Canadians capture Passchendaele

At 6 a.m. on 6 November 1917 the 1st and 2nd Divisions of the Canadian Corps went into the attack on the Passchendaele ridge east of Ypres. Less than three hours later the ruins of the village, which the British Army had been trying to reach since the beginning of the Third Battle of Ypres on 31 July, were in Canadian hands. To the north-west the Canadians also took the hamlets of Mosselmarkt and Goudberg. It was the third of the four stages of General Arthur Currie’s attack, which had begun on 26 October. That evening Field Marshal Douglas Haig wrote in his diary that it was a “very important success”. It cost, however, more than 2,200 killed and wounded.

Before the attack

After the attack of 30 October, in which the Canadians had taken Crest Farm just in front of the village and the crossroads at Meetcheele on the Bellevue spur, Currie insisted on a week’s pause. In the first days of November the exhausted 3rd and 4th Divisions were relieved by Major-General Archibald Macdonell’s 1st Division and Major-General Henry Burstall’s 2nd Division. The troops came by rail from around Cassel to the ruined station at Ypres and from there marched across a wilderness of shell holes to their positions. The relief was completed on the morning of 5 November. From 3 to 5 November it did not rain, which made it possible to bring up ammunition on hundreds of pack animals and to move some of the guns forward. So that the battle would be directed by a single command, General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army took over from the Fifth Army the sector north of the Canadians. To the south, as far as Zandvoorde, the Australian I ANZAC Corps and the British IX and VIII Corps were to make feint attacks.

The plan provided for the capture of the Green Line, roughly a semicircle with a radius of about 900 metres around the Graf House pillbox in the middle of the Canadian salient. Brigadier-General Huntly Ketchen’s 6th Brigade of the 2nd Division was to strike straight at the village with three battalions, the 27th (Winnipeg), the 31st (Alberta) and the 28th (North-West), while the 26th (New Brunswick) Battalion covered the right flank, attacking from the south. To the left of the marshy valley of the Ravebeek stream, Brigadier-General William Griesbach’s 1st Brigade of the 1st Division sent the 1st and 2nd (Ontario) Battalions forward on either side of the road from Meetcheele to Mosselmarkt. They had the farthest to go, about 1,200 metres. The 3rd (Toronto) Battalion was separately to take the Vine Cottages strongpoint on the northern boundary of the corps. On the other side the garrison had only just changed: on 3 November the German 39th Division, between the Roeselare railway and the Mosselmarkt road, had been relieved by the 11th Division, sent from Champagne. On the night of 5/6 November the German artillery shelled the forward area with high-explosive and gas shells. By four in the morning all the assault battalions were in their jumping-off positions, most of them in mud-filled shell holes.

The assault

At 6 a.m., under a clear sky, the barrage came down. The battalions left their shell holes so quickly that the German counter-barrage, which opened a few minutes later, fell mostly behind them. Prisoners said afterwards that the Canadians had followed right on the heels of the shells and that the defenders often had no time to man their machine guns. The 28th Battalion on the brigade’s left flank had the hardest time, struggling out of the Ravebeek valley, according to the brigade report through mud and water “knee-deep and in places waist-deep”, under machine-gun fire. The main resistance came from pillboxes on the northern edge of the village. The 27th Battalion was the first to enter Passchendaele.

In that battalion fought Private James Peter Robertson, a 34-year-old volunteer from Medicine Hat in Alberta, born at Albion Mines (today Stellarton) in Nova Scotia. When his platoon was held up by uncut wire and a machine gun, Robertson dashed through a gap on the flank, killed four of the crew in a fierce fight and turned the gun on those who fled. He then carried the captured machine gun at the head of his platoon to the final objective and from there fired on the retreating Germans and on snipers. Later he went out in front of the trench to bring in two badly wounded Canadian snipers. He brought in the first under heavy fire and was killed as he returned with the second. He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

On the 1st Division’s front the main attack went more easily. The Canadians took Mosselmarkt by surprise: four officers and fifty men came out of a large pillbox with their hands up. The garrisons of the camouflaged shell holes around it held out longer, but by 8 a.m. the 1st Brigade stood on the Green Line and was consolidating. The hardest fighting took place in the subsidiary attack: a company of the 3rd Battalion, cut off by the marsh from the rest of the brigade, was long unable to take Vine Cottages. Corporal Colin Barron, a 24-year-old Scot from Banffshire who had emigrated to Canada in 1910, worked round the flank of three machine guns that were holding up the advance, rushed their positions single-handed, killed four of the crews, took the rest prisoner and turned one of the guns on the retreating Germans. He too was awarded the Victoria Cross, and he survived the war.

Visibility was too poor for air combat, so the pilots of both sides strafed the enemy infantry from low level. German airmen attacked the jumping-off line of the 31st Battalion with particular ferocity, mistaking a row of discarded greatcoats for soldiers. That day continuous-wave wireless sets were tried out in the corps under battle conditions for the first time. They worked well enough that, according to the Canadian official history, commanders from then on began to treat wireless as a permanent part of their communications. The 2nd Division beat off the only serious German counter-attack of the day.

What was left of the village

Passchendaele lay on the crest of the ridge, from which the Germans had overlooked the British positions in the valleys to the west all autumn. Almost nothing was left of the village. Aerial photographs from before and after the battle show that where there had been houses and gardens there was only a field of shell holes. The British war correspondent Philip Gibbs wrote in his dispatch that day: “What is Passchendaele? As I saw it this morning through the smoke of gunfire and a wet mist, it was a ruin. Only the ruin of the church, a black mass of slaughtered masonry, and nothing else, not even a house left standing.” He added that for many soldiers this crest was the prize for which all the battles in Flanders had been fought.

The day’s balance

According to the Canadian official history, the attack and the shelling on 6 November cost the Canadians 2,238 men, including 734 killed or died of wounds. Haig noted in his diary that the objectives had been taken “at small cost”, less than 700 men, and the author of that history, G.W.L. Nicholson, concluded that the figure must have covered only the dead reported by evening. Haig also stated that 21 officers and 408 other ranks had been taken prisoner. According to Nicholson, 464 prisoners passed through Canadian collecting posts and field ambulances on 6 and 7 November. At 8.50 a.m., according to Haig’s report, a counter-attack north of the village was repulsed. In his official dispatch of 25 December 1917 Haig set the capture of the village alongside the capture of Vimy Ridge in April and wrote that for the second time that year Canadian troops had achieved “uninterrupted success”.

The next day Currie issued orders for the final stage: on 10 November the Canadians were to take the rest of the high ground north of the village, towards Westrozebeke. News of the village’s capture reached Canada during the campaign for the December election, which was to decide on conscription and the fate of the Union Government.