by Paul Ham
By mid-morning on 7 June, the ridge and the villages of Messines and Wytschaete were in Allied hands, as were 7000 German prisoners. For the first time since 1914, the Allies could move unhindered on the western slope.66 Thus far, Plumer had met Haig’s demands. The next day, Yoxall excitedly told his mother:
we have straightened out the Salient … that terrible charnel house of British life, is no more. Our success was so easy that we are wondering why we did not attempt something more ambitious …. The mine explosions seem to have stunned the German infantry.67
One of the craters, he wrote, ‘is about three times as big as our two gardens’.68
Plumer decided not to advance down the eastern slope at this point. He chose instead to utilise the five-hour pause that his plan allowed to consolidate his gains and bring forward the artillery. Several heavy guns and 40 field guns were dragged up, each with 300 rounds. The gun carriages were hitched to horses, the mules loaded with ammunition. In addition, 146 machine guns were placed along the ridge. Men with huge ‘Yukon packs’ (Canadian packs that distributed the load using a strap across the forehead, enabling a man to carry up to 65 pounds), carried the belts of machine-gun ammunition.
The offensive would resume at 3.10 pm that day, led by the 4th Australian Division. In the meantime, the British and Dominion forces crowded cheerfully along the ridgeline, reversed the German trenches, and dug themselves in, in readiness for the coming counter-attack. Behind them, a mangle of wire, equipment and corpses lay in and around the gigantic craters and piles of earth; ahead, to the east, the wonder of grassland, hedgerows and woods with leaf-bearing trees, and, further, the villages and meadows of the green valley of the Lys.
No Germans were to be seen – yet. Most of their remaining guns were hidden, in the forest at the base of the slope, and the Eingreif had not yet appeared. Every man lay waiting, thinking: when will the Huns return? When will the counter-blow come?
It struck with unexpected ferocity. Every Allied soldier had anticipated savage reprisals, but they had not yet confronted the enemy’s new elastic defensive system – under which thousands of shock troops, held back in reserve, were to be sent pouring into battle to regain lost ground.
By mid-morning, the Allies saw them coming, lines of German troops closing on Messines from the east and north. At 11 am, a long file of enemy was seen coming up the road from Wervik about two-and-a-half miles away. New Zealand forward posts saw ten lines of Germans ‘approaching them across the open fields, giving excellent targets to their machine guns’.69 At 1.45 pm, waves of German infantry had assembled along the Oosttaverne Line, a 1000-yard front across the valley. Since 9.55 am, British artillery had been pounding this front; now it intensified its fire. Soon, thousands of German reinforcements were seen in the distance, and the dreadful spectre of another Arras arose in Allied heads.
The British guns began pounding away at the advancing hordes, easily identifiable from the newly claimed high ground. Wave after wave of German attacks failed to surmount the slopes to the east, thanks also to the rows of machine guns that blazed down on the enemy. By 2.30 pm, the counter-offensive was ‘completely spent’, wrote Bean.70 The German infantry melted back to the Oosttaverne Line, and beyond.
The German batteries whose medium guns sat hidden in woods in the valley floor now came alive, shelling the Messines ridgeline and inflicting thousands of casualties on the Allied forces crammed into that small space. At the same time, a German plane penetrated the 23 British aircraft keeping guard over the ridge like a swarm of wasps, and reported the troop locations on the southern part of the ridge. Alerted, the German artillery adjusted their range and pounded this area, causing further heavy casualties.
Plumer’s plan had anticipated the counter-attacks. At 3.10 pm, as planned, the barrage resumed, creeping down the eastern slope at 100 yards every three minutes. The Australian infantry rose again, this time behind tanks. It would be close-quarter fighting, and the men were ordered to ‘fix bayonets’. The sight was too much for the Germans: having beheld tanks and Anzac infantry through the gaps of a fresh barrage, ‘many lay on the ground crying for mercy or embracing the knees of the Australians’, according to the British official history.71 Those who fled were cut down by the barrage. Many stayed in their pillboxes, and machine-gunned the approaching waves in last desperate stands.
