At 5:55 on the morning of September 26, 1917, Arthur Ellis saw the barrage open in one magnificent crash. One gun for every nine meters of front. Frederick Farrell, a 19-year-old farm laborer, was about to go over the top at Polygon Wood. At six in the morning, the attack was launched.
But the Germans knew what was coming and answered with a merciless barrage of their own. Farrell lost his rifle in the chaos. He nearly lost his senses too. But he picked up another weapon and started across no man’s land in a haze.
Lieutenant Sinclair Hunt, a schoolteacher from Singleton, described the moment the assault began. The fog was dense, and fixed bayonets glinted. A gun boomed louder than the rest, and as if by magic, four thousand men sprang from the ground in wormlike columns and dashed forward at a run. The 53rd Battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Oswald Croshaw, believed in leading from the front.
Before the attack, he told his officers, “Your men before yourselves. Look to your flanks. God bless you all. Till we meet again.
”
He was killed at the head of his battalion. On this part of the line, the advance was relatively easy. Elsewhere, the 15th Brigade captured most of the British objective as well as its own. Albert Jacka rallied his men after a barrage unsettled them.
Sergeant John Dwyer rushed a machine gun post, knocked it out, and won the Victoria Cross. The German counterattack was smashed by artillery before it could get going. But Polygon Wood was still a slaughterhouse. It cost fifteen thousand casualties.
Eighteen-year-old Leslie Mai, a plasterer before the war, wrote, “My God, it was terrible. Just slaughter. We gained our objective, but what a cost. Mates I have played with last night are now lying cold.
”
One of the myths of the Western Front is that nothing was learned. But that isn’t true. A new tactic had emerged: bite and hold. Each division advanced on a narrow front, with units arranged in depth.
Fresh troops would join the attack at each objective, so the assault never lost strength. These tactics had been used at Menin Road and again at Polygon Wood. The next step along the ridge was a place called Broodseinde. By October 1917, the landscape was a sea of mud.
Poor drainage, constant drizzle, and endless fighting had destroyed the ground. The British barrage fell on the Germans. The rain fell on everybody. Then something extraordinary happened.
As the first ANZAC soldier rose to attack, he saw a line of Germans doing exactly the same thing across the field. Both sides had planned, bombarded for, and launched an attack almost simultaneously. The Germans were trying to retake the high ground at Polygon Wood. The ANZACs were trying to take Broodseinde.
The German attack was brushed aside by the ferocity of the ANZAC assault. Prisoners later revealed that the Australian attack had anticipated the German one by only fifteen minutes. Concrete pillboxes offered resistance, but one by one the machine guns were dealt with. Victoria Crosses were won that day.
The ground grew wet and boggy, and the German barrage began causing casualties. Pale-faced, frightened Germans came forward with their hands raised. The New Zealand division attacked alongside the Australians on the left flank. Their commander, General Sir Andrew Russell, complained, “The mud is a worse enemy than the German.
”
They advanced a kilometer and secured the spur, at a cost of more than three hundred lives. Among the dead was Dave Gallagher, a 44-year-old former captain of the All Blacks. He was one of thirteen All Blacks killed in the First World War. The two ANZAC corps took more than four thousand prisoners.
Private Swinghammer remembered what happened to those prisoners. As they passed, the Australians relieved them of any valuables. Souveniring the enemy was a strong characteristic of the Australian soldier. By mid-1917, the ANZACs had been here for eighteen months.
They were different soldiers now. Training had improved. Battalions spent two weeks working on pillbox-fighting techniques. They knew how many guns it took to cut a certain length of wire.
And the commanders had changed. At Gallipoli, battalion commanders were often in their fifties. By 1917, they were in their thirties, some even in their twenties. They had once held the same positions as the men they commanded.
If you were going to follow someone into a situation where you could be killed, you wanted to know they understood what was involved. There had been a mental change in the men too. The official historian said there was only one way out of this war for an infantryman, and that was on his back—sick, wounded, or dead. Every man knew he would be put out to fight again and again until, if not in this battle, then the next, he got his bullet.
The men turned inward. Their mates became their family. The section, the platoon, the company—that bond was a tremendous force. The line now reached the outskirts of a village that had lent its name to the whole campaign.
Passchendaele. On October 9, 1917, the attack on Passchendaele exploded across the landscape. It was a two-pronged assault along the main ridge and Belleview Spur. If one prong failed, the other would be exposed to devastating enfilade fire from the high ground.
But what looked achievable on the map was far from that in reality. It rained, it deluged, and the poorly drained terrain reverted to clinging mud. Charles Gatliff, a Boer War veteran, recalled, “It’s a common sight to see men pulling one another out of the mud. It clings like glue.
”
The mud compromised the artillery. Many guns couldn’t be brought into position. Only a quarter of the usual number supported the attack. Many shells landed with a splash and disappeared into the mud without exploding.
