Who won the Battle of Messines?
The British did. On 7 June 1917 General Plumer's Second Army fired nineteen mines under the German front south of Ypres and took the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge within hours, capturing about 7,200 prisoners. Bean puts British losses at about 26,000 and German losses at roughly 23,000 to 26,000, but the Germans lost the high ground that overlooked the Ypres salient.1
At ten past three on the morning of 7 June 1917, in the half light before dawn, nineteen mines exploded under the German front line on the ridge south of Ypres, and every British gun on a front of nearly ten miles opened fire at the same moment. The roar was heard in England. Within hours British, Irish, Australian and New Zealand infantry held a ridge the Germans had kept for two and a half years. Our 7 June page tells the day in brief; this is the full story.2
Messines was the opening blow of the British campaign in Flanders in 1917, part of the war on the Western Front in World War I, and it prepared the ground for the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele). It is also a landmark in the military history of Ireland, because the nationalist 16th (Irish) and the unionist 36th (Ulster) Divisions attacked side by side. For the wider story, see the battles of Ypres and the military histories of Britain and Germany. This page is about 1917: the ridge was first fought over in the autumn of 1914, when the Germans took Messines during the First Battle of Ypres, and the British official history treats that fighting under its own name.3
Why did the British attack Messines Ridge?
The Messines-Wytschaete Ridge is a low line of hills between Armentières and Ypres. It is not high, about 260 feet at Wytschaete by Haig's count, but in the flat country of Flanders it was enough. From the ridge the Germans looked down on the British trenches, the gun lines and the roads behind them, and on the whole of the Ypres salient to the north.4
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig planned his main offensive of 1917 east and north of Ypres. He could not launch it while the Germans held the southern shoulder of the salient, because every British attack there would be overlooked and outflanked from Messines. Ludendorff saw the same problem from the other side: as long as the salient stayed in German hands, he wrote, every British attack at Ypres was outflanked from the south.5
The task went to General Sir Herbert Plumer and his Second Army. Plumer was a careful commander who prepared for months: railways, roads, water pipelines and dumps were built behind the front, and every unit was trained until it knew its task and the ground it would cross. The Imperial War Museums describe the attack as planned in meticulous detail, and Haig called the thoroughness of the preparations beyond praise.6
The attack front ran for nine or ten miles around the curve of the salient, from St Yves in the south to Mount Sorrel in the north. The final objective was the Oosttaverne Line, a German chord position across the base of the salient, so the deepest advance planned was about two and a half miles.7
How did the Messines mines work?
The heart of the plan lay underground. According to Haig's despatch, deep mining under the ridge began in July 1915 and was adopted on a grand scale in January 1916. Tunnelling companies, an Australian one among them, drove galleries under no man's land and the German front through water-bearing ground, while German miners dug and blew their own charges to find them.8
Haig's despatch counts twenty-four mines built, of which four lay outside the final front of attack and one was lost to a German charge. The tunnellers drove about 8,000 yards of gallery and, in Haig's words, used over one million pounds of explosive in them. Plumer's chief of staff, General Sir Charles Harington, gives a narrower figure for the nineteen mines actually fired: 957,000 pounds, roughly 430 long tons. Australia's Anzac Portal calls the blast the biggest man-made explosion in history up to that time, and the historian Nicholas Murray counts the Messines mines among the largest non-nuclear explosions ever.9
Keeping the mines alive was a battle in itself. At Hill 60, at the northern end of the front, underground fighting went on for more than ten months, and from November 1916 the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company carried on the work and guarded the two great charges there; its officers closed the switches that fired them. At Spanbroekmolen a German charge cut the gallery to the mine, and the 171st Tunnelling Company only reopened it on the eve of the battle. Haig records that it made the largest crater of all.10
The timing was calculated with equal care. Harington describes officers testing on the mornings before the attack how far a man could see at each hour of the dawn: by 3 a.m. a man could be made out at about a hundred yards, and Plumer himself fixed zero hour at 3:10. In the Ulster Division, Falls records, the infantry were told not to wait more than fifteen seconds for any mine that failed to go up.11
The German side: why did they hold the ridge?
