Zero Hour (16 page)

The official attitude is that Passchendaele Ridge is so important that to-morrow's attack is worth making whether it succeeds or fails…I suspect that they are making a great, bloody experiment—a huge gamble…I feel, and most of the correspondents feel…terribly anxious.

Lieutenant General Birdwood, commander of I Anzac Corps, also hoped the advance would be postponed, but, as the 2nd Division only had a minor role on the British flank, he kept quiet.

The attack went ahead on 9 October at 5.20 a.m., with the troops already exhausted from an 11-hour march to the front-line. Against a feeble resistance, and with large numbers of Germans surrendering, soldiers from the 66th Division made it to the village outskirts, but the 49th Division made no progress up the Bellevue Spur. German gunners shot them down, then turned their guns onto the 66th Division, which was forced to retreat, ending up just 450 metres from where they had started. The 2nd Division, which was supporting the 66th's flank, was also forced back down the slope.

By dusk, the attack was over. The 66th Division was reported as being just short of the first objective. It was therefore decided, possibly on the advice of Godley, that enough ground had been gained for a sufficient jumping-off position to seize Passchendaele village. Godley hadn't visited the front-line; nor had Major General Monash or Major General Russell.

Haig ordered the next advance to take place in three days' time. He had to secure the heights—failing to do so would mean that all who'd died over the previous 10 weeks had died for nothing. Blinded by Passchendaele Ridge, Haig told journalists that it was Flanders mud that had defeated the last attack, not the German Army. He said the Germans were at breaking point, and, despite the mud, all that stood between the Australians and the New Zealanders and success were ‘flesh and blood…not blockhouses. They take a month to make.'

Haig's staff should have informed him of the conditions, but they didn't. He should have known that the attacks, like those in the August rain, would fail. Even if the British divisions were at the first objective, the Australians and New Zealanders still had to advance 2300 metres: the New Zealanders to capture Bellevue Spur; the 3rd Division, Passchendaele village, with one brigade of the 4th Division supporting its flank. They were to attempt what was initially meant to be two advances in one, a difficult task in dry conditions, let alone in the mud.

For the battle to succeed the artillery had to be in position, but with rain still falling, the guns became bogged. The gunners laid debris under the wheels for traction, and, when the horses sank up to their bellies in the mud, long lines of 100 men dragged the guns forward. But few made it to their new positions and those that did sank and shifted with every shot. The guns couldn't be fired accurately. The gunners, sick from sleeping in sodden dugouts, were now expected to increase their rate of fire to make up for the lack of guns, but there weren't enough shells: the pack mules bringing them up were floundering. Some fell into boggy shell holes, disappearing altogether or needing their handlers' help to keep their heads above the surface. Those that couldn't be pulled out had to be shot. It now took 17 hours instead of one to reach the front-line, and each shell that arrived had to be cleaned of mud before being fired. When the Diggers took over from the British in the early hours of 11 October, the pillboxes and wire on Bellevue Spur stood brutally intact.

FIRST BATTLE OF PASSCHENDAELE

The front-line was littered with dead and wounded from the 49th and 66th British Divisions. ‘Stretcher bearer,' they called, and, ‘For God's sake come here.' Australian Lieutenant Walde Fisher arrived at ‘one pillbox to find it just a mass of dead'. At the next one, he found

about fifty men alive…Never have I seen men so broken or demoralised. They were huddled up close behind the box in the last stages of exhaustion and fear.

When daylight arrived, the Australians and New Zealanders crept out and moved from one waterlogged crater to the next to give the wounded food or water. If they could, they carried them back to crowded first-aid posts. All through the grey, bleak afternoon, stretcher-bearers worked to carry men out. Private Leonard Hart was dumbfounded that the British officers had abandoned the wounded: ‘I have seen some pretty rotten sights during the two and a half years of active service, but I must say that this fairly sickened me.'

