battle of passchendaele objective

A fortnight’s bombardment gave them further warning. Progress on roads, rail lines, railheads and spurs in the Second Army zone was continuous and by mid-1917, gave the area the most efficient supply system of the BEF. In January, spells of freezing cold were followed by warmer periods, one beginning on 15 January with torrential rain and gale-force winds, washing away plank roads and duckboard tracks. [71], Petain had committed the French Second Army to an attack at Verdun in mid-July, in support of the Flanders offensive. [100] The Germans were repulsed again at 6:00 a.m. but German artillery-fire continued during the day. The British and French commanders on the Western Front had to reckon on the German western army (Westheer) being strengthened by reinforcements from the Ostheer on the Eastern Front by late 1917. This memorial is on Frezenberg Ridge where the 9th (Scottish) Division and the 15th (Scottish) Division fought during the Third Battle of Ypres. Gen. Arthur Currie, opted instead to seize the high ground north of Lens at Hill 70. From 1901 to 1916, records from a weather station at Cap Gris Nez showed that 65 percent of August days were dry and that from 1913 to 1916, there were 26, 23, 23 and 21 rainless days and monthly rainfall of 17, 28, 22 and 96 mm (0.67, 1.10, 0.87 and 3.78 in); ...during the summers preceding the Flanders campaign August days were more often dry than wet. Very little progress was made. The Germans on the ridge had observation over Ypres and unless it was captured, observed enfilade artillery-fire could be fired against a British attack from the salient further north. Everything sinks down several feet into mud. The British commander was Douglas Haig. In early 1916, the importance of the capture of the Gheluvelt plateau for an advance further north was emphasised by Haig and the army commanders. Attacking on ground cut up by bombardments and soaked by rain, the British had struggled to advance in places and lost the ability to move quickly to outflank pillboxes. [34] A week after the Battle of Messines Ridge, Haig gave his objectives to his army commanders, the wearing out of the enemy, securing the Belgian coast and connecting with the Dutch frontier by capturing Passchendaele ridge, followed by an advance on Roulers and Operation Hush, an attack along the coast with a combined amphibious landing. The Canadian Corps launched a final action on 10 November, to gain control of the remaining high ground north of the village near Hill 52. Without it and other duck boards, movements would have been impossible. In the end men were drowning in the mud, and it is this phase that has branded the battle as an episode of futility. Haig discussed with the two army commanders, Plumer and Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough, what objective they should fix for the first day of the forthcoming offensive. Only on the left was the full objective reached with the capture of Bixschoote (Bikschote), Pilckem Ridge, and Saint-Julien; on the crucial right wing the attack was a failure. [9] In January 1917, the Second Army (General Herbert Plumer) with the II Anzac, IX, X and VIII corps, held the Western Front in Flanders from Laventie to Boesinghe, with eleven divisions and up to two in reserve. [160] When the German armies further south began the Spring Offensive on 21 March 1918, "good" divisions in Flanders were sent south; the 29th Division was withdrawn on 9 April and transferred to the Lys. Haig preferred an advance from Ypres, to bypass the flooded area around the Yser and the coast, before attempting a coastal attack to clear the coast to the Dutch border. [114][d], The French First Army and British Second and Fifth armies attacked on 9 October, on a 13,500 yd (7.7 mi; 12.3 km) front, from south of Broodseinde to St Jansbeek, to advance half of the distance from Broodseinde ridge to Passchendaele, on the main front, which led to many casualties on both sides. [5], Minor operations took place in the Ypres salient in 1916, some being German initiatives to distract the Allies from the preparations for the offensive at Verdun and later attempts to divert Allied resources from the Battle of the Somme. In fewer than three hours, many units reached their final objectives and Passchendaele was captured. [35][b], The 4th Army held a front of 25 mi (40 km) with three Gruppen, composed of a corps headquarters and a varying complement of divisions; Group Staden, based on the headquarters of the Guards Reserve Corps was added later. Basic Map: Ypres to Passchendaele Menin Road and Polygon Wood AQA GCSE History: Conflict and Tension - The First World War, 1894–1918. The high point of the ridge is at Wytschaete, 7,000 yd (4.0 mi; 6.4 km) from Ypres, while at Hollebeke the ridge is 4,000 yd (2.3 mi; 3.7 km) distant and recedes to 7,000 yd (4.0 mi; 6.4 km) at Polygon Wood. [150] In 2007, Jack Sheldon wrote that although German casualties from 1 June to 10 November were 217,194, a figure available in Volume III of the Sanitätsbericht (Medical Report, 1934), Edmonds may not have included these data as they did not fit his case, using the phrases "creative accounting" and "cavalier handling of the facts". The British front line was cut off and German infantry attacked in three waves at 5:30 a.m.[101] Two determined German attacks were repulsed south of Cameron Covert, then at 7:00 p.m. German troops massed near the Menin road. [120] The German 195th Division at Passchendaele suffered 3,325 casualties from 9 to 12 October and had to be relieved by the 238th Division. [8] A week after his appointment, Haig met Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, who emphasised the importance of obtaining control of the Belgian coast, to end the threat posed by German U-boats. The effect, however, proved too intoxicating behind the front. Gough planned an offensive based on the GHQ 1917 plan and the instructions he had received from Haig. [154] In his 1963 biography of Haig, Terraine accepted Edmonds' figure of 244,897 British casualties and agreed that German losses were at least equal to and probably greater than British, owing to the strength of British artillery and the high number of German counterattacks; he did not accept Edmonds' calculation that German losses were as high as 400,000. The salient had been an active battlefield since 1914. At a conference on September 28, Haig expressed his belief that the enemy was on the point of collapse and that tanks and cavalry could be pushed through. Worn-out divisions from the south had been sent to Flanders to recuperate closer to the coast. The area was quiet apart from artillery-fire and in December the weather turned cold and snowy, which entailed a great effort to prevent trench foot. