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For more than three long months in 1917, Allied and German soldiers fought tooth and nail over a battlefield churned into a sea of sucking mud and shellholes by the guns. Hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded, some of them drowning in the soupy ground - for Allied gains of just a few kilometers. So why did the Battle of Passchendaele happen at all, and was it the most pointless battle of the First World War? Summer 1917 was a time of crisis for the Allies. The Italians could make no progress in the Alps, Russia's Revolutionary Provisional Government promised to keep fighting, but its army
refused to fight, and the Franco-British spring attacks in the West had also failed. Even worse, part of the French army had mutinied, which limited it to defensive action - some in London even worried France might be on the verge of collapse. At the same time, German U-boats were waging unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, and had sunk record amounts of Allied shipping that spring. The United States had joined the Allied side in April, but it would take many months before American troops could make any impact at the front.
The British Empire was now the only Ally that could put serious pressure on Germany, so Field Marshal Douglas Haig developed an ambitious plan. He hoped that an offensive east of the Belgian town of Ypres could solve several problems and potentially change the course of the war. The British army would move out of its poor tactical positions in the Ypres salient and take the three small ridges on the outskirts of town that gave the Germans a local advantage: Pilckem, Broodseinde, and Passchendaele. Once they had taken this high ground, they could
push on towards Roulers, a major German railway and logistics centre. If all went well, they'd also capture the channel ports that housed German U-boats and secure the French channel ports behind Ypres upon which British logistics depended. This was familiar ground for both the British and the Germans, since there had been two major battles near Ypres in 1914 and 1915. That was part of the reason some British leaders, like Prime Minister David Lloyd George, were skeptical of the plan: "Before we embark upon a gigantic attack which must necessarily entail the loss of scores of thousands of valuable lives, and produce that
sense of discouragement which might very well rush nations into premature peace, that we should feel a fair confidence that such an attack has a reasonable chance of succeeding. A mere gamble would be both a folly and a crime." (Hart 352) But the pressure to act in the face of strategic danger was overwhelming, and Admiral John Jellicoe supported Haig by emphasizing the danger at sea. The Cabinet approved the plan, and Haig was confident: "It is my considered opinion, based not on mere optimism, but on a thorough study of the situation, guided by experience which I may claim to be considerable, that if our resources are concentrated in France to the fullest possible extent the
British Armies are capable and can be relied on to effect great results this summer-results which will make final victory more assured and which may even bring it within reach this year." (Wiest 74) This time, the British army was much better prepared than in previous campaigns. They had more guns, more experienced troops and commanders, and improved tactics for taking and holding limited objectives. Their small infantry units were also better armed and more flexible, with more light machine guns and hand grenade teams. The British 5th and 2nd Armies,
with 30 frontline divisions and 3000 guns, under the overall command of General Hubert Gough, would lead the offensive - with support from the French 1st Army's 6 divisions. Facing them were the 16 frontline divisions and 1500 guns of the German 4th Army under General Friedrich Sixt von Armin. The Germans though, had also gotten better. On the Somme in 1916, they'd lost too many men trying to hold frontline trenches, but in 1917 they'd adopted a more flexible elastic defence. They expected to lose their thinly-manned first line, before exhausting and isolating the attackers with
a network of mutually supporting strongpoints, anchored by concrete pillboxes along several deeper lines of defence. Once the attack had lost momentum, special Eingreif or counterattack units would strike the confused and tired enemy to push them back. The German command decided to further reinforce its defences near Ypres under the supervision of gifted defensive General Fritz von Loßberg, because they held the high ground, and because of the region's strategic importance. So the British had resolved to attack in Flanders, and the Germans prepared to meet them - but before the main British attack could begin,
