A Sheet of Iron All Night

Passchendaele: The Lost Victory of World War IBy Nick LloydBasic Books, 2017.  Mud. Clinging, sucking mud. The memoirs, letters, diaries, and reports of the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and German soldiers, from commanding generals on down to the lowest privates, who fought in Flanders in the summer and fall of 1917 all mention mud. To be sure, many things affected the fighting in Flanders, and author Nick Lloyd covers them all. But, like the soldiers who fought in Flanders, the reader cannot escape the mud.Nick Lloyd is Reader in Military and Imperial History at King’s College London in the United Kingdom. For this book, he conducted research in British, Australian, Canadian, and German archives. He also consulted hundreds of general histories, memoirs, diaries, collections of letters, and unit histories, including material in German archives. This approach makes for a well-rounded, definitive history of this battle, the centennial of which is now upon us. According to Lloyd, this book:

attempts to retell the story of this infamous battle, considering it afresh with the accumulated knowledge of a century of scholarship.... It aims to present a new account of the battle, what it was like to experience, and what it meant for the overall war efforts of both the Allies and the Central Powers.

By his in-depth research in a wide variety of sources representing both sides of the conflict, Lloyd hopes to show how near the British actually came to a decisive victory in October 1917.Before covering the battle, Lloyd reviews the situation on the Western Front as it developed from the end of 1916 until the dreadful offensive launched by French General Robert Nivelle in mid-April 1917. After French and British forces halted the sweeping German advance in 1914 the war descended into a trench-bound stalemate. The Allied offensive along the Somme River and the German and French slaughter near Verdun in 1916 wore all the armies down. It seemed that there was no possibility of a breakthrough until French General Robert Nivelle promised success for an offensive for mid-April 1917. When Nivelle’s attack bogged down and resulted in adding to the horrific casualty figures, many French troops rebelled. The Allies were in a crisis. The defeat of the French army involved in this attack rocked France and changed the overall strategic picture. Some political and military leaders, among them British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Commander-in-Chief General Philippe Petain favored halting all offensive actions on the Western Front while awaiting the arrival of the Americans, who had just entered the war. Others, such as British Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and British Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Sir William Robertson, favored continuing the pressure on the Germans on the Western Front. Haig, in particular, wanted a renewed offensive in the north, in Flanders, with the goal of a huge thrust and a breakthrough that would capture key German railway hubs and, ultimately, free the Belgian coast and capture German U-boat bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge.Throughout most of the fighting the area suffered a heavier than average rainfall. According to Lloyd: “It was the most remarkable spell of weather of the whole war.” As a result of the incessant rain in July and August, drainage ditches became rivers, and then impassable swamps. Shell holes, which in many places were so prevalent that they overlapped each other for acres, became filled with filthy water and mud into which wounded men fell and drowned. Rivers and streams became swollen, and they flooded the surrounding countryside, turning it into a muddy quagmire that sucked men, horses, and equipment down into it. Men had to build and use wooden pathways to move between rear areas and the front lines:

Moving along these narrow, precarious wooden paths became one of the enduring memories of the battle for British and Imperial soldiers: conveyor-belts of fear and terror that took them from the (relative) safety of the rear lines, all the way into the front, where there was no possibility of sleep or rest, only uncertainty and, inevitably, sheer terror.

