References

Introduction

1 ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Spectator, 3 January 1958.

2 B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914–1918 (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), p. 367.

3 Ibid., p. 361. The Walcheren Expedition of 1809 was one of the most misconceived military operations of the nineteenth century. A force of 40,000 British troops was assembled at Walcheren, a swampy island at the mouth of the River Scheldt, intending to push on to Antwerp and provide support to Austrian forces fighting against Napoleon Bonaparte. Unfortunately, an armistice between France and Austria was signed shortly before the expedition set sail, and once there the invasion force quickly bogged down. The island was evacuated before the end of the year after the loss of over 4,000 soldiers and thousands more who suffered from so-called ‘Walcheren Fever’.

4 Dan Todman sees it as ‘almost certainly apocryphal’, while Frank Davies and Graham Maddocks call it ‘largely a myth’. See D. Todman, The Great War. Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), p. 81, and F. Davies and G. Maddocks, Bloody Red Tabs. General Officer Casualties of the Great War 1914–1918 (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1995), p. 18.

5 D. Cooper, Haig. The Second Volume (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), pp. 159–60.

6 LHCMA: Liddell Hart Papers, LH 11/1927/17, ‘Talk with General Edmonds–7/10/27’.

7 See R. D. Heinl, Jr, Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1966), p. 360; M. Dewar, An Anthology of Military Quotations (London: Robert Hale, 1990), p. 247; N. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 374; R. Pois and P. Langer, Command Failure in War. Psychology and Leadership (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 143–4; Lord Wedderburn, ‘Laski’s Law behind the Law’, in R. Rawlings (ed.), Law, Society, and Economy. Centenary Essays for the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895–1995 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 33; and S. Blackburn, Mirror, Mirror. The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 104.

8 P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; first publ. 1975), p. 84.

9 D. Todman, ‘Third Ypres: Fact and Fiction’, in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds.), 1917. Tactics, Training and Technology: The 2007 Chief of Army Military History Conference (Canberra: Australian History Military Publications, 2007), p. 202.

10 A. J. P. Taylor, The First World War. An Illustrated History (London: Penguin Books, 1966; first publ. 1963), p. 194.

11 ‘An Officer’s Letter’, The Times, 31 July 1917. It reported that Sassoon was ‘suffering from nervous breakdown’.

12 ‘Memorial Tablet’, in S. Sassoon, Selected Poems (London: William Heinemann, 1940; first publ. 1925), p. 58.

13 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), II, ch. 63.

14 Cooper, Haig, ch. 20.

15 See A. Green, Writing the Great War. Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), ch. 8.

16 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, pp. 366–87.

17 F. Lloyd George, ‘Passchendaele’, The Times, 15 March 1949.

18 Lord Trenchard, ‘Lord Haig’s Decisions’, The Times, 29 January 1949.

19 J. H. Davidson, ‘Lord Haig’s Decisions’, The Times, 16 February 1949.

20 B. H. Liddell Hart, ‘The Basic Truths of Passchendaele’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 616 (November 1959), pp. 435–6.

21 For differing views on the value of Edmonds’s work on Third Ypres see Green, Writing the Great War, p. 194; D. French, ‘“Official But Not History”? Sir James Edmonds and the Official History of the Great War’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 131, No. 1 (1986), pp. 58–63; and T. Travers, The Killing Ground. The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare 1900–1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2003; first publ. 1987), ch. 8.

22 J. A. Terraine, ‘Passchendaele and Amiens I’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 614 (May 1959), p. 173.

23 J. Terraine, Douglas Haig. The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), p. 373. See also J. A. Terraine, ‘Passchendaele and Amiens II’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 615 (August 1959), pp. 331–40. See also Terraine’s collection of documents on Third Ypres: The Road to Passchendaele. The Flanders Offensive of 1917: A Study in Inevitability (London: Leo Cooper, 1977).

24 Terraine and Liddell Hart both worked on the BBC series The Great War (1964), but Liddell Hart (who had been appointed Consultant Historian) asked for his name to be removed from the credits for programmes 13 and 17 (dealing with the Somme and Passchendaele) after suggesting amendments, which were ignored. B. H. Liddell Hart, ‘The Great War’, The Times, 19 September 1964, and Todman, The Great War, pp. 111–13.

25 L. Wolff, In Flanders Fields (London: Longmans, 1960), p. xxiv.

26 See ‘Author’s Foreword’ in L. Macdonald, They Called It Passchendaele. The Story of the Third Battle of Ypres and of the Men Who Fought in It (London: Penguin Books, 1993; first publ. 1978), p. xiii.

27 R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele: The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), pp. xviii, 200.

28 Ibid., p. xix. In the third edition of their book, which was published in 2016, Prior and Wilson survey the current literature on the battle and claim that nothing published since 1996 has substantially challenged their findings.

29 For the Australian and New Zealand experiences of Third Ypres see A. Ekins, ‘The Australians at Passchendaele’, and C. Pugsley, ‘The New Zealand Division at Passchendaele’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), pp. 227–54, 272–91; G. Harper, Massacre at Passchendaele. The New Zealand Story (Brighton: FireStep Books, 2011; first publ. 2000); and A. Macdonald, Passchendaele. The Anatomy of a Tragedy (Auckland: HarperCollins, 2013). Canada’s participation has attracted a number of excellent studies, including, for example, D. Oliver, ‘The Canadians at Passchendaele’, in Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective, pp. 255–71; T. Cook, Shock Troops. Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008); and D. G. Dancocks, Legacy of Valour. The Canadians at Passchendaele (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1986).

30 The literature on the German experience of Passchendaele (in English) is extremely limited. See A. Lucas and J. Schmieschek, Fighting the Kaiser’s War. The Saxons in Flanders 1914/1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2015); R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), pp. 78–88; G. Werth, ‘Flanders 1917 and the German Soldier’, in Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective, pp. 324–32; G. C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks. The Battle in Depth in the West (Westport: Greenwood, 1976; first publ. 1940), ch. 12; and ‘“The Other Side of the Hill”. The Fight for Inverness Copse: 22nd–24th of August 1917’, Army Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (January 1935), pp. 297–303. The most useful account is undoubtedly J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), which explores the battle through little-known German regimental histories.

Prologue: The Nivelle Offensive

1 Nivelle, cited in R. A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory. French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 324.

2 Ibid., pp. 325–6.

3 Ministère de la Guerre, Les Armées Françaises dans La Grande Guerre, Tome V, Vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1937), p. 191.

4 General Karl von Einem (GOC Third Army), cited in M. Nebelin, Ludendorff. Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2010), p. 237. Several other senior officers also expressed discomfort at the ‘scorched earth’ policy, including Crown Prince Rupprecht, who reluctantly went along with it.

5 H. Hagenlücke, ‘The German High Command’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), p. 48.

6 C. Falls, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: Macmillan & Co., 1940), I, p. 488.

7 J. de Pierrefeu, L’Offensive du 16 Avril. La Vérité sur l’affaire Nivelle (Paris: Renaissance du Livre, 1919), pp. 90–91.

8 Ibid., L’Offensive du 16 Avril, p. 92.

9 Ibid., L’Offensive du 16 Avril, p. 93.

10 E. L. Spears, Prelude to Victory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), pp. 506–7, 510–11. Original emphasis.

11 C. Barnett, The Swordbearers. Supreme Command in the First World War (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), p. 193.

12 J. de Pierrefeu, French Headquarters 1915–1918, trans. Major C. J. C. Street (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1924), p. 152.

13 Falls, Military Operations: 1917, I, pp. 498–9.

14 Ministère de la Guerre, Les Armées Françaises, Tome V, Vol. 2, p. 188.

15 Of those divisions that mutinied, forty-six were ‘very much affected’ and of these thirteen were seriously affected. Ibid., pp. 193–4.

16 Pierrefeu, French Headquarters, pp. 179–80.

1. Manoeuvres of War

1 E. L. Spears, Prelude to Victory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), p. 277.

2 ‘Man of the Moment’, The Times, 8 December 1916.

3 ‘Mr Ll. George in Office’, The Times, 8 December 1916.

4 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), II, p. 575.

5 Lloyd George’s War Cabinet consisted of Andrew Bonar Law (Chancellor of the Exchequer), Lord Curzon (Lord President of the Council), Lord Milner (Minister Without Portfolio) and Arthur Henderson (Minister Without Portfolio). Henderson resigned from the War Cabinet on 11 August 1917. He was replaced by George Barnes (Minister of Pensions).

6 French casualty figures taken from R. A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory. French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 309.

7 C. Duffy, Through German Eyes. The British and the Somme 1916 (London: Orion, 2007; first publ. 2006), p. 324.

8 See for example Lloyd George’s speech of 3 November 1916 in which he delivered a typically blunt assessment. ‘We are not getting on with the war… At no point had the Allies achieved a definite clear success.’ Lloyd George, cited in D. R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (London: Associated University Presses, 1983), p. 118.

9 G. A. Leask, Sir William Robertson. The Life Story of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (London: Cassell & Co., 1917), p. 141.

10 TNA: CAB 24/1/G33, Sir W. Robertson, ‘Memorandum on the Conduct of the War’, 8 November 1915.

11 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), I, pp. 466–9.

12 Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals, pp. 133–4.

13 Hankey, The Supreme Command, II, p. 614, and J. Grigg, Lloyd George. War Leader 1916–1918 (London: Penguin Books, 2003; first publ. 2002), pp. 35–8.

14 Appendix 18, ‘Proposed Organization of Unified Command on the Western Front’, 26 February 1917, in Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917: Appendices (London: Macmillan & Co., 1940), pp. 62–3.

15 Sir W. Robertson, Soldiers and Statesmen 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: Cassell & Co., 1926), II, p. 206.

16 Appendix 19, ‘Agreement Signed at Anglo-French Conference Held at Calais’, 26/27 February 1917, in Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917: Appendices, pp. 64–5.

17 F. Stevenson, Lloyd George. A Diary, ed. A. J. P. Taylor (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 157.

18 D. Lieven, Nicholas II. Emperor of All the Russias (London: Pimlico, 1994; first publ. 1993), pp. 231–4.

19 D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 40–41.

20 TNA: CAB 24/11/GT597, J. C. Smuts, ‘The General Strategic and Military Situation and Particularly That on the Western Front’, 29 April 1917. Lloyd George’s notes on the conference can be found in War Memoirs, I, pp. 909–27.

21 TNA: CAB 24/11/GT599, Sir W. Robertson, ‘Operations on West Front’, 30 April 1917.

22 TNA: CAB 23/13, ‘War Cabinet 128 a’, 1 May 1917.

23 TNA: CAB 24/12/GT657, ‘Anglo-French Conference, May 4, and 5, 1917’ and ‘Statement by General Sir William Robertson’.

24 French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, pp. 52–3.

25 Haig diary, 4 May 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 292.

26 P. von Hindenburg, Out of My Life, trans. F. A. Holt (London: Cassell & Co., 1920), pp. 204–5. Emphasis added.

27 W. Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court. The Diaries, Note Books and Letters of Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, 1914–1918 (London: Macdonald & Co., 1961; first publ. 1959), p. 222.

28 Crown Prince Wilhelm, The Memoirs of the Crown Prince of Germany (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922), pp. 154, 157.

29 On 24 March 1917, Karl’s brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon–Parma, agreed to take a letter to President Poincaré. Prince Sixtus was serving in the Belgian Army and acted as an intermediary between the two powers. Karl promised to support France’s claims in Alsace–Lorraine, as well as the liberation of Belgium and Serbia, in exchange for a separate and lasting peace with the Allies. The ‘Sixtus Affair’ was doomed to failure, however, given the impossibility of reconciling Italy’s territorial demands with those requested by Emperor Karl. See A. Watson, Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria–Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2014), pp. 466–7.

30 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XII. Die Kriegführung im Frühjahr 1917 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1939), p. 39.

31 Duffy, Through German Eyes, p. 324.

32 R. Foley, ‘Learning War’s Lessons: The German Army on the Somme, 1916’, Journal of Military History, Vol. 75, No. 2 (April 2011), p. 500.

33 Hindenburg, Out of My Life, pp. 245, 246. For the ‘Hindenburg Programme’ see Watson, Ring of Steel, pp. 378–84.

34 Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court, p. 232.

35 H. Newbolt, History of the Great War. Naval Operations (5 vols., London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928), IV, p. 270. Original emphasis.

36 J. B. Scott (ed.), Official Statements of War Aims and Peace Proposals. December 1916 to November 1918 (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1921), pp. 1–3.

37 Ibid., p. 7.

38 Ibid., pp. 26–8.

39 Newbolt, Naval Operations, IV, p. 370. Original emphasis.

40 Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court, p. 264.

41 D. Steffen, ‘The Holtzendorff Memorandum of 22 December 1916 and Germany’s Declaration of Unrestricted U-Boat Warfare’, Journal of Military History, Vol. 68, No. 1 (January 2004), p. 219.

42 Watson, Ring of Steel, pp. 420–21.

43 TNA: CAB 24/20/GT1496, ‘War Cabinet. The Submarine Situation’, 24 July 1917.

44 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 22.

45 Hindenburg, Out of My Life, p. 265.

46 E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, p. 23.

47 How infantry strengths could decrease while the size of the army actually increased was due to the rapid expansion in the artillery, and the growing demand from supporting and technical units. During this period OHL also created fifty-three new divisions.

48 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 26.

49 Ibid., p. 27.

50 Grundsätze für die Führung in der Abwehrschlacht im Stellungskriege vom 1 Dezember 1916 (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1916). It was reprinted in March 1917, before an updated version was published on 1 September 1917.

51 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

52 TNA: WO 157/22, ‘German Instructions for a Counter-Attack Organized in Depth’ in GHQ Summary of Information, 29 July 1917.

2. Haig and the ‘Northern Operation’

1 Haig to Robertson, 13 August 1917, in D. R. Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915–February 1918 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1989), p. 215.

2 G. Powell, Plumer. The Soldiers’ General (London: Leo Cooper, 1990), p. 228.

3 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 8.

4 See Appendix I, ‘Project for Combined Naval and Military Operations on the Belgian Coast with a View to Preventing the Enemy Using Ostend as a Submarine Base’, 12 November 1916, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 396–8.

5 F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967; first publ. 1961), p. 104.

6 P. Barton, Passchendaele. Unseen Panoramas of the Third Battle of Ypres (London: Constable & Robinson, 2007), p. 17.

7 IWM: Documents 12332, ‘The Journal of John Nettleton of the Rifle Brigade 1914–1919’, p. 86.

8 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 125–6.

9 For Haig and his experiences at Ypres see J. Hussey, ‘A Hard Day at First Ypres: The Allied Generals and Their Problems, 31 October 1914’, British Army Review, No. 107 (August 1994), pp. 75–89; I. F. W. Beckett, Ypres: The First Battle, 1914 (Harlow: Longman, 2004); D. J. De Groot, Douglas Haig, 1861–1928 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 165–8; and N. Gardner, Trial by Fire. Command and the British Expeditionary Force in 1914 (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. 219–20. On the afternoon of 31 October 1914, with the BEF coming under sustained attack, Haig rode forward along the Menin Road to rally his troops. While some historians have cast doubt on the wisdom of doing this, what is clear is the lasting legacy that First Ypres had on Haig–a sense of the fragility of the British line and how near it came to collapse.

10 Haig diary, 14 March 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), pp. 276–7.

11 See P. Simkins, ‘Herbert Plumer’, in I. F. W. Beckett and S. J. Corvi (eds.), Haig’s Generals (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2006), pp. 141–63.

