Chapter VI: Messines

During the second half of May there was much coming and going of units in the Bermicourt area. The remnants of C and D Battalions returned there to refit. A and B, forming the 2nd Brigade, drew 76 Mark IV. tanks, and left for the Belgian frontier and the forthcoming attack on the Messines Ridge. Two new battalions, F and G, arrived from England. The 3rd Brigade was now formed of C and F, G replacing the former in the 1st Brigade. Preparatory to this increase in the corp’s fighting strength, Colonel Elles was raised to the exalted rank of Brigadier-General.

The battle of Messines, and the part taken in it by the 2nd Brigade, can be dealt with very cursorily. It was the opening stage of our attack in Flanders, which followed on the collapse of the French effort in Champagne and our own failure to break the Drocourt-Quéant line. The new offensive, long premeditated, was planned on a large scale and inspired by very sanguine ideas. It was hoped to drive the enemy off the whole coast-line as far as the Dutch frontier, and then, by forcing the evacuation of Lille, to open the way for an advance on Brussels and Antwerp. The preliminary operations fell into three stages. The monotonous Flemish plain is diversified, between St Omer and Menin, by a line of hills shaped like a note of interrogation lying on its back. Starting at Cassel, a very conspicuous isolated height, these hills run due eastward to Kemmel, over the Belgian border, and thence curve round Ypres to the north. The enemy held the whole of this curve, which, from the village of Wytschaete, 250 feet above the sea, falls gradually away to nothing beyond the forest of Houthoulst. Our first object was to dispossess him of the Wytschaete or Messines Ridge, which overlooks the whole Ypres salient. The second stage would be the capture after an interval of the rest of the curve, known as the Passchendaele Ridge. This, it was estimated, would be effected in three or four days. The moment the ridge was ours, the third stage was to open with the landing of a force of all arms, including even tanks, at Middelkerke, between Nieuport and Ostend, to get behind the enemy’s forces along the Yser, and so facilitate an advance on that water-logged front. No one can say how far this ambitious scheme would have prospered if the weather had remained fair. As it fell out, the first stage alone was carried through successfully. Wytschaete and Messines were taken in a few hours, but owing to the rain it took us three months instead of three days to reach Passchendaele; and long before that the amphibious enterprise at Middelkerke, the most interesting and hazardous feature of the whole plan, had perforce been cancelled. I shall give some account of its elaborate machinery later on.

Sir Herbert Plumer and the 2nd Army had been facing the Messines Ridge for two years, and plans for its capture had been developed at leisure. The surface soil in the neighbourhood lay upon a substratum of clay, very suitable for tunnelling; and for upwards of twelve months we had been driving mine-shafts beneath the German trenches. The ridge was enclosed in a small salient, with the chord of the arc, about six miles long, represented by the enemy’s third defence system, known as the Oostaverne Line. This was to be our final objective. The battle was to be finished in one day. Considering the lengthy and precise preparations for it, the moral effect of the explosion of twenty huge mines, and the powerful artillery fire which was to be concentrated on the small area within the salient, it will be apparent that there was no very urgent need for tanks. The state of the ground, moreover, already bad, would not be improved by the seven days’ preliminary bombardment; and if rain fell it would soon become impassable. Messines, in fact, was not a tank battle at all. It was one of those rare occasions when a section or two, to deal with obstinate strong-points, would have been as useful as the entire brigade which ultimately went into action.

Warning of possible operations in the Ypres salient had been received at Bermicourt early in the year. The Intelligence branch of the corps began a survey of the whole area in March; and the following month, when the 2nd Brigade was detailed to assist in the attack at Messines, the R.O.’s of A and B Battalions went forward to reconnoitre the southern sector. Ample information was available, for the 2nd Army knew all that there was to be known about the German position. It had also constructed one of the familiar large-scale models of the ridge and the country beyond; but although such representations are always worth a visit, it is doubtful if they are of much value from a tank commander’s standpoint. They bear no real resemblance to the actual ground to be traversed, and the view from a tank is so limited that the larger details of a landscape are of small use in getting bearings.

Between the 23rd and 27th May the tanks of the two battalions were detrained at Ouderdom and Clapham Junction (near Dranoutre). They lay up before the battle in the neighbourhood of the railheads--B Battalion’s machines in a wood, and those of A in timber and canvas shelters built to represent huts. These assembly positions were within four miles of the line. The usual precautions were taken to conceal the fact of the tanks’ arrival, the tracks left by their movements (which show up very clearly in aeroplane photographs) being obliterated by harrows. This was the first appearance of Mark IV.’s in the field; and another novelty was the use of old Mark II.’s for supply purposes. Twelve were attached to the brigade, carrying between them one complete fill of petrol, oil, grease, and ammunition for all the 76 fighting tanks.

