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Passchendaele

Page 13

by Paul Ham


  The new German recruit was poorly trained at this stage of the war; typically he received one to three months in German bases and two weeks in Flanders before being rushed into battle. His rifle skills were no match for the British and Anzacs. Yet he had machine guns in abundance, lines of pillboxes, and perhaps the best engineering, medical and logistical support in the field. He sorely lacked enough artillery and shells, but he had been ordered to defend, not to attack, so the shortage was less important. He was likely of Württemberg or Bavarian origin, as most of those forming the three armies of the Kronprinz Rupprecht (Crown Prince Rupert) von Bayern Army Group on the Flanders front were. The start of the influx of battle-hardened veterans from the Russian front raised his spirits and forged a do-or-die mentality that persisted well into 1918. In short, Fritz was far from ‘worn down’, no matter how often Haig and Charteris insisted that the Somme and the Aisne had exhausted him.

  A few basic comforts lay between an army in high spirits and one in the doldrums. The lack of food, warm clothes and cigarettes struck down morale more forcefully than fear or exhaustion. The British and Dominion troops lived off the same dreary rations of bully beef (from boeuf bouilli, on which Napoleon’s armies marched), biscuits, bread, jam and tea, the staple of the British Army for more than 50 years. In the trenches, the men typically ate canned, cold rations, and perhaps a dixie of hot food brought up from horse-drawn cookers in the rear. They also carried ‘iron rations’ in their rucksacks – to be eaten in emergencies – consisting of tins of bully beef and biscuits. The Germans survived largely on sausage, sauerkraut and black or rye bread.

  British dieticians set 4193 calories a day as ample for frontline troops; their German equivalents received just 4083 (well short of the best fed army in Europe, Americans, who would receive 4714).51 Soldiers’ families supplemented this meagre diet with dispatches of fruitcake, tinned fish and meat, cheeses, biscuits, chocolates, sausage and, of course, the ubiquitous cigarettes. Most men on the Western Front spent their waking hours longing for a smoke: the cheap Woodbine for the Tommies and Players and Goldflake for the officers.

  ‘The brightest moment’ of the British soldier’s day was his tot of rum at dawn, without which his ‘resistance weakened’.52 The double rum ration in his coffee before he went into battle was thought to help forge a fighting spirit. Rum ‘saved thousands of lives’, claimed Colonel Walter Nicholson. ‘It is an urgent devil to the Highlander … a solace to the East Anglian countryman before the fight.’53

  The British infantryman carried a .303 short-magazine Lee Enfield rifle (SMLE), which proved more accurate over long ranges than the German 7.92-millimetre Mauser Gewehr, and had a ten-round magazine against the German five-round. Both were effective sniper’s rifles at ranges of 1000 yards. Bayonets were standard, but rarely used in combat, inflicting only 0.32 per cent of combat wounds (see above).54

  The attacking infantrymen carried an array of clubs, knives, knuckledusters and even sharpened spades for use in hand-to-hand fighting. The most effective weapon for ‘clearing’ trenches or pillboxes was the hand grenade, of which a huge range were developed, including the first firebomb, known as P-bombs or phosphorus bombs, and the British Mills bomb, the most reliable, first used in the British Armies in 1917. Only the officers were issued with revolvers: the heavy-recoil British Webley or the reliable German Luger.

  Machine guns were the most lethal firearms, capable of scything through waves of advancing troops and dropping lines of horses. Light machine guns such as the Lewis gun (strictly speaking, a large automatic rifle) were standard in every British platoon in 1917, and fired off a 47-round drum magazine. The Lewis’s mobility and power made it the ideal weapon for attacking pillboxes. Heavy belt-fed machine guns could fire up to 600 rounds per minute: three men operating a British Vickers or German MG08 machine gun could inflict as many casualties as a platoon of riflemen.55 ‘Serried ranks of infantry could be chopped down in a single traverse,’ writes the historian Chris McNab, ‘and an infantry squad bunched together could be dispatched in seconds.’56 In action, the Vickers ‘felt like a living animal’ in the hands of the operator, ‘as the blowback of gas from the previous round discharging drew in the next’.57

