The Battle of Passchendaele, which stretched from July 31 to November 6, 1917, is today remembered above all else as a symbol of the utter senselessness of the slaughter that took place on the Western Front. It ended with the capture of Passchendaele village and, instead of the decisive breakthrough many on the Allied side had anticipated, it only widened the Ypres Salient by 8km.
The British could claim it as a victory, but it was won at enormous cost. The human price was over 300,000 killed and wounded on the British side. German casualties were only slightly less at 260,000. The British Prime Minister at the time of the battle, Lloyd George, stated in 1938 that, “Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of the war… no soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign.”
The bloodymindedness of the commander of the British armies in Europe, General Sir Douglas Haig, his failure to learn from repeated failures before and during the battle, was directly responsible for the disaster that would unfold across the wide Flanders plain in front of Ypres. As the largest British army ever assembled was decimated in front of his eyes, Haig’s response was to repeat failed tactics over and over.
The result was predictable, as General Arthur Currie, commander of Canadian forces, proved. In mid-October, with British and Australian armies depleted and exhausted, Haig ordered Canadian troops to attack. Currie protested, predicting that it would cost 16,000 pointless casualties. Haig was unmoved. The attacks went ahead resulting in 15,654 Canadians being killed or wounded.
The officer and poet, Siegfried Sassoon, summed up the madness in a line of his poem, Memorial Tablet: “I died in Hell (They called it Passchendaele)”. In the minds of the British command, military tactics were not the primary reason for the repeated failure to achieve anything close to their objectives. For that they had the weather to blame. Heavy rain started to fall on the afternoon of the very first day of the battle.
It fell for seven straight days turning the battlefield into a quagmire of thick, cloying mud. The results were disastrous for British soldiers and ambitions alike. Sassoon summed it up with the line, “I fell into the bottomless mud, and lost the light“. This was also (largely) predictable. Eighty years of Flemish weather records showed that autumn rains started in August with great regularity. Haig deliberately ignored this information.
These facts were running through my mind as I strolled through Tyne Cot Cemetery, just two kilometres from the village of Passchendaele. Tyne Cot is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in Flanders. While it has almost 12,000 tombstones, the names of 35,000 soldiers missing in action from the battle are inscribed on the wall at the entrance. It is a devastating and moving sight.
Tyne Cot was the end of my walk through part of the battlefield of Passchendaele, not quite to the furthest point of the Allied advance but a fitting place to stop. I strolled back to the village of Zonnebeke and the excellent Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, a thought provoking place that honors the lives of soldiers of all armies. The recreation of underground bunkers is exceptional, if a little clean.
I’d walked from Ypres to Hooge. At Railway Wood were twin memorials to the Liverpool Scottish Regiment and to tunnelers who died underground. I headed to Polygon Wood. The trees had long been blasted out of existence when, on September 26, 1917, British and Australian forces launched an assault against German trenches fortified with multiple concrete bunkers. It would be a bitter victory for the Allies, bought at the price of 20,000 casualties.
The trees have returned and today it is a pleasant place to walk, but at the far end of the wood are two cemeteries and a large memorial to the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions who lost so many lives here. Entering the wood I had passed a memorial to the Scottish Black Watch Regiment. In an earlier phase of the war, the Black Watch had stemmed a German attack here, suffering heavy casualties in the face of the elite Prussian Guards Regiment.
In open space to the side of Polygon Wood is a small memorial park with a nice artwork dedicated to peace. In the woods I came across the remains of several concrete bunkers, even their presence makes it hard to imagine how deformed this landscape had become by 1917. On the road to Zonnebeke were ghostly silhouettes of Australian and New Zealand soldiers.
Passchendaele was justified by the need to liberate the Belgian coast, and the ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge. Not only was it a monumental failure that cost the lives of over half a million men on all sides to satisfy Haig’s honour, all that hard won land was back in German hands in 1918 when they launched their Spring Offensive. The sheer futility and recklessness of it is mind bending.
A beautiful post. It was a visit to Tyne Cot and an evening spent in Ypres that started a lifelong passion for history and WW1/2 in particular.
Thank you. They are incredibly moving places to experience.
The utter pointless stupidity of it all does indeed boggle the mind.
It’s just the fact of the tiny gains made with such sacrifice. Difficult to comprehend.
I cant imagine what those poor fellows went through, the sheer scale of loss is crazy! As an Australian I have to get here one day to pay my respects.