The attack was to take place at dawn on 7th June. Three corps were taking part--from left to right, the 10th, 9th, and 2nd. Eventually 64 tanks were allotted to them--40 to attack the first objective, the German second line beyond the crest of the ridge, and 24 more to help in the final rush for the Oostaverne trenches. On 24th May the preliminary bombardment opened. The weather was hot and dry: there had been no rain for a fortnight; and now, day after day, the ridge was smothered in dust-clouds thrown up by the bursting shells. The gun-fire slackened on the last day, 6th May; but the enemy became nervous after dark and began to shell the back areas. He used a large amount of gas, which caused much discomfort to the tank crews on the final approach-march to the front line, for that invaluable device, the small box-respirator, is more than usually inconvenient when worn inside a tank. Later in the night a heavy thunderstorm broke; but by 2.30 A.M. the sky was clear once more.

At 3.10, on the very edge of dawn, the German front line between Hill 60 and Messines went up into the air with an indescribable shock and noise, as the nineteen huge mines exploded. Simultaneously the barrage fell through the dust-clouds upon the still-moving earth. With so tremendous a preparation, the first stage of the attack went like clockwork. Messines was carried by 7 A.M., and Wytschaete before midday. The tanks were seldom needed, and indeed were unable in most cases to keep up with the very rapid advance. One, however, by a combination of luck and skilful driving, was able to lead the Australian and New Zealand troops of the 2nd Corps the whole way to the second objective, a distance of two miles, in an hour and forty minutes. Another, the “Wytschaete Express,” convoyed the Ulster Division into that village; and a third lent very timely help at Fanny’s Farm, beyond Messines, where the infantry was held up for a time. In the meanwhile, the 24 reserve tanks had moved up to our original front line, and in the afternoon climbed the ridge to lead the assault on the final objective. The Oostaverne Line was little damaged, by comparison with the shattered first and second systems, and might have caused us serious trouble. The tanks, however, reached the trenches ahead of the infantry, and so demoralised the defenders that the whole position was taken at a light cost. During its consolidation, the surviving machines patrolled beyond it; and this dangerous operation, which often exposes tanks to direct artillery fire which they can neither avoid nor counter, led on this occasion to one very gallant and useful piece of work. Well east of Oostaverne, between that village and the Ypres-Menin railway, stood Joye Farm, at the head of a marshy little valley down which crawled a stream called the Wambeek. Late in the afternoon two of the patrolling tanks (both males of A Battalion) became ditched near the farm, actually in front of our outpost line. All efforts to extricate them before night having failed, it was proposed to withdraw the crews. The Wambeek valley, however, offered the enemy cover in which to mass his troops for a counter-attack; and as the tanks would be of material assistance in such an event, the men eventually were ordered to stand by them during the night and resume unditching at dawn. At 4 A.M., therefore, work was started again. One tank was got out, and at once moved forward toward the Ypres-Menin railway, where a counter-attack was in progress, but broke a track while attempting to cross the metals. At 6.30 the Germans were seen to be gathering along the Wambeek. Each tank could bring one 6-pounder to bear on the valley, and the majority of their crews took the machine-guns outside into shell-holes. The infantry near at hand were asked for support and supplied with ammunition, of which their Lewis-gun teams were deficient. The enemy’s attack was now developing; but although for five hours he made repeated attempts to issue from the valley, in every case he was repulsed with heavy losses, inflicted largely by the 6-pounder and machine-gun fire of the two tank crews. At 11.30 our barrage opened again and finally dispersed the assailants.

In this battle the two tank battalions lost 3 officers and 16 men killed or died of wounds, and 26 officers and 73 men wounded or missing. Eleven tanks were disabled by direct hits; 48 were ditched, and 2 were hit after ditching. There were nineteen recorded cases in which they helped the infantry. The Mark IV.’s, with their lighter sponsons and other improvements, were shown to be far handier than the old type of machine. Apart from the obvious conclusions that tanks need not have been used at all in the first phase of the attack, and that the ground was thoroughly unsuitable for any combined effort on their part, the chief lesson to be drawn from Messines was one already taken to heart--the necessity, namely, of providing a more efficient unditching apparatus for use in such pulverised _terrain_. Many casualties would have been avoided, and many more tanks would have got into action and returned that night, if the long unditching spar issued shortly after had been in use during the battle.