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on opposing sides attacked and counterattacked across sodden, porridgelike mud, in an open gray landscape almost empty of buildings or natural cover, all under the relentless harrowing rain of exploding shells, flying shrapnel, and machine-gun fire. After a modest British advance, German counter-attacks recovered most of the ground lost opposite Passchendaele, except for an area on the right of the Wallemolen spur. Battle of Passchendaele Officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele became infamous not only for the scale of casualties, but also for the mud. [25], In Flanders, sands, gravels and marls predominate, covered by silts in places. There is a low ridge from Messines, 260 ft (80 m) at its highest point, running north-east past Clapham Junction at the west end of Gheluvelt plateau (​2.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px;white-space:nowrap} 1⁄2 miles from Ypres at 213 ft (65 m) and Gheluvelt, above 160 ft (50 m) to Passchendaele, (​5 1⁄2 miles from Ypres at 160 ft (50 m) declining from there to a plain further north. [106] On the night of 3/4 October, the German commanders had doubts about the attack but decided to proceed with the Gegenangriff, warning the artillery to be ready to commence defensive bombardments. [158] On the evening of 3 March 1918, two companies of the 8th Division raided Teal Cottage, supported by a smoke and shrapnel barrage, killed many of the garrison and took six prisoners for one man wounded. The British had planned to capture the ridges south and east of the city of Ypres as part of a strategy decided by the Allies at conferences in November 1916 and May 1917. Members of the British Royal family and Prime Minister Theresa May joined the ceremonies, which started in the evening of 30 July with the service at Menin Gate, followed by ceremonies at the Market Square. [48], The Fifth Army plan was more ambitious than the plans devised by Rawlinson and Plumer, which had involved an advance of 1,000–1,750 yd (910–1,600 m) on the first day, by compressing their first three attacks into one day instead of three. [109] When the British barrage began on Broodseinde Ridge, the Keiberg Spur and Waterdamhoek, some of the German forward headquarters staffs only realised that they were under attack when British and Australian troops appeared. German strongpoints and pillboxes along the St Julien–Poelcappelle road in front of the Wilhelmstellung were captured. Every effort was to be made to induce the British to reinforce their forward positions with infantry for the German artillery to bombard them. [43] Two of the mines failed to detonate but 19 went off on 7 June, at 3:10 a.m. British Summer Time. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, opposed the offensive, as did General Ferdinand Foch, the Chief of Staff of the French Army. Yet Haig, in his report to the War Office on the first day’s fighting, stated that the results were “most satisfactory.” The explosion of millions of shells, accompanied by torrential rain, had turned the battlefield into an apocalyptic expanse—a swampy pulverized mire dotted with water-filled craters deep enough to drown a man, all made worse by the churned-up graves of soldiers killed in earlier fighting. The main ridge has spurs sloping east and one is particularly noticeable at Wytschaete, which runs 2 mi (3.2 km) south-east to Messines (Mesen) with a gentle slope on the east side and a 1:10 decline westwards. The British considered the area drier than Loos, Givenchy and Plugstreet Wood further south. On the Baltic coast from 1 to 5 September 1917, the Germans attacked with their strategic reserve of six divisions and captured Riga. The ridge had woods from Wytschaete to Zonnebeke giving good cover, some being of notable size, like Polygon Wood and those later named Battle Wood, Shrewsbury Forest and Sanctuary Wood. The attack on the northern flank again met with exceptional German resistance. The second of two attacks made by New Zealand troops during the Third Battle of Ypres, it was a disastrous fiasco. After a pause of about three weeks, Plumer intended to capture the plateau in four steps, with six-day intervals to bring forward artillery and supplies. [99] The attack was supported by flame-throwers and German infantry throwing smoke- and hand-grenades. [117] There were 13,000 Allied casualties, including 2,735 New Zealanders, 845 of whom were dead or stranded in the mud of no-man's-land; it was one of the worst days in New Zealand military history. [116], The First Battle of Passchendaele on 12 October was another Allied attempt to gain ground around Passchendaele. The attack had most success on the northern flank, on the fronts of XIV Corps and the French First Army, both of which advanced 2,500–3,000 yd (1.4–1.7 mi; 2.3–2.7 km) to the line of the Steenbeek river. Byng wanted the operations at Ypres continued, to hold German troops in Flanders. The method of attack had come to be questioned even at GHQ itself: a paper on the question led Gen. Henry Rawlinson to submit an appreciation in which he pointed out that “the British command had never yet attempted to conduct a wearing-down battle with planned, logical methods, but had relied too much on its belief that a breakdown of the German Army’s morale was within sight.” Haig was not impressed by these views, but his decision to extend Plumer’s role fulfilled them indirectly. A century later, the Battle of Passchendaele is remembered as a symbol of the worst horrors of the First World War, the sheer futility of much of the fighting, and the reckless disregard by some of the war’s senior leaders for the lives of the men under their command. [39], On 25 June, Erich Ludendorff, the First Quartermaster General, suggested to Crown Prince Rupprecht that Group Ypres should withdraw to the Wilhelmstellung, leaving only outposts in the Albrechtstellung. In the moonlight, the Germans had seen the British troops when they were still 200 yd (180 m) away. About 5 mi (8.0 km) further back, were four more Eingreif divisions and 7 mi (11 km) beyond them, another two in OHL reserve. Haig selected Gough to command the offensive on 30 April, and on 10 June Gough and the Fifth Army headquarters took over the Ypres salient north of Messines Ridge. 1918 all the ground was already swampy became optimistic that Passchendaele Ridge, many of Menin. 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