Current Information:

Age-19

Born-Lambeth

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.

58th Division arrived at Ypres during the last week of August, 1917 and on 5th September, 2/9th London of 175 Brigade moved into the front line in the northern part of the salient, in front of St Julien where after all the recent rain and fighting, the conditions were truly awful. A sea of mud could only be crossed on duckboards and the front line was a series of shell holes usually full of water. 8th September was not a good day for 2/9th London. At 7.15am a shell hit one of their dug-outs, killing six men sheltering inside it and wounding another eight. Then that evening, at 9.45 the battalion sustained another twenty six casualties, five of whom were killed, when they raided the German strongpoints, the Cemetery, Jury Farm and Winnipeg. One of those killed on this day was Sydney Coggin.