The question of the advisability of using tanks at Messines raises another which it may be of interest to consider before we close this chapter. “The third battle of Ypres,” says Colonel Buchan,[16] “was the residuum left to Sir Douglas Haig of the great plan of a Flanders offensive which he had conceived the previous winter. Events which he could not control had postponed it till too late in the summer.” Here, as elsewhere, the writer implies that the dilemma in which we found ourselves was caused wholly by the failure of the French advance on Laon. Manifestly, the work of the Allied armies was interdependent; but the principle of assuming at all costs the perfection of our own dispositions can be carried too far. There was in any case a bold alternative to the Ypres offensive, which actually was proposed and might well have been adopted, even before the postponement of the latter compromised its prospects. This alternative was a tank attack on a large scale against the central portion of the Hindenburg Line--to take place after Messines. In other words, the battle of Cambrai was to be fought in the early summer, on the same lines as eventually were adopted in the late autumn. In the Arras battles the Mark I. tanks were used for the last time, and as none really were needed at Messines, the improved Mark IV.’s and the experienced personnel lost there might have been preserved for a greater occasion. The enemy’s attention was drawn northward by the 2nd Army’s victory. He began at once to transfer reserves to meet the obvious corollary of an attack from Ypres; and to foster this belief by various stratagems was no more difficult in June than in November. Meanwhile, let us suppose the four original tank battalions, reinforced in May by F and G, to be preparing at Bermicourt and Wailly for the secret blow far to the south. By the end of June, when the three brigades began to assemble in the Salient, it would have been possible to arm them with 100 tanks apiece--300 in all. (216 fighting machines were actually in Belgium for the battle of July 31st.) Our communications across the devastated Somme area were then so far complete (or could have been made so) as to permit of a rapid and secret concentration on that front, and the plan of attack adopted with such startling results on November 20th might have been anticipated in almost every detail, with this great additional advantage--twelve or fifteen fresh divisions, instead of six tired ones, could have followed the tanks. The ground was perfect, virtually untouched by war, and not likely to be affected seriously by rain. The enemy was unprepared. And of the possible obstacles, the fabulous Hindenburg trenches, whose rear systems were not even completed by midsummer, were the least to be feared.

Such was the scheme put forward and strongly urged by the supporters of the new weapon. If it did not seem to offer so glittering a reward as a victorious advance along the coast, its prospects of success were immeasurably higher. It would possess the elements for which tanks were designed--surprise and normal country. Apart from the ordinary difficulties confronting an attack out of the Salient, where the enemy was fully prepared for one, the effect of bad weather and gun-fire upon the ruined soil reduced every ambitious military operation there to the nature of a gamble. It is interesting to note that quite early in the year, after the reconnaissance made by the Heavy Section of the whole area, the ground north of Messines was declared utterly unfit for tanks; and far less rain than actually fell in August would have ruined our offensive. (As it happened, June and July, about when it was proposed to fight the alternative tank battle, were brilliantly fine.) Nor were the strategic prospects of a blow at Cambrai to be under-estimated. A success, of which there was every probability, would have threatened directly the great line of supply, running southward through Maubeuge, by which the German armies in Champagne were fed and clothed and armed. Such a threat was the object of the November attack, and of the second battle of Cambrai ten months later, when at length it was carried through to a practical conclusion.

This excursion into strategy and speculation may seem out of place in a book of this nature. But one of my main objects in writing is to show how a belated appreciation of the correct use of tanks in battle came to overset all the theories stereotyped by years of stationary warfare, and how the tactical beliefs held by the Tank Corps itself were ultimately accepted as gospel by the Army as a whole. Already there are signs of backsliding, and in a few years we shall be told that the war was won by cavalry. But regarding Cambrai as the great conversion (if only “for the duration”), it is both interesting and pertinent to discuss the earlier proposal, although it came to nothing at the time, and was only exhumed later as a sort of counsel of desperation. In the spring of 1917 there was little hope for it. The Belgian coast-line worked like a magnet, and there were infantry and guns in plenty to be drawn thither. The main argument against the attack farther south was, however, that too few tanks were available. Yet 300 at least could have been found, and only 370 went in eventually at Cambrai. No doubt there were other and better reasons. Whatever they were, they prevailed: our activities continued to shift northward, and soon men and guns and tanks were floundering in the morasses of the Salient.