12 TNA: WO 158/214, ‘Army Instructions for Main Offensive on Second Army Front’, 12 December 1916.

13 Appendix V, ‘GHQ Letter to Second Army’, 6 January 1917, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 406–7.

14 Appendix VI, ‘GHQ Instructions for the Formation of a Special Sub-Section of the Operations Section of the General Staff’, 8 January 1917, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 407–9. A memorandum, subsequently produced by the Operations Section, argued for simultaneous assaults at Messines and Pilckem up to the German second line. Two days later a ‘body of tanks’ would go on to capture Broodseinde. Although Haig seems to have been pleased with this memorandum, it was quietly dropped after objections from the Tank Corps. See Appendix VII, ‘Memorandum by Operations Section, General Staff GHQ’, 14 February 1917, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 410–16, and R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), pp. 45–8.

15 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 15–18.

16 See T. Travers, How the War was Won. Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917–1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2005; first publ. 1992), and ‘A Particular Style of Command: Haig and GHQ, 1916–18’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1987), pp. 363–76.

17 For the influence of the ‘structured battle’ in 1915 see N. Lloyd, Loos 1915 (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), pp. 55–7.

18 See R. Prior and T. Wilson, Command on the Western Front. The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ch. 15, and H. Sebag-Montefiore, Somme. Into the Breach (London: Viking, 2016), ch. 3.

19 Sir J. Davidson, Haig. Master of the Field (London: Peter Nevill, 1953), p. 14.

20 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 37–8.

21 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), II, pp. 1249–56.

22 This point is dealt with in J. Terraine, Douglas Haig. The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), pp. 319–21.

23 Haig diary, 18 May 1917, in Sheffield and Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig, p. 294. The attack at Malmaison would actually take place between 23 and 27 October 1917.

24 Davidson, Haig, p. 15.

25 See Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War. 1914–1920 (London: HMSO, 1922), p. 64 (iii). The strength of the BEF peaked on 1 August 1917 with an estimated complement of 2,044,627 men.

26 P. Simkins, ‘The Four Armies 1914–1918’, in D. G. Chandler and I. Beckett (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; first publ. 1994), pp. 250–51.

27 C. Falls, Military Operations. France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: Macmillan & Co., 1940), I, pp. 479–80.

28 See H. Williamson, The Wet Flanders Plain (London: Faber & Faber, 2009; first publ. 1929).

29 T. Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 21.

30 IWM: Documents 4755, H. S. Taylor, ‘Reminiscences of the Great War 1914/1918’, p. 9.

31 M. Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme (London: Penguin Books, 1984; first publ. 1971), p. 88.

32 A. P. Palazzo, ‘The British Army’s Counter-Battery Staff Office and Control of the Enemy in World War I’, Journal of Military History, Vol. 63, No. 1 (January 1999), p. 63.

33 S. Marble, British Artillery on the Western Front in the First World War. ‘The Infantry Cannot Do with a Gun Less’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 163–4.

34 J. H. Morrow, Jr, The Great War in the Air. Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1993), p. 215.

35 P. Hart, Bloody April. Slaughter in the Skies over Arras, 1917 (London: Cassell & Co., 2006; first publ. 2005), p. 11.

36 J. T. B. McCudden, Flying Fury. Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps (Folkestone: Bailey Brothers & Swinfen, 1973; first publ. 1918), pp. 174–5.

37 Shortly before his death in September 1917, the German ace Werner Voss complained that ‘All English single-seaters are superior to the German fighter aircraft in climb, handling, and dive capabilities, and most of them are also superior in speed.’ K. Bodenschatz, Hunting With Richthofen. The Bodenschatz Diaries: Sixteen Months of Battle with JG Freiherr von Richthofen No. 1, trans. J. Hayzlett (London: Grubb Street, 1996), p. 46.

38 The Mark IV weighed 28 tons and was powered by a Daimler six-cylinder engine. It came in two versions: a male, with two 6-pounder guns and four machine-guns; and a female, with just six machine-guns. Each vehicle had a crew of eight. See D. Crow (ed.), AFVs of World War One (Windsor: Profile Publications, 1970), pp. 45–52.

39 The winter of 1916–17 was a watershed in British tactical development. SS 135, Instructions for the Training of Divisions for Offensive Action, was published in December 1916. This was followed by SS 143, Instructions for the Training of Platoons for Offensive Action (February 1917), and SS 144, The Organisation of an Infantry Battalion and the Normal Formation for the Attack (April 1917). Platoons would now be split into four ‘fighting sections’: one with grenade-throwers, another with a Lewis gun, a third with riflemen and snipers, and a fourth with rifle grenades. The platoon was thus ‘a complete and independent tactical unit’. The historian Paddy Griffith argues that SS 143, in particular, was ‘a vital milestone in tactics, marking a changeover from the Victorian era of riflemen in lines to the twentieth-century era of flexible small groups built around a variety of high-firepower weapons’. P. Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front. The British Army’s Art of Attack 1916–1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 77–8.

40 See P. Harris and S. Marble, ‘The “Step-by-Step” Approach: British Military Thought and Operational Method on the Western Front, 1915–1917’, War in History, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2008), pp. 17–42.

41 Rawlinson, cited in Harris and Marble, ‘The “Step-by-Step” Approach’, p. 20.

42 Haig continually prodded Plumer to go deeper into the German lines at Messines. Initially Plumer wanted to advance just 1,500 yards and capture the ridge in two days, but Haig squashed this, telling him to do it all at once. While this was a sensible and appropriate intervention, Haig proved unable to help himself, and in early May urged Plumer to go further, securing not only the villages of Wytschaete and Messines on the ridge, but also marching down the far side of the high ground out to Oosttaverne. This extension would have serious consequences and cause Second Army increased casualties on the afternoon of 7 June. Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, pp. 57–8.

43 I. Passingham, Pillars of Fire. The Battle of Messines Ridge, June 1917 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 29–34.

44 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 32–49.

45 Haig diary, 22 May 1917, in Sheffield and Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig, p. 295.

46 Sir C. Harington, Plumer of Messines (London: John Murray, 1935), p. 84.

3. ‘A Great Sea of Flames’

1 W. Beumelburg, Flandern 1917 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1928), p. 27.

2 Sir C. Harington, Plumer of Messines (London: John Murray, 1935), pp. 79, 100, 103.

3 AWM: 2DRL/0260, Account of R. C. Grieve (‘Messines’), pp. 8–10. Grieve would win a Victoria Cross for his actions that day. See G. Gliddon, VCs of the First World War. Arras and Messines 1917 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), pp. 185–8.

4 AWM: AWM4 1/32/16 Part 1, II ANZAC Corps War Diary, 7 June 1917.

5 IWM: Documents 11080, A. Johnson to his father, 10 June 1917.

6 Guinness diary, 7 June 1917, in B. Bond and S. Robbins (eds.), Staff Officer. The Diaries of Walter Guinness (First Lord Moyne) 1914–1918 (London: Leo Cooper, 1987), p. 156.

7 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations. France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 71.

8 I. Passingham, Pillars of Fire. The Battle of Messines Ridge, June 1917 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 127–32.

9 TNA: WO 157/115, ‘Second Army Summary of Intelligence, 1st to 15th June 1917’.

10 Reitinger in J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), pp. 7–9.

11 Twenty-five mines had been planted, but two were lost to counter-mining (at Peckham Farm and Petit Douve). On the southern edge of the battlefield, a cluster of mines were abandoned shortly before the battle began. One of these (at Birdcage III, northeast of Ploegsteert Wood) exploded in 1955 during a heavy thunderstorm. See A. Turner, Messines 1917. The Zenith of Siege Warfare (Botley: Osprey, 2010), pp. 44, 55.

12 E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, p. 31.

13 Rupprecht diary, 9 June 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, p. 191.

14 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 88.

15 Thaer diary, 11 June 1917, in A. von Thaer, Generalstabsdienst an der Front und in der O.H.L. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), pp. 125–6.

16 G. C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks. The Battle in Depth in the West (Westport: Greenwood, 1976; first publ. 1940), p. 283.

17 Rupprecht, cited in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 142.

18 BA-MA: MSG 2/13418, J. Schärdel, ‘Flandernschlacht 1917’, p. 1.

19 DTA: 3502.1, R. Lewald diary, 13 June 1917.

20 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), pp. 32–3, 50.

21 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 143.

22 IWM: Documents 12512, G. Brunskill diary, 12 August 1917.

23 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 56.

24 Lossberg was known as the ‘Lion of the Defensive’ and ‘directed virtually all the major German defensive battles on the Western Front from the autumn of 1915 to the end of 1917’. See D. T. Zabecki, ‘Fritz von Lossberg’, in D. T. Zabecki (ed.), Chief of Staff. The Principal Officers behind History’s Great Commanders (2 vols., Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008), I, pp. 176–86. Evidently some senior officers resented Lossberg’s predominance. When Albrecht von Thaer telephoned Ludendorff’s Chief of Operations, Georg Wetzell, on 11 June, and told him that Lossberg should be sent to Fourth Army immediately, Wetzell shrugged. ‘But that would look like the German General Staff only had one man who could lead a defensive battle. Thankfully this is not the case!’ ‘Dear Wetzell’, Thaer replied, ‘if you are so sure of final victory that you can afford to lose the forthcoming battle in Flanders, then just forget about your number one man!’ Thaer diary, 11 June 1917, in Thaer, Generalstabsdienst, pp. 125–6.

25 Account taken from F. von Lossberg, Meine Tätigkeit im Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1939), pp. 294–5.

26 Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 40–41; Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 145–6; Beumelburg, Flandern, p. 29.

27 W. Volkart, Die Gasschlacht in Flandern im Herbst 1917 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1957), pp. 20–22. A sixth Eingreif division (2nd Guard Reserve) lay on the northern sector of the battlefield as part of Group Dixmude.

28 Lossberg, Meine Tätigkeit im Weltkrieg, p. 294.

29 Thaer diary, 14 June 1917, in Thaer, Generalstabsdienst, p. 126.

30 P. Maze, A Frenchman in Khaki (Kingswood: William Heinemann, 1934), p. 227.

31 H. Gough, The Fifth Army (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931), p. 193.

32 See A. Farrar-Hockley, Goughie. The Life of General Sir Hubert Gough (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1975).

33 This view has been echoed widely. Even John Terraine, who was the most eloquent and dogged defender of Sir Douglas Haig, admitted that ‘The decision to entrust the main role in the Flanders battle to the Fifth Army under General Gough must be regarded as Haig’s gravest and most fatal error.’ J. Terraine, Douglas Haig. The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), p. 337.

34 G. Sheffield and H. McCartney, ‘Hubert Gough’, in I. F. W. Beckett and S. J. Corvi (eds.), Haig’s Generals (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2006), p. 93.

35 C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (13 vols., Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1941–2), IV, p. 351.

36 Farrar-Hockley, Goughie, p. 218.

37 Gough, Fifth Army, p. 192.

38 R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), pp. 70–77.

39 Appendix XII, ‘Memorandum on the Present Situation and Future Plans Written for the War Cabinet by the Commander-in-Chief’, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 423–7.

40 For Haig’s over-optimism in 1915 see N. Lloyd, Loos 1915 (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), and ‘“With Faith and Without Fear”: Sir Douglas Haig’s Command of First Army during 1915’, Journal of Military History, Vol. 71, No. 4 (October 2007), pp. 1051–76.

41 J. F. C. Fuller, ‘Introduction’ in L. Wolff, In Flanders Fields (London: Longmans, 1960), p. xiv.

42 For a comprehensive examination of Haig and Charteris see J. Beach, Haig’s Intelligence. GHQ and the German Army, 1916–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Beach concludes that the legend of Charteris as a ‘malign intelligence officer’, misleading his chief with over-optimistic intelligence, is something of a caricature. More likely, Charteris realized that he was dependent upon Haig’s patronage and ‘it is not difficult to imagine an almost unconscious process whereby Charteris moulded his assessments to fit with what he believed were Haig’s opinions’ (p. 322). See also J. M. Bourne, ‘Charteris, John (1877–1946)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct. 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/57800, accessed 20 Aug 2015].

43 Haig diary, 2 June 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 297.

44 Appendix XII, ‘Note on the Strategic Situation with Special Reference to the Present Condition of German Resources and Probable German Operations’, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 427–31.

45 D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 86.

46 I. Castle, London 1917–18. The Bomber Blitz (Botley: Osprey, 2010), p. 23. On some of the later raids, the Gothas were joined by one or two R.VI ‘Giants’. These were enormous four-engined strategic bombers capable of carrying a 1,000kg bomb.

47 J. Grigg, Lloyd George. War Leader 1916–1918 (London: Penguin Books, 2003; first publ. 2002), pp. 246–8. See TNA: CAB 23/3, ‘War Cabinet, 163’, 14 June 1917, in which it was agreed to draw upon plans for the further development of aircraft.

48 Robertson to Haig, 13 June 1917, in Grigg, Lloyd George, p. 163. Original emphasis.

49 It was one of Haig’s most unappealing character traits that he was always something of an intriguer–indeed he had more in common with Lloyd George than either of them would have credited. When Robertson heard of this suggestion he flatly refused to go. Nervous of the ramifications of forcing a move, Lloyd George quickly dropped the matter. J. P. Harris, Douglas Haig and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 352–4.

50 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), II, p. 682.

51 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), II, pp. 1272–6. Original emphasis.

52 Haig diary, 19 June 1917, in Sheffield and Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig, p. 300. Original emphasis.

53 Lloyd George, War Memoirs, II, p. 1277.

54 TNA: CAB 27/6, ‘Cabinet Committee on War Policy’, 21 June 1917. Lloyd George’s objections are also discussed at length in War Memoirs, II, pp. 1280–87.

55 Jellicoe’s influence on the decision to approve Third Ypres remains contentious. According to Andrew Wiest, Jellicoe was not particularly worried about the number of U-boats based at Ostend and Zeebrugge (about twelve), but rather the dangers that continued German occupation of the Belgian coast would pose against their crucial line of communication. See A. Wiest, Passchendaele and the Royal Navy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 106–11; J. Terraine, Douglas Haig. The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), pp. 333–4; and S. W. Roskill, ‘The U-Boat Campaign of 1917 and Third Ypres’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 616 (November 1959), pp. 440–42.

56 Milner, cited in French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, p. 117.

57 TNA: CAB 27/6, ‘Cabinet Committee on War Policy’, 21 June 1917.

58 TNA: CAB 27/6, ‘Cabinet Committee on War Policy’, 25 June 1917.

4. ‘Have We Time to Accomplish?’

1 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 55.

2 J. Charteris, At G.H.Q. (London: Cassell & Co., 1931), p. 231.

3 P. Maze, A Frenchman in Khaki (Kingswood: William Heinemann, 1934), pp. 228–30.

4 H. Gough, The Fifth Army (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931), pp. 197–8.

5 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, pp. 126–8.

6 Gough, The Fifth Army, p. 198. Contained in this account is a curious recollection in which Gough states that he would have preferred to limit his advance to the Black Line and not go ‘all out’ for the Green Line. Apparently, both Haig and Plumer disagreed and urged that the Green Line should remain as the main objective. This is highly questionable. At no stage during the planning of the battle had Gough wanted a more limited attack. He remained a firm believer in going as far as they could on the first day. See Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 127–8.

7 Appendix XV, ‘Memorandum Dated 26th June, 1917, by Br.-General J. H. Davidson’, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 436–9.

8 TNA: CAB 45/140, General Sir Hubert Gough, ‘Marginal Notes. Chapter VIII’.

9 Appendix XV, ‘Memorandum by General Sir Hubert Gough’, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 440–42.

10 TNA: CAB 45/140, Gough to Edmonds, 2 February 1944. In the letter Gough incorrectly referred to the night attack on the Somme as taking place in August 1916 (when it was actually fought on 14 July).

11 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 129–32.

