The official name of the battle is the 3rd Battle of Ypres, but it is universally known as the Battle of Passchendaele because the capture of Passchendaele town and its ridge (Passchendaele ridge) eventually became the primary objectives of the operation. The battle began on July 31, 1917 with an attack northeast on Pilckem and right on Gheluvelt ridge. The attacking troops in the Pilckem sector were supported by massive tanks. Initially the advance was successful, but unfortunately the right flank failed in its attempt to take Gheluvelt ridge.
Later, at four in the afternoon it started to rain. The rain lasted for several days and of course the land was flooded and made the advance of the tanks impossible.
Although Haig had the original purpose of a brief battle to break through the German lines it was revealed that it was impossible. Despite this, Haig insisted on continuing operations further north in the Langemarck area. General Gough, selected for his aggressiveness to carry out the main attack, warned Haig about the impossibility of continuing and urged him to call off the attack. But Haig inflexible as always ordered to continue the attack, despite the terrible losses. The totally sterile attack lasted three more weeks until he decided to suspend it. Then he decided to change the axis of the attack, from north to east, and by the time the weather cleared he ordered the ridge to attack again. Haig also decided to replace Gough with General Plumer who would be in charge of the next attack. Plumer, one of the most cunning and intelligent generals in the British General Staff, was in favor of carrying out small-scale attacks under the cover of an intense barrier of fire that would also discourage German counterattacks. This strategy led to the accumulation of large numbers of troops in a very narrow front, which facilitated the relief of exhausted troops and the provision of food and ammunition. The troops would advance behind a screen of fire and would be hidden and camouflaged under the smoke and dust of the explosions. However, these forecasts would be nothing if the rain made an appearance and the terrain became a viscous and impractical element.
The Battle of Menin Road on September 20 was the first of three famous victories that were achieved through the use of Plumer's new programmed tactics. At dawn on the fifth day, after five days of uninterrupted bombardment, the ANZACS launched a victorious attack with two Australian divisions on both flanks and a Scottish division to the left to reinforce the flank. One of the most notorious episodes of this attack was that of Australian 2nd Lieutenant Fred Birks. Birks led the heroic takeover of a machine gun company located in one of the German fortifications, eliminating the enemy and capturing the weapons. After this action he organized a party to take another of the fortifications that ended up taking 16 enemy soldiers, one of them the commanding officer. Birks died shortly after a shell blast while digging trenches for the shelter of his platoon. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. His body lies in the Perth Cemetery in Zillebeke (Grave I.G. 45).
Tyne Cot Cemetery
The Australians reached the bottom of Polygon Wood and Black Watch Corner at a cost of 5,000 casualties. They were relieved, and the captured sector consolidated by installing a small railway line to ensure the delivery of supplies to the new front line. On September 26 the good weather continued and the ground conditions were still optimal for Plumer's curtain of fire to continue and the Anzacs to continue. The Australian 4th Division captured the remainder of the Polygon and Butte position. They had managed to reach a position from which it was possible to attack the bulk of the Broodseinde ridge (Broodseinde ridge). The Battle of Broodseinde took place at dawn on October 3. The Australian troops waiting to attack were bombarded in their own trenches by enemy mortar fire, and when they jumped out of the trenches to attack they were surprised to see how the German troops used their own fire barrier to advance towards the Australian positions, curiously, found themselves face to face in the middle of No Man's Land. However, the Germans were eventually driven back by an Australian bayonet charge. At this point, a German machine gun began to sweep through the front Australian ranks, slowing down part of the attack. Then Sergeant Lewis McGee, armed only with a revolver, traveled about eighty meters under the bullets, finally taking the machine gun and reorganizing the attack again. McGee was awarded the Victoria Cross for outstanding leadership. Unfortunately he died on October 12 without knowing his mention. His body lies in Tyne Cot Cemetery Grave No. XX.D.1.
