Passchendaele

by Paul Ham

  By April, the Allies had retreated as far as Amiens. Remarkably, the British held Ypres – at the Battle of Fourth Ypres. Yet Paris trembled under the threat of German occupation for the second time in four years. The British, Dominion and French armies, now fighting under Foch’s supreme command, were staring at the prospect of defeat. On 11 April, in an emotional departure from his granite calm, Haig issued his famous ‘backs to the wall’ order, reminiscent of Joffre’s plea to the French Army on the Marne in 1914:

  SPECIAL ORDER OF THE DAY

  By FIELD-MARSHAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG K.T., G.C.B., G.C.V.O., K.C.I.E.

  Commander-in-Chief, British Armies in France

  To ALL RANKS OF THE BRITISH ARMY

  IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS

  Three weeks ago to-day the enemy began his terrific attacks against us on a fifty-mile front. His objects are to separate us from the French, to take the Channel Ports and destroy the British Army …

  There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.18

  The British and Dominion armies held on. Then they rallied, and struck back. The German offensive died hard, over a tortuous retreat lasting months. Failed tactics, rushed training, demoralisation, lack of food and ammunition, and overstretched supply lines were blamed for their eventual collapse – aggravated by the astonishing return to form of the British, Anzac and French forces and the arrival of the first units of the 500,000-strong American Army. The tactical sequence that had frustrated the Tommies, Anzacs and Canadians for almost three years – attack, brief success, resistance, counter-attack, and stalemate or defeat – now dragged down and destroyed Ludendorff’s great offensive.

  It culminated in the ‘100 Days’ (8 August to 11 November 1918), a rapid series of Allied victories that terminated the German war. By now, the Americans were pouring into France: 39 divisions would arrive by the end of September. The revived French had re-entered the arena. Most importantly, a battle-hardened Commonwealth phoenix had risen out of the ashes of Flanders. The Australians were now fighting as part of a stand-alone national army, injecting fresh patriotic zeal into their ranks. The newly formed Australian Corps under General Sir John Monash were about to exceed what anyone imagined possible a year earlier, when they lay immobilised in the swamps beneath Passchendaele. A glimpse of their return to form was the capture of the village of Hamel on 4 July, an opening victory of great symbolic value. Indeed, Monash would emerge as one of the outstanding commanders of the war, largely due to his generalship during the 100 Days and his mastery of the synchronisation of the new ‘weapons system’ of infantry, machine guns, artillery, tanks and aircraft – a role he likened to that of the conductor of an orchestra.

  On 8 August 1918, the British, Anzacs and Canadians burst out of Amiens, broke the German lines, captured 12,000 prisoners and 450 guns, inflicted 15,000 further casualties and advanced eight miles, the furthest achieved on the Western Front in a single day (the Flanders Offensive had taken three and a half months to capture the same distance). Over the next five days, the Canadian Corps defeated or put to flight ten full German divisions, capturing 9131 prisoners and 190 artillery pieces, advancing fourteen miles and liberating more than 67 square miles.

  Blow by blow, the Germans were heaved out of France and Belgium. Over the next three months, with terrific losses to both sides, the Allies regained all the ground they had lost in France and in Belgium. In late September, the British retook Messines and Passchendaele, in the Fifth Battle of Ypres. By the beginning of October 1918, the Germans were back to where Operation Michael had begun. Later that month, British forces occupied the Belgian coast and seized the U-boat bases, fulfilling the original goal of the Flanders Offensive the previous year.

  Ludendorff would never recover from the nightmare of Amiens, another ‘black day’ for Germany, and the ensuing 100 Days, during which some of his finest units were destroyed or utterly broken. The German forces surrendered en masse or were annihilated. They were comprehensively defeated on the battlefield, not ‘stabbed in the back’ by Jews and communists as Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler would later claim.

  Haig’s men – the British and Dominion armies – had spearheaded the Allied victory, capturing 188,700 prisoners and 2840 guns by the 100th day, just shy of the combined total of the much larger American and French armies. By this measure, the great Allied counter-offensive of 1918 ‘was, by far, the greatest military victory in British history’, Sheffield concludes19 – not without a little Anzac and Canadian help.

