and feeding up supplies, stores and ammunition, I strive to introduce similar systematic methods and order, so that there shall be no muddling, no overlapping, no cross purposes, and everybody has to know exactly what his job is, and when and where he has to do it.’57 He was visibly relieved when he handed over his sector the following day, 22 October. The Anzacs were done.