Two Queensland battalions advancing behind three tanks – and often, to the dismay of the tank crews, in front of them72 – overran an outlying German trench and took 120 prisoners. Inspired, the Anzac platoons began attacking the pillboxes, one by one. In this, their first taste of blockhouse fighting, the Australians would quietly surround the targeted pillboxes and hurl Mills bombs in the back doors or fire through the loopholes. In many cases, shellfire had smashed open the bunkers’ concrete roofs like eggshells, into which they tossed grenades.
Captain Robert Grieve led by example. Creeping up alone on a bunker at ‘Hun House’ that had pinned down his company, he single-handedly attacked and silenced two machine-gun crews inside (for which action he was awarded the Victoria Cross).73 These individual attacks on pillboxes became the stuff of legend; so would the discoveries inside them: cigars, whisky, sausages were all part of the spoils. A story, widely believed, did the rounds of a beautiful woman with blonde hair found dead in one bunker.
The advancing Anzacs gave no quarter in these frenzied assaults. Hand-to-hand combat raged around the pillboxes. German machine gunners spilled out of the rear doors with their hands raised, pleading ‘Mercy!’, ‘Kamerad!’ They were often dispatched in a hail of bullets: few prisoners were taken. A moment ago, these men had been slaughtering the Australians’ friends, so tensions were exceptionally high. The diary of Private Gallwey, whose battalion had suffered miserably at Bullecourt, reflected the incendiary mood. Finding a group of wounded Germans lying in a pillbox, his platoon fired point blank into the huddle: ‘There was a noise as though pigs were being killed. They squealed and made guttural noises … after which all was silent.’ The five bodies were then hauled out and dumped in a pile to confirm they were dead. ‘It was a good thing this hornets [sic] nest had been cleaned out so easily,’ Gallwey wrote. ‘Nearly all were young men. It is an impossibility to leave wounded germans [sic] behind us because they are so treacherous. They all have to be killed.’74
If true, this case of Australians slaughtering wounded men constituted a war crime; it was also an ‘inevitable’ consequence of war, as Bean later explained:
The tension accompanying the struggles around these blockhouses, the murderous fire from a sheltered position followed by the sudden giving in of the surrounded garrison, caused this year’s fighting in Flanders to be marked by a ferocity that renders the reading of any true narrative peculiarly unpleasant. When such tensions exist in battle the rules of ‘civilized’ war are powerless. Most men are temporarily half mad, their pulses pounding at their ears, their mouths dry … With death singing about their ears they will kill until they grow tired of killing … It is idle for the reader to cry shame upon such incidents, unless he cries shame upon the whole system of war, for this frenzy is an inevitable condition in desperate fighting.75
The Australians moved on, and captured the Oosttaverne Line and dozens of pillboxes, aided by 24 tanks, sixteen of which crossed the line. For II Anzac Corps, these days of ‘consolidation’ were far deadlier than the attack on Messines Ridge itself.
At a conference of the German High Command on 9 June, Crown Prince Rupprecht, commanding the Bavarians, and General Sixt von Armin, commanding the Fourth Army, decided to abandon any hope of recovering Messines. Between 10 and 14 June, the Germans withdrew.
For the rest of the month, the British and Anzac forces fortified the captured ground, shelled the withdrawing Germans and completed the occupation of one of the most important positions in the Salient. Telephone wires were laid, connecting the new front line with rear command.
