by Paul Ham
Again, this raised the questions that nobody explored: if the German U-boats no longer posed a serious threat to Britain’s survival, what was the case for launching an immense ground offensive to destroy the submarine bases? Hadn’t capturing the ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge hitherto been a vital aim of the offensive? No longer, it seemed: the government showed little interest in the ostensible purpose of the Flanders Offensive. Two long Cabinet debates about the submarine threat, on 13 and 20 July, did not even mention the great battle due to start at the end of that month, with the stated goal of destroying the U-boat bases.43 In any case, Haig had far bigger ambitions than a few submarine pens: the defeat of the Germans in Belgium, no less, the culmination of his ‘wearing down’ war. For this reason, Haig did not openly challenge Jellicoe (confining his doubts to his diary). However little Haig credited the First Sea Lord’s fears of Britain’s death by submarines, it certainly buttressed his case for Third Ypres.
On 21 June, at the 10th meeting of the War Policy Committee, Lloyd George made his final case against the Flanders Offensive – and for an attack on Austria through Italy. It was a bravura performance, powerfully delivered:
I made a final effort to persuade Haig and Robertson to abandon this foolhardy enterprise. I felt they were plunging into a perilous hazard when the conditions demanded unusual circumspection and preparation … I then turned to an examination of the prospects of success. I pointed out that failure would be very serious business. All the world would recognise, if Sir Douglas Haig only succeeded in reaching his first objective [Passchendaele Ridge], that our operations had failed to realise their full scope … What reason, I asked, was there to believe that we could first drive the enemy back fifteen miles and then capture a place ten miles away? For a success on this scale one of the following conditions was essential:
1. An overwhelming force of men and guns;
2. That the enemy should be attacked so strongly elsewhere that his reserves would be drawn off;
3. That the enemy’s morale should be so broken that he could no longer put up a fight.
None of the above conditions obtained at that time.44
Lloyd George’s analysis was correct. Haig did not possess, and never would, the overwhelming superiority in guns and men necessary to heave the Germans out of Belgium; nor was German morale close to collapse. Yet, having laid down a forceful argument against the offensive, the prime minister did nothing further to oppose it. Instead, he proposed a compromise, which reprised Haig’s earlier offer to end the campaign if it failed to meet his goals. The decision of whether to proceed with Third Ypres, Lloyd George said, should fall on Haig and Robertson, ‘on the understanding that if the progress they made with the operation did not realise the expectations they had formed, it should be called off’.45 Cabinet ministers, he later wrote, ‘attached great weight to the undertaking given them by both Sir William Robertson and Sir Douglas Haig that the attack would be abandoned as soon as it became evident that it was not likely to succeed …’46
This brazen shifting of responsibility conveniently belayed Lloyd George from a bad fall if the offensive failed. Well might he later use his professed ignorance of military matters as an excuse not to intervene; but that had not stopped him meddling in strategy when it suited him. As the supreme elected authority, the prime minister had the power to decide if and when an offensive should proceed or end. He protested that the Conservative forces opposing him, in the parliament and press, prohibited him from making such a stand, and he would later hold Haig solely responsible for the carnage of Passchendaele.
Obstacles of a strategic and tactical nature already beset the offensive: two prerequisites for its success were speed and surprise, as Haig had stressed. Neither was forthcoming after Messines. Haig broke his own conditions by acceding to the demands for more time, from the general he appointed to command the offensive, Hubert Gough. It was Gough who, after Messines, had persuaded Haig that he needed at least six to seven weeks to redeploy and prepare his forces. This long delay was now in progress, giving the Germans more than enough time to prepare for the coming onslaught. The tragedy of Passchendaele may be sourced, in large part, to this fateful gap between the end of Messines and the start of Third Ypres.
A youthful commander, aged just 47, General Hubert de la Poer Gough had a polarising, aggressive style of leadership that failed to engender loyalty in his junior officers yet made him a favourite of Haig’s. Of Protestant Irish extraction – he would proudly call himself ‘Irish by blood and upbringing’ – Gough had a pedigree English army officer’s background: public school (Eton) and Royal Military College, Sandhurst. The Boer War interrupted his training at the Staff College, Camberley, and in South Africa he served as an intelligence officer and commanded a regiment of mounted infantry, whom he led on a reckless offensive against the Boers in September 1901 that resulted in his capture (along with most of his regiment), and his later escape, from a Boer prison.
