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Third Battle of Ypres

This was a campaign fought between July and November 1917 and is often referred to as the Battle of Passchendaele, a village to the north-east of Ypres which was finally captured in November. It was an attempt by the British to break out of the Ypres salient and capture the higher ground to the south and the east from which the enemy had been able to dominate the salient. It began well but two important factors weighed against them. First was the weather. The summer of 1917 turned out to be one of the the wettest on record and soon the battlefield was reduced to a morass of mud which made progress very difficult, if not impossible in places. The second was the defensive arrangements of concrete blockhouses and machine gun posts providing inter-locking fire that the Germans had constructed and which were extremely difficult and costly to counter. For 4 months this epic struggle continued by the end of which the salient had been greatly expanded in size but the vital break out had not been achieved.

Whilst the early battles of 3rd Ypres were taking place, 2/6th London of 174 Brigade, 58th Division, were enjoying a month of rest. On 29th July, 1917, two days before it all kicked off, they moved from the trenches near Ytres in the south to the village of Berneville, some 10 miles south west of Arras. Here they were almost able to forget there was a war going on, apart from the odd rumble of distant guns that is. But it was not to last and on 24th August they moved by bus and train to Poperinghe. Daily they moved closer to the front line and on 1st September they found themselves in the trenches just north of St. Julien in the Ypres salient. However, to use the term “trenches” for the positions they now found themselves in is a gross exaggeration. A month of intense artillery fire by both sides and one of the wettest summer periods recorded had reduced the land to a quagmire. The banks of the River Steenbeck that ran close by and the many drainage ditches that fed into it had been destroyed and the water had flowed out onto the surrounding land transforming it into a sea of mud. Progress was only possible by moving along duckboards, the positions of which were well known to the German gunners who regularly targeted them and to move off of these duckboards risked drowning in the mud. It was impossible to dig trenches in any conventional sense so the soldiers held an outpost line of shell holes, often standing in water and mud up to their waists all day, for relief was only possible at night. The support and reserve companies were holed up in various reinforced concrete gun emplacements that had been captured from the Germans during the initial advances in August. Opposite them the enemy held a  position known as the Blunt salient and it was obviously regarded as an strategically important by the Germans who defended it vigorously. In their shell holes and blockhouses 2/6th London were subjected to all that the Germans could throw at them. Artillery, mortar, machine-gun and sniper fire were a constant danger and their casualty list, which grew longer every day, included Arthur Thomas who was killed on 1st September.