The Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele, fought from July to November 1917, ended in costly and very limited Allied gains. A confident British-led plan to break the deadlock in Flanders bogged down in mud and slaughter, and the name became a byword for the futility of the First World War.
In the summer of 1917 the flat farmland of Flanders had already been fought over for three years, yet nothing had prepared the British-led armies for what waited in the Ypres Salient. What began as a confident plan to break the deadlock ended as a name that would come to mean mud, drowning, and slaughter without end. This is the story of the Third Battle of Ypres, remembered forever by the shattered village where the advance finally stopped, Passchendaele.1
A Plan to Break the Deadlock
By mid-1917 the Western Front had barely moved in years, and the British commander Sir Douglas Haig believed Flanders offered a way out. The idea was to push north and east out of the Ypres Salient, that dangerous bulge in the line where German guns looked down on the Allies from every side, and then to break out toward the Belgian coast. There the Germans held ports that sheltered the U-boat flotillas then sinking Allied shipping at an alarming rate, so a breakthrough promised both a strategic prize and relief for a navy under strain. British, Australian, and New Zealand troops massed for the effort alongside a French army (the Canadians joined only for the final phase, in the autumn), and after a successful blow at Messines Ridge in June, the main offensive opened on 31 July. The ground itself, however, was already the enemy. Much of the low-lying Flanders plain sat only a little above sea level, drained by a fragile network of ditches that years of shelling had begun to wreck.2 › Zeebrugge Raid, 1918
The Bombardment and the Rain
Before the infantry advanced, the artillery spoke. More than 3,000 guns fired an estimated 4.25 million shells at the German positions in a colossal preliminary bombardment in the second half of July, churning the fields and smashing what remained of the drainage that had kept the land dry. Then, almost as the attack began, unusually heavy rains swept across Flanders. Water had nowhere to drain, and the pulverized earth dissolved into a bottomless sea of mud. Shell craters filled and merged into pools deep enough to swallow a man, and there are accounts of soldiers and horses drowning where they slipped from the narrow duckboard tracks. Wounded men who fell from the paths sometimes sank before help could reach them, and guns settled to their axles in the mire. The mud did not merely slow the offensive, it defined it, turning every yard into an ordeal.3
Village by Village Toward Passchendaele
With no swift breakthrough possible, the battle became a grinding sequence of limited attacks, each aimed at a slight rise, a ruined farm, or the smashed remains of a hamlet. Through late summer and autumn the line inched forward across places whose names entered the record of the war, Pilckem Ridge, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, and Poelcappelle. Progress was measured in a few thousand yards bought at fearful cost, as men attacked into machine-gun fire across ground where they could barely walk. The final objective was the ridge crowned by the village of Passchendaele, and it was Canadian troops, committed to the battle from 26 October, who fought the last bitter approaches and took the ruins of the village on 6 November 1917. By then Passchendaele was little more than a scatter of brick and splintered timber on a churned slope. A last Canadian attack on 10 November took more of the high ground on the ridge, though its northern end stayed in German hands, and after more than three months the offensive came to a close.4
The Meaning of a Name
For a gain of only a few miles of Flanders, the cost was staggering. Casualties are debated to this day, but the losses are widely put in the hundreds of thousands on each side, killed, wounded, and missing, many of the missing simply lost in the mud and never found. Commonly cited estimates put British and Empire losses at roughly 250,000 to more than 300,000, and German losses at roughly 220,000 to 260,000, though some estimates of German losses reach 400,000. In the years that followed, Passchendaele became a byword for the futility and horror of attritional trench warfare, a shorthand for battles that consumed lives on an enormous scale for slivers of ruined land. The very ground the Allies had struggled to hold was largely given up the following spring during the German offensives of 1918. Yet the endurance of the soldiers who fought there, wading forward under fire through a drowned landscape, remains one of the most haunting images of the First World War, and the name still stands as a warning about what such warfare could demand of ordinary men.5
The red poppies that bloomed on the churned ground of Flanders became the emblem of remembrance; read why the poppy is worn each November.