12 See R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), chs. 7–8.

13 136 machines would start on the first day. See Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 148, and J. P. Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks. British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 102.

14 J. F. C. Fuller, ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Spectator, 10 January 1958. See also J. Terraine, Douglas Haig. The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), p. 342, and C. Campbell, Band of Brigands. The First Men in Tanks (London: Harper Perennial, 2008; first publ. 2007), pp. 288–9. According to John Terraine, there is no evidence that Haig ever saw such ‘swamp maps’.

15 Sir James Edmonds dealt with this point in the Official History. There was, he wrote, ‘no good reason to abandon the strategic advantages of the Flanders sector and relinquish the chance of freeing the Flanders coast in order to provide harder ground for the mass employment of tanks’. Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 380. See also N. Steel and P. Hart, Passchendaele. The Sacrificial Ground (London: Cassell & Co., 2001; first publ. 2000), p. 88.

16 TNA: WO 95/104, ‘Employment of Tanks’, 19 July 1917.

17 W. H. L. Watson, With the Tanks 1916–1918. Memoirs of a British Tank Commander in the Great War (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2014; first publ. 1920), p. 99.

18 Ministère de la Guerre, Les Armées Françaises dans La Grande Guerre, Tome V, Vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1937), p. 653.

19 J. P. Harris, Douglas Haig and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 360–61. See also TNA: WO 95/519, ‘Notes on Conference at Lovie Chateau’, 16 June 1917.

20 TNA: WO 95/912, ‘Corps Commander’s Conference with Divisional Commanders’, 5 July 1917.

21 Ludendorff, cited in Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, pp. 1–3. Ludendorff’s comment on keeping one’s nerve was somewhat ironic. He would suffer a nervous collapse in September 1918. See N. Lloyd, Hundred Days. The End of the Great War (London: Viking, 2013), pp. 177–80.

22 E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, p. 51.

23 Hindenburg to Bethmann Hollweg, 19 June 1917, in E. Ludendorff, The General Staff and Its Problems. The History of the Relations between the High Command and the German Imperial Government as Revealed by Official Documents, trans. F. A. Holt (2 vols., New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1920), II, pp. 446–9.

24 W. Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court. The Diaries, Note Books and Letters of Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, 1914–1918 (London: Macdonald & Co., 1961; first publ. 1959), p. 276.

25 Bethmann Hollweg to Hindenburg, 25 June 1917, in Ludendorff, The General Staff, II, pp. 449–52.

26 Ludendorff to the Kaiser, 12 July 1917, in Ludendorff, The General Staff, II, p. 461.

27 F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1967; first publ. 1961), pp. 394–6.

28 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 11. See Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, p. 401. Michaelis did not last long. He was forced to resign on 31 October 1917 and was replaced by Georg von Hertling, a 74-year-old Bavarian politician. Although Hertling seemed a more suitable choice for the left and centre deputies, his age and natural conservatism meant that he was little more than a mouthpiece for OHL. See A. Watson, Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria–Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2014), p. 484.

29 Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court, p. 285.

30 M. Nebelin, Ludendorff. Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2010), p. 339.

31 BA-MA: MSG 2/13418, J. Schärdel, ‘Flandernschlacht 1917’, pp. 3–5.

32 Rupprecht’s father, King Ludwig III, was cousin to King Ludwig II, the legendary ‘Swan King’ of Bavaria, whose love of architecture and long-standing friendship with the composer Richard Wagner attracted both worship and derision. He drowned mysteriously in 1886. His brother, Otto, was declared insane in 1875. See C. McIntosh, The Swan King. Ludwig II of Bavaria (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012; first publ. 1982).

33 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, pp. 54, 63. German sources seem to have over-exaggerated the strength of British battalions as well as the number of guns.

34 R. Pawly and P. Courcelle, The Kaiser’s Warlords. German Commanders of World War I (Botley: Osprey, 2003), pp. 27–8. In the German Army, the Chief of Staff was the ‘pivotal figure’ in the whole chain of command. A kind of ‘super-operations officer’, a German Chief of Staff could appeal up the chain of command if he disagreed with his commander. He was, simultaneously, a subordinate of his own commander, but also the High Command’s liaison officer to that commander. See D. T. Zabecki (ed.), Chief of Staff. The Principal Officers behind History’s Great Commanders (2 vols., Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008), I, pp. 9–11.

35 Rupprecht diary, 19 June 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, p. 202.

36 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 54.

37 F. von Lossberg, Meine Tätigkeit im Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1939), pp. 295–302. The order is reproduced (in English) in G. C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks. The Battle in Depth in the West (Westport: Greenwood, 1976; first publ. 1940), Appendix 1, pp. 332–40.

38 R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), p. 79.

39 Lossberg, Meine Tätigkeit im Weltkrieg, p. 304. See also M. D. Karau, ‘Wielding the Dagger’. The MarineKorps Flandern and the German War Effort, 1914–1918 (London and Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. 150–51.

40 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 118–22.

5. ‘Under Constant Fire’

1 Kuhl, in J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), p. 52.

2 S. Marble, British Artillery on the Western Front in the First World War. ‘The Infantry Cannot Do with a Gun Less’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 187.

3 C. Falls, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: Macmillan & Co., 1940), I, pp. 177–9.

4 Marble, British Artillery, p. 173, n. 77. For Haig’s ‘bold’ comment see p. 174.

5 The devastating bombardment prior to the German Spring Offensive on 21 March 1918 could probably lay claim to being the last great preliminary bombardment of the war. However, the crucial difference with Third Ypres was that it was concentrated into a short period of time–just five hours–and aimed at neutralizing enemy defences without sacrificing surprise. See D. T. Zabecki, Steel Wind. Colonel Georg Bruchmüller and the Birth of Modern Artillery (London and Westport: Praeger, 1994).

6 Artillery statistics and frontages taken from Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 138, n. 2. There seems to be some confusion about the length of front bombarded during the battle. Sanders Marble cites 13,200 yards (7.5 miles), and Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson claim that the frontages of attack at Arras, Messines and Ypres were ‘not greatly different’. Both, therefore, seem to underestimate the length of front at Third Ypres. See Marble, British Artillery, p. 189, n. 153, and R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), p. 82.

7 Exact figures for the number of German guns are not available. The German Official History records 389 batteries in Flanders (approximately 1,556 guns), with Edmonds citing a total of 1,040 guns opposite Fifth and Second Armies. A later reference in the German account describes 1,162 guns, so the truth is probably somewhere in between. Confusingly, Prior and Wilson claim that the number of German guns was seriously underestimated by Fifth Army intelligence (by up to 50 per cent). Given that GHQ intelligence had arrived at the reasonably accurate figure of 1,500 guns, this would seem to be incorrect. In his examination of British intelligence, Jim Beach finds that ‘the picture of German forces provided before Third Ypres was fairly comprehensive’. See Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), pp. 54, 63; Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 136, n. 2; Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, p. 84; and J. Beach, Haig’s Intelligence. GHQ and the German Army, 1916–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 249.

8 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 137, n. 3.

9 See V. E. Inglefield, The History of the Twentieth (Light) Division (London: Nisbet & Co., 1921), p. 145.

10 TNA: WO 95/520, Captain G. W. Monier-Williams to Headquarters, Fifth Army, 14 July 1917.

11 Further gas bombardments followed throughout the month, including on 15 July (when 1,000 rounds were fired on the Ypres–Menin road); 17 and 27 July (when gas targeted British lines of communication and barracks behind Ypres); 20/21 July (battery positions south of Ypres); and 28/29 July (when Armentières and Nieuport were shelled with mustard gas). W. Volkart, Die Gasschlacht in Flandern im Herbst 1917 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1957), pp. 51–2.

12 J. H. Boraston and C. E. O. Bax, The Eighth Division 1914–1918 (Uckfield: Naval & Military Press, 2001; first publ. 1926), p. 124.

13 IWM: Documents 15758, Account of Colonel F. W. Mellish, pp. 27–8.

14 H. Gordon, The Unreturning Army. A Field-Gunner in Flanders, 1917–18 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1967), pp. 52–4.

15 IWM: Documents 8214, F. A. Sclater, ‘His War’, p. 8.

16 P. Maze, A Frenchman in Khaki (Kingswood: William Heinemann, 1934), p. 227.

17 I. F. W. Beckett, ‘Operational Command: The Plans and Conduct of the Battle’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), pp. 110–11.

18 There were 508 British aircraft, plus 200 French, 40 Belgian and another 104 Royal Naval Air Service planes (operating out of Dunkirk). H. A. Jones, The War in the Air. Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–37), IV, p. 142.

19 Ibid., pp. 145–6.

20 IWM: Documents 3215, ‘Recollections by A. Sambrook’, p. 60.

21 K. Bodenschatz, Hunting With Richthofen. The Bodenschatz Diaries: Sixteen Months of Battle with JG Freiherr von Richthofen No. 1, trans. J. Hayzlett (London: Grubb Street, 1996), pp. 25–6.

22 E. R. Hooton, War over the Trenches. Air Power and Western Front Campaigns 1916–1918 (Hersham: Ian Allen, 2010), p. 164.

23 Robertson to Haig, 18 July 1917, in D. R. Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915–February 1918 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1989), pp. 203–4.

24 Haig to Robertson, 21 July 1917, in Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, pp. 205–6.

25 Similar scenes of operational confusion were not unique to Third Ypres. The Battle of Loos in September and October 1915 was badly hampered by a lack of clarity over whether it was a limited or unlimited attack. See N. Lloyd, Loos 1915 (Stroud: Tempus, 2006).

26 ‘The Peace Resolution of the Reichstag of July 19, 1917’, in E. Ludendorff, The General Staff and Its Problems. The History of the Relations between the High Command and the German Imperial Government as Revealed by Official Documents, trans. F. A. Holt (2 vols., New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1920), II, pp. 475–6.

27 J. Charteris, At G.H.Q. (London: Cassell & Co., 1931), p. 237.

28 Beach, Haig’s Intelligence, pp. 246–7.

29 KA: (WK) 1789, Gruppe Ieperen Kriegstagebuch, 17 July 1917.

30 KA: (WK) 1789, Gruppe Ieperen Kriegstagebuch, 25 July 1917. Other divisions received less charitable assessments. 8th, 39th and 55th Divisions were classed as ‘average’, 25th as ‘good average’, while 38th Division was only ‘mediocre’.

31 F. von Lossberg, Meine Tätigkeit im Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1939), p. 307.

32 W. Beumelburg, Flandern 1917 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1928), p. 30.

33 Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, p. 87.

34 Rau in Sheldon, Passchendaele, p. 41.

35 Histories of Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army Which Participated in the War (1914–1918) (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), pp. 725–6.

36 TNA: WO 157/213, Fifth Army Summary of Information, 2 August 1917.

37 Marble, British Artillery, p. 189.

38 TNA: WO 95/642, II Corps Summary of Information, 25 July 1917.

39 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 61.

40 DTA: 3502.1, R. Lewald diary, 9 August 1917.

41 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 138, n. 1.

42 R. Binding, A Fatalist at War, trans. I. F. D. Morrow (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1929), p. 176.

43 BA-MA: MSG 2/13418, J. Schärdel, ‘Flandernschlacht 1917’, pp. 8–10.

44 Beumelburg, Flandern, p. 30.

45 Rupprecht diary, 28 July 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, pp. 230–31.

46 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 62.

47 TNA: WO 157/23, Advanced GHQ Summary of Information, 24 August 1917.

48 KA: (WK) 2523, ‘Nachrichtenblatt für 29.7.17’.

49 Charteris, At G.H.Q., p. 237.

6. ‘A Perfect Bloody Curse’

1 Thaer diary, 1 August 1917, in A. von Thaer, Generalstabsdienst an der Front und in der O.H.L. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), p. 131.

2 F. von Lossberg, Meine Tätigkeit im Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1939), p. 307.

3 BA-MA: MSG 2/13418, J. Schärdel, ‘Flandernschlacht 1917’, pp. 13–14.

4 H. A. Jones, The War in the Air. Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–37), IV, pp. 160–62. See also Appendix CII, ‘V Brigade R.F.C. Order No. 53 for 31st July 1917’, pp. 421–2.

5 IWM: Documents 20504, W. B. St Leger diary, 31 July 1917.

6 See Ministère de la Guerre, Les Armées Françaises dans La Grande Guerre, Tome V, Vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1937), pp. 670–75.

7 See C. Headlam, History of the Guards Division in the Great War 1915–1918 (Uckfield: Naval & Military Press, 2001; first publ. 1924), pp. 243–5.

8 F. W. Bewsher, The History of the Fifty First (Highland) Division 1914–1918 (Uckfield: Naval & Military Press, 2001; first publ. 1920), p. 205.

9 E. Blunden, Undertones of War (London: Penguin Books, 2010; first publ. 1928), pp. 154–5.

10 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, pp. 157–8.

11 TNA: WO 95/2903, ‘55th (West Lancashire) Division. Report on Operations, Ypres. July 29th to August 4th, 1917’.

12 S. Snelling, VCs of the First World War. Passchendaele 1917 (Stroud: The History Press, 2012; first publ. 1998), p. 11.

13 TNA: WO 95/104, ‘Summary of Tank Operations. 31st July, 1917. 3rd Brigade, Tank Corps’.

14 IWM: Documents 4755, H. S. Taylor, ‘Reminiscences of the Great War 1914/1918’, p. 13.

15 TNA: WO 95/104, ‘Preliminary Report on Tank Operations 31st July, 1917’.

16 TNA: WO 95/101, ‘2nd Brigade Tank Corps. Report on Tank Operations. 31st July 1917’.

17 J. H. Boraston and C. E. O. Bax, The Eighth Division 1914–1918 (Uckfield: Naval & Military Press, 2001; first publ. 1926), pp. 128–30.

18 TNA: WO 95/642, ‘Narrative of Operations on July 31st, 1917 by II Corps’, p. 2.

19 TNA: WO 95/2328, ‘Report on Operations between Zero Hour 31st July and 5 a.m. 3rd August 1917. 19th Bn Manchester Regiment’.

20 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 154–6.

21 BA-MA: MSG 2/13418, J. Schärdel, ‘Flandernschlacht 1917’, p. 17. The Prussian unit mentioned was 52nd Reserve Division, which moved up that morning to support 6th Bavarian Reserve Division. For the difficulties of this relief see J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), pp. 51–2.

22 TNA: WO 157/213, Fifth Army, Summary of Information, 4 August 1917.

23 A. Grossmann, Das K.B. Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 17 (Munich: Kriegsarchivs, 1923), pp. 79–80.

24 A. Buttman, Kriegsgeschichte des Königlich Preußischen 6. Thüringischen Infanterie-Regiments Nr. 95 1914–1918 (Zeulenroda: Verlag Bernhard Sporn, 1935), p. 234.

25 A. Grossmann, Das K.B. Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 17 (Augsburg: D. Eisele & Sohn, 1926), p. 116.

26 KA: (WK) 2523, ‘Nachrichtenblatt für 31.7.17’.

27 Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 57–8.

28 KA: (WK) 8319, ‘Gefechtsbericht der am 31. Juli und 1. August 1917 bei der 6. Bayr. Res. Div. eingesetzten Infanterie-Teile der 52. Res. Division’.

29 KA: (WK) 2523, ‘Nachrichtenblatt für 31.7.17’.

30 Lossberg, Meine Tätigkeit im Weltkrieg, p. 307.

31 These were 2nd Guard Reserve in the north, 50th Reserve and 221st Divisions in the centre, and 207th, 12th and 119th Divisions in support of Group Wytschaete. See Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 71–2, and Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 171, n. 1.

32 KA: (WK) 1789, Gruppe Ieperen. Kriegstagebuch, 31 July 1917.

33 E. Riddell and M. C. Clayton, The Cambridgeshires 1914 to 1919 (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1934), p. 107.

