End of the Third Battle of Ypres

On 10 November 1917, shortly after six in the morning and in pouring rain, the Canadian 2nd Brigade and the British 1st Division went into the attack on the heights north of the village of Passchendaele, which the Canadians had taken four days earlier. The Canadians reached their objectives and held them under hurricane fire, while the British on their left wing were driven back. It was the last large attack of the Third Battle of Ypres, which the British Battles Nomenclature Committee closed on precisely this date. After three and a half months of fighting in the mud the British army had moved the front forward about 7 km and taken the Passchendaele ridge, but had reached neither Roeselare nor the Belgian coast. Each side lost about a quarter of a million men, and the dispute over the purpose of this offensive continues to this day.

The last attack

The objective was the crossroads the British called Vindictive, about 900 metres north of the village on the road to Westrozebeke, and Hill 52, a few hundred metres further on, the highest point of the northern part of the ridge. From these places one could look down on the German rear to the north-east. General Arthur Currie entrusted the attack to the 2nd Brigade of General Frederick Loomis, from the 1st Division, supported on the right by a battalion of the 4th Brigade. On the left, on the Goudberg spur, which had been taken over by the British II Corps, the British 1st Division attacked. Opposite stood regiments of the German 4th Division and 44th Reserve Division, which on 9 November had relieved the bled-out 11th Division. According to prisoners’ statements, the German units were so intermingled that they could not say which sectors they were holding.

The 7th and 8th Battalions went over from positions north and north-east of Mosselmarkt and by 7.30 a.m. stood on the first objective, only about 450 metres further on. The 7th Battalion still had to advance a little under 300 metres to silence the machine guns in a nearby trench. Then the 10th Battalion, from the brigade reserve, took over the brigade’s whole front and carried the line to the final objective. On the way the 8th Battalion took Venture Farm and four German 77 mm field guns. To the left of the Canadians things went badly. A German counter-attack drove into the gap between two diverging battalions of the British 1st Division, the 1st Battalion, South Wales Borderers, and the 2nd Battalion, Royal Munster Fusiliers. Fired on from the flank, they suffered heavy losses and fell back. The Canadian 8th Battalion had to bend back its left flank to close the gap.

The front of the attack, narrow from the start, shrank by three fifths after the British failure. The Germans turned the artillery fire of five corps on the Canadian wedge. The bombardment was heaviest from nine until late afternoon, and many German prisoners being led to the rear were killed by their own shells. Poor visibility made it difficult for the Canadian artillery to engage the German batteries, and German aircraft machine-gunned from low altitude the men digging trenches and carrying supplies. “Almost as bad as at Pozières,” an Australian noted in his diary. “If the Canadians hold on, they are magnificent troops.” In the afternoon the 20th Battalion beat off one counter-attack with rifle fire, and another was broken up by the artillery. The Canadians pushed outposts in shell holes far down the eastern slope to secure the salient they had won. The day cost them 1,094 men, 420 of them killed.

Why it ended here

Field Marshal Douglas Haig wanted the whole ridge as far as Westrozebeke for his winter positions, but the line stopped about 800 metres short of that village. He no longer had the strength for more. After the Italian defeat at Caporetto the British government had sent or was about to send five divisions to Italy, and with them General Herbert Plumer, commander of the Second Army, who had conducted the attacks since September. The French were demanding that the British take over another sector of the front from them, and in ten days the tank attack at Cambrai, prepared in secret by the Third Army, was due to begin. Haig did not announce the end of the offensive. Smaller operations went on for another two weeks, and on 15 November the field marshal decided that further attacks in Flanders must be stopped at once, but that this should be kept secret as long as possible. From 14 November the Canadian divisions returned to their former sector at Lens and Vimy.

The balance

The offensive, which was to have broken the front, reached the railway junction at Roeselare and taken from the Germans the submarine bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge, ended with the capture of a few kilometres of shell-torn ground. The Canadian official history speaks of an advance of a mere four and a half miles, or about 7 km. The British now held a narrow, waterlogged salient around Passchendaele, under fire from three sides. According to Haig, since the end of July they had taken in Flanders 24,065 prisoners, 74 guns, 941 machine guns and 138 trench mortars.

The losses are disputed to this day. The British official history by James Edmonds, of 1948, gave 244,897 killed, wounded and missing on the British and dominion side, and the historians Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson estimate them at about 275,000. The German ten-day casualty returns of the Fourth Army give about 217,000 from the second half of July to the end of the year, and the British historian Nick Lloyd, citing the German medical statistics, gives about 236,000 from 1 August to 10 November. Edmonds, adding the lightly wounded, estimated the German losses at as many as 400,000, a figure most historians do not accept.

Haig and his critics

Haig defended the offensive in its very first summary. In his official despatch of 25 December 1917 he wrote that the Germans had used up as many as 78 divisions in Flanders, 18 of which had fought two or three times, and that the enemy’s losses had “considerably exceeded ours”. In his view the advance had been halted not by the strength of the defence but by the nature of the ground and the exceptionally wet weather. Had August been normally dry, the whole ridge could have been taken in a few weeks. After the war he added that he had had to attack so that the Germans would not strike at the French army, weakened by the mutinies. “The possibility of the French army breaking up in 1917 compelled me to go on attacking,” he wrote in 1927 to his former chief of intelligence, General John Charteris. The Canadian historian G. W. L. Nicholson noted, however, that no contemporary document survives of an autumn French request for the offensive to continue.

The critics were merciless. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, who had never believed in the plan, called the Third Battle of Ypres in his war memoirs “grim, futile and bloody”, and Passchendaele one of the greatest disasters of the war. Winston Churchill wrote of “a forlorn expenditure of valour and life without equal in futility”. Haig was accused of choosing ground that the rain was bound to turn into a swamp, and of attacking long after every reasonable hope of success had faded. An often repeated anecdote, popularised by Basil Liddell Hart, tells that Haig’s chief of staff, General Launcelot Kiggell, on seeing the battlefield for the first time, burst into tears and cried: “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?” Many historians doubt its truth, but it captures well how the battle was remembered.

Haig’s defenders pointed out that Flanders pinned down the German army in the months when France was recovering, and cost the Germans losses they could no longer make good. Erich Ludendorff himself admitted in his memoirs that some units no longer stood up to this defensive battle as they had before. The ridge won with such difficulty was given up by the British without a fight in April 1918, when they shortened their front during the German spring offensive.