On his return to Britain, he shot up the ranks, reaching lieutenant colonel by 1902, at the age of 32. Rapid promotion brought out his personal shortcomings. Gough had a ‘tedious habit of questioning regulations’ and an inability ‘to control his temper’, his then superior officer, Brigadier General Scobell, complained.47 These were understandable traits in so young and promising a commander. To his credit, Gough was painfully aware of his shortcomings, which he attributed to his impulsiveness and aggression: ‘All his life he regretted that he was prone to wound or wrong others when angry.’48 These characteristics were on unseemly display during the Curragh Incident, when Gough and 57 officers, fierce opponents of Irish independence, threatened to resign their commissions at Curragh rather than obey orders to coerce Protestant Ulster into accepting Home Rule.
His steely, unsympathetic eyes and haughty disdain for those he considered his inferiors sharpened his reputation as a bullying, ‘top-down’ commander with little feeling for the ordinary soldier. By 1917, a deep well of unpopularity had formed around Gough’s name, synonymous with ‘heavy losses and complete failure’ and with terrorising his subordinates to the extent that they were ‘afraid to express their opinions for fear of being [sacked]’.49 His thriving reputation for launching precipitate offensives with callous disregard for casualties persuaded the Anzac and Canadian commanders who had served under him at the Somme and Bullecourt never to do so again. He was a frequent sacker, and undermined, bypassed or removed commanders ‘whom he did not wholly trust’. His style was spit and polish, the kind of commander who would tour the trenches looking for dirty rifles.50 Gough, wrote Brigadier General Hodgkins in his diary on 14 March, ‘does not care a button about the lives of his men’.51
It was a heavy charge, and could easily have been applied to other generals, of course, but Gough’s unfortunate character drew a disproportionate share of junior officers’ scorn. On the credit side, he could be charming among his friends and those in whom he placed confidence. He performed well at First Ypres and arguably received an unfair spray of the blame for disasters that often originated in higher places or were driven by political motives.
Yet, he seemed to learn little, slowly, of the nature of this ever-changing war, contends Simon Robbins: Gough ‘does not seem to have learned’ anything from his experiences in 1915 and 1916.52 Where generals Plumer, Allenby, Currie and Monash scaled the learning curve and adapted to the fast-changing circumstances of the war, Gough seemed stuck in the mind of Loos and the Somme. In July 1917, he was eager to launch another spectacular frontal assault, of Nivellean dimensions. In this light, Ian Beckett’s seems a fair assessment of the man charged with the command of the opening battles of Third Ypres:
Ironically, [the] independent traits that Gough abhorred in his subordinates he embodied in practice. His inability to take direction, and his wholehearted and often unjustified confidence in his own planning, led him to overestimate his army’s abilities and contributed to his disastrous operations … 53
In the months before Thi
rd Ypres, Gough’s methods impressed the one man who might have restrained him: Haig. Haig admired Gough’s uncompromising spirit; it was the right stuff to achieve the breakthrough that Haig had so long sought. Like Haig, Gough was a ‘cavalry man’, and cavalrymen were less inclined to tolerate the ‘wearing down’ war of the trenches (Haig’s Olympian patience being the exception): the cavalry spirit yearned to gallop across distant plains in the direction of a drawn sword.