Haig planned for two phases of the campaign. In the first phase, General Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army would capture the high ground at Messines Ridge, thereby securing the southern flank. The second phase, to be led by General Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army, would be the full-blooded assault from Ypres east and northeast through Passchendaele to the Belgian coast.On June 7 Plumer’s men, after blowing nineteen mines they had dug under German positions, advanced and secured Messines Ridge. This phase, with Plumer’s meticulous planning and adequate artillery support, was successful. But the discord among senior British civilian and military officials continued. Lloyd George attempted to open a rift between Robertson and Haig, continually questioning the wisdom of Haig’s northern operation. But Lloyd George didn’t play his hand to its fullest, and operations in Flanders went ahead.Gough’s plan for the next phase, with Haig’s approval, was for a strong thrust with distant objectives followed by a breakout from the Ypres area and a move on the Belgian coast. This phase began on July 31 in the midst of abysmal weather. In a few days of fighting, Gough had gained some ground but with heavy casualties. The poor weather then caused a delay in follow-on attacks.Gough resumed the attack on August 10. The almost three weeks of intermittent attacks that followed brought much the same results as previous efforts: some British gains with heavy losses to the attackers and defenders struggling in horrible weather and ground conditions. Haig persisted in his notion to achieve a breakthrough, even at the cost of extending his timeframe.Thus, for the next phase of the battle, Haig turned the ball over to General Sir Herbert Plumer and his Second Army. Plumer was again methodical in his planning. Indeed, his “plans were straight out of his ‘bite-and-hold’ manual: exhaustive preparation for a strictly limited push forward—no more than 1500 yards in—covered all the way by his guns.” Plumer planned an advance on a narrower front allowing more adequate artillery support for the advancing troops. Plumer’s tactics bore initial success in attacks in early October, taking Broodseinde and the Gravenstafel Ridge, both of military importance. The author states that this would have been a good stopping point for Haig:

There was a sense, both then and ever since, that the campaign should have been called off after Broodseinde. The British had won a clear victory, taking the Gravenstafel Ridge, the last rise before Passchendaele, and in the face of worsening weather and awful ground, maybe they should have stayed put and been content with what had been achieved.

However, Haig’s views prevailed, and Plumer’s subsequent attacks on October 9 and 12 resulted in heavy losses with no gain. Plumer had rushed his planning and had, in a sense, abandoned bite-and-hold tactics. Despite this, Passchendaele still needed to be taken, according to Haig. Lloyd is correct in asserting that the campaign should have been stopped after Broodseinde. Up to that point losses had been heavy, and there was no reason to suspect that things would change. The weather and terrain were still terrible, and the men were tired; these are all things that Haig was aware of and should have given more weight in his deliberations. However all of this is clearer in hindsight.For the final phase of the battle, Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie led the advance with his Canadian Corps. Currie, who didn’t like the idea of an offensive in Flanders to begin with, favored bite-and-hold tactics, and his Canadians had achieved much success in previous engagements. Currie was, like Plumer, an advocate of careful planning and heavy artillery support. He had a bit more leeway with Haig than British generals did, certainly due to the fact that he commanded, basically, an Allied army rather than a colonial force. Although Currie was unable to complete his planning due to time constraints, his attack commenced on October 26; despite heavy losses, the Canadians made steady progress. On November 6 Passchendaele finally fell to the Canadians.Not surprisingly, soldiers’ accounts—both British and German—of the fighting reflect the horror and hardships of fighting in Flanders. A British officer describes his actions during an attack:

We went through a sheet of iron all night and in the morning it got worse. We attacked at 5:25 [a.m.] and fought all day at times we were bogged up to our armpits and it took anything from an hour upwards to get out. Lots were drowned in the mud and water. The Bosch[e] gave us Hell but we managed to hold on to the little we had taken till night when we dug in [emphasis in the original].

A Canadian soldier describes the conditions he encountered during one of the final attacks of the battle:

The whole countryside was a complete morass. It was impossible to move any artillery in the deep mud, because horses sank in it right up to their necks and had to be abandoned. For our infantry, the approach to the line had to be along duckboards of slats laid on top of the mud. They provided fairly secure footing, but to step off into the mud was fatal. Men fell into the morass and just disappeared.

A British Army chaplain tells of a scene at a medical dressing station where he helped to minister to the wounded men:

One young [man] of 19 years had [his] face lacerated and caked with blood. All he could say was “Shoot me, Doctor. Shoot me please. Do shoot me.” He died soon after he left the Aid Post.