34 P. Maze, A Frenchman in Khaki (Kingswood: William Heinemann, 1934), p. 245.

35 TNA: WO 95/2903, ‘55th (West Lancashire) Division. Report on Operations, Ypres. July 29th to August 4th, 1917’.

36 TNA: WO 95/959, XIX Corps War Diary, 31 July 1917.

37 E. R. Hooton, War over the Trenches. Air Power and Western Front Campaigns 1916–1918 (Hersham: Ian Allen, 2010), p. 182.

38 IWM: Documents 3980, J. S. Walthew to ‘my dear Uncle Tom’, 2 August 1917.

39 Wohlenberg in Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 79–80.

40 Riddell and Clayton, The Cambridgeshires, p. 118.

41 Boraston and Bax, The Eighth Division, p. 134. For Coffin see Snelling, Passchendaele 1917, pp. 27–30.

42 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 171–4, and F. Zechlin, Das Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 60 im Weltkriege (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1926), pp. 129–31.

43 KA: (WK) 1789, Gruppe Ieperen. Kriegstagebuch, 31 July 1917.

44 See for example Zechlin, Das Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 60, p. 132.

45 A. Farrar-Hockley, Goughie. The Life of General Sir Hubert Gough (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1975), pp. 221–2.

46 Gough ordered a Court of Inquiry to investigate why 30th Division had been unable to capture the Black Line. It concluded that ‘there was neither failure nor neglect’ in the handling of the attacking brigades, and that they had suffered from the difficult ground, which caused them to lose their creeping barrage. See TNA: WO 95/2312, ‘Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry Assembled at Headquarters 30th Division on the 10th day of August, 1917’, and J. Beach, ‘Issued by the General Staff: Doctrine Writing at British GHQ, 1917–1918’, War in History, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2012), pp. 480–81.

47 H. Gough, The Fifth Army (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931), p. 201.

48 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 177–8.

49 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium, 1916. Sir Douglas Haig’s Command to the 1st July: Battle of the Somme (London: Macmillan & Co., 1932), p. 483.

50 C. Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 189.

51 C. H. Dudley Ward, History of the Welsh Guards (London: John Murray, 1920), p. 157.

52 KA: (WK) 1789, ‘Kriegstagebuch während der Zeit des Einsatzes als Gruppe Ieperen. 1.7.17–31.7.17’.

53 R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), p. 82.

54 Lossberg, Meine Tätigkeit im Weltkrieg, p. 308.

55 Thaer diary, 1 August 1917, in Thaer, Generalstabsdienst, p. 131.

56 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 65.

57 W. Volkart, Die Gasschlacht in Flandern im Herbst 1917 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1957), p. 57.

58 Rupprecht diary, 1 August 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, pp. 232–4.

59 Haig diary, 1 August 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 308.

60 Haig diary, 2 August 1917, in Sheffield and Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig, p. 310.

61 IWM: Documents 7003, A. H. Roberts diary, 3–4 August 1917.

62 TNA: WO 95/14, ‘Daily Values of Rainfall’, July–August 1917. The accusation that such rainfall could have been foreseen seems to have come from John Charteris. In his biography of Haig, he states that GHQ knew ‘that in Flanders the weather broke early each August with the regularity of the Indian monsoon’. See Field-Marshal Earl Haig (London: Cassell & Co., 1929), p. 272. These remarks have led some writers (David Lloyd George, Basil Liddell Hart, Leon Wolff and Gerard De Groot) to criticize Haig for launching an offensive so late in the year when the possibility of wet conditions should have been anticipated. However, there seems little truth in these allegations. The historian John Hussey, who has analysed meteorological data, shows that Third Ypres ‘was not a reckless gamble on a rainless autumn’. The weather was extraordinary and unexpected. August and October were abnormally wet. Furthermore, Ernest Gold, who headed the Meteorological Section at GHQ, stated that Charteris’s statement was ‘so contrary to recorded facts that, to a meteorologist, it seems too ridiculous to need formal refutation’. See J. Hussey, ‘The Flanders Battleground and the Weather in 1917’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), pp. 140–58.

63 J. Charteris, At G.H.Q. (London: Cassell & Co., 1931), p. 241.

7. ‘Like the Black Hole of Calcutta’

1 IWM: Documents 12332, ‘The Journal of John Nettleton of the Rifle Brigade 1914–1919’, p. 100.

2 IWM: Documents 14196, G. Carter diary, 6 August 1917.

3 IWM: Documents 12332, ‘The Journal of John Nettleton of the Rifle Brigade 1914–1919’, pp. 87–8.

4 TNA: WO 95/520, ‘Notes on Conference Held at Lovie Chateau on 7th August’.

5 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, pp. 185–6.

6 IWM: Sound 717, K. Page (interview, 1975).

7 TNA: WO 95/662, ‘Daily Progress Report’, 4 August 1917.

8 G. H. F. Nichols, The 18th Division in the Great War (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1922), pp. 216–17. According to the divisional history, to capture Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood under such conditions would have been a ‘military miracle’ (p. 218).

9 Guinness diary, 10 August 1917, in B. Bond and S. Robbins (eds.), Staff Officer. The Diaries of Walter Guinness (First Lord Moyne) 1914–1918 (London: Leo Cooper, 1987), pp. 167–9.

10 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 189–90, and TNA: WO 95/14, ‘Daily Values of Rainfall’, August 1917.

11 See Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 190–201.

12 IWM: Documents 12332, ‘The Journal of John Nettleton of the Rifle Brigade 1914–1919’, pp. 93–7.

13 TNA: WO 95/2947, ‘Operations Carried out by 167th Infantry Brigade from 12th to 17th August 1917’, p. 2.

14 TNA: WO 95/2947, GA 896, Headquarters, 56th Division, 19 August 1917.

15 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 194–5.

16 C. Falls, The History of the 36th (Ulster) Division (London and Belfast: M’Caw, Stevenson & Orr, 1922), p. 116.

17 N. Steel and P. Hart, Passchendaele. The Sacrificial Ground (London: Cassell & Co., 2001; first publ. 2000), p. 154.

18 IWM: Documents 982, R. J. Clarke to his mother, 21 August 1917.

19 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 68.

20 According to the official history of the RAF, the weather was misty with cloudy patches. German smoke shells, which spread over the battlefield, also hindered observation. The infantry’s reluctance to signal their position through the use of flares may also have contributed to this failure. H. A. Jones, The War in the Air. Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–37), IV, pp. 172–3.

21 A. Karl Reber, Das K.B. 21. Infanterie Regiment. Großherzog Friedrich Franz IV. von Mecklenburg-Schwerin (Munich: Verlag Max Schick, 1929), pp. 216–17.

22 P. Kilduff, Richthofen. Beyond the Legend of the Red Baron (London: Arms & Armour, 1993), p. 146.

23 W. Beumelburg, Flandern 1917 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1928), p. 90.

24 Rupprecht diary, 16 August 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, p. 246.

25 DTA: 3502.1, R. Lewald diary, 14 August 1917.

26 Ibid., 16 August 1917.

27 KA: (WK) 2523, ‘Nachrichtenblatt Nr. 33 (für die Zeit 15.8 mit 16.8.17)’.

28 TNA: CAB 23/3, ‘War Cabinet, 204’, 3 August 1917.

29 TNA: CAB 24/22/GT1621, ‘Report on the Battle of 31st July, 1917, and Its Results’, 4 August 1917.

30 Robertson to Haig, 9 August 1917, cited in D. R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (London: Associated University Presses, 1983), p. 193.

31 Haig to Robertson, 13 August 1917, in D. R. Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915–February 1918 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1989), pp. 215–16. Original emphasis.

32 G. W. L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War. Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962), p. 297.

33 T. Cook, Shock Troops. Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008), pp. 305–7.

34 TNA: WO 256/21, Haig diary, 19 August 1917. Original emphasis.

35 Haig to Robertson, 13 August 1917, in Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, pp. 215–16.

36 J. Beach, Haig’s Intelligence. GHQ and the German Army, 1916–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 250–54.

37 J. Charteris, At G.H.Q. (London: Cassell & Co., 1931), pp. 245–7. Original emphasis.

38 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), II, p. 702.

39 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), II, pp. 1313–15, for the ‘tactics of deception’.

40 TNA: CAB 23/3, ‘War Cabinet, 203’, 2 August 1917.

41 TNA: CAB 23/3, ‘War Cabinet, 217’, 17 August 1917.

42 Hankey, The Supreme Command, II, p. 693.

43 J. Grigg, Lloyd George. War Leader 1916–1918 (London: Penguin Books, 2003; first publ. 2002), p. 220. Smuts’s report, which recommended the creation of an independent air service, the Royal Air Force, can be found in TNA: CAB 24/22/GT1658, ‘War Cabinet Committee on Air Organisation and Home Defence against Air Raids’, 17 August 1917.

44 TNA: CAB 24/24/GT1814, ‘Report on Operations in Flanders from 4th August to 20th August, 1917’, 21 August 1917.

45 See R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), pp. 104–5.

46 TNA: WO 95/520, ‘Notes on Army Commander’s Conference Held at Lovie Chateau on 17th August, 1917’. In fairness to Gough, he was also keen to hear from commanders, down to brigade level, about how best to tackle the German defensive system. This sudden urge for agreement and consensus was, however, too little, too late. J. Beach, ‘Issued by the General Staff: Doctrine Writing at British GHQ, 1917–1918’, War in History, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2012), pp. 480–81.

47 H. Gough, The Fifth Army (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931), p. 205.

48 Steel and Hart, Passchendaele, p. 155.

49 For Gough’s continuation of small-scale, ‘penny-packet’ attacks, see Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, pp. 108–10.

50 IWM: Documents 6993, M. W. Littlewood diary, 3–28 August 1917.

51 P. Gibbs, Now It Can be Told (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1920), p. 476.

52 Falls, The History of the 36th (Ulster) Division, p. 122.

53 M. Hardie, cited in A. Watson, Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 153.

54 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 202, and TNA: WO 95/520, ‘Notes on Army Commander’s Conference Held at Lovie Chateau on 17th August, 1917’.

8. ‘A Question of Concentration’

1 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), II, p. 693.

2 W. Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court. The Diaries, Note Books and Letters of Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, 1914–1918 (London: Macdonald & Co., 1961; first publ. 1959), p. 295.

3 Rupprecht diary, 20 August 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, p. 248.

4 R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), pp. 82, 87. For German losses see Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 230.

5 E. Greenhalgh, The French Army and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 236–40.

6 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 212.

7 Ibid., pp. 218–21. See also J. and E. Wilks, Rommel and Caporetto (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2001), pp. 8–12, and E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, pp. 97–100.

8 TNA: WO 95/951, XVIII Corps War Diary, Appendix C, ‘Narrative of Operations of 19th August, 1917’. According to J. F. C. Fuller, this ‘very memorable feat of arms’ produced the ‘most remarkable results… for instead of 600 casualties the infantry following the tanks only sustained fifteen!’ J. F. C. Fuller, Tanks in the Great War 1914–1918 (London: John Murray, 1920), pp. 122–3.

9 TNA: WO 95/98, ‘“G” Battalion. Tank Corps. Report on Operations–19/8/1917’.

10 Elles and Fuller, cited in J. P. Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks. British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 103.

11 TNA: WO 95/104, ‘Report on Tank Operations with XIX Corps–22nd August, 1917’.

12 So determined were the Germans to maintain their hold on this important location that they conducted at least three counter-attacks and even deployed fearsome flamethrower teams to drive the British out of the woods. See G. C. Wynne, ‘“The Other Side of the Hill”. The Fight for Inverness Copse: 22nd–24th of August 1917’, Army Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (January 1935), pp. 297–303.

13 TNA: WO 95/1871, ‘Notes on the Attack by 43rd Light Infantry Brigade. 22nd August 1917’.

14 IWM: Documents 22753, G. N. Rawlence diary, 23–25 August 1917.

15 TNA: WO 95/1871, 43 Brigade, ‘Lessons from the Attack’, 29 August 1917.

16 KA: (WK) 2523, ‘Nachrichtenblatt Nr. 36 (für die Zeit 23.8 mit 24.8.17)’.

17 Rupprecht diary, 23 August 1917, in Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch, II, p. 249.

18 Ibid., 25 August 1917.

19 Thaer diary, 23 August 1917, in A. von Thaer, Generalstabsdienst an der Front und in der O.H.L. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), pp. 133–4.

20 KA: (WK) 2233, ‘AOK 4, 26 August 1917. Wichtigste Erfahrungen der Kampf-reserven der Armee aus den Schlachten am 31.7 und 16.8.17’.

21 Lloyd George to Robertson, 26 August 1917, in D. R. Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915–February 1918 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1989), pp. 219–20.

22 M. Thompson, The White War. Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1919 (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 243.

23 TNA: CAB 23/3, ‘War Cabinet, 224’, 27 August 1917.

24 TNA: CAB 23/13, ‘War Cabinet, 225 A’, 28 August 1917.

25 D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 137–9; Haig diary, 4 September 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), pp. 321–2; and TNA: CAB 23/13, ‘War Cabinet, 227c’, 4 September 1917.

26 TNA: WO 95/951, XVIII Corps, ‘Narrative of Operations of 27th August, 1917’.

27 TNA: WO 95/3034, 61st Division War Diary, August 1917.

28 A. G. Lee, No Parachute. A Fighter Pilot in World War I (London: Jarrolds, 1968), p. 105.

29 TNA: WO 95/520, ‘Summary of Operations of Fifth Army, for Week Ending 6 p.m., 24th Aug., 1917’.

30 TNA: WO 95/520, ‘Notes on Conference Held at Lovie Chateau, 25th August, 1917 [issued on 26 August 1917]’, and Fifth Army to corps, 28 August 1917.

31 TNA: WO 95/2540, Gough to Fifth Army, 2 September 1917. Every commanding officer received a copy of this letter. Gough was apparently angry with the two Irish divisions, telling Haig that their failure to hold on to their gains was because ‘the men are Irish and did not like the shelling’. Haig diary, 17 August 1917, in Sheffield and Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig, p. 317.

32 For an example of Gough’s petulance and aggression towards subordinates see his treatment of Major-General E. S. Bulfin (GOC 28th Division) at the Battle of Loos. Between 27 September and 5 October 1915, Bulfin’s division was repeatedly ordered to make a series of hopeless advances across no-man’s-land without sufficient artillery support. See N. Lloyd, Loos 1915 (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), pp. 192–7.

33 An amphibious landing on the Belgian coast had been considered by British war planners since at least December 1914 and periodically resurfaced over the next two and a half years. Haig tasked General Sir Henry Rawlinson with planning the operation, and envisaged 1st Division landing along the coast from Westende Bains to Middelkerke, and then linking up with an attack from the Yser bridgehead, pushing towards Ostend. The landing seems to have been planned with thoroughness and care. Andrew Wiest argues that it was ‘a real and viable option… that could have liberated much of the Belgian coast’. This is debatable, however. The German historian of the MarineKorps, which defended the coastal sector, gives it short shrift. ‘Given the advanced state of the Flanders defences, it seems highly unlikely that the British landing would have been anything other than a disaster.’ See Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 116–17; A. Wiest, Passchendaele and the Royal Navy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1995), p. xxiii; and M. D. Karau, ‘Wielding the Dagger’. The MarineKorps Flandern and the German War Effort, 1914–1918 (London and Westport: Praeger, 2003), p. 161.

34 Haig diary, 25 August 1917, in J. Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele. The Flanders Offensive of 1917: A Study in Inevitability (London: Leo Cooper, 1977), p. 240.

35 TNA: WO 95/520, Kiggell to Gough, 28 August 1917, and R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), pp. 108–9.

