Current Information:

Age-25

27, Kempe Road, Kensal Rise

Born-New Southgate

Track X Cemetery, Belgium

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 3rd September, 1917, 2/8th London of 174 Brigade  found themselves in the front line trenches in the Alberta sector, north of St Julien. However, to use the term “trenches” for the positions they now found themselves in is a gross exaggeration. A month of intense artillery fire by both sides and one of the wettest summer periods recorded had reduced the land to a quagmire. The banks of the River Steenbeck that ran close by and the many drainage ditches that fed into it had been destroyed and the water had flowed out onto the surrounding land transforming it into a sea of mud. Progress was only possible by moving along duckboards, the positions of which were well known to the German gunners who regularly targeted them and to move off of these duckboards risked drowning in the mud. It was impossible to dig trenches in any conventional sense so the soldiers held an outpost line of shell holes, often standing in water and mud up to their waists all day, for relief was only possible at night. The support and reserve companies were holed up in various reinforced concrete gun emplacements that had been captured from the Germans during the initial advances in August. On top of all this they had to contend with the enemy’s artillery and gas shells which were fired at them with great regularity, so much so that 2/8th London sustained 100 casualties in their first four days there. One of these was Ernest Deebank who was killed on 6th September.