The Nivelle offensive snapped its frayed tendons, and it began to mutiny.
The British contribution to the offensive was an attack at Arras intended to fix the Germans in Artois and prevent them from turning to face Nivelle. On 9 April the Canadians, four fine divisions fighting side by side for the first time, took Vimy Ridge in one of the war’s slickest set-piece attacks. Further south, the remainder of Allenby’s 3rd Army sallied out across the landscape around Monchy-le-Preux, described by James II so long before.
The battle started well, not least because of steadily-improving artillery techniques, and Ludendorff ruefully admitted that British gains were ‘a bad beginning for the decisive struggle of the year’. But as the attackers passed their first objectives, beyond pre-planned artillery fire, they found themselves, as had so often been the case in the past, taking on intact defences without adequate support. Lance Corporal H. Foakes, a medical attendant with 13/Royal Fusiliers, saw the consequences of advancing into observed artillery fire.
Over a wide belt the high explosive and heavy shrapnel came continuously and without ceasing. Amid a terrific din of roars and explosions the high explosives pitched in the ground with a shaking thud, to explode a fraction of a second later with a roar (which I always likened to the slamming of a giant door) throwing up a huge column of earth and stones and blowing men to pieces. Continually, too, came the high explosive shrapnel. A big shell, known to the troops as a ‘Woolly Bear’, bursting with a fierce whipping ‘crack’ about one hundred or two hundred feet from the ground, they rained down red hot shrapnel and portions of burst shell case.84
A battle which had started with great promise was soon stuck fast, but Haig was compelled to continue it to deflect German pressure from the French. It is not a battle that features prominently in British folk memory, but it should. Its average daily loss rate, between 9 April and 17 May, of just over 4,000 men, was higher than that of the Somme.
Haig knew that the French army was in ‘a very bad state of discipline’, and the gossipy Lord Esher drove up from Paris to GHQ and told John Charteris that ‘the morale of the whole nation has been badly affected by the failure of their attack’. But the French, understandably, kept quiet about the full extent of the mutinies, and Pétain – ‘they only call me in catastrophes’ – vigorously wielded stick and offered carrot to restore his army to reliability.
We cannot prove that Haig embarked upon his forthcoming campaign in Flanders simply because the French had mutinied, tempting though it would be to believe it. It is, however, clear that that he had long been committed to attacking in Flanders when the opportunity offered. When the printed version of his dispatches omitted this firm declaration which had formed part of the original, he had it inserted as an addendum:
The project of an offensive operation in Flanders, to which I was informed His Majesty’s Government attached considerable importance, was one which I had held steadily in view since I had first been entrusted with the Chief Command of the British Armies in France, and even before that date.85
An Allied conference in May concluded that a major war-winning offensive would have to wait until the Americans, finally drawn into the war by Germany’s adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, were present in France in strength. There were many who presciently feared that the Germans, now increasingly able to concentrate on the Western Front, might win the war before this happened, and by remaining on the defensive the Allies would hand the initiative to the Germans.
Finally, as we have seen, Haig was under pressure to get German submarines off the Flanders coast. In May he showed Pétain a sketch-map which showed a phased advance from Ypres to Passchendaele, and then out to Roulers and Thorout. As the second phase of the land advance began, there would be an amphibious hook along the coast, with a landing near Ostend. ‘Success seems reasonably possible,’ he told the War Cabinet that month.
It will give valuable results on land and sea. If full measure of success is not gained, we shall be attacking the enemy on a front where he cannot refuse to fight, and our purpose of wearing him down will be given effect to. We shall be directly covering our own most important communications, and even a partial success will considerably improve our defensive positions in the Ypres salient.86
The third battle of Ypres was thus the child of mixed strategic parentage, as soldiers’ bitter descriptions of it so accurately recognised.
As a curtain-raiser to the main battle, entrusted to Sir Hubert Gough’s 5th Army, Sir Herbert Plumer’s 2nd Army was to take Messines Ridge, south of Ypres. Plumer was ‘Plum’ to his contemporaries, ‘Drip’, because of a long-term sinus problem, to irreverent subalterns, but ‘Daddy’ to his men. His hallmark was meticulous planning and careful briefing: it is no accident that the future Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was serving as a staff officer in one of his corps, saw the Plumer method first hand, and learnt much.
On 7 June nineteen mines (nearly a million pounds of high explosive) exploded beneath Messines Ridge. A German observer tells how:
Nineteen gigantic roses with carmine-red leaves, or enormous mushrooms, were seen to rise up slowly and majestically out of the ground, and then split into pieces with an almighty roar, sending up many-coloured columns of flame and smoke mixed with a mass of earth and splinters, high into the sky.87
Plumer’s chief of staff, Sir Charles ‘Tim’ Harington, recalled that the next morning he found four dead German officers in a dugout without a mark on them: they had been killed by the shock. Plumer’s infantry advanced to secure almost all their objectives on the first day. Although Plumer lost 25,000 men, he captured over 7,000 prisoners and killed or wounded at least another 13,000 Germans. It was an impressive victory, marred only by a tendency for the infantry to lack initiative: the German 44th Infantry Regiment, just back from the Eastern Front, regarded the British infantry as lumpier than the Russian.
The local German army group commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, thought that the capture of Messines Ridge presaged an immediate attack on his vital ground, the Gheluvelt Plateau, crossed by the Menin Road due east of Ypres. But Haig was unable to follow his right hook with a straight left. It took time to swing resources up to 5th Army, further north, the French requested more time to prepare their 1st Army, which was to attack on the British left, and in any event Lloyd George, who had serious doubts about the coming battle, was reluctant to allow it to proceed. Formal permission arrived only six days before the attack began. The delay between the capture of Messines Ridge and the opening of the main battle was ultimately fatal, primarily because the weather broke just as Gough’s men went forward.
Third Ypres, like the Somme, was marked by tensions between GHQ and army headquarters. Gough, selected because he was the youngest and most dashing of the army commanders, did not know the salient well, and later agreed that it had been a mistake to send him to ‘a bit of ground with which I had practically no acquaintance’. However, he hoped ‘to advance as rapidly as possible on Roulers’, and then push on to Ostend: he always believed that this was Haig’s intention too. However, Haig agreed with their opponent that the Gheluvelt Plateau was indeed crucial, and wrote: ‘I impressed on Gough the vital importance of the ridge, and that our advance north should be limited until our right flank has been secured on the ridge.’88 The French 1st Army would attack on Gough’s left, and Plumer’s 2nd Army would mount smaller diversionary attacks on his right. When the moment was right, Rawlinson, his 4th Army headquarters commanding a much smaller force than it had the previous summer, would launch the amphibious assault.
The
