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Overview
'Gentleman, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.' So said General Plumer the day before 600 tons of explosives were detonated under the German position on Messines Ridge. The explosion was heard by Lloyd George in Downing Street, and as far away as Dublin. Until 1918, Messines was the only clear cut Allied victory on the Western Front, coming at a time when Britain and her allies needed it most: boosting Allied morale and shattering that of the Germans. Precisely orchestrated, Messines was the first true all-arms modern battle which brought together artillery, engineers, infantry, tanks, aircraft and administrative units from a commonwealth of nations to defeat the common enemy. So why is its name not as familiar as the Somme, Passchendaele or Verdun? This book examines the battle for the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge from the British, ANZAC and German perspectives. Illustrated with archive photographs and maps, it is a major contribution to our understanding of one of the seminal battles of the First World War.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752483658 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 02/29/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Pillars of Fire
The Battle of Messines Ridge June 1917
By Ian Passingham
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 Ian PassinghamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8365-8
CHAPTER 1
Prelude
An army which thinks only in defensive terms is doomed. It yields initiative and advantage in time and space to an enemy – even an enemy inferior in numbers. It loses the sense of the hunter, the opportunist.
Gen Sir David Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them (1983).
The offensive is the most effective means of making war; it alone is decisive.
General Erich von Ludendorff, My War Memories (1919).
Out with the Old?
Winter 1916
The third and hardest winter of the war. It froze the feet and souls of the men on both sides of the wire: sentinels of their respective front lines, existing in a surreal, troglodyte world. The winter of 1916/17 was the coldest for more than 30 years. Perhaps it was nature's verdict on the conflict which had been fought on and under the soil of France and Flanders since December 1914: it was bleak, iron-hard and enduring. As the season took hold it seemed as though it, like the war, would be endless.
Private Leslie Jungwirth (10th Machine Gun Coy), with 3rd Australian Division, wrote home:
It has been snowing all day. Our clothes are wet and we have had no chance to get dry. I've felt so miserable. ... I am in my dug-out trying to sleep but it is impossible, my limbs are aching with cold. ... The cold: It started to freeze about 12 January and kept freezing. The temperature was down to 10 below zero [Celsius]. A number of men got frozen feet and hands.
The year 1916 had been marked by a grim harvest of human suffering for the Allied and German armies alike. Verdun and the Somme were indelible scars on the memory of those who had fought there and survived. It was the end of another year of mourning for the millions of lovers, fathers, mothers, wives and children at home struggling to cope with their losses.
By the end of the year the Germans in the west had exhausted their offensive capability. Despite the charnel houses of Verdun and the Somme, the Allies had actually achieved more than they had dared to hope, after the disastrous first day of the Somme offensive. It had been the most sustained offensive effort to date and had forced the German soldier from positions which had been considered impregnable. General Erich von Falkenhayn, German Supreme Commander at the beginning of the Somme campaign, ordered that: 'The first principle in position warfare must be to yield not one foot of ground; and if it is to be lost to retake it by immediate counter-attack, even to the use of the last man'. This doctrine gravely depleted German manpower and many of its most experienced and hardened men. German troops saw Verdun, and particularly the Somme, as the killing fields of the 'Old Guard'. These were the men who had survived the first two years, but whose graves now littered the battlefield.
At the end of August, Falkenhayn's career had become another casualty of the Somme campaign. His profligate use of his troops in the defence of the Somme could not continue. He was replaced by General Erich von Ludendorff and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Their mission was to create a radically new defensive doctrine. They were to supervise the secret construction of a new defensive line as the bedrock of future operations on the Western Front, the Siegfried Stellung, or Hindenburg line. They were also under pressure to increase their forces, despite the losses of 1916.
The Central Powers had had a bad year. At Verdun, General Robert Nivelle had inspired the reclamation of the territory lost in the German offensives of the spring and summer through a series of French counterstrokes, and had become a hero in France. Gorizia had been taken on the Italian Front. In the east, General Brusilov had destroyed three Austrian armies. Only the Rumanian campaign had offered a crumb of comfort as the solitary success.