  The big guns were the war-winning weapons. Artillery had thus far caused 70 per cent of casualties on the Western Front, and would inflict a higher percentage in Flanders. Never had so much steel fallen on human flesh. Heavy explosive shells tore bodies in half and decapitated men who a moment ago had been chatting or filling a pipe. A soldier who took a direct hit was blown to pieces, showering his comrades with his blood and entrails. Shrapnel shells, bursting overhead, scattered tiny balls, like shot, that cut down advancing platoons. Those whose bodies survived a bombardment often lost their self-control, reduced to ‘nervous cases’, though surprisingly few fled or went mad – such was the pressure not to break.

  There were dozens of kinds of cannon, ranging from small trench mortars to heavy guns. The Stokes mortar, developed by Wilfred Stokes, could send 25 bombs per minute in a high, near-vertical arc into the enemy trenches; a quick adjustment in the angle extended the range up to 800 yards. The Germans had earlier developed the hated ‘minenwerfers’ (‘minnies’, the Tommies called them), whose fat, sluggish rounds could smash open trenches.

  The medium field artillery covered a great assortment of guns of various power and sizes. Two prolific models were the Royal Field Artillery’s Ordnance QF (Quick Firing) 18-pounder, and the German 7.7-centimetre Feldkanone. Both had a range of about 9000–10,000 yards, and their ubiquity meant they dominated the battlefield. Throughout 1917, on the Western Front, the British QF shot 38 million shells out of an available 42 million manufactured.58

  The heaviest guns and howitzers pumped shell after shell onto the enemy lines in an unbearable, deafening continuum. These monsters were capable of cracking open pillboxes and ‘delivering localized earthquakes’ at ranges of up to 15,000 yards.59 One of the most powerful British heavy guns was the Ordnance BL 60-pounder, capable of firing two 60-pound shells (5 inches in diameter) per minute. Larger, road- or rail-mounted howitzers could fire 9.2-inch or even 12-inch shells, destroying especially stubborn targets such as bunkers, buildings or fortifications. Germany’s Krupp guns – notably ‘Big Bertha’, in 1914 the largest cannon ever fired – had smashed open Belgium’s forts and alerted everyone to the fact that heavy artillery would decide who won the war.

  The scale of this onslaught beggars the imagination. By April 1917, the Royal Artillery fielded about 2300 heavy guns on the Western Front, firing about five million rounds in the second quarter of the year (compared with 706,222 in the same period in 1916).60 Between July and November 1917, the Royal Artillery would expend two to three million shells per week, a total of about 33 million during Third Ypres, two-thirds of which were fired into the Salient.

  The Germans were outnumbered in artillery by three to one, and in shells by six to one.61 Being on the defensive, however, they could afford to sit and wait, and pack their firepower into devastating counter-battery attacks, which, if well timed and aimed, could cut down the enemy as they left their trenches (as happened to many British troops on the first day of the Somme). The Germans also happened to have a threefold advantage in gas shells with which to terrorise attacking troops. No army had yet faced the impact of such concentrated shellfire in so small an area, and the density of the barrages is what would make the coming battle a uniquely terrifying experience.

  The British invested great hopes of cracking open the enemy lines in two new weapons, whose destructive potential would not be realised until the Second World War: tanks and aircraft. Primitive tanks had been available since the Somme, and were now hailed as a war-winning weapon. Yet the soft Flanders soil, soon to turn to liquid mud, would quickly end their effective use in 1917, with the exception of a few dry weeks.

  Aircraft flew incessantly overhead, on thousands of sorties, mostly combat and photoreconnaissance missions. They would play a criti
cal role in Third Ypres. This was the era of the Royal Flying Corps’ Sopwith Camel, the famous biplane that would shoot down 1294 enemy aircraft – more than any other Allied fighter – and whose crews used to joke that sorties offered them a choice between a wooden cross, a Red Cross and a Victoria Cross;62 and the Fokker Eindecker, the best known German aircraft, whose dominance would end in 1917, as well as the Albatros series, famously flown by Manfred von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’ and ‘ace of aces’, credited with shooting down 80 enemy planes.

