A Canadian Victory : Passchendaele, 1917

[Maestro]

Greetings ladies and gentlemen.

A few important battles in WWI were won due to Canadian troops, or with major help coming from the Canadian Corp. (Well, at least from what we can see on the CBC and Historia channel.) So I decided to make a serie of threads about our different victories in WWI. Here is the second one : Passchendaele.

Taken from : Battle of Passchendaele - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Battle of Passchendaele, or Third Battle of Ypres was one of the major battles of World War I. The battle consisted of a series of operations starting in June 1917 and petering out in November 1917 in which Entente troops under British command attacked the Imperial German Army. The battle was fought for control of the village of Passchendaele near the town of Ypres in West Flanders, Belgium.

The attack served several strategic purposes. A successful attack offered the British a chance of inflicting significant casualties on the German army. A breakthrough in Flanders would hinder the German submarine campaign against British shipping, and also help prevent German bombers from attacking targets in mainland Britain. Whether successful or not, the attack would prevent the German Army from exploiting the serious morale problems of the French.

During the battle, British troops launched several massive attacks, heavily supported by artillery and aircraft. However, they never managed to make a breakthrough in well-entrenched German lines. The battle consisted of a series of 'Bite and Hold' attacks to capture critical terrain and wear down the German army, lasting until the Canadian Corps took Passchendaele on 6 November 1917, ending the battle.

Passchendaele has become synonymous with the misery of fighting in thick mud. Most of the battle took place on reclaimed marshland, swampy even without rain. 1917 had an unusually cold and wet summer, and heavy artillery bombardment tore up the surface of the land. Though there were dry periods, mud nevertheless feature of the landscape; newly-developed tanks bogged down in mud, and soldiers drowned in it.[...]

First Battle of Passchendaele

The First Battle of Passchendaele, on 12 October 1917 began with a further Allied attempt by 5 British and 3 ANZAC divisions (the New Zealand Division and the Australian 3rd and 4th Divisions) to gain ground around Poelkapelle. The heavy rain again made movement difficult, and artillery could not be brought closer to the front owing to the mud. The Allied troops were fought-out, and morale was suffering. Against the well-prepared German defences, the gains were minimal and there were 13,000 Allied casualties.

On this day there were more than 2,700 New Zealand casualties, of which 45 officers and 800 men were either dead or lying mortally wounded between the lines. In terms of lives lost in a single day, this remains the blackest day in New Zealand's recorded history.

By this point there had been 100,000 Allied casualties, with only limited gains and no breakthrough.

Attack on 22 October

The British 5th Army undertook 2 small operations on the 22nd, one with the French First Army at Houthulst Forest, the other east of Poelcappelle. The objective of the attack was to maintain pressure on the Germans while the Canadians were getting ready for for the Second Battle of Passchendaele, as well as supporting the French attack on Malmaison (the last attack during the Second Battle of the Aisne), planned to start on the 23rd (the attack actually took place on the 24th).

The attack consisted of units from XVIII Corps (18th Division) and XIV Corps (34th and 35th Divisions), as well as units from the French I Corp (1st Division).

The attack commenced at 5:35 am, with the French 1st Division and the British 35th Division attacking north/northeast towards the Houthulst Forest, and the British 34th and 18th Divisions attacking northeast/east from Poelcappelle. The French 1st Division sucessfully covered the left flank of the attack towards the Houthulst Forest, while the British 35th Division initially managed to seize its first objectives, but was forced back to its starting line by German counter-attacks. The left flank of the attack by the British 34th Division was unsucessful, while the right flank managed to keep up with the attacking forces of the British 18th Division (who managed to advance 3-400 yards and captured rest of Poelcappelle). The British 5th Army sustained 478 casulties during the attack.

 

[Maestro]

Part II

Second Battle of Passchendaele
26 October - 10 November Main article: Second Battle of Passchendaele

The four divisions of the Canadian Corps were transferred to the Ypres Salient and tasked with making additional advances on Passchendaele. The Canadian Corps relieved II Anzac Corps on 18 October from their positions along the valley between Gravenstafel Ridge and the heights at Passchendaele. Interestingly, it was virtually the same front as had been occupied by the 1st Canadian Division back in April 1915. The Canadian Corps operation was to be executed in series of three attacks each with limited objectives, delivered at intervals of three or more days. As the Canadian Corps position was directly south of the inter-army boundary between British Fifth and Second Army, the British Fifth Army would mount subsidiary operations on the Canadian Corps' left flank while the I Anzac Corps would advance to protect the right flank. The execution dates of the phases were tentatively given as 26 October, 30 October and 6 November.