As bad as it was for the attackers, it was not easy for the defenders either. The Germans also had to cope with the Flanders mud in addition to the British shelling that drove man mad. A German soldier writes about his experience being under British artillery fire:

Geysers the size of houses, consisting of soil, metal splinters and rocks erupt everywhere. It is as if giant invisible fists were pounding, clobbering everything without mercy. Everyone who hasn’t been hit yet looks for a gap in the horrible wall of fire, half insane from breathlessness and terror.

A German artillery officer comments on the hardships endured by men and horses alike:

As we prepared to move our guns, one of the limbers [a two-wheeled cart to which an artillery piece’s trail was mounted while being transported] slid down into a huge shell crater. Officers and men attempted, in some cases up to their necks in icy water, to free the horses. Despite the greatest efforts this proved to be impossible, because the horses were trapped by the mud. There was nothing else for it but to put them out of their terrified misery with a revolver shot. Hardly one hundred metres further on, another team fell into a crater where, before it could be rescued, all the horses were drowned.

Such accounts are repeated many times in the narrative. Truly men on both sides experienced a living hell during this battle.Haig’s forces had finally captured Passchendaele, but should the battle have been fought in the first place? The crux of the matter, according to the author, was the struggle between two tactical approaches to the situation: A massive push with an unlimited objective that results in a breakthrough, favored by Haig and Gough on the one hand, and limited, set-piece attacks marked by thorough preparation and heavy artillery support, favored by Plumer and Currie on the other. Lloyd sees Passchendaele as a “lost victory”:

Had [Plumer] been in charge from the beginning, had the offensive begun a month earlier, and had “bite and hold” been the guiding principle upon which British operations were based, who knows what could have been achieved? It is possible that a major victory could have been won in the late summer and autumn of 1917 [emphasis in the original].

Lloyd may be right, but he requires a lot of conditions to have been met.According to Lloyd, the blame for the failure must fall on Haig. Contrary to popular belief, Haig and his staff officers knew of the prevailing dreadful weather and the sea of mud his men had to contend with, and he should have accordingly curbed his desire for a massive breakthrough and tailored the attacks to the actual conditions. He should have begun with bite and hold tactics. Lloyd claims this would have largely nullified German defense-in-depth tactics and would have resulted in steady gains of ground with fewer British casualties.The author also rightly assigns blame to Lloyd George. Although he tried to shift blame to Haig and other military men, Lloyd George had the authority to call a halt to Haig’s plans at any time. The author, while acknowledging Lloyd George’s difficulty due to lack of military experience, asserts that the British government failed to provide an overall strategic goal or approach to defeating Germany. This, then, was reflected in Haig’s at times vague approach to military operations. Furthermore, Lloyd George allowed himself to become distracted by a fixation on operations in such “peripheral” theaters as Italy, Turkey, and Salonika.It is difficult to authoritatively play “what if” with battles, which are complex, murky affairs at best. Lloyd’s argument, that Passchendaele represented a “lost victory,” is certainly defensible, if not conclusively proven. Indeed, there is no way to conclusively prove anything with regard to “what might have been” at Passchendaele simply because there are too many “what if” questions in Lloyd’s argument, as noted above.The best that can be said is that Haig should have recognized that the weather, terrain, and German resistance were not allowing his attacks to progress as he had wished. With this in mind, he should have called a halt to the operation sooner, especially given the fact that worse weather would be coming on with the onset of autumn and winter. While Lloyd acknowledges as much, he goes too far in his claim of a “lost victory.”The book, though, is a valuable addition to the historiography of Passchendaele. Lloyd has done a remarkable job in producing a well-written, thoroughly researched history of a particularly dreadful battle fought during a war known for its battlefield horror. It is a fitting tribute to the British and Commonwealth troops who fought it.____Major Peter L. Belmonte, USAF (Ret.) is a military history book reviewer and the author of Italian Americans in World War II (2001), Days of Perfect Hell: The US 26th Infantry Regiment in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, October-November 1918 (2015), and Calabrian-Americans in the US Military During World War I, Volumes 1 and 2 (2017).