Current Information:

Age-23

4, North Wharf Road, Paddington

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 King’s Royal Rifle Corps of 41 Brigade, relieved units of 56th Division, just north of the Menin road. On the previous day 56th Division had launched a major, but largely unsuccessful attack here as part of the Battle of Langemarck and the positions they moved into were in a terrible state as a result of both the weather and vast amount of shells that scarred the landscape. The shelling continued during the three days they stayed here and the battalion suffered casualties. One of these was James Warfield, who was killed on 19th August.