The first stage began on the morning of 26 October. The 3rd Canadian Division was assigned the northern flank which included the sharply rising ground of the Bellevue spur. South of the Ravebeek creek, the 4th Canadian Division would take the Decline Copse which straddled the Ypres-Roulers railway. The 3rd Canadian Division captured the Wolf Copse and secured its objective line but was ultimately forced to drop a defensive flank to link up with the flanking division of the British Fifth Army. The 4th Canadian Division initially captured all its objectives, but gradually retreated from the Decline Copse due to German counterattacks and mis-communications between the Canadian and Australian units to the south.

The second stage began on 30 October and was intended to capture the position not captured during the previous stage and gain a base for the final assault on Passchendaele. The southern flank was to capture the strongly held Crest Farm while the northern flank was to capture the hamlet of Meetcheele as well as the Goudberg area near the Canadian Corps' northern boundary. The southern flank quickly captured Crest Farm and begun sending patrols beyond its objective line and into Passchendaele itself. The northern flank was again met with exceptional German resistance. The 3rd Canadian Division captured Vapour Farm at the corps' boundary, Furst Farm to the west of Meetcheele and the crossroads at Meetcheele, but remained short of its objective line.

To permit time to facilitate inter-divisional reliefs, there was a planned seven day pause between the second and third stage. British Second Army was ordered to take over section of the British Fifth Army front adjoining the Canadian Corps, so that the central portion of the assault could proceed under a single command. Three consecutive rainless days between 3 and 5 November aided logistical preparations and reorganization of the troops for the next stage. The third stage began the morning of 6 November with the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions having taken over the front, relieving the 3rd and 4th Canadian Divisions respectively. Less than three hours after the start of the assault, many units had reached their final objective lines and the town of Passchendaele had been captured.

A final successful action to gain the remaining high ground north of the village in the vicinity of Hill 52 was launched 10 November. This attack on 10 November brought to an end the long drawn-out Third Battle of Ypres. The Second Battle of Passchendaele cost the Canadian Corps 15 654 casualties with over 4 000 dead, in 16 days of fighting.

Aftermath

Passchendaele could be regarded by some as a re-play of the Battle of the Somme a year earlier, that is as a giant offensive aimed at causing a breakthrough in trench warfare that gradually broke down and evolved into a bloody attrition battle that resulted in enormous casualties for minimal gains. The battle even occurred within an almost-identical time frame of the Somme Offensive, starting in July and ending in mid-November 1917, by which time the Allies had crawled forward eight kilometres and had taken over half a million casualties for strategically worthless terrain in the process. Though the German losses were smaller – around 350,000 – they were also irreplaceable, unlike those of the Allies.

A final similarity to the Somme is the difficulty to declare the battle a victory for either side, though as the Allies did succeed in taking all their objectives, and inflicted overwhelming and unaffordable German casualties, it can be said to be a (staggeringly Pyrrhic) Allied victory.

Because of the Third Battle of Ypres there were insufficient reserves available to exploit the Allied success at the Battle of Cambrai, the first breakthrough by massed tanks, that restored somewhat the shaken confidence of the British government in the final victory. The politicians were reluctant however to fully replace the manpower losses, for fear the new troops would be sacrificed also. This made the British Army vulnerable to a German attack.

The major German offensive of 1918, Operation Michael, began on 21 March 1918, and a supporting operation which became the Battle of the Lys, began on 9 April. This regained almost all of the ground taken by the Allies at Passchendaele, with the Germans advancing about 6 miles (9.7 km). This meant that every inch of ground gained in the offensive was lost to the Germans, in a space of about three days. However, the Germans were also easily pushed away from Ypres once more in the fifth and final battle around the city in September and October 1918.

Altogether, the four years of fighting around Ypres claimed the lives of some 300,000 soldiers of the British Empire; of whom 90,000 have no known graves. These battles, and those British Empire soldiers who gave their lives, are commemorated at the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, the Tyne Cot Cemetery and Memorial to the Missing, the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world with nearly 12,000 graves. The German cemetery in the region is also a massive one, as a sizeable proportion of their casualties on the Western Front also fell around Ypres.

More than any other battle, Passchendaele has come to symbolise the horrific nature of the great battles of the First World War. In terms of the dead, the Germans lost approximately 260,000 men, while the British Empire forces lost about 300,000, including approximately 36,500 Australians, 3,596 New Zealanders and some 16,000 Canadians from 1915 to 1917. 90,000 British and Dominion bodies were never identified, and 42,000 never recovered. Aerial photography showed 1,000,000 shell holes in 1 square mile (2.56 km2).

 

[snafud1]

Sort of "in topic" but Iron Maiden made a song called Passchaele that is a tribute to the battle.

 

[Maestro]

Nice way to hijack a thread !

 

[Freebird]

Nice way to hijack a thread !

Yes, but it was Iron Maiden {now if it had been a Madonna song he'd be walkin' the plank... }


I watched the History channel on WWI, it's just unbelievable what they went through.

 

[snafud1]

Same here. It was definitely a nightmare of a war. And my post had a key word in it.