The Battle of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, had raged through
the entire month of August, but had gone quiet as that month came to an end.
Well, it’s quiet no more, for this week Passchendaele comes to life, and comes to
life with a bang as Herbert Plumer cracks the German defenses.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the Second Battle of Verdun and the 11th Battle of the Isonzo River had both
come to an end.
There were mutinous disturbances among some British soldiers and the Chinese Labor Corps
in France, and in Russia, Army Commander Lavr Kornilov attempted a coup to establish a military
dictatorship; a coup that quickly failed, but that left tens of thousands of armed Bolsheviks
in the capital after Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky had appealed to them for help against
Kornilov.
And there are further developments in Russia in the wake of all this.
Leon Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders are released from prison because of public pressure.
They’ve been held there since the street violence of the July Days.
The political outcome of the Kornilov affair was a disaster for Kerensky.
He was hated now by both the left and the right; the left thought he had been in league
with Kornilov for a time, which was sort of right, the right thought he was a traitor
who had abandoned the capital city to the Bolsheviks.
His provisional government was by now impotent, and Kerensky’s appeal for assistance had
kind of showed who had power in Petrograd.
Many Bolsheviki and the Bolshevik Red Guards were now armed, and releasing Bolshevik leaders
from prison threw them into an already volatile political situation, and think - at the beginning
of the year, their were registered 24,000 Bolsheviks, by the end of September that number
would be over 400,000.
On the 21st, sailors of the Baltic fleet will declare that they do not recognize the authority
of the Provisional Government and will not follow its orders.
Kerensky tries this week, with the council of five, to declare Russia a republic, but
who was listening by now?
Russian soldiers in France were even infected by the spirit of revolution.
There was a brigade at La Courtine who raised the Bolshevik red flag and refused to go to
the front.
On the 16th, though, they were attacked by a brigade loyal to Kerensky.
Several dozen Russians were killed in “The Massacre of La Courtine”.
American Army Commander John Pershing visited the camp and declared it, “the vilest and
most unsanitary place I have ever seen.”
(Gilbert) There was even a joke at the time about the Russian army, because of its dire
state and the territory it lost over the summer:
“How far did the Russians retreat today?”
“14 km, same as they will tomorrow.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s as far as a tired German can walk.”
But revolt was not limited to Russians.
This week, 500 Egyptian laborers rioted at Marseilles.
They had been led to believe that their position was only temporary, and now found out that
they were to stay in France until the end of the war, and who knew when that would be?
One laborer knocked a British officer out and seized his rifle and bayonet.
He was tried and executed for “disturbance of a mutinous nature”.
And further north in Belgium, the second phase of the Battle of Passchendaele began.
The first three weeks of September had been surprisingly free of rain in Flanders, which
was great for the attackers.
British General Herbert Plumer, now in overall charge of the 2nd and 5th armies, wanted to
take the Gheluvelt Plateau with the 2nd while Hugh Gough with the 5th took part of the Ypres
Ridge on the left.
Plumer had managed to gather more artillery for a barrage even greater than those of July
and August.
He had one artillery piece for every 5m of front and his artillery would be fired in
five waves, with each one being a zone nearly 200m deep.
Zone one was shrapnel, two was high explosive, the third was indirect machine gun fire, and
the last two were high explosives.
The entire pattern, nearly a kilometer deep from front to back, swept over all German
positions is a storm whose character changed every few minutes.
Three and a half million shells were fired in this storm before and during September
20th.
Now, on the 16th came reports of an incident where some British soldiers who were brought
in from No - mans land, claimed under oath that they’d seen some of their men, after
being disarmed and taken prisoner, bayoneted by the enemy.
So with that fresh in their minds, there were few prisoners taken on the 20th when the offensive
was renewed.
Plumer had the fortune to hide his preparations behind the slightly elevated ground he had
taken in early June at the Battle of Messines Ridge and when his men now attacked behind
a creeping barrage, the German positions fell fairly easily.
When they reached their objectives, they stopped and began building defenses.
The soldiers in the main German defenses further to the rear waited for the British to come
at them, and by the time they realized that wasn’t going to happen, it was too late
in the day to counterattack.
So Plumer’s plan had been a success.
Okay, it was an expensive success - casualties were high - but the German casualties from
the barrage and this day of battle were some 25,000, and more importantly, the Germans
were alarmed.
Plumer’s plan had been to not try for a breakthrough of a few miles since that would
be pretty futile against the new flexible German defenses, but to take small gains that
never went far enough to trigger a counterattacks.
Cumulatively, they might drive the Germans out of their defenses altogether.
The attack today had not just taken some German ground, it had captured pillboxes and bunkers
that were crucial to the German defense system.
Plumer had put a crack into the Hindenburg Line and the Germans were vulnerable to further
attacks.
He had planned to advance in four stages, each no more than 1,500 meters and he would
have a six day pause between stages for the artillery to be brought up.
The Times announced on the 21st, “Menin Road Battle.
Big British success.”
and the day after that began giving the troops details - Australians at Glencorse Wood, South
Africans at Borry Farms.
But was it really a big success?
Historians have generally thought so, but Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson argue against
that since Plumer only took limited ground with big casualties - over 20,000 casualties
for five square miles gained, which is v. By comparison, Hugh Gough’s attack July
31st that’s been often maligned, including by myself, took 18 square miles, losing about
1,500 for each one.
Having said that, the ground given up in July was largely abandoned by the Germans as the
attack came on, but the ground taken now was very much ground that the Germans really wanted
to keep and couldn’t really afford to lose.
German Fourth Army reports claiming everything was okay and there was nothing to worry about
were looked on with serious skepticism by Crown Prince Rupprecht, in overall command
of that army as part of his Army Group Rupprecht.
He thought it was a big mistake to underestimate the enemy, and believed himself guilty of
doing just that.
“I too believed that, owing to their heavy losses, the English were no longer capable
of renewing the great battle in Flanders”.
(Passchendaele).
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was soon to visit the front to see for himself
what was going on, and then on to Paris to discuss something interesting.
On the 19th, London had got a telegram from its Ambassador to Spain that a representative
of the German government was interested in knowing if his Majesty’s government would
listen to a suggestion for peace.
That German was none other than the new Foreign Secretary Richard von Kühlmann, and he wondered
if Britain would talk about the possible restoration of Belgium, if Germany could have a free hand
in Russia and could get back its African colonies.
In the end, nothing would come of this, since British Commander in Chief Sir Douglas Haig
and Chief of Staff Wully Robertson wanted to keep on fighting, also, the British notified
their Allies about this idea, and they held that any offer of a separate peace should
just be ignored.
When von Kühlmann realized this wasn’t gonna happen, he made a speech in the Reichstag
that Germany would never abandon its territorial claims in the west.
And there was some new action in territory in Africa.
On the most forgotten front of the war, the Libyan front.
On the 20th, General Nuri Pasha - half brother to Ottoman Minister of War Enver Pasha - and
the Ottoman Africa Group Command were defeated by General Cassini at Zanzur, west of Tripoli.
And that ends the week, with the resumption of hostilities in Belgium, and the spirit
of revolution in the air in the east and the west.
Well, among the Russians, at any rate.
But morale for the British on the West is pretty high.
Plumer seems to have solved the problem of breaking the German defenses.
That’s great!
And, I mean, at only 4,000 casualties per square mile.
Hey, go outside and walk a mile in one direction.
Then turn a right angle and walk another.
Now think that it took 4,000 casualties to take just that land.
Now think how far you are from Berlin.
If you are curious about the mostly forgotten Libyan Front, you can click right here to
find out more about that in one of our weekly episodes.
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