As winter wore on, the opposing armies sank into a fitful hibernation while the political and military wheels rolled out new plans for 1917. In 1916 there had developed a new reality to the war on the Western Front: 'attrition', or more graphically in German Materialschlacht – a technological war. At the so-called 'sharp end', the innocence of 'Kitchener's Army' and the millions who had answered their respective nations' call was gone forever. It had been replaced by an implacable, hardbitten determination to do one's duty – and survive. Equally hard lessons had been learned on both sides.
To the commanders on the ground, the COs, junior officers, NCOs and men, nothing much had changed in their daily routine. They lived as best as they could in the front lines. Daily shelling and sniping constantly reminded them that each day might be their last. Comradeship and a common sharing of the often bestial conditions in which the men fought sustained them. They were determined not to let their mates down. Above all, they maintained a stoic acceptance of their situation and a cynical humour at least helped them to make light of their lot – to a point. The 'BEF' and 'Wipers Times' and Regimental magazines reflected it:
The World wasn't made in a day,
and Eve didn't ride on a bus:
But most of the world's in a sandbag
and the rest of it's plastered on us!
Solace was sought through writing, poetry, keeping diaries (although the latter was officially frowned upon). The soldiers' humour was not confined to the enemy and the General Staff:
Notice
We regret to announce that an insidious disease is affecting the Division, and the result is a hurricane of poetry. Subalterns have been seen with a notebook in one hand, and bombs [grenades] in the other absently walking near the wire in deep communication with the muse and equally deep oblivion of the buzzing of machine guns. ... Even Quartermasters with 'books, note, one', and 'pencil, copying', breaking into song while arguing the point re 'boots, gum, thigh'. The Editor would be obliged if a few poets would break into prose: as a paper 'cannot live by poems alone'.
Thousands of men were about to join the conflict. They were eager enough to do their bit, but any naïve notions that each may have had of glory and crushing 'Harry Hun' were already consigned to the painful history of the past two and a bit years. Maj-Gen Sir John Monash's 3rd Australian Division were off to France and Flanders after gruelling training on Salisbury Plain. Thousands of soldiers, about to join their units for the first time, were preparing to cross the Channel also. Among them was 19-year-old Pte Walter Humphrys, who was now old enough to join his battalion, 15th London (Civil Service Rifles) Battalion, of 47th (2nd London) Division. In weeks he would be with his battalion opposite Hill 60 near Ypres. In June he would go 'over the top' at Messines in the Ypres Salient.
'The Salient' – Grasping the Sickle's Handle
The Ypres Salient has been variously described as a skull, a geographical question Mark or more graphically, a giant sickle, '... with its cutting edge turned against the British holding the Salient.' (See map 2) Since the winter of 1914 the Ypres Salient had been an almost immovable bulge in the Allied front line. 'Salient' is a term which describes a bulge in a front line which juts out into enemy territory. The town of Ypres lies in Flanders, which means 'the flooded land'. The land was, and remains today, flat and criss-crossed by drainage ditches. Prior to the First World War, these drainage ditches had kept the seasonal flooding in this region at bay. During the first and second Ypres campaigns in 1914 and 1915, much of this drainage system (together with Ypres itself) was destroyed by continual artillery fire.
Thereafter, when it rained much of the battlefield and rear areas were turned into a shell-cratered lunar-like landscape of watery mud. Soldiers in the British and German front lines were forced to live in perpetually inundated trenches, where drainage became virtually impossible. Trench foot and nephritis/'Trench fever' and scores of other illnesses became as common as the effects of the bullet and the bomb. The troops who had served here considered it to be a regular Hell on earth – a place of continued shelling, trench raids and other activities which reduced each man's odds of coming out unscathed.
