by Paul Ham
In short, the British and Empire forces had to capture Messines Ridge, to ‘straighten’ this S-bend in the Salient before they could open the battle for Flanders proper.2 It posed a formidable obstacle: British forces had tried and failed to capture Messines Ridge several times since 1914, chiefly around the bloody sentinel of Hill 60, where the soil was heavy with Allied and German dead. In 1917, von Lossberg’s flexible defensive system presented a more difficult barrier: the German trench lines radiated back from the high ground in great depth, interspersed with wire and peppered with concrete pillboxes.
Haig had no choice: the ridge had to be taken if his main offensive was to have a chance of success. The man he selected for the job was General Herbert Plumer, commander of the Second Army, who had been commanding the Allied defence of Ypres for almost two years. Haig regarded Plumer as too cautious; he preferred more aggressive generals like Gough and Rawlings. At Messines, however, Plumer was seen as the best choice because he knew the area so well. Determined to reward Haig’s faith in him, in June 1917 Plumer threw himself at the task with every sinew in his ageing body.
Plumer was among Haig’s more astute and capable generals; he was certainly no donkey. Despite his unpromising appearance – his white walrus moustache, pink face and pot belly – Plumer was a superb planner who left nothing to chance. A master of trench warfare, his watchwords were ‘Trust, Training and Thoroughness’. A careful and compassionate man, he tried to find ways of minimising Allied casualties while maximising the enemy’s.
He elicited the admiration of those who worked with him, not least the Australian commander General John Monash, who shared Plumer’s fastidious attention to detail. The two men met no less than eight times in the weeks before Messines, poring over the plan. Plumer owed much of his success to a close meeting of minds with his intelligence officer, Major General Sir Charles ‘Tim’ Harington. The two men worked so well together, ‘it was impossible to see where one ended and the other began’.3 Their relationship went back to the start of the war and would have a great impact on the outcome of Messines: as early as 1915, for example, Plumer and Harington had had the foresight to authorise the start of deep tunnelling under the German positions on Messines Ridge with a view to blowing them up.
Plumer started planning the attack on Messines in January 1917, five months before it was scheduled to begin. Using a huge scale model of the terrain – ‘the size of two croquet lawns’4 – at Scherpenberg, he ran through every possible scenario and ensured every man knew his specific job. He presented his plan to Haig in April: the offensive would start with a preliminary bombardment over four days (later extended to almost two weeks); then, at ‘zero’ hour, a series of huge mines would blow up under the German positions; the creeping barrage would burst forth; the infantry would attack and seize – ‘bite and hold’ – Messines Ridge. On the second day, they would capture the village of Wytschaete, dig in and defend their gains from German counter-attacks. The whole operation would advance the Allied line no further than 1500 yards.
Haig was unimpressed; he wanted more emphasis on ‘bite’ and less on ‘hold’. He insisted that Plumer capture Wytschaete and Messines villages on the first day, and then advance as far as the Courtrai–Roulers line, beyond Passchendaele, a distance of between 20 and 30 miles, surely an impossible task.5 At this stage, Haig envisaged the Messines and Passchendaele operations as a continuous offensive. That was plainly unworkable, Plumer felt, and he made his views clear. In early May, Haig revised his plan: Messines would now be confined to a single battle, the first in a two-stage attack, Haig told a conference of army commanders on 7 May. The great Flanders Offensive, proper, would begin several weeks later, with the capture of Gheluvelt Plateau and Passchendaele before the clearing of the Belgian coast. There would be no more talk of Plumer’s men reaching Roulers within a few days; instead, they would take Messines and Wytschaete, advance down the German side of the slope and secure the whole Messines position – within the first day.
To execute the plan, Plumer issued a list of demands. He would need another hundred medium cannon, bringing the total to 1510 field and 756 heavy guns, and 142,000 tons of ammunition to ensure they produced the densest possible barrage. Against this immense arsenal, the Germans were thought to possess just 344 field and 404 medium and heavy guns, giving the Allies a five to one advantage in field guns and two to one in heavy guns.6 A critical task for the artillery, Haig said, was to obliterate the rolls of wire in front of the German lines, the existence of which had obstructed the infantry at Loos and the Somme.
