Battle of Messines (1917) ends

On the evening of 14 June 1917, at 7.30 p.m., the British artillery opened fire south and east of Messines and on both sides of the canal from Ypres to Comines. It was the last attack of General Herbert Plumer’s 2nd Army in the Battle of Messines. The New Zealanders took the fortified Au Chasseur inn on the road to Warneton, the British 25th Division the village of Gapaard, and in the north the defences on the spoil heap by the canal, which the Germans had held for a week, at last fell into British hands. Along the whole front from the Warnave stream to Klein Zillebeke the British closed up to the German Warneton Line. Seven days after the mines were blown, the battle for the Messines–Wytschaete ridge came to an end. That is also how it was dated after the war by the British Battles Nomenclature Committee.

A week after the mines

The British had taken the ridge on the first day, 7 June, and by evening had also occupied most of the German Oosttaverne Line at its eastern foot. The following days brought no more great gains, but they were very hard for the soldiers. On the crowded ridge and the exposed eastern slopes they were shelled by German artillery, especially batteries placed beyond the flanks of the attack, south of the river Lys and beyond the canal. These caused most of the British losses in the battle. According to the history of the 25th Division, in the days after the main attack artillery caused 90 per cent of its losses.

The British command expected great German counter-attacks, but they did not come. At dawn on 8 June the Australians of the 4th Division regained most of the stretch of the Oosttaverne Line from which they had withdrawn the previous evening under the fire of their own artillery. In the evening, after heavy shelling, the Germans attacked along almost the whole new front, but were everywhere repulsed. In the valley of the Blauwepoortbeek stream, where the Germans still held a piece of the line, a tragic mistake occurred that evening. Observers on the ridge took a withdrawing Australian battalion for a German counter-attack, while the Germans in turn took the British units coming to relieve it for an attack. Both sides called down a barrage, and for two hours the artillery of both armies pounded the same patch of ground. The confusion in fire control lasted until 9 June, when the New Zealand Division and both Irish divisions were withdrawn from the line and command of the artillery returned to the corps.

The Germans withdraw

On the German side news from the front long remained unclear. The staff of the army group of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria was convinced that the Oosttaverne Line was still in German hands. On 8 June they considered whether to hold it as long as possible, to fall back a kilometre to the Warneton Line, or even to go straight back behind the Lys and the canal. Retaking the ridge, which on 7 June was to have been done “at any price”, proved impossible. On 10 June Rupprecht decided to withdraw the troops to a line from Klein Zillebeke through Houthem to Bas-Warneton and Deûlémont, in front of the new defences on the canal and the Lys.

On the night of 10/11 June the Germans left unnoticed, leaving behind only officer patrols. In the morning prisoners taken by the Australians at Blauwepoortbeek stated that their units were to withdraw that very night. Patrols found empty shelters and abandoned field guns with their breech-blocks removed. Over the following days the Australians, and then the British who relieved them, pushed posts forward to Gapaard Farm, from where the wire of the Warneton Line could be seen. On 12 June New Zealand soldiers, sent to bury the dead in the former no man’s land, wandered by accident deep into the German trenches south of the flank of the attack and discovered that they were empty. The Germans had also quietly abandoned the whole stretch of front as far as the Lys, where no one was attacking them.

The last attack

Plumer judged that the Oosttaverne Line gave no good observation and ordered the front to be pushed further down the slope. The attack was set for the evening of 14 June. The New Zealand Division, which on 12 June had returned to the line in place of the 3rd Australian Division, had to use the same tired battalions that had fought the night before. After a bombardment that also covered the Warneton Line and the batteries at Warneton and Deûlémont, the infantry moved off at 7.30 p.m. The Otago battalion took Sunken Farm and reached de la Croix Farm on the Douve together with soldiers of the 25th Division. The Canterbury battalion, after hard fighting, took the concrete shelters in the ruins of the Au Chasseur inn, defended by nearly 150 Germans, and La Truie Farm, and then repulsed a counter-attack by the German 22nd Reserve Division. In the north the spoil heap by the canal was taken. According to the New Zealand divisional history, posts were pushed forward to the Warneton Line along the whole front of the army. Over the following days the New Zealanders also cleared the ground as far as the Lys, but the fighting had by then turned into ordinary trench warfare. Part of the heavy artillery set off north, to Ypres.

The balance

The Battle of Messines was the British army’s greatest success on the Western Front so far. In a single day the 2nd Army took the ridge that the Germans had held since November 1914 and deprived them of observation over the southern part of the Ypres salient. Field Marshal Douglas Haig reported the capture of 7,200 prisoners, 67 guns, 94 trench mortars and 294 machine guns. British losses from 1 to 12 June, according to the British official history, amounted to 24,562 killed, wounded and missing, more than half of them suffered by II ANZAC Corps with the Australians and New Zealanders. The Australian official history estimates them at about 26,000. German losses are given in various ways: according to German figures quoted by British historians, from 21 May to 10 June they amounted to 21,886 men, including 7,548 missing, and German medical statistics give 26,087 for 7–14 June. Both sides thus lost roughly the same number of men, which, for an attack in this war, was an exceptionally favourable result for the attacker.

The German official history admitted that the British blow “fully succeeded”, and Rupprecht’s chief of staff, General Hermann von Kuhl, called it after the war one of the worst tragedies of the war. As early as April Kuhl had proposed abandoning the exposed salient, but the commanders on the spot objected, not knowing about the mines under their trenches.

What next in Flanders

Messines was only a prelude. The main blow from Ypres to the east and north-east, which was to drive the Germans from the Belgian coast, Haig had already entrusted in May to General Hubert Gough and his 5th Army. Before the battle he had considered striking further north immediately after the capture of the ridge, at the Gheluvelt plateau beyond Ypres. On 8 June he urged Plumer on, but Plumer replied that he needed three days to move the artillery. Haig therefore handed the II and VIII Corps, which held that sector, over to Gough, and on 10 June the 5th Army took over the front north of Observatory Ridge. On 14 June Gough declared that a separate attack would push his troops into a new salient shelled from three sides, and preferred to take the plateau as part of the main offensive. The preparations for it, with the building of roads, railways and artillery positions under the eyes of German observers, were to take several more weeks. The Germans, who after Messines no longer had any doubt where the next blow would fall, began to strengthen their defences at Ypres. Rupprecht wrote in his diary on 12 June that what mattered now was to win the battle that was beginning to develop at Ypres.

The British were also worried by something else. The day before, on 13 June, German Gotha bombers had attacked London in broad daylight, which soon forced the British to pull some aircraft back from France for home defence. The great offensive from Ypres, known as the Battle of Passchendaele, began on 31 July 1917.