It had been the scene of some of the most savage and bitter fighting in the latter part of 1914 (First Ypres), and the first use of gas by the enemy on 22 April 1915, which heralded a German offensive designed to snuff out the British resistance around Ypres (Second Ypres). Though the 1915 offensive failed, the salient continued to be overlooked by the German army which held and exploited the high ground. This gave it a dominating and terrifying command over the salient as a whole. The British forces occupying the front-line trenches here were under constant observation and danger from three sides. Even without a grand offensive here, thousands of men had become casualties: victims of German snipers, machine-guns and, above all, the artillery. The unpleasantness of it all was graphically illustrated by place names such as: 'Hellfire', 'Shrapnel' and 'Suicide Corner'; 'Sniper's House'; 'Dead Cow', 'Stinking' and 'Hell Farm'.
Capt Oliver Woodward, of 1st Australian Tunnelling Company summed up the troops' view of his part of it:
On leaving Ypres by way of the Lille Gate there is seen about two miles distant a low ridge of hills, the highest point of which is slightly over 100 feet above the level of the city. This ridge forms the northern section of what [is] known as 'The Messines Ridge'. Virtually due east of Lille Gate, the Ypres–Menin railway passes through this ridge ... just to the north of the railway cutting here is the highest point 'Hill 60'. Hill 60 was just high enough to dominate the countryside lying to the west and the east. Thus it became a ... point of great importance to both the British and German forces.
The enemy had the luxury of staring into the salient from their own seats in the circle of this macabre theatre of war. They forced the pace of the drama which unfolded here, obliging the 'players', principally the BEF, to act out the German script.
But Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) since December 1915, was planning to change this scenario. The sickle would be seized by the 'handle' in the south and the 'blade' would then be turned against the German garrison to sweep them away. But the southern line of the salient was dominated by the Messines–Wytschaete Ridge, running from St Eloi in the north to St Yves and Ploegsteert ('Plugstreet') Wood in the south. (See map 2) The ridge was already associated with extraordinary events, including the gallant but doomed defence of Messines by the London Scottish and the 6th Dragoon Guards (Carabiniers) throughout Hallowe'en night 1914, the 'Christmas Truce' and the 'other' war which raged underground from Hill 60 to Ploegsteert Wood and St Yves. This special conflict below the surface of Flanders was to play a starring role in the drama to follow.
To Take a 'Bow'
The ridge would have to be captured if any serious attempt was to be made in the northern part of the salient. It was a vital task, but an extraordinarily difficult one to accomplish. After all, the Germans had been there for over two years and had improved this sector known to them as the 'Wytschaete-Bogen'. Messines, Wytschaete and the rest of the defensive positions here had been strongly fortified and the defence arranged in depth to prevent any breakthrough. The German defence was shaped like an archer's bow formed by the front line, with the draw-string or chord, known as the Sehnen Stellung, as the principal depth position, centred on the village of Oosttaverne. This second main defensive line would have to be taken in order to secure the main Messines–Wytschaete Ridge. It was dubbed the 'Oosttaverne Line' by the British. It would fall to one man uniquely qualified to crack this German nut.
General Plumer – Personal Roads to Messines
By 1917 it was said that Gen Sir Herbert Plumer, Commander of Second Army and the 'warden of the Ypres Salient' for two years, knew every puddle in the salient. One of the most prominent war correspondents of the day wrote of him: 'In appearance he was almost a caricature of an old time British General, with his ruddy, pippin-cheeked face, white hair and a fierce little white moustache, and blue, watery eyes, and a little pot-belly and short legs.' Plumer looked every inch the caricature of the affable yet elderly and out-of-touch General who had apparently orchestrated routine slaughter on the Western Front. Yet this image could not have been further from its mark. His resolute defence of the Ypres Salient had dissuaded any further German offensives since May 1915. His appearance may well have been David Low's inspiration for 'Colonel Blimp', but those under his command respected his thoroughness and his emphasis on the importance of detailed planning, training and rehearsals for battle, and leadership.