36 Haig seems to have been influenced by the unpopularity of Gough’s Chief of Staff, Neill Malcolm, who was accused of concealing information from his commander. See I. F. W. Beckett, ‘Operational Command: The Plans and Conduct of the Battle’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), p. 110.

37 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 207.

38 TNA: WO 95/275, Plumer to GHQ, 12 August 1917.

39 Appendix XXV, ‘Second Army’s Notes on Training and Preparation for Offensive Operations’, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 459–64.

40 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 236–7.

41 Appendix XXI, ‘Second Army Operation Order No. 4 of the 1st September, 1917’, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 449–50.

42 TNA: WO 95/98, I Brigade Tank Corps, ‘Allotment of Tanks to Objectives for Operations on 20th September 1917’.

43 TNA WO 95/275, ‘General Principles on Which the Artillery Plan Will be Drawn’.

44 TNA: WO 95/275, ‘Statement Showing the Rounds per Gun, Number of Guns and the Number of Rounds Required for a 7 Day Bombardment’. Plumer would also be able to employ significant amounts of the No. 106 Instant Percussion Fuse, which had recently been developed. These fuses offered a much more satisfactory method of wire-cutting by using high-explosive shells, rather than conventional shrapnel. The 106 ‘detonated the shell immediately it impacted the ground, before it had dug itself into the earth’. This ensured that the blast went outwards, horizontally, rather than upwards, giving better results at breaking down wire entanglements. Moreover, it could do so without cratering the ground. See P. Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front. The British Army’s Art of Attack 1916–1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 140.

9. ‘An Introduction to Hard Work’

1 TNA: WO 95/275, Plumer to GHQ, 12 August 1917.

2 C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (13 vols., Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1941–2), IV, p. 734, n. 149. See also A. Elkins, ‘The Australians at Passchendaele’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), pp. 231–2.

3 E. P. F. Lynch, Somme Mud. The Experiences of an Infantryman in France, 1916–1919, ed. W. Davies (London: Bantam, 2008; first publ. 2006), p. 231.

4 IWM: Documents 3215, ‘Recollections by A. Sambrook’, p. 56.

5 C. E. W. Bean, Making the Legend. The War Writings of C. E. W. Bean, ed. D. Winter (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1992), pp. 23–4.

6 Bean, The Official History of Australia, IV, p. 734.

7 TNA: WO 95/3535, ‘Advance Report on Operations of 5th Australian Division’.

8 AWM: AWM4 1/46/11, 4th Australian Division War Diary, 11–20 September 1917.

9 AWM: 2DRL/0512, B. W. Champion diary, 13 August 1917.

10 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations. France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, pp. 243–4. These minor operations were intended to improve the line and secure a number of strongpoints along the front. Both attacks failed.

11 Bean, The Official History of Australia, IV, p. 748.

12 C. Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 191.

13 W. H. L. Watson, With the Tanks 1916–1918. Memoirs of a British Tank Commander in the Great War, ed. B. Carruthers (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2014; first publ. 1920), pp. 126–7.

14 J. T. B. McCudden, Flying Fury. Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps (Folkestone: Bailey Brothers & Swinfen, 1973; first publ. 1918), p. 183.

15 Ibid., pp. 186–7.

16 K. Bodenschatz, Hunting with Richthofen. The Bodenschatz Diaries: Sixteen Months of Battle with JG Freiherr von Richthofen No. 1, trans. J. Hayzlett (London: Grubb Street, 1996), pp. 37–8.

17 E. R. Hooton, War over the Trenches. Air Power and Western Front Campaigns 1916–1918 (Hersham: Ian Allen, 2010), pp. 175–8.

18 H. A. Jones, The War in the Air. Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–37), IV, pp. 180–81.

19 Ibid., p. 202.

20 Haig diary, 28 August 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 320.

21 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 244–7.

22 AWM: AWM4 14/2/2, Chief Engineer I ANZAC Corps, War Diary, 5–18 September 1917.

23 See J. Lee, ‘Command and Control in Battle: British Divisions on the Menin Road Ridge, 20 September 1917’, in G. Sheffield and D. Todman (eds.), Command and Control on the Western Front. The British Army’s Experience 1914–1918 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2004), pp. 119–39, which details the ‘blizzard of paperwork’ that divisional commanders faced.

24 AWM: 2DRL/0512, B. W. Champion diary, 6 September 1917.

25 Bean, The Official History of Australia, IV, pp. 752–3.

26 Appendix XXII, ‘Second Army Addendum of 10th September 1917, to Operation Order No. 4 of 1st September 1917’, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 451–2.

27 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 71.

28 Thaer diary, 11 September 1917, in A. von Thaer, Generalstabsdienst an der Front und in der O.H.L. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), pp. 136–7.

29 See C. Duffy, Through German Eyes. The British and the Somme 1916 (London: Orion, 2007; first publ. 2006), pp. 41–5, for the development of German interrogation techniques.

30 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 70. See also R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), pp. 82–3.

31 Thaer diary, 4 and 6 September 1917, in Thaer, Generalstabsdienst, pp. 136, 137.

32 Rupprecht diary, 6 and 12 September 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, pp. 258, 260. This was not the case. See Bean, The Official History of Australia, IV, p. 758.

33 German unit movements in J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), pp. 145–7. See also Histories of Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army Which Participated in the War (1914–1918) (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), p. 372.

34 KA: (WK) 1790, Gruppe Ieperen Kriegstagebuch, 10 September 1917.

35 W. Volkart, Die Gasschlacht in Flandern im Herbst 1917 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1957), pp. 57–8.

36 DTA: 3502.1, R. Lewald diary, 24 August–10 September 1917.

37 Ibid., 13 September 1917.

38 The incident occurred on the evening of 19 August when Ludendorff’s train, shunting past the southern end of Brussels, collided with the engine of an ammunition train coming the other way. The carriage was torn apart, throwing Ludendorff and his staff to the ground, but not causing any serious injuries. Apparently, an incorrect switch had placed Ludendorff’s train in danger–and with it gave rise to the possibility that the history of the war, and Germany, would have changed dramatically, had Ludendorff being killed or seriously wounded. M. Nebelin, Ludendorff. Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2010), p. 240.

39 Ibid., p. 225, and E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, p. 77.

40 Nebelin, Ludendorff, p. 240. Pernet was probably shot down by Lieutenant Ralph Curtis and Second Lieutenant H. Munro of 48 Squadron. See J. Guttman, Bristol F2 Fighter Aces of World War I (Botley: Osprey, 2007), p. 15.

41 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 198.

42 Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story, II, pp. 99–100.

43 Ibid., p. 92, and Rupprecht diary, 20 August 1917, in Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch, II, p. 247.

44 TNA: WO 157/24, ‘GHQ Summary of Information’, 25 September 1917.

45 See J. Förster, ‘Ludendorff and Hitler in Perspective: The Battle for the German Soldier’s Mind, 1917–1944’, War in History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2003), pp. 324–5, and A. Watson, Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria–Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2014), pp. 485–6.

46 R. Binding, A Fatalist at War, trans. I. F. D. Morrow (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1929), pp. 182–3.

47 A. Watson, Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 170. See also Divisions of the German Army, p. 363.

48 BA-MA: MSG 2/13418, J. Schärdel, ‘Flandernschlacht 1917’, p. 7.

49 Schwilden, in Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 147–8.

50 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 73.

51 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 255, n. 1.

10. ‘A Stunning Pandemonium’

1 TNA: WO 157/118, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 24 September 1917.

2 G. Powell, Plumer. The Soldiers’ General (London: Leo Cooper, 1990), p. 216. According to the commander of I ANZAC Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood, ‘General Plumer (whose Second Army we had now rejoined) called me up and asked what I thought of postponing the attack for twenty-four hours. I was entirely against this. My 1st and 2nd Divisions were already on the move, quietly making their way to their positions of assembly.’ Lord Birdwood, Khaki and Gown. An Autobiography (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1941), p. 314. 5mm of rain fell on the night of 19/20 September. TNA: WO 95/15, ‘Daily Values of Rainfall’, September 1917.

3 C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (13 vols., Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1941–2), IV, pp. 758–9.

4 Ibid., p. 757.

5 IWM: Documents 15177, A. G. MacGregor, ‘War Diary 1917–1919’, 19/20 September 1917.

6 M. Farndale, History of the Royal Regiment of Artillery. Western Front 1914–18 (London: Royal Artillery Institution, 1986), p. 205, and Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 238.

7 The ground seems to have prevented the tanks from making any effective contribution on 20 September. Of the nineteen machines supporting 58th Division, none were able ‘to be of any material assistance to the infantry’. Thirteen ditched and four received direct hits. In 51st Division, one machine helped to capture a German position known as Delta House, but the others were stopped by either receiving direct hits or ditching. In such soft, crater-filled ground, unditching gear proved useless. TNA: WO 95/98, I Tank Brigade, ‘Report on Tank Operations 20.9.17’.

8 TNA: WO 95/1740, ‘9th (Scottish) Division. Narrative of Events. From September 18th to September 24th 1917’, Appendix C, ‘Action of Enemy’.

9 TNA: WO 157/118, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 21 September 1917.

10 AWM: 3DRL/1465, A. D. Hollyhoke, ‘Battle of Polygon Wood: (Part of “Menin Road Battle”)’, pp. 1–4.

11 TNA: WO 95/983, I ANZAC Corps, ‘Weekly Summary of Operations’, 21 September 1917.

12 TNA: WO 95/3256, War Diary, 2nd Australian Division, September 1917, Appendix C: ‘Operations of 20th September, 1917’.

13 TNA: WO 95/2566, ‘39th Division. Report on Operations of 20th September 1917’.

14 TNA: WO 95/2183, ‘Operations of 69th Infantry Brigade from 19th September to 25th Sept. 1917’.

15 S. Snelling, VCs of the First World War. Passchendaele 1917 (Stroud: The History Press, 2012; first publ. 1998), p. 150.

16 Ibid., pp. 151–2.

17 TNA: WO 95/853, ‘X Corps Narrative. Zero Hour 20th September, to 6 a.m. 21st September’.

18 H. A. Jones, The War in the Air. Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–37), IV, pp. 183, 185.

19 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 74. Zone calls had been developed in 1916 in order to engage targets of opportunity. The battlefield was divided into a series of zones (based on the lettered squares of the 1:40,000 map), which were each subdivided into four letters (each covering 3,000 yards square). This gave each zone a two-letter code, which could then be quickly and efficiently sent to ground observers. This ‘reduced the necessity for personal liaison between the flying officers and the gunners to a minimum, and so eliminated the confusion which might otherwise arise from difficulty of communication when the armies were moving’. See Jones, The War in the Air, II, pp. 175–6.

20 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 272–7.

21 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 74.

22 Kleine in J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), pp. 161–2. II Battalion had lost over 200 men before it had even got to the front. Histories of Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army Which Participated in the War (1914–1918) (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), p. 728.

23 KA: (WK) 1246/1, ‘Gefechtsbericht des 11 IR Ueber Einsatz des Regts. Als Stossregiment im Abschnitt der bayer. Ers. Div. vom 20.9–22.9.1917’.

24 Haig diary, 20 September 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 329. Original emphasis.

25 ‘Menin Road Battle’, The Times, 21 September 1917.

26 ‘The British Victory’, The Times, 22 September 1917.

27 J. Charteris, At G.H.Q. (London: Cassell & Co., 1931), pp. 254–5.

28 TNA: WO 157/118, ‘Second Army. Comments on Operations, 20th Sept., 1917’, 28 September 1917.

29 See G. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), p. 176, and The Chief. Douglas Haig and the British Army (London: Aurum Press, 2011), pp. 238–9; P. Simkins, ‘Herbert Plumer’, in I. F. W. Beckett and S. J. Corvi (eds.), Haig’s Generals (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2006), p. 156; N. Steel and P. Hart, Passchendaele. The Sacrificial Ground (London: Cassell & Co., 2001; first publ. 2000), p. 233; and A. Ekins, ‘The Australians at Passchendaele’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), pp. 219–20.

30 R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), p. 119. Prior and Wilson cite the figure of 27,001 casualties for 31 July 1917, which refers only to those losses within Fifth Army and does not include the 4,849 casualties that Second Army sustained that day. If the combined figure of 31,850 is used, the casualties per square mile rise to 1,769. See Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 177–8, n. 1.

31 A. Farrar-Hockley, Goughie. The Life of General Sir Hubert Gough (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1975), p. 235.

32 Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, p. 123. These criticisms are largely repeated in G. Casey, ‘General Sir Herbert Plumer and “Passchendaele”: A Reassessment’, Firestep, Vol. 5, No. 2 (November 2004), pp. 40–60.

33 German regimental histories neatly capture this dichotomy. For example, the history of the 239 Reserve Infantry Regiment noted, with pride, its performance on 31 July, with the enemy suffering ‘terrible losses’. See J. Schatz, Geschichte des Badischen (Rheinischen) Reserve-Infanterie-Regiments 239 (Stuttgart: Chr. Belser, 1927), p. 125. Likewise, the author of the history of 60 Reserve Infantry Regiment crowed about a ‘brilliantly executed counter-attack’ on 31 July, which contributed to the failure of the British to break through on the first day. See F. Zechlin, Das Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 60 im Weltkriege (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1926), p. 136. For similarly positive views (‘unsurpassable performance’ and ‘outstanding bravery’) see also A. Wiedersich, Das Reserve-Infanterie Regiment Nr. 229 (Berlin: Verlag Tradition Wilhelm Rolf, 1929), p. 93. Contrast this with several histories of those regiments that fought on 20 September and the mood is much less exuberant. For example, the history of 11 Infantry Regiment complains that it suffered ‘heavy losses’ from the ‘overwhelming shelling’, leaving company strengths as low as 25–30 men (as opposed to 100 men that morning). A. Dunzinger, Das K.B. 11 Infanterie-Regiment von der Tann (Munich: Bayerische Kriegsarchivs, 1921), p. 55. 459 Infantry Regiment also lamented the ‘heavy losses’ and ‘bloody tragedies’ of 20 September. F. von Pirscher, Das (Rheinisch-Westfälische) Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 459 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1926), p. 73. See Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 148–65.

34 Rupprecht diary, 20 September 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, p. 263. For Fourth Army’s report on the battle see Pirscher, Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 459, p. 74.

35 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 75.

36 J. Grigg, Lloyd George. War Leader 1916–1918 (London: Penguin Books, 2003; first publ. 2002), p. 262.

37 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), II, pp. 1315–16. Whether this was the case remains impossible to verify. Lloyd George admitted that he had ‘no direct evidence’ of it, but had been told by an ‘unimpeachable’ source after the war that someone from GHQ rang up Fifth Army and told them to alter the composition of the prisoner cages prior to the Prime Minister’s arrival. For Lloyd George this was ‘all in keeping with the effect made to create an impression, that although the Belgian coast was not as yet much nearer, those who stood between us and that objective did not possess the requisite quality to bar the way much longer against our tremendous onslaughts’. At a meeting of the War Cabinet on 27 September, Lloyd George had remarked on the ‘poor condition of the German prisoners whom he had seen on the 26th instant’. TNA: CAB 23/4, ‘War Cabinet, 240’, 27 September 1917.

38 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), II, pp. 702, 703.

39 TNA: CAB 24/27/GT2143, Decypher Sir A. Hardinge (San Sebastian) to Lord Hardinge, 19 September 1917.

40 TNA: CAB 23/16, ‘War Cabinet, 239(a)’, 27 September 1917, and ‘Cypher Telegram to His Majesty’s Representatives, 8 October 1917’.

41 See D. R. Woodward, ‘David Lloyd George, a Negotiated Peace with Germany and the Kuhlmann Peace Kite of September, 1917’, Canadian Journal of History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1971), pp. 75–93, and D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 144–7.