At the same time, the II Anzac Corps commanders who had not visited the line were realising that the jumping-off point was practically the same as before the last attack. To offset the extra distance, the pace of the creeping barrage was doubled. Now the men would have to cross the first 450 metres in 20 minutes, a pace never attempted in dry weather, let alone in mud. According to Private Stanfield, the soldiers at Flanders were

a pretty dumb beast. That's how he's treated, you see. He was only gun fodder, that's what I feel. We were pretty dumb beasts, or we wouldn't have been thrown into that sort of warfare, because it was hopeless before you started, we all knew that.

That night, as it rained heavily, the men moved to their jumping-off positions, and by 4 a.m. they were waiting under waterproof sheets in shell holes for dawn and zero hour.

Opposite the New Zealanders was the blocked Ravebeek stream, muddy craters, wire entanglements, then the pillboxes on Bellevue Spur. The men hoped the artillery would destroy the wire, or that at least the pillboxes would be bombarded while they cut through it. But when the shelling eventuated, it was sporadic and brief. The Diggers wanted to do their best, but, as one New Zealand officer wrote in his diary:

I do not feel as confident as usual. Things are being rushed too much. The weather is rotten, the roads very bad, and the objectives have not been properly bombarded. However, we will hope for the best.

Across no-man's-land, Crown Prince Rupprecht wrote in his diary: ‘most gratifyingly—rain; our most effective ally'.

At 4.20 a.m. the rain stopped, but the wire in front was still intact. Then, at zero hour, 5.25 a.m., the men followed a creeping barrage of mud and steam, only to be shot down. Mud swallowed the dead and wounded and weighed the survivors down. They unclogged their guns and rifles and fired at the pillbox loopholes, momentarily forcing the Germans to take cover, while others slid forward to cut the wire. Second Lieutenants John Bishop and Norman Watson cut through both belts, then charged a pillbox. Short bursts from a machine gun killed them both before they could throw their bombs.

At 8 a.m., the New Zealanders were ordered to dig in and hold what little they'd gained of the slope. German gunners fired down at them from the spur as they dug into the sloppy mud. Around them, snipers hidden in trees, shell holes and even in the wire picked off men scurrying to find better shelter. Many of the men didn't see a single German that day.

Experiencing less opposition than the New Zealanders, the Australians of the 9th Brigade left a trail of dead and wounded as they outflanked pillboxes, then dug in at the second objective, 1900 metres from the start.

The 10th Brigade, next to the New Zealanders, hadn't got as far. With the New Zealanders out of action, the Germans on Bellevue Spur had turned their guns onto the advancing Australians. In groups of two or three, they scrambled from crater to crater, but with only 150 men remaining and just at their first objective, they dug in. While they waited for reinforcements, 20 of them set out for Pass-chendaele. They crept up a sheltered gully and walked straight into the village. There were no Germans, but there were no Australians in sight either, so the men returned to their comrades. With shells exploding around them, their officer, Major Lyndhurst Giblin, sent a message to headquarters asking ‘What am I to do?' He'd already sent soldiers to suppress the fire from Bellevue Spur but they didn't return. At 3 p.m., orders were given to the Australians to withdraw to the starting point.

THE COLD TRUTH

The Australians and New Zealanders had failed. It was the New Zealanders' first defeat. Many blamed the commanders, particularly Lieutenant General Godley. One New Zealander, Corporal Harold Green, believed ‘the stunt should never have been ordered under such conditions. It was absolute murder.' Rifleman Henry Gibbens felt that the commanders—‘the bloody heads'—should ‘have been sent over the top instead of us. They had nothing ready and you were up to your hips in mud and water.'

That evening, with rain still falling, the men held on grimly to the little they'd gained. There were nearly 3000 New Zealand casualties, and more than 4000 Australian. The aid posts overflowed. Limbs hung from tendons; some men had huge holes in their bodies; and one shocked soldier continued to drink his coffee as it poured out of the bullet hole in his cheek. Doctors and orderlies toiled to help them but the wounded arrived faster than they could be seen to. Outside, men lay on the wet ground, shaking uncontrollably under ‘cold driving rain and hail' and exploding shells.

