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Born-Ireland

Enlisted-Mill Hill

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 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.

The 13th Middlesex battalion of 73 Brigade, 24th Division, had been involved in the opening stages of Third Ypres before being relieved and then undergoing a period of training behind the lines. On 23rd August they returned to the trenches near Inverness Copse where they stayed, under heavy shell fire, until relieved four days later. On the morning of 24th August the enemy attacked their positions in an attempt to regain a dug out that had been captured from them two nights previously but after a hard fight the Germans were beaten off and the dug out remained in the hands of the battalion. There were a number of casualties for 13th Middlesex on this day, one of whom was John Anderson.