The German command knew an attack was coming. According to Bean, it detected signs of preparation against the salient as early as January 1917, and by the end of April Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commanding the army group, concluded that the British could attack there as soon as they had troops to spare. The front was held by the XIX Corps, known as Group Wytschaete, in the north and the II Bavarian Corps in the south, both under the Fourth Army.12
The real question for the Germans was whether to stay on the ridge at all. Rupprecht's chief of staff, Hermann von Kuhl, proposed evacuating the salient and falling back behind the Lys. Ludendorff recalled that there were thoughts of withdrawing to the chord position, but the army believed the ridge could be held, and repulsed attacks, he argued, always cost the attacker more. Bean adds that the corps commanders disliked giving up a ridge with fine views for a line it overlooked, and so the salient was held.13
What they did not know about was the mines. Ludendorff wrote that both sides had long ceased mining there, that German listening posts heard nothing, and that the charges must have been laid long before. Bean puts it more bluntly: the German command was totally unaware of the great mines, and the capacity of the British miners was disastrously underrated. A small withdrawal would have made all their work useless, but nobody proposed it for that reason.14
German doctrine relied on counterattack divisions held back from the front to strike once an attack lost momentum. At Messines they came too late. Bean records the first troops of these divisions arriving about noon, after the ridge had fallen, and Ludendorff admitted that heavy artillery fire across the salient prevented the reserves from intervening effectively.15
What happened on 7 June 1917?
At 3:10 a.m. the nineteen mines went up together. Cyril Falls, the historian of the Ulster Division, describes great towers of crimson flame and earth thrown half a mile; its commander, Major General Oliver Nugent, called the sight a vision of hell. The Imperial War Museums record that the explosion could be heard in London. Whole garrisons of the German front and support trenches were killed, buried or stunned.16
The infantry of three corps went forward behind a creeping barrage: II Anzac Corps in the south with the 3rd Australian, New Zealand and 25th Divisions, IX Corps in the center with the 36th (Ulster), 16th (Irish) and 19th Divisions, and X Corps in the north with the 41st, 47th and 23rd Divisions. The German first trench system offered little resistance, and the survivors surrendered in large numbers.17
The advance kept almost exactly to the timetable. By about 7 a.m. the New Zealanders had taken the village of Messines, and before midday the two Irish divisions had fought their way through Wytschaete. Harington's summary says the crest was stormed along the whole front within three hours, and by about 10 a.m. the first objective line east of the two villages was held. Only in Battle Wood, north of the Ypres-Comines canal, did resistance go on.18
Tanks played a small part. Harington counts about forty, of which fifteen reached their objectives; Haig noted that the infantry moved so fast that only a few could get forward in time, though one helped the New Zealanders past a strongpoint at Fanny's Farm. In the afternoon fresh troops attacked down the eastern slope, and by evening the Oosttaverne Line had been taken except for a stretch east of Messines, which fell the next morning.19
The Germans struck back on 8 June. After a heavy bombardment they counterattacked along nearly the whole new front in the evening, with fresh divisions including the 1st Guard Reserve, but could not break in. Over the following days the British pushed their posts forward, and by 14 June the old German lines north of the Lys were in their hands.20
The Irish at Messines: the 16th and 36th Divisions
For Ireland, Messines has a meaning of its own. The 16th (Irish) Division had been raised largely from nationalist recruits, at a time when the party leader John Redmond urged Irishmen to fight, and the 36th (Ulster) Division from the unionist Ulster Volunteer Force. In June 1917 they stood next to each other in IX Corps, the Ulstermen under Nugent on the right and the 16th under Major General William Hickie on the left.21
Their objective was the village of Wytschaete, on the highest point of the ridge. The boundary between the two divisions ran through the village, so that half of it fell to each. By 5:30 a.m. the Ulster battalions had taken L'Enfer Hill and the southern defenses of the village while the 16th fought through Wytschaete Wood; Falls records the 9th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers clearing the Ulster half of the ruins while the Munsters of the 16th cleared the other.22
Among the casualties was Major Willie Redmond, the 56-year-old nationalist member of Parliament for East Clare and brother of the Irish Party's leader. He had insisted on joining the assault with the 6th Royal Irish Regiment and was hit soon after leaving the trench. Private John Meeke, a stretcher-bearer of the 11th Inniskillings in the Ulster Division, reached him and stayed with him though wounded himself, and Ulster soldiers carried Redmond back to their division's dressing station at Dranoutre, where he died that evening. Meeke received the Military Medal.23
