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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 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 four 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.

Battle of Pilckem Ridge (31st July-2nd August)

This was the opening attack of Third Ypres and began at 3.50am on 31st July when British and French troops launched their offensive to break out of the Ypres salient. The day had mixed results. To the north the Pilckem Ridge was captured but there was less success further south along the Gheluvelt Ridge, where a combination of stiff German resistance and low cloud, which hindered observation, meant that only the first objectives were captured. Further attempts to push on were stopped in their tracks by specialist German counter attack divisions and resulted in a 70% casualty rate among the British troops. Then in the afternoon, the rain came and under the weight of shells falling on it, the battlefield soon became a quagmire. Over the next two days, suffering the most appalling conditions in the mud and the rain, the troops had to fight off numerous German counter attacks.

At the outbreak of war in 1914 there were two machine guns to each battalion which was far from adequate and substantially fewer than the German Army. The need for more of these weapons and the specialised training they required led to the establishment of Machine Gun Corps in the autumn of 1915 with each infantry brigade being furnished with their own machine gun company, taking the same number as the brigade.

At 3.50am on 31st July, 1917, 56 Brigade of 19th Division attacked on the Second Army front just to the south of the Ypres salient, with the village of Wytschaete behind them. The attack was made by the  7th Royal Lancaster, 7th East Lancashire and 7th Loyal North Lancashire battalions. Within three hours they had fought their way to their objective, the Blue Line. Enemy counter-attacks forced them back slightly in some places but with the assistance of support battalions the new  line was stabilised and held. Needless to say, 56 Brigade suffered many casualties with nearly 150 men killed and many more wounded. Throughout the fighting the 56th Machine Gun Company accompanied the attack and suffered their share of the casualties. One of these was Charles Cornell.