The German wire remained intact. The 49th Division failed against the uncut wire and concrete pillboxes on Belleview Spur. The 66th was exposed to devastating fire. At the end of the day, all Second ANZAC had to show for its effort was a substantial casualty count.
Field Marshal Haig’s verdict: “It was simply the mud that defeated us. The men did splendidly. ”
Thomas Cleary, an electrician from Sydney, was there. “Pouring rain with no shelter, no tucker, and told to do the best we could,” he recalled.
“I put in easily the worst night I ever did or expect to put in. If it wasn’t for the thought I was on active service, I think I would have wasted a cartridge on myself. ”
The conditions were unimaginable. Dead and dying bodies rotted in the foul mud.
The stench was appalling. Rats feasted on corpses and grew to the size of cats. Lice infested virtually every man, causing trench fever. And then there was trench foot.
Lieutenant Symple, a 26-year-old accountant from Sydney, wrote, “I am suffering from trench feet as a result of having been in knee-deep water for seventy-two hours without a break. ”
The cold and wet caused a loss of circulation, leading to fungal infection, which could turn to gangrene. Keeping your feet dry was essential, and virtually impossible. The attack on October 9 had failed.
But there was no question of calling a halt. The next attack would have to take both the ground that the first had failed to capture and Passchendaele itself. Haig, misled by incomplete reports, believed Broodseinde had been a reasonable success. So he ordered the attack on Passchendaele.
That decision remains one of the most controversial of the entire war. On October 12, after another fourteen millimeters of rain, the attack began. The Third Australian Division was to assault along the Passchendaele ridge. The New Zealand division attacked along Belleview Spur.
In the low ground between them, the Ravebeek stream had become a muddy morass forty-five meters wide. The official history of the 40th Battalion described the land as an expanse of shell holes filled with water. In places, it looked like a series of lakes. Each division was supposed to advance a kilometer and a half.
But the Third Division’s plan was based on inaccurate reporting. Its advance ended up being over two kilometers—much too far for a bite and hold. One war diary described the scene: “There are many men who were lost. Lost altogether in the bog.
Rain, high explosives, and gas rain down. ”
The New Zealanders on Belleview Spur were smashed against perfectly intact German wire. Their casualty count remains the worst single-day tally in New Zealand’s military history. The Australian 40th Battalion recorded what it saw.
“The New Zealanders were coming up on our left in two magnificent waves. They were seen there all that day, still in two waves, lying dead in the mud in front of the uncut wire. ”
Private McCumber remembered the battle. “The New Zealanders couldn’t get through, and as soon as we got past Fritz, he started sniping us.
We have no cover at all. They must have killed half the section. ”
Untroubled German machine guns on Belleview Spur tore into the Australians attacking on the right of the New Zealanders. A party of twenty men reached Passchendaele, but they had to turn back when they realized they were alone.
Haig described the end of the battle in his dispatch. “The valleys of the streams were found to be impossible,” he wrote. “It was therefore determined not to persist in the attack. ”
Major General John Monash complained, “Our men are being put into the hottest fighting and are being sacrificed in harebrained schemes like Bullecourt and Passchendaele.
”
Many men drowned in the mud. Stretcher bearers could take up to six hours to travel a single kilometer. The cost-effectiveness of battles can be measured in casualties per meter of ground gained. At Messines and Broodseinde, the cost was one man per meter.
At Passchendaele, it was thirty-five men per meter. Many of the dead are buried at Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in the world. The battered Australians withdrew. They were replaced by the Canadians, who captured and finally held Passchendaele Ridge between October 26 and November 20.
It cost them four thousand killed and nearly twice as many wounded. Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Field Marshal Haig detested each other. In his memoirs, Lloyd George vilified the field marshal, writing of Passchendaele, “No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign. ”
But the attritional tactics were having a profound effect on the enemy.
General Ludendorff wrote, “The wastage was extraordinarily high, and in the West, we began to be short of troops. ” The German High Command said Germany had been brought to near destruction by the Flanders battle of 1917. Haig’s strategy had very nearly worked. After their withdrawal from Passchendaele, the Australian units were reorganized into the Australian Corps.
The New Zealanders went to XXII Corps. But there remains one action of 1917 that shaped the year ahead, even though the ANZACs weren’t involved. At Cambrai, 120 kilometers south of Passchendaele, tanks played an influential role for the first time. More than three hundred attacked in one morning.
New artillery developments and infantry tactics proved effective. The attack went further in six hours than Third Ypres had in three months, and with half the casualties. Cambrai proved that technology was becoming as crucial on the battlefield as manpower. The start of 1918 was quiet, gripped by winter.
Few Allies thought this would be the last year of the war. Many expected 1919, even 1920, when the trickle of Americans would become a flood. For this reason, the Germans had to act decisively. In the spring of 1918, just months after the Canadians had captured Passchendaele, the Germans launched one last desperate throw of the dice.
The British were forced to give up not only Passchendaele but other dearly fought gains in the face of a devastating German onslaught that almost brought success. Then the Germans met the Australians at a place called Villers-Bretonneux.