they planned to eliminate a troublesome German position from underground. The German trenches on Messines Ridge overlooked the area where the British planned to advance, and if they didn't take it, the Germans could direct devastating artillery fire against British troops on the move in the open. So British and Australian tunnelers dug underneath the ridge for months, and hollowed out 21 huge caverns deep under German positions. Engineers then filled the mines with over 400 tons of explosives. On June 7, 19 of the mines exploded, blowing much of the top off of
Messines Ridge and wiping out the German trenches. German officer Lieutenant Meinke bore witness: "The earth roared, trembled, rocked - this was followed by an utterly amazing crash and there, before us in a huge arc, kilometres long, was raised a curtain of fire about one hundred metres high.[…] It was like a thunderstorm magnified one thousand times!" (Hart 350) British artilleryman Ralph Hamilton was less poetic: "[German] shells are bursting round now as I write […] but it makes one laugh to think of their little efforts compared
to [what] we are providing. We are getting revenge for 1914 with a vengeance." (Hart 350) It's been claimed 10,000 Germans were killed in the blast, but that figure is disputed and was likely much low er. The claim that the explosion was so loud it was heard in London is harder to assess. In any case, British, Australian, and New Zealand infantry then went over the top with the protection of a creeping barrage, and took what was left of the ridge, securing the southern flank of the coming offensive. On July 31, 1917, the Battle of Passchendaele, also known as the 3rd Battle of Ypres, began. British artillery had fired 4.3 million shells, three times the weight of fire on the
Somme one year earlier. British soldier John Handley was among those who went over the top: "I went forward, till suddenly I fell, tripped up by the German wire. As I plunged into the mud several rifle shots flashed and cracked from the enemy trench just in front of me. […] My rifle was useless, choked with mud. Pulling out a hand grenade, I released the lever and lobbed it as near as I could to the area from which the shots came. Bobbing up to see the explosion, I saw several heads silhouetted against the flash. I had aimed well. At that moment one of our
Lewis gun teams came up and I led them into the German trench where, in the half light of dawn, we only found one badly wounded Hun." Hart 355 General Gough had set ambitious objectives for the first days, but even with the British superiority in artillery and infantry, and several dozen tanks, they couldn't achieve them all. They and the French advanced a maximum of about 3.5km and captured Pilckem Ridge, but the right flank made little progress on the Gheluvelt Plateau. German counterattacks also reclaimed some British gains of the first days, and the Germans' newly
developed mustard gas caused further problems. The fighting was intense, including for German artilleryman Gerhard Gurtler: "Darkness alternates with light as bright as day. The earth trembles and shakes like a jelly. […] We crouch between mountains of ammunition (some of us up to our knees in water) and fire, while all around us shells upon shells plunge into the mire, shatter our emplacement, root up trees, [and] flatten the house behind us […] We look as if we had come out of a mud-bath. We sweat like stokers on a ship; the barrel is red-hot;
the cases are still burning hot when we take them out of the breech; and still the one and only order is, 'Fire!'" (Hart 504-505) The British attack had bogged down - literally, since the battlefield had quickly become a bog. Unusually heavy rain fell on most days right from the start of the offensive, and since the earth had already been churned up and the drainage system destroyed by years of intense shelling, the battlefield became a sea of mud and water-filled shellholes. This made movement for men, horses, or tanks an exhausting effort, caused the death of
many wounded men by drowning, and prevented shells from exploding since the soup they landed in was too soft to set off contact fuses. Men and horses often had to stick to narrow wooden duckboard paths, which made them especially vulnerable to German artillery. British Chief of General Staff Sir Launcelot Kiggell, upon seeing the battlefield later, is rumoured to have exclaimed: "Good God! Did we really send men to fight in that?" (Moore) In the face of these conditions, the British launched smaller attacks on August 10, 16, 22, and 27, but made little progress in the quagmire against effective German defences.