  Pilots tended to come from the privileged classes, young men who saw themselves as part of a rare elite, superior to the troglodyte world in the trenches below. The Germans were initially the better pilots: 70 of their aircraft shot down 300 British planes in ‘Bloody April’ 1917, killing or wounding 200 men. The balance would be levelled during Third Ypres, largely due to the reckless courage of pilots such as Old Etonian Lieutenant Arthur Rhys Davids DSO, MC (with bar), who seemed to think the whole thing a daring game. Rhys Davids, who had loathed his brief stint in the army – ‘My darling Ma,’ he wrote home, ‘everyone is so common and so sordid’ – could not contain his delight on being selected by the 56th Squadron, Royal Flying Corps: ‘Gee! ain’t I bucked? Just think Mums: I shall be with my friends Muspratt and Potts; we have for flight commanders two of the best fighting pilots in the RFC …’63

  Flying aces like Rhys Davids and von Richthofen tended to speak of ‘bagging’ an enemy plane and racking up ‘kills’. The pilots’ chief weapon was the cockpit-mounted machine gun, with which they engaged each other in spectacular duels in the sky. British aircraft were also used to identify their troops’ locations during battle, relying on klaxon horns or white flares to mark the soldiers’ forward-most lines, and were critical as artillery spotters, guiding the guns to their targets from the air.

  Communication between headquarters and the front lines was otherwise limited to telephone lines – whose wires were always being cut – runners, carrier pigeons and even semaphore flags, a relic of the nineteenth century. The bulky, primitive wirelesses were of little use on the battlefield; no radios or helicopters were yet available, of course. ‘The era of the First World War stands as the only period in history in which high commanders were mute,’ concludes one historian.64 Junior officers, leading their men into the attack, revolvers at the ready, were responsible for relaying orders and making decisions under fire; many were killed or wounded before they could do so. The average life expectancy of a lieutenant on the Western Front, hitherto no more than a few months, would soon be measured in weeks.

  The great challenge facing the generals was how best to deploy such destructive firepower. Being almost always on the attack in 1916 and 1917, the Allies were preoccupied with trying to find a way of using their superior firepower to break the German lines. Deep trenches, dugouts and bunkers protected the enemy from the biggest projectiles. Only the infantry could destroy the enemy in detail, yet how could they advance across exposed terrain? The Somme and other battles had taught the generals that only a barrage of great density and destructive power could shield the infantry as they advanced, break up the enemy wire, and keep the German counter-attack divisions at bay.

  The artillery barrage had come a long way since 1914. Back then, the static barrage hammered away at a single target, such as a trench line or pillbox. The more advanced ‘box’ barrage bracketed a position on several sides, with the aim of protecting the British infantry in the boxed-off area from counter-attacks. Yet these barrages failed to achieve their aims, as shockingly demonstrated at the Somme.

  The new concept of the ‘creeping barrage’ aimed to shield the advancing infantry behind a slow-moving wall of exploding shells. It was used to stunning success at Vimy Ridge, in April. To produce a moving barrage, the medium and heavy gunners fired together in carefully controlled belts, which moved forward in precisely timed increments or ‘lifts’. This diabolical configuration would advance like a slow-moving wall of steel, chopping up everything in its path, throwing up geysers of soil, pocking the field in craters. No soldier would ever forget the sound of its approach, in which the mass of exploding shells merged into a constant din dubbed ‘drumfire’.

  To succeed, the creeping barrage required exact calculation, taking in the density of fire, rate of extension of fire, and positions of friendly infantry and enemy. The gunners would launch as many as eight successive belts of shell, carefully timed to lift in increments of perhaps 50 yards a minute. The infantry would advance behind this protective curtain to the edge of the enemy trenches, charge out of its smoky embrace and kill or capture the stunned survivors, most of whom would be stupefied with shock.

  If the barrage advanced too quickly, or lacked the density to destroy entrenched enemy positions, the defending Germans would be able to recover and shoot down the attacking troops stranded in the open – as happened to the British Army on the Somme. Or, the barrage might prove too dense and slow, churning up the battlefield and rendering it impassable to troops, horses and gun carriages, especially if accompanied by torrential rain.