One telephone party included Ronald Skirth, the gunner, and his
two friends, Geordie and Bill, none of whom was a telephonist. Their mission bewildered them. They headed east across no-man’s-land on 8 June through the aftermath of battle. Skirth held a basket containing a carrier pigeon, the purpose of which eluded him. He presumed he was meant to send the bird back with the message that the telephone worked, but surely that was the point of the telephone, he questioned. He carried on:
[W]e reached the site of the enemy’s old trenches … It was a ghastly sight which met our eyes. I cannot attempt to describe what shapes and colours, things which once were human bodies and parts of human bodies assume after they have been blown sky high. Some looked like bluish-green replicas of the Michelin Tyre-men in the old advertisements – only inflated to twice life-size. Others were … incomplete … 76
In shock, the party stumbled on: ‘I had the utmost difficulty in forcing myself forward … I turned my head to see where my two pals were. One was being violently sick … we were the only living creatures in that nightmarish landscape.’ Skirth saw something a few yards from the track that compelled him to take a closer look. What it was, he could not bring himself to write down: ‘I was about to faint. I crouched and pulled my head low between my knees.’
Soon the German bombs began falling near the party: ‘A dozen times we had to flatten ourselves or jump instantly into a shell-hole.’ Bill and Geordie were both killed while trying to fix the phone line; the fourth member of the party was already dead. On finding their broken bodies, Skirth ‘burst into uncontrollable tears. I remember crying out, “Oh God! Why couldn’t you have let them die less horribly?”’
He lay in a shell hole alone with the carrier pigeon, wondering whether to continue towards the British trenches or go back. He decided to attach a message to the pigeon – ‘Report three of our party killed …’ – but lacked paper and pencil. He opened the lid of the basket: ‘There wasn’t any pen, pencil or paper. Only a dead pigeon.’77
The Battle of Messines Ridge was a complete Allied victory. In terms of vital territory gained, it was the most decisive of the war thus far. Vimy Ridge alone bore comparison.78 For once, the euphoria in the press seemed justified: ‘Great victory at Messines! Read all about it! Great victory at Messines!’ shouted the newsboys at Piccadilly, as theatregoers spilled onto the streets that night.
The victory opened up a great expanse of German territory to Allied eyes for the first time in two and a half years, chiefly the Gheluvelt Plateau, due east of Ypres, the destruction of which would be vital to the success of the Flanders Offensive. That success relied, however, on the ruthless exploitation of the victory: the enemy should be given no breathing space. Instead, as we shall see, the British commanders dithered and delayed, giving the Germans ample time to erect the most formidable defensive shield in the western theatre.
For now, Haig could be forgiven for dwelling on the victory. He proudly reported to the War Cabinet, ‘over one million pounds of explosives were used … The simultaneous discharge of such an enormous aggregate of explosive is without parallel in land mining, and no actual experience existed of the effects which would be produced.’79 The impact on German morale had been ‘tremendous’, the War Cabinet heard on 11 June.80 King George V sent his congratulations to Haig and Plumer.
Victory came at a high cost, in men and morale. The British and Empire body count, at 24,562 killed or wounded (of whom the Anzacs incurred more than half),81 was higher than the German count of about 22,900 (including 7200 prisoners). And German artillery had knocked Allied morale: the rate of shell shock rose rapidly after Messines, from 50 cases admitted to hospital on 7 June to about 1800 cases by the end of the month82 – a grim warning to High Command, who continued to ignore or downplay the ‘nervous cases’.
If fewer enemy guns could do this to the British and Australians, the effect on the German soldier’s nervous system of a creeping barrage was devastating: the blow to German morale at Messines was ‘simply staggering’, Ludendorff later acknowledged.83 Rupprecht wrote dejectedly in his diary on 9 June, ‘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!).’84
7
A FATAL DELAY
Never has an army been in a better position before a defensive battle.
General Fritz von Lossberg, German defence expert known as ‘the fireman of the Western Front’, before the start of Third Ypres
You are out here for one purpose and one purpose only – to kill Boches. From what I have seen every man here today is good for two or three Boches.
Major General Sir Geoffrey Percy Thynne Feilding
Haig’s buoyant mood at this time led him to make decisions that misread the reality around him. Prone to recurring visions of Germany’s collapse, he laboured under the delusion that the enemy’s forces were completely demoralised. Their finest divisions were decimated, he believed – even as evidence to the contrary emerged, of a revivified and lethal foe.