42 J. T. B. McCudden, Flying Fury. Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps (Folkestone: Bailey Brothers & Swinfen, 1973; first publ. 1918), p. 195.

43 AWM: AWM4 14/2/2, Chief Engineer I ANZAC Corps, War Diary, 19–30 September 1917.

11. ‘War with a Big W’

1 IWM: Documents 17248, S. Roberts, ‘The Glorious Sixth’, p. 151.

2 TNA: WO 256/22, Haig diary, 21 September 1917.

3 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 280.

4 TNA: WO 256/22, Haig diary, 23 September 1917.

5 AWM: 2DRL/0277, S. E. Hunt, ‘The Operation at Polygon Wood’, pp. 5–6.

6 C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (13 vols., Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1941–2), IV, p. 813.

7 AWM: 2DRL/0277, S. E. Hunt, ‘The Operation at Polygon Wood’, pp. 6–7.

8 AWM: AWM4 23/66/16, 49/Battalion, ‘Report on Operation 25–27th September, 1917’.

9 AWM: AWM4 1/48/18 Part 2, ‘Report on Operations Carried Out by 4th Aus. Division on 26/9/1917 and Subsequent Days’.

10 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 288.

11 The German attack on 25 September was conducted by two regiments, 229 Reserve and 230 Reserve (of 50th Reserve Division), and was able to make some limited gains between the southern edge of Polygon Wood and the Menin Road. It was supported by twenty heavy and forty-four field batteries, an almost unprecedented amount of artillery for such a modest operation. Tellingly, 33rd Division’s history states that they were attacked by ‘no less than six Divisions’. See Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 283, n. 2, and G. S. Hutchinson, The Thirty-Third Division in France and Flanders 1915–1919 (Uckfield: Naval & Military Press, 2004; first publ. 1921), pp. 67, 72.

12 S. Snelling, VCs of the First World War. Passchendaele 1917 (Stroud: The History Press, 2012; first publ. 1998), pp. 166–74.

13 TNA: WO 95/853, ‘39th Division. Report on Operations of Sept. 26th 1917’.

14 H. A. Jones, The War in the Air. Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–37), IV, pp. 191–3.

15 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 292, n. 1.

16 Caspari, in J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), pp. 169–71.

17 F. von Pirscher, Das (Rheinisch-Westfälische) Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 459 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1926), pp. 83–4, 89.

18 TNA: WO 95/748, V Corps, ‘Report on Attack of 26th September, 1917’.

19 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 293, n. 3.

20 R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), p. 131. Prior and Wilson (incorrectly) claim that the casualty rate at Polygon Wood was 50 per cent higher than at Menin Road.

21 C. R. Simpson (ed.), The History of the Lincolnshire Regiment 1914–1918 (London: The Medici Society, 1931), pp. 264–6.

22 IWM: Documents 22718, E. V. Tanner diary, 26 September 1917.

23 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 77.

24 A. Wiedersich, Das Reserve-Infanterie Regiment Nr. 229 (Berlin: Verlag Tradition Wilhelm Rolf, 1929), p. 106.

25 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 292, n. 1.

26 TNA: WO 95/983, I ANZAC Corps War Diary, September 1917, Appendix H, ‘Notes on the Situation’. See also Histories of Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army Which Participated in the War (1914–1918) (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), p. 85, and TNA: WO 157/118, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 24 September 1917.

27 Thaer diary, 28 September 1917, in A. von Thaer, Generalstabsdienst an der Front und in der O.H.L. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), pp. 139–40.

28 Ibid., p. 140.

29 W. Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court. The Diaries, Note Books and Letters of Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, 1914–1918 (London: Macdonald & Co., 1961; first publ. 1959), p. 303.

30 E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, pp. 102–3.

31 The machine-guns would be grouped in four- and eight-gun batteries. These tactical changes are discussed in G. W. L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War. Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962), pp. 316–18.

32 Group Ypres would mount the attack, known as Operation ‘Hohensturm’ (‘Storming Heights’), with four battalions, led by 212 Reserve Infantry Regiment (45th Reserve Division) and supported by 4th Guard Infantry Division, which would hold the sector from where the attack would take place. By recapturing this ground, particularly a rise known as Tokio Spur, it would provide better observation, allow them to dig in on higher, dryer ground, and strengthen morale. See TNA: WO 95/3256, 2nd Australian Division Intelligence Summary, 6 October 1917, and K. Gabriel, Die 4 Garde-Infanterie-Division. Der Ruhmesweg einer bewährten Kampftruppe durch den Weltkrieg (Berlin: Verlag von Klasing & Co., 1920), p. 100.

33 T. T. Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine. The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine during the First World War (Fort Leavenworth: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1981), p. 66, n. 116.

34 Fourth Army Operation Order, 30 September 1917, in Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 184–6.

35 W. Beumelburg, Flandern 1917 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1928), pp. 120–21.

36 TNA: WO 95/3256, ‘Translation of Captured Documents’ in I ANZAC Corps Intelligence Summary, 6 October 1917. A number of divisional commanders raised major objections to the massing of troops in this manner, but were overruled. Ludendorff argued subsequently that he only agreed to this because of the opinion of experienced officers at the front, but this seems unlikely. See Beumelburg, Flandern, p. 124, and Sheldon, Passchendaele, p. 233, n. 2.

37 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 296.

38 TNA: WO 256/22, Haig diary, 28 September 1917.

39 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 297.

40 Haig diary, 2 October 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 331.

41 Sir C. Harington, Plumer of Messines (London: John Murray, 1935), pp. 314–17.

42 AWM: 3DRL/2379, H. A. Goddard, ‘Tour of a Company in the Front Line’, pp. 1–2.

43 AWM: 3DRL/2316, letter, 1 October 1917, in ‘War Letters of General Monash: Volume 2, 4 March 1917–28 December 1918’.

44 C. Edmonds [C. Carrington], A Subaltern’s War (London: Anthony Mott, 1984; first publ. 1929), pp. 104–6.

45 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 299–301.

12. ‘An Overwhelming Blow’

1 Monash, cited in G. Serle, John Monash. A Biography (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2002; first publ. 1982), p. 293.

2 The use of jumping-off tapes was because of the lack of ‘regular or continuous trenches’ from which the attack could be launched. H. Stewart, The New Zealand Division 1916–1919. A Popular History Based on Official Records (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1921), p. 258.

3 The exact time of the German barrage differs across accounts. In Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 303, it is 5.20. Bean has it at 5.27. C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (13 vols., Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1941–2), IV, p. 843. The war diaries of the divisions involved put it later (between 5.40 and 5.45 a.m.). See AWM: AWM4 1/42/33, Part 1, 1st Australian Division War Diary, 4 October 1917, and AWM4 1/44/27 Part 2, 2nd Australian Division War Diary, October 1917.

4 AWM: AWM4 1/46/12 Part 2, 42/Battalion Report, 4 October 1917.

5 C. Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning (London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 191–3.

6 AWM: AWM38 3DRL 606/254/1, H. G. Hartnett diary, 4 October 1917.

7 AWM: AWM4 23/1/27, ‘1st Australian Infantry Brigade. Summary of Intelligence. From 0600, 4th October to 0600, 5th October, 1917’.

8 See O. E. Burton, The Auckland Regiment (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1922), p. 173.

9 S. Snelling, VCs of the First World War. Passchendaele 1917 (Stroud: The History Press, 2012; first publ. 1998), p. 184.

10 Peeler, cited in ibid., p. 182. Both men were in action again on 12 October 1917, when McGee was killed.

11 H. A. Jones, The War in the Air. Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–37), IV, pp. 184, 203.

12 TNA: WO 95/98, I Tank Brigade, ‘Report on Tank Operations 4th, October 1917’.

13 TNA: WO 95/952, ‘Operations of 4th Oct. 1917’, in XVIII Corps War Diary, October 1917.

14 IWM: Documents 1933, Account of W. A. Rappolt, pp. 94–5.

15 K. Gabriel, Die 4 Garde-Infanterie-Division. Der Ruhmesweg einer bewährten Kampftruppe durch den Weltkrieg (Berlin: Verlag von Klasing & Co., 1920), p. 103.

16 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 305, n. 2.

17 TNA: WO 95/276, Second Army Summary of Operations, 27 September–4 October 1917.

18 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 315–17.

19 See for example ‘Broodseinde. Greatest Victory of the War’, Taranaki Daily News, 25 October 1917.

20 AWM: AWM4 1/44/27 Part 2, 2nd Australian Division War Diary, Appendix XXI, ‘Second Army Summary’, 6 October 1917.

21 Lord Birdwood, Khaki and Gown. An Autobiography (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1941), pp. 315–16.

22 Lloyd George, cited in Bean, The Official History of Australia, IV, p. 877. See also L. Wolff, In Flanders Fields (London: Longmans, 1960), p. 195, and R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), pp. 137–9.

23 Bean, The Official History of Australia, IV, pp. 833, 875. See also N. Steel and P. Hart, Passchendaele. The Sacrificial Ground (London: Cassell & Co., 2001; first publ. 2000), p. 253, and A. Ekins, ‘The Australians at Passchendaele’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), pp. 220–21.

24 German Official History in J. Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele. The Flanders Offensive of 1917: A Study in Inevitability (London: Leo Cooper, 1977), p. 281.

25 Rupprecht diary, 5 October 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, p. 267.

26 BA-MA: MSG 2/5960, Dieffenbach to Grandfather Balser (letter no. 5), 9 October 1917.

27 See ‘Fourth Army Daily Report’, 4 October 1917, in J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), p. 206, which reported the loss of only ‘a narrow strip of territory’.

28 TNA: WO 159/119, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 11 October 1917.

29 Gabriel, Die 4 Garde-Infanterie-Division, p. 107.

30 A. Macdonald, Passchendaele. The Anatomy of a Tragedy (Auckland: HarperCollins, 2013), p. 167.

31 AWM: AWM4 1/44/27 Part 2, 2nd Australian Division War Diary, Appendix XXI, ‘Extracts from 2nd Army and 1st ANZAC Intelligence Summaries’, 6 October 1917, and W. Beumelburg, Flandern 1917 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1928), p. 131.

32 AWM: AWM4 1/46/12 Part 2, 37/Battalion Report, 4 October 1917.

33 Beumelburg, Flandern, p. 122. Emphasis added.

34 E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, p. 104.

35 German Official History in Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele, pp. 281–2. The line Army Group Rupprecht selected ran from the Yser north of Dixmude, past Merckem, west of Roulers and Menin, and passing the Lys at Deûlémont. See Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 81.

36 Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story, II, p. 104.

37 R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), p. 85.

38 Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army, 9 October 1917, in Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 226–7. Original emphases. See also Beumelburg, Flandern, p. 124.

39 Rupprecht diary, 12 October 1917, in Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch, II, p. 271.

40 Haig diary, 4 October 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), pp. 332–3.

41 G. S. Duncan, Douglas Haig as I Knew Him (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 64–5. Emphasis added.

42 J. Charteris, At G.H.Q. (London: Cassell & Co., 1931), pp. 257–8.

43 Steel and Hart, Passchendaele, pp. 261–2; G. Harper, Massacre at Passchendaele. The New Zealand Story (Brighton: FireStep Books, 2011; first publ. 2000), pp. 52–4; and Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, pp. 138–9 and 160–61. Edmonds (Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 325) cites a conference on 7 October in which both Plumer and Gough told Haig that they would prefer it if the campaign were closed down. Prior and Wilson dispute Edmonds’s findings and argue that at no point did either general urge a cancellation of future operations.

44 TNA: WO 256/23, Haig diary, 5 October 1917. Apparently, Haig told one senior officer that ‘When we get the Ridge, we’ve won the war.’ T. Travers, How the War was Won. Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917–1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2005; first publ. 1992), p. 17.

45 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 323–5, and TNA: WO 95/276, Second Army G.311, 6 October 1917.

46 Sir C. Harington, Plumer of Messines (London: John Murray, 1935), pp. 111–12, and Tim Harington Looks Back (London: John Murray, 1940), pp. 63–4.

47 Godley, cited in Macdonald, Passchendaele, p. 53.

48 See G. Sheffield, The Chief. Douglas Haig and the British Army (London: Aurum Press, 2011), pp. 245–6; T. Cook, Shock Troops. Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008), p. 317; and N. Cave, Battleground Europe. Ypres. Passchendaele: The Fight for the Village (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007; first publ. 1997), pp. 9–10.

49 J. Terraine, Douglas Haig. The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), pp. 367–8.

50 See the report by VIII Corps in M. LoCicero, A Moonlight Massacre. The Night Operation on the Passchendaele Ridge, 2 December 1917: The Forgotten Last Act of the Third Battle of Ypres (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2014), pp. 52–7. This refutes the idea that holding on to the Passchendaele Ridge was ‘comfortable’. It concludes that there was very little point in holding the ridge unless as a jumping-off point for a spring offensive in 1918. When Sir Henry Rawlinson inspected the positions on 10 November, he readily admitted that Passchendaele was ‘untenable’ against ‘a properly organized attack’. Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, pp. 180–81. I am grateful to Dr K. W. Mitchinson for discussing this question with me and sharing his knowledge of the ground.

51 TNA: CAB 23/4 ‘Conclusions of an Anglo-French Conference, Held in the Train at Boulogne, on September 25, 1917, at 3.15 p.m.’

52 Haig diary, 3 October 1917, in Sheffield and Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig, p. 331.

53 TNA: CAB 24/28/GT2243, General Headquarters, British Army in the Field to CIGS, 8 October 1917.

54 Robertson to Haig, 9 October 1917, in D. R. Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915–February 1918 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1989), p. 234.

55 D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 154–5. See TNA: CAB 27/6, ‘Eighteenth Meeting of the Cabinet Committee on War Policy’, 3 October 1917.

56 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), II, pp. 711–12.

57 Robertson invited Major-General A. A. Lynden-Bell (former Chief of the General Staff, Egyptian Expeditionary Force) to the War Policy Committee on 8 October to discuss the logistical challenges of the Palestine theatre of operations and the difficulty the British would face in reaching the Jaffa–Jerusalem line. TNA: CAB 27/6, ‘Cabinet Committee on War Policy’, 8 October 1917.

58 Robertson’s withering dismissal of the medical analogy can be found in his Soldiers and Statesmen 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: Cassell & Co., 1926), II, p. 257.

59 Hankey, The Supreme Command, II, pp. 712–13.

60 TNA: CAB 27/6, ‘Cabinet Committee on War Policy’, 11 October 1917.

13. ‘The Weakness of Haste’

1 AWM: PR84/068, A. Birnie to ‘Dear Mother and Father’, 26 October 1917.

2 TNA: WO 95/15, ‘Daily Values of Rainfall’, October 1917.

3 TNA: WO 256/23, Haig diary, 8 October 1917. Original emphasis.

4 N. Annabell (ed.), Official History of the New Zealand Engineers during the Great War 1914–1919 (Wanganui: Evans, Cobb & Sharpe, 1927), pp. 153–4.

5 IWM: Documents 6618, J. A. Whitehead, ‘Four Years’ Memories’, pp. 107–12.

6 IWM: Documents 15758, Account of Colonel F. W. Mellish, p. 29.

7 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 324.

8 For the problems facing the artillery of II ANZAC Corps between 5 and 9 October see A. Macdonald, Passchendaele. The Anatomy of a Tragedy (Auckland: HarperCollins, 2013), pp. 178–80.

9 IWM: Documents 17248, S. Roberts, ‘The Glorious Sixth’, p. 149.

10 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 330.

11 R. Thompson, ‘Mud, Blood, and Wood: BEF Operational and Combat Logistico-Engineering during the Battle of Third Ypres, 1917’, in P. Doyle and M. R. Bennett (eds.), Fields of Battle. Terrain in Military History (London: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 245–6.

