Allies retake Passchendaele

On 29 September 1918, the second day of the Flanders Army Group’s attack, the Passchendaele ridge east of Ypres was already firmly in Allied hands, and the Belgians had recovered Diksmuide on the Yser. The British chronology of the war places the recapture of Passchendaele under this date, but according to Belgian sources and the British official history the ruins of the village had already been taken on 28 September by units of the Belgian 4th Carabiniers Regiment and the Grenadier Regiment, and on 29 September the Belgians pushed beyond the ridge. Thus in two days the place whose name had become for the British the symbol of the whole war returned to Allied hands. In the autumn of 1917 it had taken more than three months to capture, in the First and Second Battles of Passchendaele, until the Canadians took the village on 6 November. In April 1918 the British gave it up without a fight, and now the Belgians retook it within a single day.

After a night of pouring rain the attack started on 29 September at 6 a.m., after a short bombardment. The objective was the German Flandern I position, running from the Lys at Wervik through Moorslede to the north. The Germans had already reinforced their four divisions facing the Belgians and fought back stubbornly. On the right wing the Belgian 8th Division, together with the Scottish 9th Division, in which a battalion from the Dominion of Newfoundland was serving, took the Keiberg hill by 10 a.m. At Moorslede the Belgians ran into strong resistance and asked for help. The commander of the 9th Division sent them a brigade, and at 2.30 p.m. the Scots and Newfoundlanders broke through the position on a stretch of almost four kilometres. The Belgians took Moorslede and broke into the position not far from Roeselare. Further north things went harder for them, and they did not take the northern end of the ridge with Westrozebeke that day.

On the left wing of the Belgian army Diksmuide fell. The town, which the Germans had taken on 10 November 1914 from French marines and Belgians at the end of the Battle of the Yser, had lain just behind the front line for almost four years and was completely ruined. The Belgians did not attack it frontally, across the flooded ground along the Yser, but took it by a wide outflanking move from the south and from the rear. The British official history, summarising the account of the Belgian Ministry of War, calls Diksmuide the symbol that Ypres was for the British. The British official history, the British chronology and Flemish accounts give 29 September as the day the town was liberated; some Belgian publications give 30 September.

That same day, south of Ypres, the British recovered the Messines ridge, which the Germans had abandoned during the night: the 30th Division entered Messines, and the 34th Division passed through Wytschaete as far as the Ypres–Comines canal. Despite these successes the day did not bring the breakthrough hoped for by the Army Group’s French chief of staff, General Jean Degoutte. The heavy guns got stuck on sodden roads across the belt of shell craters, and the rain prevented the airmen from supporting the infantry. At Kruiseecke and Zandvoorde the British came to a halt in front of fresh German troops. The French cavalry, which was to go into the gap, could not get through the devastated ground.

The recovery of Passchendaele and Diksmuide had symbolic significance for the British and Belgians as well. On 30 September the Belgians also took Westrozebeke and Staden, the last part of the ridge, and all the heights around Ypres were in Allied hands. In front of the second German position, however, the attack got stuck in the mud, and the further advance into Flanders had to be postponed until mid-October.