  No battle had been fought in such conditions, or with such firepower, forcing many hard questions on the British and Anzac commanders: how would they bring up the artillery fast enough to resume the barrage once the infantry had captured their objectives? How would they aim and fire guns in muddy, unstable soil? How would the vital sound-rangers (who used pairs of microphones to pick up and fix on targets) and topographers (who carried their maps and tripods up to the front) operate in such conditions? And how would that new species of soldier, apparently impervious to fear, the forward observation officer, perform in a treeless wasteland? What if it rained and bogged down the advance? Preoccupying the German soldier were questions of how long he could withstand successive waves of shellfire followed by waves of infantry. All these questions, and many others, had no easy answers: both sides were learning how to fight the war as they went.

  And both sides were now on the march, or travelling in lorries or light rail, moving through northern France towards Flanders. Great lines of men coursed through the French and Belgian countrysides. Throughout the night, in the distance, the forward soldiers heard the distant crump of the guns and saw flares burst and illuminate the sky, sweeping to earth in red, green and white sparks. The pipers were playing at the head of the Scottish regiments, as the men sang and waved their hats for photojournalists.

  Here came Lieutenant Patrick Campbell, the anxious young officer who itched to prove himself in action, but for whom the low boom of guns sounded ‘terrifying … more sinister than anything I had ever imagined’: ‘If there had been someone with me that I loved I could have endured it. But there was no one … to endure fear and loneliness together was more than I could bear … what hope for me was there when I was up in the middle of it? And what would happen to me if I failed?’65

  Campbell reached Flanders in June, on a clear summer’s night. All the countryside was lit up in silver starbursts:

  I saw the flat plain, the low willows bordering the dykes, the taller poplars … then the beautiful light went out, and it was so dark for a moment that I could not see the ears of the horse I was riding. I made friends with the stars overheard, I had no other friends. They encouraged me, they seemed to talk to me.66

  A few nights later, his platoon tried and failed to take ten wagon-loads of stones, for road-building, up to the front; shellfire forced them back, among the sound of larks and scenes of Flemish farmers:

  That was the strange thing about the war in Flanders, so short a distance separated peace from war. You could go up from the world of ordinary men and women, cattle and green fields, up into the very mouth of destruction, and back again to the same clean sights and smells and quiet noises, all in the space of a short summer night.67

  In their headquarters, the commanders fixed their minds on their maps. Contours marked the high ground at Messines Ridge, barely 150 feet above sea level, which the Germans had held since 1915: this the
y must capture first.

  6

  THE MINES OF MESSINES

  It is said that the detonation of the gigantic mines could be heard in London …. All around Messines the ground was said to have been covered by the bodies of Bavarian soldiers (our poor, brave 3rd Division!).

  Crown Prince Rupprecht, commander of the Bavarian Army

  A slight ridgeline wrinkled with hills, of which the highest is a mere 60 metres above sea level, runs through the villages of Messines and Wytschaete (which the British dubbed ‘White Sheet’ and the Germans called ‘Wijtschate’) on the southern limit of the Salient. Sleepy little market towns before the war, in 1917 they were mostly rubble. The British forces were entrenched on the western side of the ridge, with their base at Ploegsteert (‘Plugstreet’) Wood. They had held this position more or less since 1915; from January to May 1916, Winston Churchill had served here, as commanding officer of a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers. The plain rising gradually to the ridge was now a mass of trench lines and shell holes.

  The Germans were dug in on top of the ridge and down the eastern slopes, where the plain runs gently into the Lys valley, interrupted by hedgerows and woods, green and undisturbed. They had held this nine-mile curve of high ground, from Saint Yves to Mount Sorrel, since 1915 (see Map 3). It had obvious military value: from here, looking north, the Germans enjoyed a perfect vantage point over Ypres and the Salient, with a bird’s-eye view of the Gheluvelt Plateau to the east of the city, where the German commanders had correctly concluded that Haig would launch the main Flanders Offensive. From Messines, ‘the Germans could watch every detail of any preparations the British make for an offensive eastwards between Ypres and the Belgian Coast’.1 And all of it was within German artillery range.

 

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