12 German pillboxes were also protected with new ‘apron wire’ that had not been encountered before. See TNA: WO 157/119, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 13 October 1917.

13 C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (13 vols., Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1941–2), IV, p. 900, and Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 324, n. 1.

14 TNA: WO 157/119, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 14 October 1917.

15 IWM: Documents 15110, Account of N. Hind, pp. 451–2, 474.

16 TNA: WO 95/2768, 49th Division, ‘Narrative of Events 8th to 10th October 1917’, and Brigadier-General, 148 Infantry Brigade, to Headquarters, 49th Division, 13 October 1917.

17 TNA: WO 95/3120, ‘66th (East Lancashire) Division. Account of Action East of Ypres 9/10/17’.

18 IWM: Documents 1690, Account of P. R. Hall, pp. 16–17.

19 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 334, n. 1.

20 Second Army intelligence was unimpressed with the ‘new policy of defence’. In a report the day after Poelcappelle, it noted that in the case of 195th Division ‘there was no material departure from the old principle of the defence in depth’ and captured officers apparently denied ‘all knowledge of any change in policy’. See TNA: WO 157/119, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 10 October 1917.

21 W. Jürgensen, Das Füsilier-Regiment ‘Königin’ Nr. 86 im Weltkriege (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1925), p. 189.

22 H. von Wolff, Kriegsgeschichte des Jäger-Bataillon von Neumann (1. Schles.) Nr. 5 1914–1918 (Zeulenroda: Verlag Bernhard Sporn, n.d.), pp. 157–8.

23 DTA: 3502.1, R. Lewald diary, 7–10 October 1917.

24 Rupprecht diary, 10 October 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, p. 270.

25 German Official History, cited in J. Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele. The Flanders Offensive of 1917: A Study in Inevitability (London: Leo Cooper, 1977), p. 299.

26 W. Beumelburg, Flandern 1917 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1928), p. 131.

27 Histories of Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army Which Participated in the War (1914–1918) (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), p. 287.

28 Beumelburg, Flandern, p. 131.

29 Menges in J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), p. 218.

30 Macdonald, Passchendaele, p. 185.

31 IWM: Documents 7197, F. J. Rice diary, 10–11 October 1917.

32 This is generally accepted. See for example N. Steel and P. Hart, Passchendaele. The Sacrificial Ground (London: Cassell & Co., 2001; first publ. 2000), pp. 273–5, and R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), p. 169.

33 TNA: WO 256/23, Haig diary, 10 October 1917. See Haig’s diary entry for 9 October in which he states that 66th Division took all its objectives and 49th ‘gained all except small piece on left’.

34 Macdonald, Passchendaele, p. 56.

35 P. A. Pedersen, Monash as Military Commander (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1985), p. 198.

36 G. Serle, John Monash. A Biography (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2002; first publ. 1982), p. 294.

37 In Charles Bean’s papers he records a talk Harington gave at Second Army HQ prior to Poelcappelle, in which he was strongly in favour of continuing, telling assembled journalists that after one or two more attacks, the cavalry ‘would be ready to go through’. Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, pp. 160–61. See also Sir C. Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back (London: John Murray, 1940), p. 63.

38 P. Simkins, ‘Herbert Plumer’, in I. F. W. Beckett and S. J. Corvi (eds.), Haig’s Generals (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2006), pp. 157–8. One of those who saw Plumer at this time was surprised by his optimism and cheerfulness: ‘it is the old story: those who live right away from the troops engaged cannot possibly understand the strain and weariness affecting fighting troops at the Front…’ Jack diary, 8 October 1917, in J. Terraine (ed.), General Jack’s Diary 1914–18. The Trench Diary of Brigadier-General J. L. Jack, D.S.O. (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1964), p. 280.

39 J. R. Byrne, New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914–18 (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1922), p. 192.

40 A. E. Byrne, Official History of the Otago Regiment, N.Z.E.F. in the Great War 1914–1918 (Dunedin: J. Wilkie & Company, 1921), pp. 211–12.

41 TNA: WO 95/1740, ‘9th (Scottish) Division. Narrative of Operations, 12.10.17’.

42 AWM: AWM4 23/9/12, ‘Ninth Australian Infantry Brigade. Report of Operations Carried out on 12-10-17’.

43 Langford, cited in G. Harper, Massacre at Passchendaele. The New Zealand Story (Brighton: FireStep Books, 2011; first publ. 2000), p. 71.

44 Byrne, Otago Regiment, pp. 216–18. Cockerell was later awarded a Distinguished Service Order: ‘a rare Order for an officer of his rank’, notes the battalion history.

45 D. Ferguson, The History of the Canterbury Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 1914–1919 (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1921), p. 198.

46 AWM: AWM4 23/51/12, 34/Battalion War Diary, 12 October 1917.

47 AWM: 2DRL/0185, ‘Extracts from the Late Lieut. G. M. Carson’. Original emphasis.

48 Bean, The Official History of Australia, IV, pp. 917–18. A small party from 10 Brigade managed to reach Passchendaele church, but, finding it abandoned and with no signs of support, had to withdraw.

49 S. Snelling, VCs of the First World War. Passchendaele 1917 (Stroud: The History Press, 2012; first publ. 1998), pp. 246–8.

50 AWM: AWM4 23/9/12, ‘Ninth Australian Infantry Brigade. Report of Operations Carried out on 12-10-17’. The retreat from the Blue Line would result in a Court of Inquiry held in December 1917. It made a series of recommendations, including better command and control, and the need for battalion commanders to ‘take hold of the situation’. See A. Fox, ‘“The Word ‘Retire’ is Never to be Used”: The Performance of the 9th Brigade, AIF, at First Passchendaele, 1917’, Australian War Memorial, SVSS Paper (2011), pp. 1–28.

51 AWM: PR84/068, A. Birnie to ‘Dear Mother and Father’, 26 October 1917. Emphasis added.

52 Wolff, Jäger-Bataillon von Neumann, pp. 171–2. The reference to the ‘English’ was probably because German sources often failed to differentiate between different nationalities in the BEF.

53 H. Stewart, The New Zealand Division 1916–1919. A Popular History Based on Official Records (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1921), p. 291.

54 Russell, cited in C. Pugsley, ‘The New Zealand Division at Passchendaele’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), pp. 285–6.

55 C. Pugsley, On the Fringe of Hell. New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), pp. 249–50.

56 Harper, Massacre at Passchendaele, pp. 76–8.

57 AWM: 3DRL/2316, letters, 18 and 21 October 1917, in ‘War Letters of General Monash: Volume 2, 4 March 1917–28 December 1918’.

14. ‘Not Worth a Drop of Blood’

1 A. H. Atteridge, History of the 17th (Northern) Division (Glasgow: Robert Maclehose & Co., 1929), p. 259.

2 IWM: Documents 13966, Account of G. Skelton.

3 IWM: Documents 17248, S. Roberts, ‘The Glorious Sixth’, p. 153.

4 IWM: Documents 4755, H. S. Taylor, ‘Further Reminiscences of World War 1’, p. 5.

5 IWM: Document 7613, Account of V. E. Fagence, pp. 6–7.

6 IWM: Documents 7197, F. J. Rice diary, 22 October 1917.

7 AWM: 2DRL/0277, S. E. Hunt, ‘The Operation at Polygon Wood’, p. 12.

8 IWM: Documents 12332, ‘The Journal of John Nettleton of the Rifle Brigade 1914–1919’, p. 101.

9 A. Ekins, ‘The Australians at Passchendaele’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), p. 245. Rates may also have been higher given that the death penalty was not applied to Australian soldiers (owing to a clause in the Australian Defence Act of 1903). See C. Pugsley, On the Fringe of Hell. New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991). pp. 131–2.

10 A. Macdonald, Passchendaele. The Anatomy of a Tragedy (Auckland: HarperCollins, 2013), p. 49.

11 Lord Birdwood, Khaki and Gown. An Autobiography (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1941), pp. 316–17.

12 Haig diary, 13 October 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 336.

13 TNA: WO 95/15, ‘Daily Values of Rainfall’, September–October 1917. At Vlamertinge, September produced 25mm of rain less than the average, with October being worse by 32mm.

14 TNA: WO 256/21, Haig to Charteris, 5 March 1927. Original emphasis. See also Sir J. Davidson, Haig. Master of the Field (London: Peter Nevill, 1953), p. 59. The offending passages can be found in W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1916–1918. Part II (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927), pp. 337–9.

15 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 326.

16 This argument was dismissed as early as 1959. See B. H. Liddell Hart, ‘The Basic Truths of Passchendaele’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 616 (November 1959), pp. 433–5. For more recent discussions see B. Bond, ‘Passchendaele: Verdicts, Past and Present’, in Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective, p. 484, and T. Travers, How the War was Won. Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917–1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2005; first publ. 1992), p. 18.

17 E. Greenhalgh, The French Army and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 234.

18 TNA: WO 256/22, Haig diary, 26, 27 and 29 September 1917.

19 TNA: WO 256/23, Haig diary, 18 October 1917. According to William Philpott, ‘Nothing caused more regular and repetitious squabbling between the allied headquarters than the question of the fair distribution of the defence front between the allied armies.’ W. J. Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 108.

20 TNA: WO 256/23, Haig to Pétain, 19 October 1917. See also ‘Note of General Pétain’s representations in favour of more line being taken over by the British Armies’, in which Haig criticizes Pétain’s anxiety and states that the ‘prosecution of our offensive’ would be ‘the wisest military policy’ in the event of Russia exiting the war.

21 Macdonogh had suggested that the morale of German troops ‘gives no cause for anxiety to the German High Command’, which prompted a quite extraordinary entry in Haig’s diary for 15 October. ‘I cannot think why the War Office Intelligence Department gives such a wrong picture of the situation except that General Macdonogh… is a Roman Catholic and is (unconsciously) influenced by information which doubtless reaches him from tainted (ie., Catholic) sources…’ Haig was referring to a call for peace negotiations that had been made by Pope Benedict XV on 1 August 1917. For many historians this outspoken attack sums up Haig’s lack of objective thinking and clarity. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson conclude that ‘self-deception could go no further’. See Haig diary, 15 October 1917, in Sheffield and Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig, pp. 336–7, and R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), p. 166.

22 Robertson, cited in J. Beach, Haig’s Intelligence. GHQ and the German Army, 1916–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 258–9.

23 D. G. Dancocks, Legacy of Valour. The Canadians at Passchendaele (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1986), pp. 96–7.

24 T. Cook, Shock Troops. Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008), p. 316.

25 S. B. Schreiber, Shock Army of the British Empire. The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War (Westport: Praeger, 1997), p. 19.

26 Macdonell, cited in Dancocks, Legacy of Valour, pp. 97–8. Original emphasis.

27 T. Cook, The Madman and the Butcher. The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and Sir Arthur Currie (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2010), ch. 3, pp. 73–4.

28 According to Currie, Haig finally revealed his secret when they met at the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919. Apparently, Haig wanted to prevent German attacks on the French Army, while also restoring civilian morale with a victory. Interestingly, he made no mention of having to secure ground that would give his troops somewhere to winter. G. W. L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War. Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962), p. 328, and Cook, Shock Troops, p. 317.

29 Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War. 1914–1920 (London: HMSO, 1922), p. 146 (Table X). Totals correct as of 8 October 1917. A fifth division was forming in England, but it never took to the field. Currie had it broken up in February 1918 to furnish much-needed replacement manpower for the corps.

30 Canadian tactical development has attracted considerable attention. See I. M. Brown, ‘Not Glamorous, But Effective: The Canadian Corps and the Set-Piece Attack, 1917–1918’, Journal of Military History, Vol. 58, No. 3 (July 1994), pp. 421–44; T. Cook, No Place to Run. The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), and Shock Troops; C. Pugsley, ‘Learning from the Canadian Corps on the Western Front’, Canadian Military History, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 5–32; B. Rawling, Surviving Trench Warfare. Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); and Schreiber, Shock Army of the British Empire.

31 Beach, Haig’s Intelligence, pp. 38–9. Beach states that ‘the Canadians were always at least a year ahead of British corps in their intelligence manning’.

32 Rawling, Surviving Trench Warfare, p. 111.

33 J. Hansch and F. Weidling, Das Colbergsche Grenadier-Regiment Graf Gneisenau (2 Pommersches) Nr. 9 im Weltkriege 1914–1918 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1929), p. 417.

34 J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), pp. 258–9.

35 R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), pp. 85–6.

36 Peistrup, in Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 245–6.

37 DTA: 3502.1, R. Lewald diary, 19 October 1917.

38 Taken from ‘Dreamers’, in S. Sassoon, Selected Poems (London: William Heinemann, 1940; first publ. 1925), p. 20.

39 Thaer diary, 28 September 1917, in A. von Thaer, Generalstabsdienst an der Front und in der O.H.L. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), p. 140.

40 Sheldon, Passchendaele, p. 243.

41 G. Werth, ‘Flanders 1917 and the German Soldier’, in Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective, p. 329.

42 Kleysteuber, in Sheldon, Passchendaele, p. 215.

43 TNA: WO 157/119, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 12 October 1917.

44 See for example TNA: WO 157/119, Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 22 October 1917.

45 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), pp. 99–100.

46 W. Jürgensen, Das Füsilier-Regiment ‘Königin’ Nr. 86 im Weltkriege (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1925), pp. 187–8.

47 IWM: Documents 1933, Account of W. A. Rappolt, pp. 61–5.

48 Reichskriegsministeriums, Sanitätsbericht über das Deutsche Heer (Deutsches Feld- und Besatzungsheer) im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1934–8), II, p. 708.

49 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 86.

50 Rupprecht diary, 5 August 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, pp. 235–6.

51 Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 314–15. Figures taken from Table 47 in Sanitätsbericht über das Deutsche Heer, III, p. 55.

52 Thaer diary, 11 October 1917, in Thaer, Generalstabsdienst, p. 143.

53 Rupprecht, in Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 228–9.

54 Rupprecht diary, 21 October 1917, in Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch, II, pp. 273–4.

55 Ibid., 24 October 1917, II, p. 275.

56 For the creation of Group Staden see Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 87, and Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 40–41.

57 DTA: 3244.17, E. Schaarschmidt diary, 20 October 1917.

58 G. C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks. The Battle in Depth in the West (Westport: Greenwood, 1976; first publ. 1940), pp. 310, 313.

59 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 249.

15. ‘Against the Iron Wall’

1 E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, p. 106.

2 G. W. L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War. Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962), p. 313.

3 D. G. Dancocks, Legacy of Valour. The Canadians at Passchendaele (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1986), p. 103.

4 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4957, Reel T-10774, File: 504, Part 2, ‘Canadian Corps Artillery Report on Passchendaele Operations Oct. 17th to Nov. 18th 1917’, pp. 12, 14.

5 Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919, p. 318.

6 CWM: 58A 1 27.11, Memoirs of G. F. McFarland, Vol. II, p. 29.

7 J. Adair, ‘The Battle of Passchendaele: The Experiences of Lieutenant Tom Rutherford, 4th Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles’, Canadian Military History, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Autumn 2004), pp. 66–8.

8 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4896, Reel T-10690, File: 289, Part 1, ‘Headquarters–8th Canadian Infantry Brigade War Diary October, 1917. Appendix 22’.

9 S. G. Bennett, The 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles 1914–1919 (Toronto: Murray Printing Company, 1926), p. 80.

