Thursday, August 20, 2015

August in Flanders


Passchendaele took place on and near the ridgelines south and east of the Belgian city of Ypres (the British Tommies pronounced it 'Yippers').

AKA the Third Battle of Ypres, the campaign opened on 7 June 1917 with the explosion of 19 mines under the German front lines at Messines Ridge south of the Ypres salient. The mines averaged 21 tons of explosives each. They were able to advance two miles on a six mile front,but then bogged down.
 
 
By mid-August eyewitness participants described it as “Mud…lice…more mud…noise…jagged steel...horror…men and animals torn to pieces…mud seeded with brains and blood…mud heaving with the putrefying corpses of tens of thousands.”
 
Sapper John Hunter of the Royal Engineers recalled digging trenches: "It looks like a graveyard I told Jock, who told me just to slice the bodies through at each side of the trench and not to bother digging any more out.  The odour was awful and the more we dug the more dead men's bodies we had to go through."
 
A German general described it as …” worse than Verdun…the greatest martyrdom of the world war.”
 
It lasted from June to November, but much of it was fought in August.  It was actually not a single battle but a five month long campaign comprising at least 12 major battles plus supporting operations.  It cost the British Commonwealth at least 244 thousand casualties plus perhaps 140 thousand more French and Belgian.  The Russians in the Kerensky Offensive (launched to support Passchendaele) lost 60 thousand.  German losses were at least 217 thousand.  However, all these casualty figures are disputed.  
 
The campaign included the Battles of Pilckem Ridge, Westhoek, Hill 70, Langemark, Menin Road Ridge, Polygon Wood, Broodeseinde, Poelcappelle, First Passchendaele, La Malmaison, and Second Passchendaele in addition to the opening Battle of Messines Ridge.
 
At Pilckem Ridge on 31 July the final Allied artillery barrage just before the attack was heard in London and throughout southern England.  It was the loudest man-made noise heard on earth (up until that time??).  It rivaled the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883.  Yet even with that final barrage and the prior two-weeks of artillery prep, the advance only gained 4000 yards and was then thrown back by German counterattack.
 
On 10 August, British II Corps captured Westhoek Ridge but were again thrown back by German counterattack except for one small corner.
 
Hill 70 in mid-August was fought mainly by the Canadian Corps fresh from the Battle of Vimy Ridge a few months earlier.  At the Battle of Hill 70 they were reportedly the first victims of the large scale use of Yperite AKA mustard gas.  They may have had gas masks or Hypo helmets as a Canadian Medical Officer is credited as inventing the gas mask after the 1915 chlorine attacks.  But were those masks effective against Yperite?  98 years later in August 2015 mustard gas attacks were still happening in Syria and Iraq. 
 
Langemark, also in mid-August was indecisive.  The German counterattack retook any earlier gains.
 
Again in August the French launched the Second offensive battle of Verdun to support the Passchendaele battles. No German counterattack was mounted.  Their Eingreif Divisions apparently were busy in Flanders.

It got better for the Brits in September, October, and November.  They had developed more effective 'bite and hold' tactics.  But even so they never did achieve one of their major goals, which was capturing the U-boat pens on the Belgian seacoast.  Total gains were about five miles so they were still 30 miles from Zeebrugge.


The Canucks were also in at the end of the campaign when they captured Passchendaele Ridge in November.  What little gains the Brits made during Passchendaele (and arguably the entire war) were due in large part to the sacrifices of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish, Scots; Indian Gurkhas, Sikhs, Rajputs, Pashtuns, and Bengalis; as well as South Africans, and Blacks from both East and West Africa and the West Indies.  
 
Field Marshal Douglas Haig AKA Butcher Haig started this bloodbath against the wishes of his Prime Minister, and concealed the start of the campaign until 31 July which was considered the official start.  And he also went against against the advice of General Foch who at that time was Chief of the French General Staff and later became Haig's boss as the "Commander-in-Chief (Généralissime) of the Allied Armies".  Haig maintained through out the campaign that the casualties were worse on the German side and that attrition was breaking the back of the German 4th Army.  Not so apparently.  If his intent was to force the Germans to spend lives, they did, but at what cost?.  And as the son of a veteran of Passchendaele was quoted as saying:  "But if this is generalship, why don't lumberjacks fell oak trees by butting their heads against them?"

 

11 comments:

  1. Talk about a world gone mad! And we like to bitch about the problems we have nowadays.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ael - And they thought it would be the war to end all wars. If only that had been true!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Beneath Hill 60 is a great movie dramatization of this battle and the mining operations surrounding it in particular. It is tough to watch though, particularly the ending.

    ReplyDelete
  4. PFK - Thanks for the tip - I'll try to rent a copy. Those sappers were incredible. It would be bad enough just to be working in the bowels of the earth like a mole. But infinitely worse to be down there worried about counter-mining - or gas, there would be no escape down there.