  17

  WHAT THE LIVING SAID

  Whilst hundreds of thousands were being destroyed in the insane egotism of Passchendaele, every message or memorandum from Haig was full of these insistences on the importance of sending him more men to replace those he had sent to die in the mud. If Britain said, ‘Where are my lost legions?’ then anyone who asked such a question on her behalf was betraying the Army and attacking our soldiers.

  David Lloyd George, War Memoir

  Still swept the rain, roared guns, Still swooped into the swamps of flesh and blood, All to the drabness of uncreation sunk, And all thought dwindled to a moan, Relieve!

  Edmund Blunden, ‘Third Ypres’

  No other battle in British history has inspired so much righteous indignation, passionate debate and biting satire as Passchendaele. On the 100th anniversary of the campaign, it is time to attempt a fresh understanding. Was Passchendaele ‘worth it’? How did it contribute to the final victory, if at all? Should it have been fought in the first place? Perhaps we should start by asking that oddly juvenile question, ‘Who won?’

  It seems perverse to speak of winners and losers in a struggle that ended so piteously. Commanders on both sides claimed Third Ypres as a great victory, of course. The cold verdict, however, is that the British and Empire forces ‘lost’ Third Ypres: they lost the body count; they lost the original strategic case for Third Ypres, in failing to capture the submarine bases on the Belgian coast; and they lost the tactical battles in August and October. Those they won were largely thanks to September’s dry weather.

  And yet, in every battle, the men far exceeded what any commander could expect of a soldier. They were ordered to attack again and again, in battles that Haig and his generals knew had little or no chance of success and would inflict huge casualties. They were used as thousands of little battering rams, hurled against the enemy lines without realising that their commanders had lost hope of achieving the original goals of Third Ypres. Most were unaware that they were fighting a war of pure attrition, the point of which was to drain German lifeblood, at higher cost than to their own ranks. And that is why the Allies ultimately ‘won’ the Great War, as we’ve seen: they had a deeper pool of manpower to draw upon. They could have kept going until every last German man was dead or wounded.

  How then would Haig reconcile his serial losses between 1915 and 1917 with the extraordinary triumph of 1918? He did so with a splendid flourish of his pen, assisted by the thriller writer John Buchan. In 1919, they sat down to write his final dispatch to the government, in which Haig recast Passchendaele and every other offensive under his command as ‘victories’, according to a set of criteria that overrode his previous, specific objectives (e.g. to clear the Belgian coast).

  A striking example of Haig recasting the goal of an offensive to suit the result followed the Somme. In the aftermath, he described the Somme as the ‘Opening of the Wearing Out Battle’, suggesting that his chief aim had always been to wear down the enemy. In fact, the planning of the Somme prescribed a major breakthrough and the resumption of mobile warfare; its attritional ‘benefits’ were a distant second. Lloyd George would not let Haig forget it, and the Somme’s staggering casualties cursed their relationshi
p. Indeed, even Haig’s staunchest admirers have baulked at this ex post facto justification of the slaughter.1

  Haig then extrapolated the justification for the Somme forward and backward in time, armed with the great validator of final victory. By this reading, he had always intended Passchendaele as another stage in his master plan to crush the enemy’s power to wage war; the U-boats were a secondary consideration. It bore out his general war plan, to ‘wear down the enemy but at the same time have an objective’.2 This meant also winning the Materialschlacht, the battle of material attrition over the supply of munitions and war resources (which the British blockade was already winning, at great cost to German civilians).

  Passchendaele was thus transformed into one battle within a great, four-year struggle that Haig had planned from the start. The war should thus be seen as ‘a single continuous campaign’, he wrote in 1919, broken into three ‘stages’: first, ‘the creation of continuous trench lines from the Swiss frontier to the sea’ (1914); second, ‘close and costly combat’ to wear down his opponent (1915–16) and ‘to pin him to his position’ (1917); third, the decisive blow, ‘when signs of the enemy becoming morally and physically weakened are observed’ (1918). At every stage, casualties ‘will necessarily be heavy on both sides for in it the price of victory is paid’.3

  Here, then, under the astonished gaze of Lloyd George, was Haig’s strategic assessment of the Great War: a four-year process of chronic slaughter, which he had planned from the start. Every other rationale for the offensive, all the strategic and territorial imperatives that Haig had pinpointed on his great maps, were secondary aims of a war whose primary purpose was human annihilation.