That month, Crown Prince Rupprecht’s Bavarian Army Group were ordered to move to Messines to relieve the exhausted units stationed there, mostly Saxons and Württembergers, who had occupied the ridge for several months. Since January, Rupprecht and his staff had assumed that Flanders (Flandernschlacht) would be the scene of Haig’s next great offensive, and correctly judged that the opening blow would land here, at Messines, on what German topographers called Wijtschatebogen (the Wijtschate Salient). At least two British prisoners ‘had spoken with certainty of it’.7 One, captured on 29 May, told the Germans that the attack on Messines ‘would take place on 7th June after eight days’ bombardment’.8
The Germans had also correctly divined that the Messines Offensive would probably start with some sort of mine explosion. They had had hard experience of the British penchant for tunnelling at various points beneath the Messines ridgeline. In previous years, mine blasts had preceded British assaults on the hills in the area, chiefly at Hill 60 in 1914 and at Saint Eloi on 27 March 1916, when six huge mines killed 300 Germans and blasted a hole in the front line.9 On the Somme, too, a series of massive mine explosions warned the Germans of the coming attack. ‘From this time [late 1916] onwards,’ noted a German history of Flanders, ‘the Germans knew what they were in for at the Wijtschate Range. They had observed the activities of the English mine layers …’10 But the Germans would have no idea of the extent of Allied tunnelling under Messines, which surpassed anything yet attempted in the underground war.
Alert to the mine risk, in April 1917 Rupprecht considered abandoning Messines altogether and withdrawing to a safer line, ‘in order to avoid heavy losses’ from ‘a large-scale enemy attack’ on the ridge, which was ‘exceedingly endangered due to its protruding front alignment and [British] mining preparations’, states the German history.11 He chose not to; the high positions along the ridge were too valuable. The German commanders ‘believed that it was not permissible to give up the important hillside lines of Wijtschate and Mesen [Messines] without a fight, and decided to retain the current front’. In so doing, the Germans ‘severely underestimated’ the ‘English mining preparations’ at Messines. The German history adds, with melancholy hindsight, ‘By early June, it was too late to take any such measures, and things took their fateful course.’12
On 21 May 1917, the British heavy gunners opened up on the German lines. The ‘softening up’ involved all 2266 guns, including 1158 18-pounders and 352 4.5-inch howitzers. During the next fortnight, the British guns fired about 3.5 million shells onto German lines around the Salient, concentrating heavily on the Messines area. At the same time, some 300 Allied aircraft, about double the German number, flew low over the enemy, photographed their artillery positions, strafed the high points and attacked German observation balloons.13 On the ground, 72 Mark IV tanks rumbled forward to prepare for their first action: to help the infantry capture the ridge, which they were expected to accomplish a few hours after ‘zero’, just before dawn on 7 June (in the event, the tanks would prove of little value at Messines).
One British artillery officer about to head to Messines was Lieutenant Allfree, the solicitor and father of four, whom we last saw at Étaples. He was presently ‘loafing about’ with his fellow officers in the Counter-Battery Room at VIII Corps Heavy Artillery headquarters, in a chateau in northern France, enjoying a whisky and soda.14 Here, he could overhear the anguished telephone calls of battery officer
s in the field, who were then coming under German fire and were seeking advice. The HQ commander, a Colonel Walters, replied with the size and direction of retaliatory fire; e.g., as he told one gunner, ‘Ring up Colonel J. and tell him to put 30 rounds from a 6 inch into X3, and we’ll see if it has any effect.’ Or he would order planes to ‘shoot 300 rounds’ on an enemy gunner’s position.15 The coordination of artillery and aircraft had made great advances since the days of the Somme.
