Battle of Passchendaele (1917): Third Ypres and the Flanders Mud

The Battle of Passchendaele, officially the Third Battle of Ypres, was a British-led offensive fought in Flanders, Belgium, from 31 July to 10 November 1917. British, Dominion and French troops attacked German positions on the ridges east of Ypres, aiming to break out towards the Belgian coast. After more than three months in rain and mud, they captured the ruined village of Passchendaele, but the cost made the name a byword for the horrors of the Western Front.

Background

The town of Ypres had been held by the Allies since the First Battle of Ypres in 1914. It sat in a salient, a bulge in the front line, overlooked on three sides by low German-held ridges. A second battle in 1915 had brought the first large-scale German use of poison gas.

By 1917 the British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, wanted a major offensive in Flanders. He hoped to capture the high ground, take the railway junction at Roulers (Roeselare) and advance towards the Belgian coast, where German submarine and destroyer bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge threatened British shipping.

The wider situation also mattered. The French army had been shaken by mutinies after the failed Nivelle Offensive in April and May 1917, and Russia was falling apart after the February Revolution. The Admiralty, alarmed by German submarine sinkings, also supported an attempt on the Belgian ports, and a planned amphibious landing on the coast was prepared to follow a breakthrough, though it never took place. The War Cabinet in London had doubts but gave its approval in July. Haig argued that a British offensive would keep pressure on Germany while France recovered.

Messines and the preparation

The first step was the Battle of Messines on 7 June 1917. General Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army detonated 19 huge mines under the German lines on the Messines Ridge, south of Ypres, and captured it in a carefully planned assault.

The main offensive did not follow for seven weeks, giving the Germans time to strengthen their defences. Under the guidance of the defensive expert Colonel Fritz von Lossberg, the German Fourth Army of General Friedrich Sixt von Armin built a deep system of concrete pillboxes, machine-gun posts and counter-attack divisions held in reserve. In July the Germans also used mustard gas for the first time, near Ypres.

Haig gave the main role to General Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army. A preliminary bombardment of more than four million shells, fired by some 3,000 guns from mid-July, smashed the German front but also destroyed the drainage of the low-lying fields.

The battle

The opening and the August rains

The infantry attacked on 31 July 1917 in the Battle of Pilckem Ridge. British and French troops made gains of up to about 3 km on the left, but the attack stalled in the centre on the Gheluvelt plateau. That afternoon heavy rain began to fall, and it continued for much of August.

The battlefield became a morass of water-filled shell holes linked by duckboard tracks. Men, horses and guns sank in the mud, and wounded soldiers could drown. Carrying a single stretcher case back to an aid post could take a team of several bearers hours, and supplies of food, water and ammunition had to be brought forward at night along tracks that German gunners had registered. Exhaustion and exposure became as dangerous as enemy fire. Gough’s attacks in August, including the Battle of Langemarck on 16-18 August, gained little ground at high cost.

Plumer’s step-by-step attacks

In late August Haig shifted the main effort to Plumer. Using a “bite and hold” method, Plumer launched limited attacks with massive artillery support, advancing about 1,500 metres at a time and then holding the ground against German counter-attacks. With drier weather in September, these attacks succeeded.

The Battle of the Menin Road Ridge on 20 September, the Battle of Polygon Wood on 26 September and the Battle of Broodseinde on 4 October, in which Australian and New Zealand divisions played a major part, pushed the Germans off much of the high ground. German commanders regarded Broodseinde as a serious setback.

October: the final push in the mud

Haig decided to continue, hoping to capture the remainder of the ridge before winter. The rain returned. The Battle of Poelcappelle on 9 October and the First Battle of Passchendaele on 12 October were fought in appalling conditions with artillery that could not be brought forward. On 12 October the New Zealand Division suffered about 2,700 to 2,800 casualties, more than 840 of them killed, the worst day in New Zealand’s military history.

The Canadian Corps under General Sir Arthur Currie, fresh from its success at Vimy Ridge, was then brought in. Currie warned that the operation would cost about 16,000 casualties, insisted on careful preparation, and attacked in stages from 26 October. Canadian troops captured the shattered village of Passchendaele on 6 November, and a final attack on 10 November secured more of the ridge. The offensive then ended.

Key people

• Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (1861-1928), British commander-in-chief, who planned the offensive and insisted on continuing it.
• General Sir Hubert Gough (1870-1963), commander of the Fifth Army in the opening phase.
• General Sir Herbert Plumer (1857-1932), commander of the Second Army, architect of Messines and the September attacks.
• Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie (1875-1933), commander of the Canadian Corps.
• Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria (1869-1955), commander of the German army group in Flanders.

By the numbers

Casualty figures include killed, wounded, missing and captured. They remain controversial because the British and German armies counted losses differently and because the post-war British official history was criticised for inflating German losses.

Consequences

Passchendaele weakened the German army, which could ill afford its losses, and it kept German attention on Flanders while the French army recovered. It did not achieve its strategic goals: the Belgian coast stayed in German hands and no breakthrough was made.

The ridge itself proved hard to hold. When the German spring offensive struck Flanders in April 1918, the British withdrew from the Passchendaele area in a matter of days to shorten their line. The cost of the battle also shaped British politics: Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had doubted the offensive, kept reserves in Britain over the winter and later attacked Haig’s conduct in his memoirs.

Soon after the battle ended, British forces tried a different approach at Cambrai on 20 November, using massed tanks and surprise artillery fire instead of long bombardments.

Myths and facts

A well-known story claims that Haig’s chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, burst into tears on first seeing the battlefield and asked whether men had really been sent to fight in such conditions. The anecdote comes from later second-hand accounts and is widely regarded as doubtful.

It is also commonly believed that the whole battle was fought in deep mud. The worst conditions came in August and from October onwards; the September attacks under Plumer were fought on drier ground and were among the most successful British operations of the year. Historians still debate whether the offensive should have been halted after Broodseinde in early October.

Legacy

Passchendaele became one of the defining images of the First World War for Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, alongside the Battle of the Somme. Photographs by Frank Hurley and others, and the writing of soldiers and poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, fixed the image of men struggling through a landscape of mud and shattered trees. Sassoon’s poem “Memorial Tablet” includes the line “I died in hell— (They called it Passchendaele)”.

Tyne Cot Cemetery, near Zonnebeke, is the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world, and its memorial wall lists around 35,000 missing soldiers. The village, now Passendale, hosts the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, and the battle’s centenary in 2017 drew large commemorations. Every year farmers in the area still turn up shells, equipment and occasionally human remains, a reminder of how much of the battle lies just beneath the fields. Canada’s battlefield memorial stands on Crest Farm, the knoll the Canadians took near the village.

Timeline

• 1917, 7 June: The Battle of Messines opens with the explosion of 19 mines.
• 1917, 31 July: The main offensive begins at Pilckem Ridge; heavy rain follows.
• 1917, 16-18 August: The Battle of Langemarck.
• 1917, 20 September: Plumer’s Battle of the Menin Road Ridge.
• 1917, 4 October: The Battle of Broodseinde.
• 1917, 12 October: First Battle of Passchendaele; heavy New Zealand losses.
• 1917, 6 November: Canadian troops capture Passchendaele village.
• 1917, 10 November: The offensive ends.

Why it matters

The Battle of Passchendaele showed both the growing skill of the British and Dominion armies and the terrible limits of offensive warfare on the Western Front. Its enormous human cost for modest gains made it, more than almost any other battle, a symbol of the futility and suffering of the First World War.