Status Updates From Passchendaele: The Untold S...

This ersatz infantry training too was a manifestation of how differently things were done in Second Army: the desired distant objective did not dictate the preparations. The object was total suppression of hostile resistance.

But the best laid plans of Great War tacticians ... hit the best snags. First, As usual the bad weather rendered the ambitious counter battery program myopious,

A fivefold creeping barrage would plaster the 1km deep zone of assault all day, hugging the foot soldiers advance by progressively slowing down to a standing pillar of fire in front of the day's final objective.

The infantry training over resembling terrain and around scale models instilled a large measure of conformism to match the close advance of the barrage.

By the end of the month Haig decided to go with a Big Push: Plumer's Second Army was to stretch out a helping hand at Gheluvelt. Plumer wanted to do it step by step: Nonne Boschen, Polygon Wood..using 5 divisions: 3 in X corps & 2 in Anzac corps, feat. the biggest baddest concentration of battering batteries ever seen in the West: 575 Heavies & 720 field guns in a 5km wide arc, for 3 times the density 31/7.

Here Prior is spot on. "These improvements did not adress the essence of his difficulties. 5th army was unable to supply fire of sufficient accuracy & density to carry troops through German defences at little cost, nor to maintain those that did get forward on their objectives in the face of unsuppressed artillery operating in conjunction with the counter-attack forces."

The first operation went stellar. 19/8 saw 3 dry days, just enough to firm up a few roads for tanks, Cambrai style, to lumber down a few 100 yards, to gulp up those fortified farms. It was the only dry road they would enjoy.

A few later failures-by-yard altered Haig to the tenacity of the German chessboard defence pattern, but he could not simply forward his guns through the muck, only more mop-up infantry

Sufficiently cowed (or embittered) by the failure of his grand opening, Gough decided to approach Passchendaele in 6 smaller steps. But his handling of "bite & hold" didn't go well.

Prior is unusually condemning about this phase: "what we are looking at are five piecemeal narrow front attacks of a sort that had been tried in 15 16 and early 17 with singular lack of succes".

August saw twice the normal amount of rain, without dry days, resulting in the haunting image of wounded slowly drowning in craters. A second heavy push against Gheluvelt Plateau on 16/8 achieved virtually nothing. Gough blamed his own infantry for bunching up forward. Haig did nothing to stop it: yet he carries the responsibility for the Go with [insufficient] guns and in such bad weather.

Was there any way to look positively on this day ?

It was a "good catch" two-thirds along the line, with a lower casualty-to-mile ratio than the infamous 1st of July 1916, but still, for all the metal thrown, again the cavalry command had not scored a rupture.

The right wing's abundant infantry allocation (II corps had 3 rather than 2 divisions) faced abundantly worse odds against a greater number of intact pill boxes and pre-registered German counter fire. Plumers' act of deception, meanwhile, distracted exactly ...nobody.

The center lost some ground to counter-attacks at the bayonet by unaffected counter infantry from Passchendaele village itself.

Herein lays the Crux of the "More Guns Solve Everything" philosophy. Were there ever enough to go round ? Artillery was anointed 1917 Queen of the Battlefield by the uselessness of infantry weapons and 120 underpowered Mark IV tanks in swamps.

Artillery commitment had to be total. The Field Artillery was made responsible for the first creeping barrage at two times the density of Arras & some wire-cutting as well.

Some debate contuined over the merits of a Focus on Gheluvelt, the hardest nut, or of spraying the whole 14km evenly over the week?

PRIOR offers further cryptic remarks on guns sitting idly on the Belgian coast & guns "wasted" by Plumer, who earlier was described as being short of'em to play Main Attacker as a deception.

As Major-General, Sir John Davidson on Haig's own staff pointed out that a shorter advance would make things easier for the infantry's relief and promote artillery saturation. Haig only made a "Somme-style" criticism about the bombardment.

PRIOR wrote this 3 year before his Somme study. What is this Somme style criticism exactly ?

The first day was supposed to carry 5km past Pickem up to Steenbeek (st. Juliaan) & past Broodseinde to Polygon Wood. It did NOT. While still an operation of a "bite and hold nature" & not as ambitious as Haig's Channel-sweeping, it nevertheless reads like an overly optimistic catalogue of the Passchendaele campaign's many bloody battle subdivisions.

Plumer could either mass his artillery for flank support or use it to fake being the main attacker. he choose Option two. But he didn't have enough guns to fake it. As usual, the real attacker had pooled extra from the neighbours.