Redmond was buried in the garden of the convent at Locre (now Loker), and at his widow's wish the grave was never moved to a war cemetery; it still stands on its own. On 11 November 1998 President Mary McAleese of Ireland, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and King Albert II of Belgium, opened the Island of Ireland Peace Park near Messines, a round tower in memory of soldiers from the whole island of Ireland who died, were wounded or went missing in the war. Falls counts 1,239 prisoners taken by the 36th Division against 1,119 casualties up to 9 June.24
Australians and New Zealanders at Messines
The southern end of the attack belonged to II Anzac Corps under Lieutenant General Sir Alexander Godley. The New Zealand Division under Major General Sir Andrew Russell had the village of Messines itself as its objective, with the 3rd Australian Division under Major General John Monash to its south and the 4th Australian Division in support.25
The New Zealanders went through the village street by street, cellar by cellar. On its edge Lance Corporal Samuel Frickleton of the 3rd Battalion, New Zealand Rifle Brigade, already wounded, led his section through the British barrage and destroyed two German machine guns and their crews, which had been holding up the advance. He was wounded again later in the day and received the Victoria Cross.26
Holding the ridge cost more than taking it. Once the crest was won, the troops on its forward slopes lay under heavy German shellfire. Stewart, the New Zealand official historian, gives the division's losses in the battle as 3,700, and the New Zealand Army Museum counts about 700 of them killed; Bean's tables, covering a longer period, give nearly 5,000. Bean calculated that II Anzac Corps suffered more than half of all British casualties at Messines.27
How many casualties were there at Messines?
Messines was cheap by the standards of the Western Front, but not cheap. Bean puts British losses at about 26,000 for the battle, and the Australian Anzac Portal gives about 26,000 killed, wounded or captured on each side over two weeks. Harington recalled telling war correspondents on the evening of 7 June that the day had cost a fifth of the casualties expected.28
German losses are harder to fix. Reichsarchiv figures supplied to Bean give losses of about 23,000 for the same period, including 7,548 missing, while British headquarters estimated 39,000. Haig's final count of captures was 7,200 prisoners, 67 guns, 94 trench mortars and 294 machine guns; Harington's figure for 1 to 20 June is 7,261 prisoners. Bean quotes the German official history as saying the salient had been lost with dreadful casualties.29
Who won the Battle of Messines?
Messines was a clear British victory. The ridge was taken in a day, the German counterattacks failed, and the British held what they had won. The Imperial War Museums call it one of the most successful battles of the war, and Bean wrote that it showed the British staff could plan and carry through a first-rate stroke.30
On the German side the verdict was as sharp. Ludendorff admitted that the British mines had broken the position and that 7 June had cost Germany dear, and Kuhl, quoted by Bean, called the battle one of the worst tragedies of the war. The Germans had to accept the loss of the ridge and fall back on the chord line at its base, and on 10 June Crown Prince Rupprecht decided to give up even that and retire about a mile farther east, to a line through Houthem and Warneton, evacuating the ground between the Lys and St Yves the same night.31
Why did the Battle of Messines matter?
Messines secured the southern flank of the Ypres salient and the high ground from which the Germans had watched the British for years. On 10 June the Fifth Army took over the front north of it to prepare the main offensive. Ludendorff noticed that the British did not press their advantage: they seemed, he wrote, to want only a better position for the great Flanders offensive.32
That offensive did not begin until 31 July 1917, and Haig gave it not to Plumer but to General Sir Hubert Gough, whose deep objectives proved costly. Spencer Jones notes that Haig rejected Plumer's careful, methodical plan for a more ambitious one; only when Plumer took over the battle in August did his step-by-step bite and hold method bring progress. Messines therefore became both a model and a warning.33
The ridge did not stay British for good. In April 1918, during the German spring offensive in Flanders, the Germans took Messines again, and Ludendorff wrote of it as retaken. Some of the 1917 mine craters can still be seen on the ridge today.34
Where was the Battle of Messines fought?
The battle was fought on the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge in West Flanders, Belgium, south of Ypres (Ieper), roughly midway between Ypres and Armentières. The villages are now called Mesen and Wijtschate. The front ran from St Yves near Ploegsteert Wood in the south, past Messines and Wytschaete, to Hill 60 and Mount Sorrel near the Ypres-Comines canal in the north.35