  While the commanders all understood what this meant, they did not spell it out to their political leaders. It would not play well in the press or with politicians, of course. Yet army commanders made no bones about the meaning of attrition among themselves. Well before Third Ypres, Haig’s chief of staff Sir Launcelot Kiggell was saying, ‘Boche killing is the only way to win war’, not territorial gain.4 Ludendorff said as much in April 1917: ‘Basically, this war comes down simply to killing one another.’5 Robertson had been saying the same since 1915. The generals were thus inured to ‘normal wastage’ at 7000 dead and wounded per week, as the price of attrition. That was planned for. During the Somme and Third Ypres, normal wastage ran at 20,000–50,000 casualties per week. That, too, was planned. A certain level of wastage was, in fact, desirable, because it implied the enemy had sustained similar losses. Allied generals would often bemoan their own low casualties as evidence of a want of offensive spirit. Haig himself had complained in his diary, on 4 September 1916, at the height of the Somme: ‘The unit did not really attack, and some men did not follow their officers. The total losses of this division are under a thousand! [i.e. too low].’6

  Haig’s 1919 despatch, his last, makes no mention of the original goals with which he justified Third Ypres to the government and his generals in May and June 1917. The British, Anzac and Canadian soldiers thought they were fighting to capture a ridge or a submarine base or some other ‘objective’; in fact, they were fighting chiefly to kill or wound more Germans than the Germans could kill or wound of them.

  Haig thus recast Passchendaele as a victory, part of the second and third stages of his four-year offensive: it had worn down the enemy and pinned the German forces to Flanders, denying them the freedom to attack the weakened French. Had he not attacked in Flanders, Haig argued, the German Army might have broken through the weak French defences and won the war.

  Haig’s argument has since formed the bedrock of the case for Passchendaele as a ‘decisive’, war-winning offensive, as he wrote:

  The rapid collapse of Germany’s military powers in the latter half of 1918 was the logical outcome of the fighting of the previous two years. It would not have taken place but for the period of ceaseless attrition which used up the reserves of the German Armies … It is in the great battles of 1916 and 1917 that we have to seek for the secret of our victory in 1918.7

  At the same time, however, Haig’s war drained the manpower of the British and Dominion armies. Addressing this point, he remarked, ‘our total losses in the war have been no larger than were to be expected. Neither do they compare unfavourably with those of any other of the belligerent nations …’8

  The slaughter of millions seems to have had no greater purchase on Haig’s moral sensibility than a cavalry charge across a Sudanese desert. His losses, he wrote, were examples of ‘splendid gallantry’. His moral compass was of a different age: Haig was a Victorian gentlemen and a Christian fatalist. He believed himself predestined to do what had to be done, in the name of God, King and Empire. He brought the morality of John Calvin and Queen Victoria to the monstrosity of the howitzer.

  There are deep flaws in Haig’s case. The most damning is that it failed on its own terms: at Loos, the Somme, Arras and Third Ypres far more of his own forces were killed or ‘worn down’ than Germany’s. Passchendaele ravaged the morale of the British and Dominion soldiers, whose spirit fell into the darkest slough of despond since the war began.

