Battle of Mount Sorrel begins

On Friday 2 June 1916 the German XIII Corps from Württemberg attacked the Canadians on the eastern edge of the salient at Ypres. The objective was the last stretch of the ridge around the town that had remained in Allied hands since the Second Battle of Ypres: the flat knoll of Mount Sorrel and two neighbouring summits, called by the Canadians Hills 61 and 62. The higher of them, Tor Top, and Observatory Ridge, running west from it, gave a view over the German rear. The Germans had been preparing this attack for six weeks, and the soldiers learnt its date only the previous afternoon, together with the news of a “great naval victory” in the Battle of Jutland.

At six in the morning the commander of the 3rd Canadian Division, Major-General Malcolm Mercer, and the commander of its 8th Brigade, Brigadier-General Victor Williams, went up to the front line to inspect the positions near Tor Top. The day before, the new commander of the Canadian Corps, Lieutenant-General Julian Byng, had instructed Mercer to prepare a proposal for a local attack that would improve this exposed and poorly fortified position. At about 8.30 a.m. the German fire began to grow, and from 9 a.m. the sector from Sanctuary Wood to Mount Sorrel was hit by a bombardment such as British soldiers had never yet known. The Canadian artillery replied, but the German batteries destroyed its telephone lines and killed the forward observers. According to a German witness the whole Canadian position turned into a cloud of dust, out of which flew beams, tree trunks, weapons and sometimes human bodies.

The 4th Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles (dismounted cavalry fighting as infantry), near Armagh Wood suffered most. Its trenches ceased to exist. Soldiers who had taken shelter in a tunnel dug by the engineers on the reverse slope of Mount Sorrel were buried in it and after several hours were taken prisoner. Of more than 700 men of the battalion, 76 came out unscathed. Williams was wounded and taken prisoner. Mercer, stunned by a shell burst, tried to reach his staff, but a bullet shattered his leg, and during the night of 2–3 June he was killed by shell fragments. He remained the highest-ranking Canadian killed in the war. For several critical hours the division and the brigade were without commanders. Only in the afternoon did Byng entrust the 3rd Division to the commander of its artillery, Brigadier-General Hoare Nairne.

At 1.07 p.m. the Germans blew mines just in front of the Canadian trenches on Mount Sorrel and in the sunshine went into the assault in four waves. Battalions of the 120th, 121st and 125th Infantry Regiments crossed the levelled trenches, wiping out the last small groups of defenders with grenades, bayonets and flamethrowers. They took Mount Sorrel, Tor Top, most of Armagh Wood and part of Observatory Ridge, where they captured two guns of the Canadian field artillery whose crews fought to the end. In the north, in Sanctuary Wood, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry held up the German flank for a long time, paying for it with more than 400 killed and wounded, including its commanding officer. In accordance with orders setting a limited objective, the Germans halted a few hundred metres beyond the old front line and began to dig in, although according to their later accounts the road to Ypres lay open.

Towards evening Canadian reserves, including machine guns from the 1st Division, closed the gap with a new, makeshift line. At 8.45 p.m. Byng ordered that all the ground lost during the day be retaken that same night. A counter-attack by two brigades of the 1st Division was set for two in the morning, but the approach march under fire took so long that it began only on the morning of 3 June, in full daylight, and ended in a bloody failure.