Germans retake Passchendaele

On 16 April 1918 German troops marched onto the Passchendaele ridge east of Ypres without a fight. General Herbert Plumer’s British Second Army had withdrawn from it as planned, in several stages, and the last outposts left the old front line at four in the morning. The Germans noticed only in the afternoon. Thus within a few days the British gave up the ruined village and the muddy heights they had fought for in the Third Battle of Ypres from July to November 1917, and which the Canadians had taken on 6 November.

The plan to shorten the front in the Ypres salient dated back to March. On 23 March, the third day of the great offensive on the Somme, Field Marshal Douglas Haig ordered Plumer to prepare such a withdrawal in order to free divisions for other armies. The narrow, deep salient, shelled from three sides, absorbed many troops, and after the German attack on the Lys and the loss of the Messines ridge it threatened to be cut off from the south. On 11 April Plumer ordered the corps in the salient to withdraw their main forces to a defensive zone further back, leaving only outposts in the forward zone. By the night of 12–13 April the first stage was complete, and from then on the Passchendaele ridge was held only by outposts. Plumer agreed to a further withdrawal reluctantly. He and his corps commanders were sure they could hold their positions, but Haig’s staff pointed out that the front had lengthened, the men were exhausted and there would be no new British divisions.

On 14 April at Cassel Plumer issued the order to withdraw to a new main line of defence, running from Kemmel through Voormezeele and the White Château, a mile east of Ypres, to the Pilckem ridge. The Belgians to the north of the British were to conform and extend their front southwards. On the night of 15–16 April, while every hillock was being fought for near Bailleul, units of several divisions quietly withdrew from the salient. The artillery had already removed the ammunition from the forward dumps, and at 4 a.m. the outposts left the old front line. According to Haig’s dispatch, the troops took up position on the line of the Steenbeek stream and the Westhoek and Wytschaete ridges. The old defensive zone was to be held for some time as an outpost position, to allow time for the new line to be fortified.

On the morning of 16 April British patrols crossed the abandoned ground and found no Germans. One of them caught a German artillery officer who was looking for sites for observation posts and had no idea where the British were. The German Guard Corps, which was preparing to attack from Houthulst Forest, knew nothing of the withdrawal until the afternoon. Only late in the afternoon did its divisions move into the abandoned positions, and according to the German Fourth Army’s war diary the first report reached its headquarters at 4.40 p.m. When the Germans approached the new line, the outposts drove them off with close-range fire. The chief of staff of the Fourth Army, General Fritz von Loßberg, considered the British abandonment of the Ypres salient in itself “a very fine result”. The same day, further south, the Germans took Meteren and Wytschaete.

From a military point of view the withdrawal was sensible. The front was shortened, and the divisions freed from the salient could reinforce the fighting on the Lys. Even so, giving up Passchendaele was bitter. In the Third Battle of Ypres each side had lost about a quarter of a million men, and the ground the British had won at that price, with the Passchendaele ridge and the Gheluvelt (PL) plateau, returned to German hands within a few days almost without a shot. Many soldiers who remembered the mud of autumn 1917 took it as proof of how little those sacrifices had achieved. The new line ran close to the one from which the British had attacked on 31 July 1917, and the front stayed there until the Allied autumn offensive in September 1918.