A Canadian Corps attack to distract the Germans took Hill 70 near Lens, but had little impact on the ongoing battle near Ypres. Haig now decided that Gough's ambitious tactics were not working, and British leaders considered stopping the offensive. But Haig was convinced it could still work, and put General Herbert Plumer in charge. Plumer had suggested a more methodical approach in the planning stages and now he had the chance to put his limited bite and hold plan into action. According to this method, British troops would advance in small
increments of about 1000 meters at a time, with crushing artillery support. They would then consolidate their positions, repel the inevitable German counterattack, before doing it all again. So the British had inched forward in the sludge and changed commanders. In September the weather improved, and the British brought in the battle-hardened Australian and New Zealand Corps, or ANZAC, for the next phase of the attack. Using Plumer's bite and hold method, and with the support of overwhelming British artillery fire, the ANZACs took critical ground on the Gheluvelt Plateau and Polygon Wood. By this time,
the German defences were under extreme pressure, and they rushed more troops and extra machine guns into their front lines to shore up their positions - a decision that cost them more casualties. So did the dozens of unsuccessful counterattacks they launched to retake lost positions - the mud meant the Eingreif units rarely arrived in time. Haig was encouraged by the capture of 5000 German prisoners, so ordered the attack to continue. Starting on October 4, the ANZACS led the advance against Broodseinde Ridge, the same day it began to rain again. In the by now familiar morass of mud and water, only now it was also cold, the ANZAC and
British troops captured and held the Ridge. The battlefield was both swamp and cemetery: "All around us lay the dead, both friend and foe, half in, half out of the water-logged shell holes. Their hands and boots stuck out at us from the mud. Their rotting faces stared blindly at us from coverlets of mud; their decaying buttocks heaved themselves obscenely from the filth with which the shell bursts had smothered them. Skulls grinned at us; all around us stank unbelievably. These corpses […] would lie and rot and disintegrate foully into
the muck until they were an inescapable part of it to manure the harvests of a future peace-time Belgium. Horror was everywhere." (Hart 364-365) Haig still felt the Germans were on the edge of breaking, so he ordered a quick attack towards the third and final ridge east of Ypres, Passchendaele Ridge. The British, French and ANZACS hastily attacked, but couldn't get far in a hail of German fire and the usual mud. The New Zealand Division suffered its worst day of the war on October 12: 843 dead for no gain. Australian soldier Walde Fisher observed the exhaustion and hopelessness of fighting in such a wasteland:
"Our units sank to the lowest pitch of which I have ever been cognisant. It looked hopeless - the men were so utterly done. […] We got up to our positions somehow or other - and the fellows were dropping out unconscious along the road […] the shell stricken and trodden ground [was] thick with dead and wounded - some of the Manchesters were there yet, seven days wounded and not looked to. But men walked over them - no heed was paid to anything but the job. Our men gave all their food and water away, but that was all they could do." (Hart 522) With the ANZACs exhausted, Plumer now brought in another crack formation - the Canadian Corps. Canadian General Arthur Currie was reluctant to
commit to the attack, and predicted 16,000 casualties, but ultimately followed orders. The fresh Canadians faced a powerful but worn-down enemy, as German soldier Ernst Jünger experienced when he arrived at the front in late October: "I called out for directions to an NCO who was standing in a doorway. Instead of giving me an answer, he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, and shrugged his shoulders. […] I sprang over to him, held my pistol under his nose, and got my information out of him that way. It was the first time in the war that I'd
come across an example of a man acting up, not out of cowardice, but obviously out of complete indifference." (Jünger 194-195) Between October 26 and November 10, the Canadians went over the top four times, gaining a few hundred metres of freezing slop each time. They finally captured Passchendaele Ridge, taking most but not all of the high ground around the village of the same name. As Currie predicted, they took just under 16,000 casualties to do it. Scottish-born Canadian soldier Donald Fraser was hit by a shell as he was bringing supplies up to the front line: "I was thrown by the force of the explosion on
to my face into the gutter at the side [of the road]. The first thing that surged through my mind was 'Am I dead, am I dead?' […] I saw my horse lying dead half over my right thigh and pinning me down. […] After squirming for several minutes, I managed to pull my leg [out, but] the right side of my face was burning and stinging as if someone had stuck hot needles in it. It was full of tiny bits of metal. […] I started down the road [and only then noticed] that my right arm was shattered at the shoulder, completely twisted and dangling." (Fraser 314-315) So after months of the two armies wallowing in the Flanders mud,
the 3rd Battle of Ypres was over. Casualty estimates vary, but British losses were likely 240 to 275,000 (including nearly 16,000 Canadians and about 40,000 ANZACS), along with 9000 French, while German losses were probably 200 to 220,000. The terrible losses and unimaginable battlefield conditions made Passchendaele, for many in the British Empire, the symbol of the futility of the entire war. British officer Siegfreid Sassoon captured some of these emotions in his poem Memorial Tablet in 1918: "I died in hell- (They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight, And I was hobbling back; and then a shell Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light."