The next day, Allfree travelled to his battery position, through a desolation of craters, British guns and enemy shells, ‘bursting to my left and now somewhat behind me’. At last, at Soyer Farm, just west of Ploegsteert (‘Plug Street’), he encountered a smallish officer with a fair moustache and glasses, standing in a sunken road. ‘Is this 111th Siege Battery?’ he asked him.
‘Yes, are you Allfree? We have been expecting you. My name is Marshall. Come and see Cripps – he is in the Mess.’16
Within a week, Allfree and his men were blasting away at Messines Ridge, shelling the wire in front of the German lines. The rounds were fitted with the new 106 fuses, which exploded more reliably on impact – essential to the destruction of barbed wire. They were a great improvement on the unreliable fuses used at the Somme, with which a third of some calibre rounds failed to explode and ‘an alarming number’ detonated prematurely.17
Possessing fewer guns, the German batteries responded by trying to pick off each British battery one by one, the results of which Allfree had just heard on the telephone. The German counter-bombardment succeeded in destroying or damaging several gun placements and igniting ammunition dumps, which went up in great blazes, but it fell well short of inflicting serious damage.18 So the German gunners resorted to gas, blanketing the plain beneath them in clouds of phosgene and chloropicrin. This had more serious consequences.
Allfree’s battery was caught in the thick of the gas attack. ‘[T]he place reeked,’ he recalled. ‘It would have been fatal to have removed one’s gas mask …. We longed for a breeze to spring up to blow the foul stuff away, but it remained dead calm.’ He and two comrades spent the night on higher ground to escape the huge gas cloud, which was heavier than air. At one point, they briefly removed their gas masks and lay down in a meadow. One officer thrust his head into a patch of grass, which seemed gas-free, and he even got some sleep. ‘We went and looked at him from time to time,’ Allfree recalled, ‘to see that he was still alive.’19 Finally, ‘day broke, the sun came out, the shelling ceased and the gas gradually dispersed, till at last we could take off those beastly gas masks. What a relief it was to … light a cigarette!’20
At around this time, twenty-year-old Captain Harry Yoxall arrived at his divisional HQ in the Messines area, determined as ever to take the fight to the Boche. ‘[D]aily the bombardments are becoming heavier,’ he wrote to his mother on 1 June, ‘and nightly the raids more frequent. We’re hitting the Boche with both hands now and I must say that on the whole he takes it like a little gentleman.’21 As a staff officer, Yoxall worked well back from the front line. Here, he observed how quickly nature reasserted itself outside the battle zone:
There are not many flowers in this part of the world but there is plenty of blossom, lilac … hawthorn, cherry & pear. The birds too are going it good … and seem to have been very prolific this year. In one tree alone in the garden of Divisional Hqs there are 18 nests.22
On 3 June, he climbed a hill and witnessed ‘one of our stunts’,23 a dress rehearsal of the creeping barrage. At 3 pm, the 18-pounders fired three belts of shellfire, 700 yards deep, on the German trench lines.24 The barrage advanced slowly across the field like a dust storm. ‘It was a wonderful sight,’ Yoxall wrote in his diary. ‘[T]he broad barren patch of the [German] trench lines [were] transformed into an inferno of twisting shells, so that the view became obliterated with the smoke and dust & the sky grew heavy overhead on that bright day of early June …. It was difficult to realize that there were human beings in the midst of that tornado of steel & explosive. Still, they were Germans: they asked for this, and now they’ve got it.’25 He described the same sight, less aggressively, in a letter to his mother: ‘I do not think that there has ever been so great a weight of metal thrown about … certainly the gunfire on both sides is heavier than it ever was while I was down on the Somme …’26
The next day, Yoxall turned 21 and reflected gratefully:
Life has been kind to me: personally I can have very little to complain of, save in the way of so many good friends gone …. If death should come to me I hope I may meet it as well as they: & why should I fear to follow where so many better men have gone.27
War had sharpened his feelings for his family into something tangible, expressible:
Dear people, I thank you: now that the little quarrels and jealousies of childhood are past, I love you all with a very great love: & esteem it a great privilege that by being out here to fight for you I can in some measure repay the great debt I owe you.28
