Battle of Passchendaele

Background

By the summer of 1917 the Allied plan for the year had gone wrong. The French Nivelle Offensive had failed in the spring and the French army was recovering from mutinies, so the weight of the Western Front fell on the British Expeditionary Force. Its commander, Sir Douglas Haig, had long wanted to attack in Flanders. Breaking out of the Ypres Salient and taking the high ground east of the town, including the Passchendaele ridge, might lead to a decisive breakthrough and open the way to the Belgian coast, from whose ports German submarines threatened British shipping.

The ground mattered: the Germans held the Gheluvelt Plateau and the low ridges running north-east through Broodseinde to Passchendaele, which overlooked the salient. The first step was taken on 7 June, when General Sir Herbert Plumer's Second Army fired nineteen mines under the Messines Ridge to the south and took it, at a lower cost than had been feared.

The main offensive did not follow for seven weeks, and the pause is one of the battle's arguments. Haig gave the main attack to General Sir Hubert Gough and the Fifth Army rather than to Plumer. The decision to go ahead was disputed in London: the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, opposed the offensive, as did Ferdinand Foch, and historians still question the choice of Flanders, the choice of Gough, and whether Haig should have waited for the Americans. A preliminary bombardment of about two weeks warned the Germans what was coming.

The armies

The attackers were the British Fifth Army (Gough) in the centre and north and the Second Army (Plumer) to the south, with the French First Army under François Anthoine on the left at Bixschoote. Over the battle the British Empire committed some 50 divisions and the French six. Dominion troops did much of the decisive fighting: I and II Anzac Corps, with four Australian divisions and the New Zealand Division, in September and October, and the Canadian Corps under Sir Arthur Currie, about 100,000 strong, at the end. A Belgian division fought on the northern flank. Gough planned to use 120 Mark IV tanks on the first day, but the artillery was the real weapon: by September the Second Army had about one gun or howitzer for every five feet of front.

The German 4th Army under Friedrich Sixt von Armin, part of Crown Prince Rupprecht's army group, held the salient. Its chief of staff, Fritz von Loßberg, refused to withdraw to a rear line and organised a defence in depth: a thinly held forward zone studded with concrete pillboxes and machine-gun nests, villages fortified for all-round defence, and specialist counter-attack (Eingreif) divisions waiting behind the Menin and Passchendaele ridges to strike any attack that had outrun its artillery. Between 77 and 83 German divisions passed through the battle.

The battle

Gough's offensive, July–August. The battle that CDB90 records as a single engagement, Ypres III (319), opened at 03:50 on 31 July at Pilckem Ridge. In the north XIV Corps and the French advanced 2,500–3,500 yards to the Steenbeek; the French passed their final objective by 13:30. On the right, though, II Corps took only part of its objectives on the Gheluvelt Plateau, the key to the whole position. From about 11:00 the German Eingreif divisions counter-attacked, and when rain in the afternoon blinded the British artillery observers they drove the centre back from the Ypres–Roulers railway to St Julien. Some British brigades had lost about 70 per cent of their men.

The rain went on: 127 mm fell in August, much of it in five days, and the shelled ground turned to swamp. Gough attacked again at Westhoek on 10 August and at Langemarck on 16–18 August, where XIV Corps took the village, but the attacks on the plateau failed. On 25 August Haig gave the main effort to Plumer and moved the Second Army's boundary north onto the plateau.

Plumer's bite and hold, September–October. Plumer spent three weeks of mostly dry weather preparing a series of short steps, each no more than about 1,500 yards deep, six days apart, under a massive barrage, with the captured ground prepared at once against counter-attack. At the Menin Road on 20 September, with the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions north of the road and ground fog covering the advance, most objectives fell by mid-morning; the Eingreif divisions were caught by the barrage and beaten off by nightfall. At Polygon Wood on 26 September the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions led, each attacking division on about 1,000 yards of front behind a five-layer barrage, and nothing taken was lost. At Broodseinde on 4 October twelve divisions, including the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Australian and the New Zealand Division, attacked just as the Germans were forming up for a counter-attack of their own; the barrage fell on them, the Australians took Zonnebeke and the ridge, and over 4,700 Germans were captured. The German official history called it a black day.

The mud, October. That afternoon the rain returned and hardly stopped. Guns sank, roads vanished and the barrage weakened. At Poelcappelle on 9 October most of the ground gained in front of Passchendaele was lost again. On 12 October, in the First Battle of Passchendaele, the New Zealanders attacked the Bellevue Spur into uncut wire and intact pillboxes and suffered about 2,700 casualties, over 840 of them killed, their worst day of the war; the 3rd Australian Division reached towards the village but could not hold what it took.

The Canadians, October–November. The Canadian Corps relieved II Anzac Corps on 18 October. Currie laid plank roads and tramways and brought up his guns before attacking on 26 and 30 October, when Crest Farm fell. Further north the French First Army and a Belgian division cleared the Merckem peninsula by 28 October. On 6 November the 2nd Canadian Division took what was left of Passchendaele village in under three hours, and on 10 November a last attack pushed a little further along the ridge, short of Westroosebeke. The offensive then stopped.

Aftermath

The British Empire had taken the ridge but not broken through. Its losses are put at anything from about 245,000 to 450,000, depending on who counts and how; the Canadian Corps lost 15,654, close to the 16,000 Currie had predicted, and Australian units about 38,000. German losses run from about 200,000 to 400,000, with the official German figure near 217,000. Divisions had to go to Italy after the disaster at Caporetto, and on 20 November the British attacked at Cambrai. In 1918 the British abandoned the ridge without firing a shot.

The battle's meaning is still disputed. Lloyd George later called it one of the greatest disasters of the war, and for many readers Passchendaele stands for the mud and futility of the Western Front. Prior and Wilson argue the carnage was not inevitable and place the responsibility on the high command, especially for carrying on into October. Others point to the German official history, which said Germany had been brought near to destruction in Flanders, to Sheldon's argument that Germany could not afford its losses whatever the ratio, and to Griffith's view that bite and hold kept working until November. Haig thought it a success.

The dead are commemorated at the Menin Gate, at Tyne Cot Cemetery and at the Canadian memorial on Crest Farm.

Wargaming it

Third Ypres is a campaign of set-piece attacks, and each one makes a good game at battalion or company scale (a stand as a platoon or section) on a few thousand yards of front. The best contrast is between two days only weeks apart: Gough's deep attack on 31 July, with infantry outrunning their guns and Eingreif counter-attacks arriving as the rain comes in, and Plumer's Menin Road or Broodseinde, with short bounds, a dense barrage and the defender's counter-attack caught in the open. A third, grimmer scenario is 12 October on the Bellevue Spur, where the attacker has little artillery, uncut wire and ground that halves movement.

Key terrain is subtle: pillboxes and fortified farms are the real objectives, and the low spurs give observation out of proportion to their height. Rules should make artillery the main weapon, with fixed barrage lines and a timetable, and weather and ground state should be variables that change through the game.

For the defender the question is how far forward to hold and when to commit the Eingreif reserve. For the attacker: how deep to go, and whether to exploit after Broodseinde, as some urged and Plumer declined. A divisional-scale campaign game of the whole battle, with rotation, rain and the October decision to go on, lets players argue the case for and against continuing.

Maps and pictures

Pictures from the time

Photographs by the armies' photographers and the press, and drawings made at the time: free-to-use pictures from the battle's category on Wikimedia Commons. Each opens its file page there, with the full caption and source.