Dan Snow on Passchendaele

Presenter Dan Snow discusses why The Battle of Passchendaele was such a unique moment in the First World War.

Passchendaele. The word itself conjures up an image of hell. A shattered landscape, waterlogged, mud that drowned men and horses, a few shattered stumps of trees marking out pre-war woodland, a smudge on the churned up earth to show where farms and villages once stood.

And death. Passchendaele is the name given to the third battle fought in as many years around the town of Ypres in the fields of Flanders, Belgium. It was the costliest of the many battles around the infamous Ypres Salient, where the British found themselves surrounded on three sides by German forces on higher ground. Half a million men were killed or wounded at Passchendaele. It is the largest battle in British history after the Battle of the Somme and one of the biggest battles of the First World War.

It is not just the cost of the battle that makes it synonymous with crushing loss and disappointment. It is the fact that hopes had been high. The Somme had been a dreadful apprenticeship for the army of British amateurs. Lessons had been learnt. Earlier in 1917 successful attacks had driven the Germans back from strong positions on Vimy and Messines Ridges. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander, hoped that a mighty offensive around Ypres might liberate more Belgian territory, roll the Germans back from Ypres itself, capture ports on the Channel from which German submarines were sinking the merchant ships keeping Britain supplied and restore the morale of Britain’s allies, rocked by the collapse of Russia and the shocking failure of a big French spring offensive.

A collection of volunteers and Pals Battalions had been through hell on the Somme and had been transformed into a tough army of veterans. Junior officers and sergeants knew their jobs. New weapons gave them an edge. Tanks would now cover infantry attacks, crushing barbed wire for infantry behind. Light machine guns could now be carried forward giving the attackers half a chance against German defences. New artillery tactics provided the attacking troops with more cover than they had had at the Somme.

The first day of the attack went much better than the first day of the Somme the year before. British, New Zealand and Australian troops advanced deep into German defences. Some units pushed two miles forward. Unlike the Somme when 60,000 men were killed or wounded in a single day, British losses were less than half of that and with far fewer fatalities. The generals were optimistic, but that afternoon it started to rain.

August 1917 was wet. Thick clouds kept British planes grounded. Tanks got stuck in the mud. Men drowned in rain water filled shell holes. The Germans maintained a pitiless barrage of shellfire on and launched frequent counterattacks before the British forces could consolidate their gains.

By early November the British had given up hopes of a big breakthrough and focussed all their attention on the village of Passchendaele before winter finally brought a halt to major operations. Canadian troops eventually seized the shattered remnant of the village. They were about six miles away from where the front line had been in July.

Prime Minister David Lloyd Geroge called the offensive ‘one of the greatest disasters of the war.’ It was however also a disaster for the Germans who, like the British, lost around a quarter of a million men killed and wounded. Historians will debate forever whether it was the atrocious weather than prevented a bigger breakthrough for the British. What is certain is that the hugely impressive British victories of 1918 were in part due to the brutal lessons learned at Passchendaele. Britain won the First World War in 1918 by marrying technology and tactics in a devastating way. The deadlock of the Western Front was one of the greatest challenges in military history, the British would eventually break that deadlock but it took terrible battles like Passchendaele to learn and refine the techniques that would one day win the war.

World War One Remembered: The Battle of Passchendaele will be broadcast on Sunday 30th July at 19.00 on BBC Two and on Monday 31st July at 11.00 on BBC One.