(Sassoon) The battle has also caused heated debates, including as part of the controversy over Field Marshal Haig's generalship: "Why has not Haig been recognized as one of England's great generals? […] The answer may be given in one word-Passchendaele." (Wiest 83) [British Newspaper] But was the battle, as we often hear, really pointless? The British certainly did not achieve their initial goals. They'd advanced about 12km, but failed to capture all of Passchendaele Ridge, which left them a nearly untenable salient. The Belgian coast and Roulers remained in German hands.
Also 3rd Ypres had used up reserves that could have been used to exploit British success a few weeks later at Cambrai. And the battle had damaged the British army and home front morale, bringing it to its lowest point in the war. There were political consequences as well. Lloyd George judged the battle "senseless" and blamed Haig. To prevent another Passchendaele, the Prime Minister held back troops in England rather than send them to the front - a decision that cost the Allies badly in spring 1918. As for the Germans, their High Command was
concerned about the irreplaceable losses they'd suffered, ammunition shortages, morale problems, and their struggles to stop bite and hold - a staff report even worried at one point the army in Flanders might break. Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff later wrote: "The state of affairs in the West [in late 1917] appeared to prevent the execution of our plans elsewhere. Our wastage had been so high as to cause grave misgivings, and had exceeded all expectation." (Ludendorff 480) On the other hand, Ludendorff and other commanders considered Passchendaele an overall defensive victory. The Germans had prevented a breakthrough,
and still had the strength to go on the offensive on the Eastern, Romanian, and Italian Fronts while Passchendaele was ongoing. In hindsight, the German army was not close to breaking. Many historians, and General Gough, have criticized Haig for continuing the battle for so long. Prolonging the fighting damaged the British Army far more than the much larger German Army, and did not allow for the British to improve their learning curve. And even though Plumer's bite and hold tactics inflicted losses and took some ground, it was not a recipe for an operational
or strategic breakthrough in a reasonable amount of time or at a reasonable cost. Others have argued that it's hard to see how the British could have stopped the offensive under the strategic circumstances of the time. German U-boats were still sinking ships, Russia was hardly fighting, and France was still recovering from the mutinies. Stopping or admitting defeat might damage Allied prestige in the eyes of the Americans, who might then have been more likely to force peace based on a stalemate. According to this argument, the British Empire
was the only ally that could hit the Germans, and Flanders was the most strategically important area where the British had the means to do it. What is for certain is that the Battle of Passchendaele, whether it was a pointless slaughter or a strategic choice in a situation with no good options, still stirs debate and emotions more than a century later. Since you are watching this detailed documentary about one of the First World War's most infamous battles, I think you might be interested in more history deep dives.
If you want to learn more about the Battle of Berlin, you should check out our 4 ½ hour 18-part documentary series 16 Days in Berlin. Covering the entire battle day-by-day with detailed maps, animations, expert interviews and more, 16 Days in Berlin is the most detailed documentary about this battle ever produced. With our uncompromising portrayal using authentic combat footage, we couldn't upload it to YouTube because of their advertising guidelines. So, where can you watch 16 Days in Berlin? On Nebula, a streaming service we're building together with other creators, where we don't have to worry about advertising
guidelines or the almighty algorithm. Nebula is available in 4K resolution in your browser, on your smartphone, Smart TV or streaming box like Apple TV or Roku. If you go to nebula.tv/thegreatwar you can watch 16 Days in Berlin, our other original documentaries Rhineland 45 and Red Atoms as well as a host of other smart creators - and all that for just $36 for an entire year. And that's not all, on Nebula you can also watch all our regular videos ad-free and earlier than on YouTube. Right now, you can also get the Nebula Lifetime Membership. Pay once and get access to everything Nebula has to offer for as long as you and Nebula exist. The Lifetime
membership allows us to invest in more original content and improve the platform for everyone. One third of your Lifetime membership will also support us at Real Time History directly. If you want to learn more about the Battle of Cambrai which followed the Battle of Passchendaele check out our previous video on that. As usual you can find all the sources for this episode in the video description below. If you are watching this video on Patreon or Nebula, thank you so much for the support, we couldn't do it without you. I am Jesse Alexander and this is a production of Real
Time History, the only history channel that knows the true state of affairs in the West.