    Amazing that almost a century after WW1, that Islamic Front sappers are using mine tunnels loaded with explosives to attack Assad's troops in Aleppo, Idlib and elsewhere.
    http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/syria-civil-war-massive-tunnel-bombs-become-new-rebel-weapon-break-stalemate-videos-1451101

    ReplyDelete
  5. Speaking of Syria, did you read the Rivers of Babylon article. Hydraulic wars may be coming back into fashion.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Never fails to astound me the almost child-like faith many of the GOs on both sides had in the value of "attrition" long after combat outcomes showed that the process typically resulted in little more than marginal additional casualties for them"attrited" compared to the "attrit-er". Proof, if you needed it, that when faced with the alternatives of facing unpleasant facts and clinging to a beloved theory general officers are no different than most people in preferring hope to defeat.

    The modern correlate seems to be the theory of Western-style COIN. Despite repeated demonstrations that rebellion suppression only works with genocidal-level force and that Malaya was a freakish one-off the COINdinistas keep insisting that we can "do" Syria...or Libya...or Yemen...if "we just had enough troops and time..."

    ReplyDelete
  7. That said...I recall reading that on a vast scale attrition "worked"; that at some point in WW1 all the four main Allied armies became largely combat-ineffective. The French after the Neville Offensives, the Russian after Samsonov's, the British after this series of engagements, and the Italians after Ninth Isonzo. Individual units retained some offensive capabilities but in general could not be trusted to conduct major attacks without risking collapse.

    The was Petain's "genius"; to understand that the combination of tactical defense, the fresh Americans, and the cumulative damage of blockade and bloodletting to Germany offered a hope of victory. Haig, Foch, Ludendorff...they didn't get it. Petain did, and thus managed to hang on.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AEL - thanks for that link. Nothing seems to ever go out of fashion in war. Technology advances but some strategies are the same now as they were in the paleolithic age.

    ReplyDelete
  9. FDChief - Agree with you on attrition. But I think the real attrition that won the war was not attrition of the armies, but attrition of national will. The Kaiser's empire was foundering, plagued with its own revolutionaries, and its people hungry. Same with the Austro-Hungarian Empire only more so, it could not depend on its minorities either in or out of uniform. The Czechs, Slovaks, Western Ukrainians, Poles, Slovenes, Croats, Bosniaks, Romanians and Trieste-Italians were all more oriented towards gaining their own independence instead of fighting the Hapsburgs. Ditto for the Turks who had massive internal dissension with Arabs, Armenians, Greeks and Kurds.

    As for Foch, I don't believe he was an attritionist. I know his Ninth Army suffered a lot of casualties in 1914 during their victory at the Marne, but so did Fifth and Sixth Armies. And Joffre was overall commander there. Foch was definitely against Haig's Passchendaele Campaign. And in 1918 he is credited with brunting the German Spring Offensive and then was the architect of Allied Grand Offensive in August and September. He has been credited with creating the strategy which finally won the land war. Perhaps Petain had a hand in his strategy or maybe not? Petain, I thought was more interested in technology, with building up French artillery and tanks, which to his creidt had a great effect. But I don't believe he had any say so on the blockade - that was a purely British strategy.

    ReplyDelete
  10. No question that the Central Powers lost (and the Allies won) because of political and economic attrition more than human lives lost. In this case I'm speaking of the purely military effects.

    I won't pretend to really know the politics of the GQG. My comments are based on a very cursory knowledge of the individuals, and it was Person who is quoted as saying that he was waiting "...for the tanks and the Americans." I always assumed that by "the tanks" he meant not just the vehicles but the overall effects of the Allied material superiority as the addition of American industrial might on one hand and the bite of the blockade on the other tipped the balance in the Allies' favor...

    ReplyDelete
  11. Chief -

    I also am ignorant of the GQG politics. I know that Foch, made CINC of the Allied Armies in April(?) 1918, was head of the GQGA, but did that make Foch superior in rank to Petain?? Probably not, I assume it was more like Ike and Marshall. Or perhaps like Pershing and Bliss? So Foch probably took a great deal of advice from Petain. But Foch's strategy got the credit for the allied victory, and rightly so.

    As far as the tanks go, you are right. 3000 plus Renault light tanks were produced in France in 1917 and early 1918. Along with close to 800 heavy Schneiders and St Chamonds. Patton's 1st Provisional Tank Brigade at St Mihiel and later the Argonne was all Renault FT light tanks. Some American made Renault FTs were made under license but production was late and they never saw action.

    http://www.tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww1/fr/renault_ft.php

    Interesting to note though that all (most?) early French and British tank running gear design was based on American made caterpillar tractors built by Holt Manufacturing in Stockton CA.

    mike

    ReplyDelete