Gough’s Fifth Army Headquarters was an unlovely square block north of Poperinghe, called Lovie Chateau. His chief of staff was a ‘harsh and unsympathetic individual’ called Neill Malcolm, who would soon poison relations between Gough and his corps commanders, and contribute to the atmosphere of terror that reigned over the Fifth Army during the campaign.54
And so, an aggressive and unpopular cavalryman took charge of planning the first battle. And yet, instead of pouncing on the chance Messines presented, Gough curiously prevaricated. At an army commanders’ conference at Lilliers on 14 June, he effectively tore up the original Flanders Plan and insisted on six weeks to prepare, to which Haig acquiesced. At first glance, this defied common sense and military reason. General Rawlinson had told Haig in January that no more than 48–72 hours should divide Messines from the main attack.55 The Allies should exploit the enemy’s confusion to the maximum, Rawlinson had said. Plumer, too, advised Haig to seize on Messines’ success at once. He would need three days, he said, to get his guns into position to make a limited attack on Gheluvelt. In the minds of Plumer and Rawlinson, mounting a swift attack after Messines, even a limited one, was not a logistical ‘impossibility’. The cavalrymen, however, were thinking on a different scale …
Why Haig failed to expedite the offensive has excited much speculation. The fairest answer is that Haig needed additional time to prepare for the more ambitious campaign that he and Gough envisaged. In Gough’s mind, the battle plan was clear: after an artillery pounding of unprecedented force, his Fifth Army would smash open the German lines east of Ypres and break out into the wide, green plains beyond Passchendaele; the ridge would be his within a week or so. The consequences of so swift an advance, of placing his men beyond the protective range of their artillery, were not examined.
Victory at Messines emboldened Haig to adopt Gough’s more aggressive tactics. By acceding to the revised plan, Haig countermanded his own advice (Haig tended to advise rather than order his generals, delegating tactical authority to the commander in the field) that he had offered at the Doullens meeting on 3–4 May: first, attack the high ground on the Gheluvelt Plateau, and then progress by stages – ‘bite and hold’ – a kilometre or two, dig in, and defend your gains while your artillery moves up to cover the next bite. By mid-June, his thoughts chimed with Gough’s rather than those of the more experienced Plumer: the Germans were on the brink of collapse, and a final, almighty blow would finish them off. In this light, the bite and hold tactics that had proved so effective at Messines were to be relegated: the situation demanded a decisive thrust. And temperamentally, ‘Goughie’ was a ‘thruster’, not a biter.56 His breakthrough would demand many more guns and men, and they would take time to put in place. And so, the tactical urgency of delivering an immediate, if limited, strike against the Germans was lost, and the Messines advantage squandered. In lunging for the highest fruit, Haig left the rest to rot, and risked gaining none.
Haig tended to fashion his orders, or advice, according to his commanders’ temperaments, sometimes blurring the ultimate purpose of the battle.57 Clearly, he wanted to cover himself against all outcomes. He told Gough on 30 June, ‘the object of the Fifth Army offensive is to wear down the enemy, but, at the same time, to have an objective: I have given two: the Passchendaele-Staden ridge and the coast.’ The steady-handed Plumer, who would support Gough, should ‘be ready to act offensively on the right, north of the Lys’.58 Gough lacked the subtlety of mind to see that if one objective failed, the other should be pursued. He interpreted this as a green light to make up his mind as he went.
Of all the myriad considerations on Gough’s desk, from the length of the bombardment to the composition of forces, the most critical was: to what depth should he advance, and how should his men hold the ground captured? On the first day, Gough intended to capture 3000–3500 yards of German-held ground in three stages, followed by further ‘jumps’ of up to 2000 yards if the situation permitted. The British troops were to seize the territory bracketed inside three lines on his maps (see Map 4): blue (1000 yards), black (2000 yards) and green (3500 yards). The blue line ran just beyond the front line, and embraced Pilckem Ridge, part of the Frezenburg Ridge and Westhoek. The black line ran before Saint Julien and Langemarck in the north, and Polygon Wood and Tower Hamlets in the south. The green line enclosed the entire Wilhelm Stellung (the Germans’ ‘Wilhelm Position’), at which point the officer in charge would have to decide whether to press on to the red line, 1500 yards further on, past Broodseinde and Gravenstafel to the threshold of Passchendaele Ridge.
Capturing all this in a single day, and Passchendaele within a week, was a heavy demand. And it raised the question of whether Gough’s artillery could advance at the same pace as the men. The barrage was vital in shielding the men as they charged and destroying the German wire on the way. Ominously, Gough’s pre-battle planning failed to answer it.
