The Third Battle of Ypres, or, The Battle of Passchendaele

Friday, February 23, 2024

The poor city of Ieper had suffered much during the war. Early in the war, the Germans were racing for the coast to take control of Europe. They swept across France and then North to Belgium. They took Belgium in a little over two weeks. The Allies finally got their act together and held them off in Ieper.

The first battle of Ieper took place in November & December of 1914. While they held the Germans off, they made no headway, and the front lines came to a stop forming a Salient with Ieper right in the mouth of the Salient.

Constant shelling of Ieper pretty much flattened the city and the return shelling by the allies churned up the ground in the Salient.

The second battle of Ieper in April and May of 1915 has the dubious honor of being the first time that gas warfare was used on a large scale. When the wind was just right, 200 tons of heavy, green and yellow chlorine gas were released, and the Allies watched in confusion as the wall of green gas drifted towards them. The trenches were quickly emptied, and hundreds were left dead. The allies responded quickly and while the situation was desperate for a while, they were able to re-secure the salient.

Up until now the Germans were fighting a two front war but in March of 1918, they signed a truce with Russia. Even before the truce was signed, a million German troops were transferred from the Russian front line to the western front. Many of them to Ieper. This was the beginning of what the Germans called the Spring Offensive.

In response to the German Spring offensive, and largely because of their success at hill 70, the Canadians were sent to Ieper to save the day. By this time the City of Ieper was already in ruins.

The third battle of Ieper is arguably the worst battle in all of World War One. The objective was to take the city of Passchendaele which is why this battle is often referred to as the battle of Passchendaele.

After two weeks of heavy shelling to “soften the enemy”, the British (including the Canadians) and French launched their attack on July 31, 1917. Unfortunately, it started to rain on the same day and the rain continued for three weeks. This is what James had to march through and he carried his big gun and headed up the hill.

The soldiers were often in mud up to their waste and if they ever happened to find themselves in a shell hole, they couldn’t get out without the help of another soldier lowering his rifle into the hole to give the poor soldier something to grab onto. Many of the deaths in this battle were from drowning in mud. The battle was often referred to as a battle of mud and blood. The allies lost a quarter of a million soldiers in this attack and as bad as it was for the Allies, it was just as bad for the Germans. Their losses were similar.

One of the museums had quotes from soldiers who served in Passchendaele and one of the quotes read, “I spent thirty-one months in France and Belgium and I would do all the rest over again rather than those six weeks at Passchendaele.”

Ernest Black

After the loss of half a million human beings, the allies advanced about five miles.

The Canadians lost more than 4,000 men with 12,000 wounded. To keep track of James’ odds of survival, he had a 4% chance of dying in this battle and a 12% chance of being wounded. Overall, he had a 31% chance of being dead or wounded. If he had three friends, one of them would have been gone.

When we arrived at Ieper on the evening of Feb 22, 2024, the city was beautiful and showed no signs of a battle. After the war, Winston Churchill tried to have the destroyed city remain as it was, as a memorial to the evils of war, but the citizens of Ieper would have none of it. They wanted their home back. They rebuilt the city exactly as it was. It amazes me how it could have been done, these cities are very ornate and detailed, but they have reproduced it all. You would never know what the city was like after the war but a few people left a few remnants of the disaster.

Our first stop was to the cemetery where John McCrae is buried. John McCrae is the man who wrote the famous poem, “In Flanders Field”.

He wrote this poem while a soldier at Ieper and was killed shortly after he wrote it. In case you’re unfamiliar with the poem it goes as follows:

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Our next stop was the grand market in Ieper. It is fascinating what they do for the handicapped in Europe. This little model of the “Cloth Hall” sitting in front the actual cloth hall is for blind people so they can get an idea of what the building looks like. 

The cloth hall was originally the headquarters and a trading place for cloth merchants during medieval times. It was first built 1200 and 1300.

Today the cloth hall contains a couple of museums which were quite amazing. Perhaps my favorite item in the museum was this section cut from the trunk of a fallen tree. The black marks in the cut section are bullets from WW1.

Near the city of Passchendaele is a small memorial to Canada as a tribute to their major contribution to the battle.