After the Australian bayonet charge, the German troops withdrew to their trenches. There, together with other reserve troops, they were crushed by British artillery. The Australians continued the advance under the barrier of fire and finally managed to take the Broodseinde ridge on 4 October. When the Australian troops reached the ridge, they saw the drawing of the German lines crystal clear. The only obstacle to victory was the town of Passchendaele located to the north and which was heavily occupied by the Germans. These three fantastic victories vindicated Plumer's strategy of going step by step, although they were possible because time gave them a truce and the ground was dry enough to allow a breakthrough. The next day, October 5, it started to rain. It was not torrential rain, but a constant rain that ended up soaking to the bone. Haig, encouraged by the three successes, ignored the rain and decided to launch another attack on the Germans on the Passchendaele ridge. He even warned the cavalry to be ready for the attack. He ordered the Anzacs to take Passchendaele on October 9 even when the wind and rain had raised a terrible storm. Haig's decision was reckless as conditions were utterly adverse: the belts of barbed wire had not been cut and the Germans had replaced their exhausted troops with fresh reinforcement units sheltered from the elements in their concrete fortifications. The main reason for Haig's insistence on continuing the attack was to prevent his troops from having to remain all winter in a Dantean scenario, with extreme weather conditions, and above all with the constant threat of being within range of the German positions without coverage.
Tyne Cot Cemetery
The Australians attacked and in Augustus Wood, near Tyne Cot, Captain Clarence Jeffries, with an assault platoon, in the attack on a German fortification, captured four machine guns and took 35 prisoners. Position secured Jeffries led the attack to the next German position but fell under the bullets of a German machine gun. He was posthumously awarded the VC and his grave is in Tyne Cot Cemetery, not far from that of Sergeant McGee. According to John Laffin, all the officers in the battalion were killed or wounded that day.
Incredibly, and largely because of the courage of Captain Jeffries, twenty Australian soldiers reached the ruins of what was once the church of Passchendaele. Unfortunately, the British troops, from the right flank, were unable to hold and support the Australians, who were forced to retreat into the craters flooded with water and mud that the howitzers and torrential rains created and that was their front line. original. The British artillery had no reserves of ammunition, and the few shells that fell did so by sinking into the slimy mud, turning into harmless columns of mud and water. Despite all this, Haig decided to continue the attack, even as rain and freezing cold made their appearance on October 12. The attack was hopelessly doomed to failure. The slimy sea of mud invaded everything and made the sacrifice of the troops as absurd as it was inhuman.
It was in this attack that Sergeant McGee was killed. The only solid objects in the middle of this sea of crater-spattered mud were the German concrete fortifications, which with their machine guns under the camouflaged protection of the mud caused many casualties. The attack cost 7,000 casualties. 3,200 soldiers from the Australian 3rd Division died in just 24 hours. In the end, the exhausted Australian troops were withdrawn, but Haig, pathologically obsessed with taking Passchendaele, ordered the Canadians to end the battle. However, Canadian General Arthur Currie, one of Haig's few generals with common sense, adamantly refused to advance until weather conditions improved and troop supplies were adequate.
Finally, on November 12, the Canadians took Passchendaele, or what was left of it.
The battle was over, and aerial photographs were taken after it. It is estimated that there were more than half a million craters in the area where the town of Passchendaele had once stood. This was what Haig hoped, for his troops to spend the winter there. The results of the offensive were Pyrrhic: the predictions of breaking the enemy lines were not fulfilled, and the few gains were at a very high price in human losses. The British had achieved their objective, although it was totally useless in terms of strategic planning as the amphibious attack on Nieuport had been abandoned and there was no longer any hope of capturing the German ports, which were finally blocked with the sinking of old ships. in Zeebrugge.
Tyne Cot Cemetery
The Battle of Passchendaele claimed more than half a million dead in three months. The Germans lost about 250,000 men and the British about 300,000, of whom more than 36,000 were Australians. More than 90,000 bodies of Australian or British soldiers could not be identified, and around 40,000 were never recovered, dwelling forever in the hideous quagmire. Many of those who drowned were wounded or exhausted soldiers who had slipped or fallen from the wooden walkways that crossed the huge craters or puddles created by the howitzers and who were unable to escape the disgusting and nauseating slimy sludge that had become. battlefield.
Passchendaele was the last war of attrition of the Great War, and it still remains in memory as a futile battle, just like that of the Somme a year earlier. The criticisms lie, above all, in the fact that a year after the battle of the Somme, Passchendaele was a carbon copy in terms of strategy and tactics, not so much in weapons.