Private George Tierney and five other stretcher-bearers struggled through the mud to carry out a wounded man but they soon had to stop: all were vomiting from the effects of an earlier gas attack. Around them, the walking wounded led other gas victims, their eyes bandaged over. With nothing left to vomit, Tierney retched continually as his eyes filled with water and swelled up. By the time he reached the hospital, he was blind. Nurses bathed his eyes and inserted cocaine under his eyelids before bandaging them, but ‘the agony was awful…it was as though my eyes were full of sand.' The gas could cause lung-collapse and, over two nights, five men died. Tierney was kept alive by the hard work of New Zealand nurses, who visited other hospitals on their days off to find New Zealand soldiers and see if they could help them. It took Tierney two weeks to regain his sight; others took much longer.

Bringing supplies up through the mud, Ypres sector.
AWM E00963

To cope with the numbers of wounded, extra battalions were sent forward to act as stretcher-bearers. It took eight men four hours to stretcher out a single soldier to advanced dressing stations, where doctors stitched up wounds, sawed off mangled limbs and applied splints to broken ones.

At the front-line, German soldiers held their fire and directed stretcher-bearers towards the wounded. But not all of them could be found. Men cried out at night. One kept calling over and over. Private Stanfield helped search for him but

we couldn't find him and we heard him crying part of the next day. Calling, you know, calling, sort of crying, not screaming or anything, crying out. We just knew there was a wounded man lying down under something you see. We never found that man. That's the only thing that's stuck in my memory.

Twice now the Germans had defeated the Allies, and their spirits lifted. Their artillery fired over sneezing gas, which made it difficult to wear a mask, then mustard gas followed, blistering skin, swelling eyes and turning the men's voices hoarse. At night, Gotha bombers flew overhead, lit by the glare of British searchlights.

The Diggers were demoralised and depressed. Victory or defeat both came at a heavy cost. Men spoke of times before or after Passchendaele. They hated the war and could see no end to it. The thought of another winter filled them with despair.

A VICTORY TOO LATE

The Canadians took over and, at their commander's insistence, were given more time to prepare. They would seize in three advances what the Australians and New Zealanders had been expected to take in one. In bitter fighting, after an 11-day bombardment, they captured Bellevue Spur on 26 October, then Passchendaele on 10 November.

The Third Battle of Ypres finished three months after it had begun. Over 70,000 Allied soldiers had been killed and 200,000 wounded. Although the Germans lost fewer troops, their commanders worried they wouldn't recover from the damage done. They began to realise the war could be lost.

Then, on 20 November, 400 British tanks tore a 10-kilometre hole in the Hindenburg Line near Cambrai. It was a huge success—in one day the British gained six kilometres, over half what had been captured in the three-month Ypres offensive. People in Britain celebrated, and for the first time since the start of the war, church bells were rung in celebration. But 10 days later, the Germans counterattacked and regained the lost ground. Despite this victory, the German commanders knew they wouldn't survive if they continued to take a defensive approach to the war.

THE YEAR ENDS

The Australians stayed at Passchendaele for several more weeks, then all five divisions moved to Messines to rest and recover. For the first time since arriving on the Western Front, all the Australian divisions were together under one commander, Birdwood—now promoted to full general. The I Anzac Corps was renamed the Australian Corps, while II Anzac Corps became XXII Corps. The New Zealanders took over the line in front of Polygon Wood.

It was another hard winter. When the land froze, bullets ricocheted off the earth and fragments from exploding shells ‘flew incredible distances'. Icicles hung from tin hats, and soldiers slipped on the duckboards. Gas lingered blue in the still air and the dead lay frozen and twisted.