Current Information:

Age-19

34, Seaton Street, Euston

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.

14th Division arrived at Ypres in the middle of August, 1917 and on 17th August, 7th Rifle Brigade of 41 Brigade moved into the front line near the Menin Road with Battalion HQ at Stirling Castle. This was the second day of the the Battle of Langemarck, there was intense shelling by both sides and it is very likely that it was this shell fire that caused the death of Edward Murphy.