10 CWM: 58A 1 27.11, Memoirs of G. F. McFarland, Vol. II, p. 32.

11 Adair, ‘The Battle of Passchendaele’, p. 74.

12 They were Private T. W. Holmes (4/CMR); Lieutenant R. Shankland (43/Battalion); Acting Captain C. P. J. O’Kelly (52/Battalion); Private C. J. Kinross (49/Battalion); Lieutenant H. McKenzie (7/Canadian MG Company); Sergeant G. H. Mullin (PPCLI); Major G. R. Pearkes (5/CMR); Private C. F. Barron (3/Battalion); and Private J. P. Robertson (27/Battalion).

13 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4938, Reel T-10744, File: 434, Part 2, 43/Battalion War Diary, 26 September 1917.

14 S. Snelling, VCs of the First World War. Passchendaele 1917 (Stroud: The History Press, 2012; first publ. 1998), pp. 256–9.

15 J. Hansch and F. Weidling, Das Colbergsche Grenadier-Regiment Graf Gneisenau (2 Pommersches) Nr. 9 im Weltkriege 1914–1918 (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1929), p. 424.

16 C. Stachelbeck, Militärische Effektivität im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die 11. Bayerische Infanteriedivision 1915 bis 1918 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), pp. 208–9, 215.

17 11th Bavarian Division suffered 1,800 casualties as opposed to over 3,400 in the two attacking Canadian divisions. See C. Stachelbeck, ‘Strategy “in a Microcosm”: Processes of Tactical Learning in a WW1 German Infantry Division’, Journal of Military & Strategic Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer 2011), p. 18, n. 50.

18 Stachelbeck, Militärische Effektivität im Ersten Weltkrieg, p. 222.

19 See TNA: WO 157/119, ‘Enemy’s New Battery Positions Disclosed Oct. 1st 1917’, in Second Army Daily Intelligence Summary, 2 October 1917. A point in the centre of the Canadian Corps area was about 6,000 yards from the front line at Passchendaele, but only 3,000 yards from that to the southeast. LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4957, Reel T-10774, File: 504, Part 2, ‘Canadian Corps Artillery Report on Passchendaele Operations Oct. 17th to Nov. 18th 1917’, p. 32.

20 DTA: 3502.1, R. Lewald diary, 26 October 1917.

21 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4957, Reel T-10774, File: 504, Part 2, ‘Canadian Corps Artillery Report on Passchendaele Operations Oct. 17th to Nov. 18th 1917’, p. 17.

22 H. A. Jones, The War in the Air. Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922–37), IV, p. 210.

23 A. Revell, Brief Glory. The Life of Arthur Rhys Davids, DSO, MC and Bar (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2010), pp. 195, 209. Research indicates that he was shot down by Karl Gallwitz and came down somewhere around the Passchendaele Ridge. His body was never found.

24 Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919, pp. 320–21.

25 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4940, Reel T-10747, File: 440, Part 2, 49/Battalion War Diary, November 1917, Appendix A.

26 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4949, Reel T-10760, File: 437, Part 2, ‘5th CMR Battalion. Summary of Operations, October 30th–31st, 1917’.

27 Snelling, Passchendaele 1917, p. 283. The story of Allen Otty, who was surely deserving of a VC, is told in C. Mainville, ‘Mentioned in Despatches: Lieutenant Allen Otty and the 5th CMR, at Passchendaele 30 October 1917’, Canadian Military History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring 2014), pp. 137–63.

28 Currie to Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Turner, 30 October 1917, in A. Currie, The Selected Papers of Sir Arthur Currie. Diaries, Letters and Report to the Ministry, 1917–1933, ed. M. O. Humphries (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), pp. 55–6.

29 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations. France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, pp. 351–3.

30 TNA: WO 95/3095, ‘Report on the Operations of 63rd (Royal Naval) Division East of Ypres 24th October–5th November 1917’, p. 10.

31 TNA: WO 95/952, XVIII Corps War Diary, 30 October 1917.

32 J. Grigg, Lloyd George. War Leader 1916–1918 (London: Penguin Books, 2003; first publ. 2002), p. 271.

33 Robertson to Lloyd George, 27 October 1917, in D. R. Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915–February 1918 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1989), pp. 239–40.

34 Lloyd George to Robertson, 27 October 1917, in Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, p. 240.

35 Robertson to Lloyd George, 27 October 1917, in Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, p. 241.

36 TNA: CAB 23/4, ‘War Cabinet, 263’, 2 November 1917.

37 D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 161–2.

38 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), II, pp. 1439–41.

39 D. R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (London: Associated University Presses, 1983), p. 214.

40 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, p. 355.

41 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4957, Reel T-10774, File: 504, Part 2, ‘Canadian Corps Artillery Report on Passchendaele Operations Oct. 17th to Nov. 18th 1917’, pp. 22, 23, 25.

42 LAC: RG41, Vol. 21, Testimony of H. L. Sheppard.

43 Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919, pp. 323–4.

44 IWM: Documents 7376, M. McIntyre Hood, ‘Recording on First World War 1914–1918’, p. 12.

45 CWM: 58A 1 221.1, A. R. Coulter diary, 4 November 1917.

46 LAC: RG41, Vol. 8, Testimony of G. Noir.

47 LAC: RG41, Vol. 22, Testimony of W. M. Rae.

48 Currie in Dancocks, Legacy of Valour, p. 159.

49 T. Cook, Shock Troops. Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008), p. 357.

50 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4957, Reel T-10774, File: 504, Part 2, ‘Canadian Corps Artillery Report on Passchendaele Operations Oct. 17th to Nov. 18th 1917’, p. 8.

51 K. Radley, We Lead, Others Follow. First Canadian Division 1914–1918 (St Catharines: Vanwell, 2006), p. 166.

52 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4913, Reel T-10704–10705, File: 351, ‘Report on Operations Carried Out by [1] Bn. on the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th November’.

53 LAC: RG41, Vol. 12, Testimony of W. McCombie-Gilbert.

54 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4935, Reel T-10739–10740, File: 425, Part 2, ‘Narrative of Operations for the Capture of Passchendaele and the Surrounding Heights. 28th North West Canadian Battalion. November 6th/7th 1917’.

55 LAC: RG41, Vol. 11, Testimony of W. E. Turner.

56 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4935, Reel T-10738–10739, File: 423, Part 2, ‘27th (City of Winnipeg) Battalion. Narrative of Operations Covering the Attack on Passchendaele’.

57 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4938, Reel T-10744, File: 434, Part 2, Canadian Corps, Summary of Intelligence, 6 November 1917.

58 LAC: RG9, III-D-3, Vol. 4935, Reel T-10738–10739, File: 423, Part 2, ‘27th (City of Winnipeg) Battalion. Narrative of Operations Covering the Attack on Passchendaele’.

59 H. Nollau, Geschichte des Königlich Preußischen 4 Niederschlesischen Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 51 (Berlin: Wilhelm Kolk, 1931), pp. 205–6.

60 LAC: RG41, Vol. 11, Testimony of W. E. Turner.

61 IWM: Documents 7376, M. McIntyre Hood, ‘Recording on First World War 1914–1918’, p. 13.

62 Snelling, Passchendaele 1917, pp. 290–91.

63 KA: (WK) 9197, ‘Ereignisse bei 4 Armee von 6.11 abends bis 7.11 abends’.

64 Rupprecht diary, 6–7 November 1917, in Crown Prince Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929), II, pp. 282–3.

65 DTA: 3502.1, R. Lewald diary, 6 November 1917.

66 Haig diary, 6–7 November 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 339. Original emphasis. Haig seems to have been referring to the number of dead, not total casualties, which were over 2,200. See Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919, p. 325.

67 The Canadians were not able to secure all of Hill 52 on 10 November, which led to the sanctioning of an ill-fated night attack on 2 December. This operation is detailed in M. LoCicero, A Moonlight Massacre. The Night Operation on the Passchendaele Ridge, 2 December 1917: The Forgotten Last Act of the Third Battle of Ypres (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2014).

68 Sir C. Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back (London: John Murray, 1940), p. 65.

69 Currie diary, 9 November 1917, in Currie, Selected Papers, p. 57.

70 Lieutenant-Colonel A. Adamson (CO/PPCLI), cited in N. S. Leach, ‘Passchendaele–Canada’s Other Vimy Ridge’, Canadian Military Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2008), p. 81.

71 Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919, p. 327. The official total was 15,654, although the Canadian Corps Battle Casualties file lists 16,404. See Cook, Shock Troops, pp. 365, 686–7, n. 41.

72 Currie to Hearst, 14 November 1917, in Currie, Selected Papers, p. 59.

73 T. Cook, The Madman and the Butcher. The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and Sir Arthur Currie (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2010), p. 359.

74 See N. Lloyd, Hundred Days. The End of the Great War (London: Viking, 2013).

75 Dancocks, Legacy of Valour, p. 238.

76 CLIP: K. W. Foster, ‘Memoirs of the Great War 1915–1918’.

Epilogue

1 Sir C. Harington, Plumer of Messines (London: John Murray, 1935), p. 112.

2 Kuhl, cited in D. Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives. A Case Study in the Operational Level of War (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 94.

3 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1918. The German March Offensive and Its Preliminaries (London: Macmillan & Co., 1935), p. 254. (German forces on pp. 152–3). Whether the disaster on 21 March 1918 could be directly attributed to the effects of Third Ypres on the BEF remains a matter of debate. Edmonds turned the question around and argued that it is possible ‘complete success’ only eluded the German Army because of the ‘exhaustion, practically the destruction, of their best divisions in Flanders’. Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 366. It seems probable that the extent of the retreat in the opening days of the German offensive was, at least in part, because of the hasty expansion of the British front line over the winter, but it is also undeniable that by trying to win a major victory in the summer of 1917, Haig wore down his divisions and left his army in a perilous situation with few reserves left to meet any unforeseen contingencies. Fifth Army would pay the price in March 1918.

4 A. Farrar-Hockley, Goughie. The Life of General Sir Hubert Gough (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1975), p. 312.

5 Harington, Plumer, p. 161.

6 P. Gross (dir.), Passchendaele (Montreal: Alliance Films, 2008).

7 Rupprecht in J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), pp. 312–13.

8 F. von Lossberg, Meine Tatigkeit im Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1939), p. 309.

9 P. Simkins, ‘Foreword’ in Sheldon, Passchendaele, p. viii.

10 D. Gottberg, Das Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 465 im Weltkriege (Osnabrück: Verlag Carl Prelle, n.d.), p. 158.

11 See D. Todman, ‘“Sans peur et sans reproche”: The Retirement, Death, and Mourning of Sir Douglas Haig, 1918–1928’, Journal of Military History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (October 2003), pp. 1083–1106.

12 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), II, p. 701.

13 See J. H. Boraston (ed.), Sir Douglas Haig’s Despatches (December 1915–April 1919) (London: HMSO, 1919), p. 135.

14 See R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), p. 84. Kuhl is quoted approvingly by a number of historians including J. Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele. The Flanders Offensive of 1917: A Study in Inevitability (London: Leo Cooper, 1977), p. 342; W. J. Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 149; and G. Sheffield, The Chief. Douglas Haig and the British Army (London: Aurum Press, 2011), pp. 247–8.

15 Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele, p. xxi.

16 R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele. The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), p. 33.

17 TNA: CAB 45/140, Gough to Edmonds, 3 May 1944, ‘Marginal Notes. Chapter XII’.

18 Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, pp. 199–200.

19 See for example J. P. Harris, Douglas Haig and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 337–41, 360–61, 378–82; N. Steel and P. Hart, Passchendaele. The Sacrificial Ground (London: Cassell & Co., 2001; first publ. 2000), pp. 302–3; T. Travers, How the War was Won. Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917–1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2005; first publ. 1992), p. 11.

20 C. Barnett, The Swordbearers. Supreme Command in the First World War (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), pp. 236, 237, 239.

21 Prior and Wilson make this point in their conclusion to Passchendaele (p. 197), but their earlier dismissal of the effectiveness of Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde undermines their case. Because they judge these battles on the amount of ground gained (and not by their effect on the enemy), they fail to realize how successful they were. Ground was not the key metric in ‘bite-and-hold’ operations.

22 Plumer’s mastery of ‘bite and hold’ would provide Bernard Law Montgomery, the future Field Marshal and ‘Victor of Alamein’, with his ‘deepest and most lasting lessons of the war’. As a young staff officer with IX Corps in Second Army, Montgomery was involved in the planning for Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde and described them as ‘masterpieces’. See N. Hamilton, Monty. The Making of a General 1887–1942 (London: Coronet, 1984; first publ. 1981), p. 117. Montgomery’s comments on Plumer’s battles can be found in a letter to his father, 9 October 1917 (p. 120).

23 See for example Haig’s diary entries for 1 August (‘A terrible day of rain. The ground is like a bog in this low lying country’); 2 August (‘this bad weather takes so much out of the men in the trenches that more frequent reliefs are necessary’); 16 August (‘the country is very wooded and much broken up by our heavy shell fire’); 17 August (special arrangements were being made to pass freshly cleaned rifles up to the front line ‘owing to the mud’); 4 October (‘Rain fell heavily this afternoon as I took a walk’); 6 October (the ground ‘became very muddy and slippery’); 7 October (discusses the possibility of it being too wet ‘to admit of our men going forward’); 9 October (‘The ground was so bad that 8 hours were taken in marching to forming up points’); 12 October (‘very bad state of ground’); and 13 October (when the ground was so soft that light railway engines had apparently ‘sunk halfway up the boilers in the mud’), in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), pp. 309, 310, 316, 317, 333, 334, 335, 336. In Haig’s despatch on ‘The Campaigns of 1917’, frequent references are made to poor weather and muddy conditions. See Boraston (ed.), Sir Douglas Haig’s Despatches (December 1915–April 1919), pp. 116, 128, 129, 133.

24 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), II, p. 1304.

25 Prior and Wilson, Passchendaele, pp. 37–8.

26 Philpott, Anglo-French Relations, pp. 138–40.

27 D. R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (London: Associated University Presses, 1983), p. 133.

28 See J. Thompson, The Lifeblood of War. Logistics in Armed Conflict (London: Brassey’s, 1991), pp. 40–44.

29 H. Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 142.

30 D. Graham and S. Bidwell, Coalitions, Politicians and Generals. Some Aspects of Command in Two World Wars (London: Brassey’s, 1993), p. 90.

31 IWM: Documents 15758, Account of F. W. Mellish, p. 30.

32 Harington, Plumer, p. 303.

33 Ibid., p. 112.

34 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 360–61.

35 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 96.

36 Reichskriegsministerium, Sanitätsbericht über das Deutsche Heer (Deutsches Feld- und Besatzungsheer) im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (3 vols., Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1934–8), III, p. 53.

37 The subject of German losses has attracted considerable debate. Sir James Edmonds was convinced that the real figure was significantly greater than the published statistics, perhaps rising to as high as 350,000 or 400,000. Liddell Hart called these estimates ‘mythical’ and, more recently, Jack Sheldon has accused Edmonds of ‘creative accounting’ and of showing a ‘cavalier handling of the facts’ in regard to German casualties. According to Sheldon, it is only possible to reach a total of 400,000 if one takes into consideration all those who were treated for ‘minor cuts and wounds’ at regimental aid posts (but who were not struck off unit strength). As he notes, ‘It is hard to see any merit in insisting that a man remaining with his unit and capable of carrying out his duties, must be regarded as a battle casualty of the same significance as someone evacuated with serious or life-threatening injuries.’ See B. H. Liddell Hart, ‘The Basic Truths of Passchendaele’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 616 (November 1959), pp. 436–7, and Sheldon, Passchendaele, pp. 313–15, 319, n. 58.

38 C. von Clausewitz, On War, trans. M. Howard and P. Paret (London: David Campbell, 1993; first publ. 1976), p. 220. Emphasis added.

39 P. Gibbs, Now It Can be Told (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1920), p. 474.

40 LAC: RG41, Vol. 15, Testimony of G. Bell.