He was an infantryman who had seen action before this war in South Africa and during the many colonial wars characteristic of the latter part of the Queen Victoria's reign. Born in the year of the Indian Mutiny (1857), he was educated at Sandhurst and commissioned into the York and Lancaster Regiment at the age of 19. His first major actions were in the Sudan in 1884. He was the battalion Adjutant as a Captain (Capt) at the battles of El Teb and Tamai. In 1893, now a Major, he served in what was to become Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) where he raised and commanded a corps of mounted rifles and with it assisted in putting down the Matabele rebellion.
By the summer of 1899, he was in South Africa as a Special Service officer, serving under Col Baden-Powell. When the Anglo-Boer war broke out, Plumer was trusted to continue offensive operations while Baden-Powell was diverted by the relief of Mafeking. His outstanding performance throughout the South African War earned him the highest praise and promotion to Colonel and then Major-General (Maj-Gen) by 1902. Lord Kitchener's dispatches of 23 June 1902 underlined this contribution: 'Throughout the campaign, Plumer has invariably displayed military qualifications of a very high order. Few officers have rendered better service.'
In 1902, Plumer was one of the youngest senior officers in the British Army. Between 1903 and 1914, he commanded a brigade and a division, as well as being appointed to Northern District Command and Quartermaster-General, a member of the Army Board. He was promoted to Lieutenant-General (Lt-Gen), and called upon to command V Corps at Ypres in January 1915. At that time, V Corps was part of Second Army, commanded by General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, and whom Plumer succeeded in May 1915.
His conduct of the defence of the Ypres Salient, first at St Eloi, then in support of the Canadian action which prevented a German breakthrough after their first use of gas, at Hooge and the Bluff, all convinced his German opposite numbers that there would be little point in attempting a major offensive here between 1915 and 1917.
However, in February 1916 the Germans launched a determined attack in the area of the Bluff, just north of the Ypres–Comines canal. Although they were repulsed, FM Haig criticised Plumer's conduct of the action. In a frank discussion with the C-in-C, Plumer offered to resign. Haig, realising Plumer's many qualities and his potential as a sound army commander, turned down the offer.
With this exception, the effect of Plumer's resolute and consistent operational performance on the ordinary soldiers was described by Lt Brian Frayling, Royal Engineers (RE), an officer with 171 Tunnelling Company which was to play an important role in the events to come:
Junior officers and other ranks were not supposed to have opinions about very senior officers, but we all knew when we were under General Plumer's Army Command, there was a clear-cut plan and maximum efficiency. Any references to a certain other Army Command [Fifth] were universally unprintable. Everything under General Plumer was successful, under the other a flop.
Plumer was tough, yet sensitive to the conditions in which he was expecting his men to fight and win. He was one of the senior commanders on both sides of the wire who were more thoroughbred than the 'Donkeys' or 'Butchers and Bunglers' observations which have clouded the perception of subsequent generations.
The Promise of Spring – New Hope and Grand Plans for 1917
In 1916, plans had been devised to force the German defenders off the dominating bow-shaped ridges overlooking Ypres from Pilckem in the north to Messines in the south. However, the German offensive at Verdun led to a drastic reappraisal of the priorities for the Allies in 1916 and the Ypres offensive was shelved in favour of the Somme campaign.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pillars of Fire by Ian Passingham. Copyright © 2012 Ian Passingham. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
List of Photographs and Plates,
Maps/Diagrams,
Glossary and Introductory Notes,
Foreword,
Preface,
1 Prelude,
2 An Orchestra of War,
3 Instruments of War,
4 Across the Wire: Towards 'Soldatendämmerung',
5 Overture: 1–6 June,
6 'The Messines Symphony' – First Movement and Phase One: 'Soldatendämmerung': a.m. 7 June,
7 Second Movement and Phase Two: 'Strike the Chord': p.m. 7 June,
8 Third Movement: 'Not a Retreat, merely a Withdrawal': 8–14 June,
9 Fourth Movement: 'Opportunity Gained ... and Lost',
10 Finale: Repercussions – Third Ypres, Cambrai and Crisis,
11 Coda: The Legacy of Messines,
12 Postscript: 'To my chum',
Appendix 1,
Appendix 2,
Select Bibliography,
Copyright,