It was late so after grabbing a waffle we headed to our bnb. It was a small but amazing little loft that the owners built above their garage. As cute as it was though, the fact that the toilet is separated from the main room by a short wall took some getting used to. Alex enjoyed this fact far too much.

By coincidence, our B&B was on Patricia Street. That thrilled us because the regiment that James was in was the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. Our hosts found that fascinating and told us about a memorial to the Princess Pat’s just a couple of hundred yards from their house at the end of the street.

On Friday morning, Feb 23 we headed to the Passchendaele museum. It was also quite amazing. I couldn’t possibly share everything we saw there but here are a few samples.

A beautiful old manor house had been converted into the museum.

These artillery shells look like a work of art but in reality, these are their original colors. Each shell is color coated to make it clear what kind of shell it is. Some contain poisonous gas, others, throw out lead shot and others just exploded.

At the end of the tour you head outside through a series of trenches. The trenches are made exactly how a typical trench at the time would have been. This is a German trench which typically used woven sticks to hold up the sides.

The Allies used corrugated steel and sandbags to support the walls. The boards at the bottom were called “duck walks” and they were an attempt to keep your feet dry.

And finally, the bathrooms. If our BnB wasn’t enough, the museum bathrooms were a further reminder that Europeans have a different level of modesty than Americans. This bathroom was used by both men and women and the door was never closed. You had no privacy when relieving yourself.

Our hosts told us that when they first bought their little farm, one of their neighbors told them about what life was like right after the war. Their house had survived all the shelling, but they of course had no electricity or running water. There was a shell hole just outside their house, so they used this new “pond” for all their water needs including drinking and cooking. It wasn’t until a few years later when the water dried up during a dry spell that they found a body at the bottom of the shell hole.

The third battle of Ieper had more missing soldiers than just about any other battle in Europe. Mostly because so many of the bodies were lost in the mud but also because the front lines moved a lot. The British would gain a few miles and then they would stop and bury their dead. The Germans would then push the British back and in so doing they would obliterate any signs of the cemetery and those soldiers buried there so now we have an entire cemetery with no way of finding them.

As we were driving from place to place and looked at the fields, it wasn’t hard to imagine just how tough it would have been for the soldiers. I can hardly imagine walking across this muddy field. Just imagine how much worse it would have been after being shot up by artillery.

We then visited the Tyne Cot cemetery. The Tyne Cot cemetery was created after one of the earlier battles of Ieper but was greatly enlarged after the third battle. To keep the whole experience authentic, it rained the entire time we were in Ieper. Actually, it rained the entire time we were in Europe, but it rained especially hard while we were in Ieper. In an attempt to make the visit authentic, Mom decided to roll in the mud while we were at Tyne Cot. There was a small slope in one part of the cemetery and mom slipped and slid down the slope. Other than a bruise on her tail bone she was not hurt. It was a job cleaning her coat though.

Just before we left on this trip, mom learned that Nana had two relatives at Tyne Cot. The body of Nana’s Great Grandpa Bernard Kerr was never found and his name is on the wall at Tyne Cot and her Uncle Albert Edward England is buried there.

Bernard Kerr died on April 12, 1918 and her uncle Albert England died on November 6, 1917. It is weird to think that these guys were there the same time as James Shaw was. Maybe they knew each other. They would never have imagined that their grandchildren would have met and married each other.

The cemetery was beautiful and kept up well.

Every single day at 8:00 the city of Ieper has a short service to remember those who fell in defense of their city. They call it “The Last Post”. As part of the “Last Post”, anyone can lay a wreath at the Menin Gates. Mom wanted to do this for her Great Grandpa so Friday night she prepared this wreath and off we went to watch “The Last Post”.

The Menin Gate is being renovated so they have the entire front of it covered with this sheet. It is a poor substitute for the real gate but the ceremony was quite amazing.

Mom wasn’t quite sure when she should lay the wreath so she asked a security guard what she should do and he took her right to the front. You can see her in this picture if you look for a heavy red plaid coat. She was cold so she was wearing Alex’s coat.

They had a high school choir sing and then two trumpeters came out and played the last post. It was quite solem and a great experience. I think that might be moms wreath in the to picture.