This had obvious consequences for the men on the ground. Haig’s strategy of wearing down the enemy made a huge call on manpower, as we’ve seen. It was not for him to answer the awkward political question of how the nation would tolerate ‘normal wastage’ of 35,000 casualties a month. That was a question for the politicians. The War Cabinet dared not publicly say what they all knew: that Allied casualties had exceeded Germany’s at every major battle thus far – Second Ypres, Loos, the Somme, Verdun, Arras, the Aisne – chiefly because forces attacking fortified positions sustained higher losses than those defending them. This brutal arithmetic boiled down to the fact that the British and Dominion troops were being killed or wounded at a faster rate than Germany’s.
In purely strategic terms, the casualty rate did not overly concern Haig because the British were able to draw on a much deeper pool of manpower than the Germans. By that calculus, Germany’s defeat was simply a matter of time – and body count. Even with the Russians a virtual spent force, and France in the doldrums, Britain could rely on her doughty Dominion partners – who had proven so solid in battle – and the arrival of America’s vast reserve of recruits, half a million men strong. In short, Haig could afford to ‘waste’ more lives than the enemy.
All this alarmed Lloyd George. The prime minister would never accept the logic of Haig’s war. Preserving British lives had led Lloyd George to support the Nivelle Offensive and promote his Italian adventure. The former had failed; the latter was mothballed. That left the prime minister with no other choice than to bend an ear to the victor of Messines, a man he had damned as monstrously profligate with soldiers’ lives, and whom he had tried to subordinate to the French to avoid the political fallout of another Somme.
This was the psychological backdrop to Haig’s appearance, on 19 June, at the first meeting of the prime minister’s Committee on War Policy, set up to concentrate power over the direction of the war in the prime minister’s hands. It contained a further four men: Andrew Bonar Law (the Conservative leader), Alfred Milner (the 1st Viscount Milner, statesman and a former South African high commissioner), George Curzon (1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, leader of the House of Lords and a former Viceroy of India) and Jan Smuts (temporary lieutenant general in the South African Army, a founding spirit of Apartheid and the smartest man in the room). Robertson would dismiss Milner as a ‘tired and dyspeptic old man’ and Curzon as a ‘gas bag’, adding in a letter to Haig dated 9 August that Smuts ‘has good instinct but lacks knowledge’.1
The Committee’s military experience amounted to the prime minister’s week in the militia and Smuts’s hit-and-run raids in the Boer War and questionable command of the South African forces against the Germans in Africa. Into their inexperienced hands passed the responsibility for the entire British war effort, on land, sea and air. For Lloyd George, it was a political ploy: he meant to use this nimble-footed committee as a means of bending the leadership of the war to his will. His four colleag
ues were not chosen for their readiness to defy him: Smuts proved to be the only member willing, on occasions, to challenge the prime minister, but all would duly fall into line under Lloyd George’s dominance.
And so, about six weeks before the Flanders Offensive was due to start, Haig and Robertson were summoned to appear before the War Policy Committee in Lord Curzon’s Privy Council Office at 10 Downing Street. Haig arrived in a confident mood, with all the runes in his favour: he had won Messines and Lloyd George had lost Nivelle. At first, the prime minister put on a good show of contrition: he possessed in abundance the politician’s reptilian ability to adapt to changing scenery. He began the meeting by saying that he recognised the ‘very powerful statement’ Haig had made in favour of the Flanders Offensive, in recent days.2 The trouble was, he disagreed with them …
Let’s briefly review those statements. Just after Messines, on 12 June, Haig had sent Robertson an outline of his thinking on the coming Flanders campaign. Scornful of Lloyd George’s Italian strategy, Haig pressed the case for fighting the war primarily on the Western Front: ‘to fail in concentrating our resources in the Western theatre, or to divert them from it, would be most dangerous. It might lead to the collapse of France. It would certainly encourage Germany.’3 Most military minds agreed with him. Haig’s unfailing optimism then led him to cast several hostages to fortune. He reckoned that he could clear the Belgian coast ‘this summer’, and that victory in Belgium ‘might possibly lead to [Germany’s] collapse’.4
