The Allies had been gaining ground in the west the past couple of weeks, but this week
they’ll re-learn the perennial autumn lesson of the war; you can fight in the cold, you
can fight in the heat, but you just can’t fight in the mud.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week, the Allies were so successful at Broodseinde that German High Command was re-thinking
its entire defensive strategy. Offensively, though, the Germans were planning a new offensive
to the northeast against the crumbling Russian army. There was skirmishing on the Italian
Front and sabotage on the Hejaz railway, the Ottoman’s vital supply link.
And that German offensive, a real amphibious operation, began near the end of this week.
It was an attack and an invasion attempt on the islands in the Gulf of Riga. On the 10th,
they bombed Russian transports at south end of Oesel Island and the next day made a combined
naval and military landing. The Russian coastal batteries were destroyed. On the 12th, they
land at the island Dagö. An attempt to capture the pier on Moon Island is repulsed. This
operation, known as Operation Albion, will kick into high gear next week.
And Russia will certainly have its hands full resisting it; on the 6th a Russian railway
strike began, with over a million men leaving their posts, so moving troops to the front
was now impossible. And anyhow, the situation at home in Petrograd, the capital, was still
deteriorating.
Leon Trotsky had been elected Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin was still lying
low in Finland. Back when the February Revolution had happened, Trotsky too had been living
abroad, in the Bronx, but had returned to Russia to cast his lot with the Bolsheviks.
By now he was becoming the public face of Bolshevik leadership. Apparently, he was a
real fire and brimstone speaker too. (Revolution) “This man Trotsky is the king of agitators;
he could stir up trouble in a cemetery.” That was a quote from Leighton Rogers, a New
York bank employee stationed just now in Petrograd, and he also paraphrased some of Trotsky’s
talk in his diary.
“Comrades, in a few weeks, a week, a few days, we are going to rise from our slavery...
you may be free men as the revolution meant you to be. You must support the Soviet because
we shall give you, first, peace; second, bread; and third, land. Yes, we shall take all the
land from the rich and divide it among the peasants, and we shall reduce the hours of
work, my comrades of the factories, to four, at double the wages you now receive...”
Pie in the sky kind of stuff, but it couldn’t help but have a real appeal in light of the
daily situation in the city at the time. Domestic electricity was reduced to just the hours
between 6 PM and midnight, and since the streetlights were not lit because of the worry of zeppelin
raids, and since the whole city was starving, there was a HUGE rise in robbery, rape, and
murder in the dark of night. In fact, people were frequently stabbed and killed for not
turning their valuables over quickly enough. Food supplies from outside the city were disrupted
because the trains carrying them were attacked and plundered, and in the countryside, particularly
in the south, it was total chaos, with peasants ransacking country estates and killing the
landlords.
The German offensive against Russia was just beginning, but the British one against the
Germans in Belgium - the Battle of Passchendaele - was now in its third month.
On the 9th it was renewed, though rains were by now turning Flanders into something of
a shallow muddy lake. The lead role moving forward would be troops from the Dominions
- Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but the state of the battlefield made fighting
not just difficult, but impossible. Artillery could quite simply not be moved. It couldn’t
even be set firmly in one place. Some big guns sank out of sight in the mud. An entire
light railway sank out of sight in the mud. They tried bringing artillery shells forward
on pack mules, but many of them too sank and drowned in the mud. Even had the shells gotten
to the front, it wouldn’t have made all that much difference anyhow, since the mud
beneath the water was too soft to activate their fuses, so they too sank and disappeared.
In the center, some ANZAC troops - Australian and New Zealand Army Corps - did miraculously
manage to fight their way forward, but this exposed them to machine gun fire from three
directions instead of one, and they had to withdraw to the starting point, leaving the
wounded to disappear in the bog.
