The Forgotten General by Jock Vennell

Author:Jock Vennell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The Guns of October

‘At length our barrage lifted we all once more formed up and made a rush for the village. What was our dismay upon reaching almost to the top of the ridge to find a long line of practically undamaged German concrete machine-gun emplacements with barbed wire entanglements in front of them fully 50 yards deep. The wire had been cut in a few places by our artillery but only sufficient to allow a few men through at a time. Even then what was left of us made an attempt to get through the wire and a few actually penetrated up to his emplacements only to be shot down before their surviving comrades’ eyes. It was now broad daylight and what was left of us realised that the day was lost . . . We had lost nearly 80 percent of our strength and gained about 300 yards of ground. This 300 yards was useless to us for the Germans still held and dominated the ridge.’—Corporal Len Hart describes the New Zealanders’ attack at Passchendaele on 12 October 1917.163

By September 1917, the combined casualties of the Somme and Messines offensives and the steady drain on manpower were worrying the New Zealand Government. There was a feeling within the country, Allen wrote to Godley, that New Zealand was being ‘bled to death’ while Australia and Canada were not making a fair contribution to the war effort.164 Godley rejected the suggestion, arguing that Australian troops in France had been more regularly employed and had seen harder fighting than those of the New Zealand Division. By September 1917, he wrote, the New Zealanders had been used only twice in offensive operations—on the Somme and at Messines. At all other times they had been deployed in a quiet and easy part of the line.165 The bloody sacrifice of Passchendaele a month later and the costly battles of 1918 would soon remedy that.

In 1917, Passchendaele was a small, nondescript village astride a low ridge in northwest Belgium, near France’s northern border. By September that year it was a pile of rubble and still in German hands. The offensive that had reduced it to that state would not have taken place if British Prime Minister Lloyd George had had his way. Despite the success at Messines, Lloyd George was haunted by the rising toll of British casualties on the Western Front—already 250,000 dead—for what he felt were paltry strategic gains. His preference was to conserve manpower by postponing any further offensives until American troops arrived in France in sufficient force to swing the military balance of power against Germany. In the end, however, Lloyd George and his Cabinet gave Haig reluctant approval for the second part of his planned Flanders offensive.

Haig’s task was a formidable one. Since Messines, the Germans had strengthened their defences on the ridge and their positions were again some of the strongest on the Western Front. To reach the German positions the attacking British divisions would have to traverse

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.