Meanwhile, ‘the day approaches’, he wrote: ‘Daily and nightly the bombardments become more severe.’29
In the early hours of 7 June, the first waves of 80,000 British and Dominion troops – of Plumer’s Second Army – moved into position along the taped ‘jump off’ point. For many, the journey had been traumatising. The eight attack battalions of Monash’s 3rd Australian Division, who had left their billets at 11 pm the previous night, were passing through Ploegsteert Wood when high explosive, incendiary and gas fell amid them, killing or wounding many and disorientating the column. Gas shell landed with a seemingly harmless ‘plop’, followed by the hissing sound of the chlorine or phosgene escaping into the atmosphere – in this case, beneath a forest canopy. The unfortunates who failed to get their masks on in time fell retching to the ground. Horses and mules ‘were passed on the road gasping piteously in the poisonous air’.30 The gas killed or disabled an estimated 500–1000 Australians, about ten per cent of their force, before they reached the front.31 Most reached the jump-off point within 40 minutes of zero hour. Some late arrivals headed straight over the top and into battle. Several gassed soldiers even joined the fight until their poisoned lungs disabled them.32
At 2.10 am on 7 June, British aircraft flew low overhead to drown the sound of the advancing tanks. A 3.05 am, a faint glimmer of dawn shone on the eastern horizon. The sun would not challenge the moon, just past full, for at least an hour. So far, the Germans had failed to detect the huge forces gathering in the dimness on the plain beneath them. At one point, a few New Zealanders who’d crept into no-man’s-land drew a burst of machine-gun and rifle fire. Then all turned quiet again, and the soldiers awaited the signal, to be preceded by the detonation of a string of huge mines buried deep under the German positions on Messines Ridge.
The Allied impetus for this astonishing military feat arose from the dogged persistence of one of those talented mavericks the British always seem to find in a crisis: in this case, Major John Norton Griffiths. At the outbreak of war, Griffiths was 43, a Boer War veteran and a Conservative member of parliament. He had spent many years working in remote African and American mines as a mining engineer and was now operating a successful structural engineering firm that specialised in big projects such as drainage systems and underground rail networks. He had a tunnel vision, literally.
At the time, his men were participating in the construction of the Manchester sewer system and the London Underground, where they had developed a technique called ‘clay-kicking’. While lying on their backs in tunnels too small to swing a pick, they’d deliver a sharp kick to a specially designed spade, which dislodged the clay. In December 1914, Griffiths offered a few ‘clay-kickers’, or ‘moles’, to the War Office for frontline work. The then commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir John French, ignored the offer, shutting the door on the lessons of centuries of military tunnelling, which had repeatedly demonstrated its efficacy against fortified positions. No doubt, the explosive shell had made tunnelling under besieged castles superfluous.
Now, however, destroying rows of trench lines containing tens of thousands of troops required a revival of the tunnel, Griffiths believed, and he pressed his atavistic vision on the British Army.
The failure of conventional mining methods spurred him to take firmer action. In December 1914, the Allies had tried, and failed, to detonate 45 pounds of gun cotton in a 20-yard trench a few yards from the German lines. The Germans responded by igniting ten charges along the front near the village of Le Plantin, killing an estimated 3000 Indian soldiers. Many suffocated in their trenches, and morale collapsed among the survivors, so much so that elements of the Indian Corps refused to stay in the line. ‘The fear of being swallowed suddenly by a massive explosion beneath their feet’ sapped morale among troops already enduring the frightful conditions of the winter trenches.33 Few had any confidence in the early British tunnellers, who failed to grasp the rudiments of tunnel drainage and construction. The Germans, however, seemed well advanced. On 3 February 1915, German tunnellers again succeeded in detonating mines under Allied positions, this time at Saint Eloi, on Messines Ridge, of all places, with heavy casualties.