Gough's plan, as any in this war, rested on 4 core elements: Duration of preliminary bombardment (9 days). Length of attack front (14 km). Support to secure the flanks of his 5th Army by French troops on his left & 2nd British Army on the right under Plumer.

The attack launched from beside Houthulst Forest southward to kleine Zillebeke road to take most of Gheluvelt Plateau in ambitious terms of penetration depth.

the Big Boom at Messines woke up Ludendorff, who dispatched Colonel von Lossburg to 4th Army to increase the number of defence lines from 3 to 5 to 7 on the Geluvelt plateau. A good month later, mid-july, he had a "forward battle zone" of breastworks & concrete MG posts. The word here was old-fashioned "inflexibility" [do other books say this?] until the counterattack could be launched from the rear.

Once the Ypres planning was shaped (not completely according to his suggestions) Rawlingson was sidelined to plan an amphibious attack from Nieuwpoort for after the prospective Ypres breakthrough, but a German pre-emptive attack at Lombardsijde forced him to sit & wait in an extra cramped salient on the IJzer.

The famous mines gained the crest, but the creeping was slower than the infantry. It pulled back, looking to observers as a German counterattack. Next, the creeping pulled backward too much; casualties mounted from friendly fire, plus Jerry guns who'd retreated at the last minute before detonation. Regarding these intreprid German cannoneers, the 4th Australian Division, fresh off Bullecourt, took no prisoners...

Expressed in numbers rather than qualitative improvements, "Messines had 300 planes , 756 heavies & 1510 field guns, for an overall 2:1 superiority in artillery. The period from 21 to 31 May saw a wire-cutting barrage, answered by heavy German counter-fire."
[note to Prior: how important was the focus on wire vs. anti-battery? How many spotter planes vs. anti-Jagdstaffeln ? Throw some numbers THAT way. ]

Messines reaped the rewards from Arras' excellent artillery planning w/ multiple barrages 500 yard deep total + long-range suppressing fire from Vickers heavy MG & all-new spotting techniques for counter-battery fire, which became a priority. W/ Better calculations than Somme of ammo & heavy guns per yard frontage & per enemy gun, but once moved forward these calculations had to start over & became a guessing game.

Haig was vacilitating, but towards the big goal of bursting the salient and the coast. Hubert Gough was brought to Ypres to instill a breakthrough spirit (Robin Neillands also identifies him as a "thruster" - but out of his league commanding an Army)

Rawlingson wanted to capture Messines first (the mines were ready), move all his heavy guns forward in 72 hours to tackle Gheluvelt etc. Haig ended up discarding all proposals & after the failiure at Chemin des Dames, split off Messines, with any follow-up operation postponed to weeks later. Why the wait?

All in all, Rawlingson had come up with the only good plan: Plumer's alternative was to advance towards Passchendaele by careful stages, with an artillery weight which would require more guns than Britain had in the entire west! The think tank at Haig's own HQ wanted to take Pilckem and Messines Ridge with guns and take Gheluvelt only with tanks ; in a wooded, swampy terrain this would've constituted suicide.

Prior poses that if the politicians could control the next Flanders offensive by the phase, they had the power to abort the next advance based on poor returns. At the same time, Indecision more than inevitability seems his password on such political strategic control. No alternative to a sustained mode of attack in France could be judged suitable...

Haig was not a supreme commander or military dictator; he was 'merely' commanding a task force under the supervision of a civilian democracy. Lloyd George was not politically isolated or too weak to resist Haig's Flanders focus when he wanted to. Neither was "Big Ypres 3" inevitable. Contrary, operations with limited objectives seemed to start paying off, such as Arras or the recapture of Verdun ground by Nivelle.

Haig & Rawlingson disputed over extent of the attack front, need for a deception attack, whether to inflict indirect bombardment on the German 2nd line, invisible to British spotters, & relative merits of a bite-&-hold approach vs. the Big Push. Rawlingson yielded over the Somme because Haig had protected him from dismissal by John French in '15, but these tactical-strategic twist apples will resurface in Flanders

The Somme planning predates Verdun so there is no true causal relation (a popular misconception) but it did reveal the vital role of artillery, rather than manpower. P&W paint a languid picture of civilian decision making [..but I wonder, couldn't Lloyd George have sped up ammo production?] The only true concession to Verdun was that the British needed to bear the brunt of the joint offensive.