And there was the thorny issue of Gheluvelt Plateau. Everything relied on seizing the high ground at Gheluvelt, as Haig had stressed. Gheluvelt stood at the midriff of the Salient’s eastward bulge. Here, the German gunners enjoyed an unrestricted view over the plains before Ypres. Driving them back in a broad line would force the bulge further east, lengthening the sides and thrusting the advancing troops deeper into the German noose. Ideally, then, Gough should first concentrate on the Germans on Gheluvelt, to remove their flanking fire. The heavy German artillery at Gheluvelt imperilled this plan: indeed, Gough had received fairly solid aerial intelligence telling him where to expect most of the enemy. The German presence on the plateau was a direct obstacle to the success of the offensive. In the end, Gough decided to attack along a single, wide line, to attempt to destroy everything in his path, ‘straighten’ the Salient and ultimately break through to open country.
At the same time, Haig had reverted to favouring the more cautious, step-by-step approach. He failed to communicate this to Gough, who proceeded in the belief that a swift breakthrough remained the chief aim of the offensive – and even revised upwards his expectations, hoping for a gain of 6000 yards on the first day.
If Gough was ‘not subtle enough to understand the dual nature of the offensive’, as Andrew Wiest concludes59 – i.e. the capture of the Belgian coast in tandem with the wearing down of the enemy – then so too were most others involved in the plan, notably the prime minister. The problem lay in Haig’s failure to clarify his orders and insist they be obeyed, a failure the historian Gary Sheffield has called ‘a dreadful abdication of command responsibility’.60 And so the Flanders campaign continued towards its terrible denouement, and those who had the power to stop it, or influence the outcome, still misunderstood, or disagreed on, why it should proceed and what it should achieve.
In early July, King George V visited Flanders to congratulate the men on the victory at Messines. For his Highness’s entertainment, several battalions mocked up a re-enactment of the battle: a drum roll took the place of the guns and mine blasts, and lines of flag-bearing men on horseback enacted the creeping barrage. The advancing British swept all before them, and hundreds of ‘Germans’ surrendered, emerging from their ‘trenches’ with their hands in the air. The show delighted the King’s party so much the men gave a second performance.
In the German camp, Rupprecht and Ludendorff had been aware of Haig’s plan as early as May, a month before the British Government claimed it knew (that is, if we believe Lloyd George’s story that Cabinet had been ignorant of the Flanders Offensive until 19 June). The German press had been fully informed: Frankfurter Zeitung re
ported on 1 July, ‘the renewal of an ambitious land operation [in Flanders] with far-reaching strategic aims is doubtless to be expected …. [F]or a long time … we have contemplated these things in a state of preparation’.61 Local Flemish farmers also got wind of the coming attack before Lloyd George, simply by noticing the huge build-up of men and matériel. When one farmer asked the Germans for permission to move his livestock, the po-faced military police snapped, ‘What? An impending offensive? How do you know that? How dare you give away military preparations!’62
The Crown Prince knew the attack was coming, but was greatly relieved by the delay. His greatest fear – that the Allies would launch a series of sudden attacks in the Salient within days of Messines – had not materialised. On 12 June, six weeks before it struck, he described the British Flanders Offensive as ‘certain’, precisely forecasting its object, the Belgian coast.63
Every day of British inaction handed the Germans a great opportunity.64 The day Messines ended, Ludendorff acted at once to fortify the German defences in Flanders. On 14 June, he dispatched General von Lossberg, his man for all crises, to German headquarters at Courtrai. Promoted to chief of the general staff of the Fourth Army, von Lossberg set about transforming Germany’s lines into the strongest defensive system on the Western Front (a task he’d already been hard at). The curious absence of British action after Messines gave him all the extra time he needed.
Von Lossberg developed a series of trench systems within a defensive zone six to seven miles deep, interspersed with rolls of wire, snipers’ nests and concrete bunkers that formed a near-impenetrable barrier. British troops entering this labyrinth would first encounter ‘great wedge-shaped masses of rusty metal’, the belts of wire, 30 yards deep.65 Anyone caught in the wire would be machine-gunned.