  Nor did Haig’s French counterparts support his Flanders operation, despite his claim that it saved them from a massed German attack. The French High Command had little faith in Third Ypres and did not encourage Haig to pursue it.9 Foch famously scorned the Flanders Offensive as a ‘duck’s march through the inundations to Ostend and Zeebrugge’ and Haig’s plan as ‘futile, fantastic and dangerous’.10 Nivelle thought Flanders a low priority. And General Wilson claimed that Pétain had told him, in May 1917, ‘Haig’s attack towards Ostend was certain to fail, and that his effort to disengage Ostend and Zeebrugge was a hopeless, hopeless one!’11

  Pétain habitually exaggerated French weakness to secure Anglo-Saxon help, as we’ve seen.12 And Haig went along with Pétain because it served his cause in Flanders. In truth, the French forces were in much better shape than Pétain pretended. Some units were in rude good health, shown by their emphatic victory at Malmaison on 23 October 1917 – a ‘brilliant success’, as Robertson told the War Cabinet, against ‘good’ German troops, who had been well-prepared.13 Haig later suggested that Pétain had begged him to continue fighting in Flanders, to avoid a French collapse: there is no evidence of Pétain or any French commander pleading for Haig to continue. Nor is there any evidence of Pétain visiting Haig to urge the British commander to press on with the Flanders offensive (as Haig later claimed).14 In short, the French commanders reckoned their Army had recovered and were ready to defend France. Pétain said as much to Charteris in 1917: ‘the British as well as French Armies should confine their fighting to small operations with limited objectives’.15

  The Germans were confused about the outcome: had they won it or lost it? In the immediate aftermath, Crown Prince Rupprecht claimed Germany had triumphed:

  The sons of all German tribes … have made the English and French attempt to breakthrough a failure … In spite of the unheard of mass deployment of men and material the enemy has gained nothing. So the Battle of Flanders is a heavy defeat for the foe, for us it is a great victory.16

  Distance yielded a different conclusion. The verdict of General der Infanterie Hermann von Kuhl, Rupprecht’s chief of staff, played into Haig’s hand. Von Kuhl did not say that British forces had won the battle; he wrote that they had had no choice other than to fight it in 1917, given the collapse of Russia, the French exhaustion and the American delay:

  The one and only army capable of offensive action was the British … If they had broken off their offensive, the German army would have seized the initiative and attacked the Allies where they were weak … For these reasons the British had to go on attacking until the onset of winter ruled out a German counter-attack. Today, now that we are fully aware about the critical [state of] the French army … in the summer of 1917, there can be absolutely no doubt that through its tenacity the British Army bridged the crisis in France. The French army gained time to recover its
strength; the German reserves were drawn towards Flanders. The sacrifices that the British made for the Entente were fully justified.17

  Third Ypres, Kuhl added, was Germany’s ‘worst ordeal of the World war’; his men had suffered their ‘greatest martyrdom’ in Flanders fields, which had inflicted irreparable damage on German morale. ‘The former sharp German sword became blunt.’18

  Further distance produced fresh German interpretations, in histories and memoirs. Ludendorff’s and Hindenburg’s memoirs acknowledge that Passchendaele had depressed German morale, though no more so than British morale. Yet Third Ypres had failed to break the German spirit. ‘The enemy,’ wrote Ludendorff, years later, ‘charged like a wild bull against the iron wall which kept him from our submarine bases … He dented it in many places, and it seemed as if he must knock it down. But it held, although a faint tremor ran through its foundations.’19

  The German history of Flanders cast Third Ypres as both a German and a British victory. Haig lost the tactical war to Germany’s ‘flexible defence’ (and the weather!) and lost the strategic war because the ridges he gained had no strategic value and were easy targets for German counter-attacks.20 At the same time, however, the British forces had won at Passchendaele, ‘by tying up the Germans with the most severe of exertions’ and wearing them out. ‘In the year 1918, it turned out that this victory played a decisive part in terminating the war in favour of the Allied Forces …’21

  It is a rich irony that the German commanders became Haig’s biggest cheerleaders. Yet their case cannot go unchallenged. For one thing, it is impossible to calculate the extent to which Passchendaele helped or hindered the Allied victory. To call Passchendaele ‘decisive’ retrospectively endows a strategically useless slaughter (as the Germans described it) with the status of a turning point in the war. This ignores a multitude of more forceful long-run ‘causes’ of the eventual Allied victory: the British blockade, Germany’s economic and logistical collapse, the American reinforcements, the French recovery, and the extraordinary revival of the British and Dominion forces.