But even though the attack the 9th was a disaster, the attack planned for the 12th would still
go forward as planned. I’ll quote Nick Lloyd here, from “Passchendaele, a new History”,
“The attack on 12 October should never have gone ahead. While (Commander Sir Douglas)
Haig and his commanders could, perhaps, be forgiven for ordering their divisions forward
on October 9th... there was no excuse for trying again just 72 hour later.” Haig,
though, was optimistic as ever.
John Monash, commander of the 3rd Australian Division, which would make the main assault,
was not enamored of the job ahead of him. On the 11th, he pleaded for a delay, but to
no avail. General Johnston, artillery commander of the New Zealand division, had so much difficulty
getting equipment moved around, that that same day he said straight out that an artillery
attack could not be guaranteed for tomorrow.
It’s interesting to think about where General Sir Herbert Plumer fit into all of this - the
guy whose Second Army has seen success the past few weeks.. When he began his program
of limited offensives September 20th, it was a plan with attacks every six days, and now
they were down to just three days. Haig was now abandoning Plumer’s bite and hold tactics
and once again looking for the big breakthrough. Why did Plumer not literally stick to his
guns here on his need for adequate preparation and planning? I really don’t know, and he
didn’t leave behind memoirs. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Anyhow, the attacks on October 12th failed by a combination of exhausted infantry, terrible
terrain, weak artillery support, and strong German defenses. Communications constantly
broke down and pigeons couldn’t even fly against the harsh winds. II ANZAC Corps was
tasked that day with taking the highest part of the ridge, Monash’s division would take
the actual village, and the New Zealanders on the left would take Bellevue Spur. In some
places, orders called for an advance of nearly three kilometers across the swamp. The attack
failed and failed badly.
Some of the bloodiest fighting of this or any other battle was at Bellevue Spur. The
German 6th Jäger Regiment held it and their barbed wire had not been destroyed by the
preliminary artillery barrage. Their combat report read in part, “Despite the heaviest
of losses, the troops were in the best of spirits... due to the first-rate impact of
their guns and in view of the colossal losses among the English. The day was a particularly
great day for the machine guns... during the course of this day alone, more than 130,000
rounds of machine gun ammunition were delivered - all targets... could be taken under continuous
machine gun fire. Some of the machine guns fired up to 15,000 rounds... the effect of
the machine guns was truly devastating for the enemy.” The New Zealand Division there
suffered 3,000 casualties, the single worst day in New Zealand’s military history.
I’ll have another quote here, from John Keegan, about this battle and this week. “Even
the most enthusiastic technical historians of the Great War, even ready to highlight
the overlooked significance of an improvement in the fusing of field-artillery shells or
range of trench-mortars, concede that Haig should have stopped after Broodseinde. He
determined adamantly otherwise.”
Having said that, the British war cabinet finally began looking at the battle’s total
casualties October 11th. Now, you might think that they would look at the casualties compared
with the ground gained and see whether Haig’s promise of a breakthrough to the Belgian coast
was still possible, but they didn’t. In fact, on the 16th, they will send him congratulations
for (Prior and Wilson), “...his continuous, persistent, and dogged advance of 4½ miles
in conditions of great difficulty”.
The Germans were also losing ground was down in Africa.
They retreated from the British in the Mbe Mkuru Valley, and after engaging Belgian troops
northeast of Mahenge, the Belgians occupied Mahenge, the former German regional HQ, on
the 9th.
And the week comes to an end, with Allied failures in the west, the beginnings of a
German offensive in the east, Belgian success in the south, and crime all over Russia.
It wasn’t just Russia that had food issues, though theirs were likely the worst. This
week, France announced the worst harvest in 50 years, though the French distribution chain
was still completely intact. Chaos in the Russian countryside; starvation in Petrograd
causing murder and robbery to be commonplace; the government obviously unable to cope with
it. And a magnetic speaker telling you that he’ll give you a four-hour workday for double
wages comes along? Yeah, sure, I might believe him. I might believe in him. Desperation makes
strange bedfellows.
If you want to know more about the German defenses at Passchendaele, you can click right
here for our special episode about that. Our Patreon supporter of the week is sneurlax,
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