End of the Battle of Polygon Wood

On 3 October 1917 a week of fighting came to an end which the British Battles Nomenclature Committee after the war included in the Battle of Polygon Wood. At dawn German infantry attacked once more near the road from Ypres to Menin and, as Field Marshal Douglas Haig wrote in his dispatch, “broke down before our positions”. The ground taken on 26 September by the Australians and British in General Plumer’s second step remained in their hands. That same evening four Anzac divisions set off by night for the jumping-off tapes in front of the Broodseinde ridge, from which the next attack was to start the following day.

A week of counter-attacks

According to the British historian John Terraine, from 26 September to 3 October the Germans attacked and counter-attacked at least 24 times. After the defeat of 26 September the command of the German Fourth Army turned to more carefully prepared counter-attacks (Gegenangriff), after a day or two, instead of immediate counter-strokes, which British artillery had twice shattered. At dawn on 30 September, in mist and smoke, troops of the 19th Reserve Division with flamethrowers attacked the British 23rd Division on the Menin road. They were driven off by rifle fire and grenades, and the British counted about 80 German dead in front of their trenches.

The most serious was the attack of 1 October on the south-eastern edge of Polygon Wood. It was carried out by the group of General Arthur von Gabain with two regiments of fresh counter-attack divisions, Fourth Army storm troops for taking pillboxes and mortar companies. The British 21st and 7th Divisions and a neighbouring Australian battalion pinned down most of the attackers in shell holes in the middle of no man’s land. The Germans retook only the copse of Cameron Covert, captured by the Australians on 27 September, and advanced at most about 130 metres. A renewed attack in the afternoon failed completely, and the 210th Reserve Regiment alone lost about 350 men. In a counter-attack on the 21st Division’s sector Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Bent was killed, the Canadian-born 26-year-old commander of the 9th Battalion of the Leicestershire Regiment, who had gathered a reserve platoon and various detachments and led them forward. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. In these days Lieutenant-Colonel Humphrey Scott, commander of the Australian 56th Battalion, was also killed; after his unit had been relieved he stayed on the Butte to show the new sector to his British successor and was shot there.

Operation “Höhensturm”

The attacks of 30 September and 1 October were meant to prepare the ground for a larger operation. The German 4th Guard Division, which after 26 September had relieved the shattered 3rd Reserve Division near Zonnebeke, concluded that without regaining the Tokio spur it could not hold the Broodseinde ridge: any counter-attack over its exposed crest would be shot to pieces. Group “Ypres” therefore prepared Operation “Höhensturm” (Storming the Heights): the 212th Reserve Regiment of the 45th Reserve Division, reinforced by storm troops and 32 mortars, was to pass through the Guards’ lines and retake the spur from Zonnebeke to the edge of Polygon Wood. The attack was set for dawn on 3 October, but after the bloody failure of 1 October it was postponed by a day. On 2 and 3 October the division and corps commanders watched rehearsals. In line with the new principles of defence agreed on 29 September by General Erich Ludendorff with the command in Flanders, the German front lines were more densely held and the counter-attack divisions were moved closer to the front.

Preparations on the British side

Meanwhile the British were preparing for the third step. On 28 September Haig surprised his army commanders by announcing that it would soon be necessary to move from limited attacks to exploitation, and on 2 October he approved plans for a pursuit with cavalry and decided to continue the offensive at Ypres for as long as the weather allowed. The attack on the Broodseinde ridge, planned for 6 October, was brought forward by two days. Between 29 September and 1 October X Corps relieved the 5th Australian Division in Polygon Wood, and General Alexander Godley’s II Anzac Corps took over the sector north of the Ypres–Roeselare railway. For the first time in the war four Anzac divisions, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Australian and the New Zealand Division, stood side by side in the line. From 1 October the artillery fired practice barrages twice a day so that the Germans would not guess when the real attack would start.

In a report of 1 October British intelligence predicted that the Germans would attempt a counter-attack at Zonnebeke, but did not know that it had been postponed to 4 October. The Germans, for their part, had been expecting an attack for several days, and a “very reliable agent” had warned them of it as early as 1 October. On the afternoon of 3 October a drizzle began to fall, and in the evening, as Haig noted, a gale and rain came in from the south-west. After dark columns of Australian and New Zealand battalions passed through the Menin Gate at Ypres and made for their forward positions. Opposite them, on the eastern slope of the ridge, the battalions of the 212th Reserve Regiment were assembling for their dawn attack.