Hill 70

Thursday, February 22, 2024

When we were done at Vimy Ridge we continued on to Ypres. Ypres was near one of the areas where I served on my mission and I just can’t say the name of the city in English. It will always be Ieper to me. When I was here on my mission Ieper was actually spelled Ijper. In old Dutch they used to have a letter which looked like a y with two dots over it. Once typewriters came along they didn’t have that letter so they decided to type it using an ij together which kind of looks like a y with two dots over it. For the city of Ieper, the English decided to just go with a y to get Ypres and the Flemish decided to just go with Ieper since that is how it is pronounced in Dutch anyway.

On our way to Ieper (I’m going with the modern Flemish spelling) we stopped at hill 70. This was James second battle. After the Canadians success (but a loss for the greater battle) in the battle of Vimy ridge, Arthur Currie was put in charge of the Canadian Army. Arthur was the guy in charge of the first Canadian division. While he didn’t have a ton of battle experience, he was a brilliant man and not scared of saying what he believed.

The biggest difference he made was he kept the Canadians together. With the loss of so many troops, the British wanted to split the Canadians up and use them to strengthen other battalions, but Arthur would have none of it. He figured that his men had now fought together and had formed a bond between the men that can’t be forged in any other way. He also argued that they knew how each other fought and that also gave them extra strength. As the war progressed, he was proven correct, and the reputation of the Canadians as a superior army continued to grow.

For those (like me) who don’t know what a salient is, it is when a line surrounds an area on three sides.

At Ieper, the allied forces had pushed back the German lines enough to form what they now referred to as the Ieper Salient. The Germans were trying hard to close the salient and the Allies were doing their best to take advantage of it.

Hill 70 was just south of the Ieper salient, so the Canadians were told to go take hill 70 to draw German troops away from Ieper. Actually, the Canadians were told to take the city of Lens but Arthur told them that would be a waste of time. Hill 70 was a high point and as long as the Germans controlled it, they could control anything nearby. He finally convinced them to let him take Hill 70 instead of Lens.

The battle of hill 70 was taken by the Canadians without the help of any other forces. It was a success that they shared with nobody else.

The Canadians attacked hill 70 on August 15, 1917 with 100,000 troops and then held off twenty-one German counter attacks. They lost 9,000 soldiers (1,556 died) but took out 25,000 Germans. That means that he had a 1.6% chance of dying in this offensive.

If we’re keeping track (and I am), James had a 3.6% chance of dying a Vimy Ridge and 1.6% of dying here so at this point in his career as a soldier he had a 5.1% chance of dying.

If we’re talking about being wounded, he had a 7.4% chance of being wounded on Hill 70 and a 7.0% chance of being wounded at Vimy Ridge so overall he had a 13.9% chance of being wounded. Adding it all up, the odds of him still standing at this point were 82%. That’s crazy, he had a 1 in 5 chance of being dead or wounded after only two battles. If he had five friends, one of them was gone.

The monument at Hill 70 was very simple but quite nice. I thought it was very well done for such a small town. This is what they had on top of the hill.

Vimy Ridge

Thursday February 22, 2024

On the morning of February 22, we got up, ate breakfast, took one last trip through the Small Market of Arras, and then headed north to the City of Ypres. On the way to Ypres we stopped at Vimy Ridge.

As long as I can remember, I have always heard about “The Battle of Vimy Ridge”, but it wasn’t until we went on this trip that I realized that most Americans haven’t heard of it. I now realize that while the battle of Vimy ridge was pivotal in the war and it was the battle that brought Canada to significance and gave them a seat at the planning table for how the war was prosecuted, it was just another ugly battle for most Americans who couldn’t tell you the name of any battle in World Ward One. It was the battle that brought the Canadians into their own. 

Up until this point, Lisa, Alex and I were humbled and affected by the destruction of the battlegrounds but at Vimy Ridge, this became personal. This is the first battle that James Shaw fought. It was here that he first fired his gun at an enemy; and James had a big gun. He was a Lewis gunner and that also made him a big target for the enemy. As we walked the grounds around the memorial, we walked on the same ground that James walked on. They have a Canadian flag outside the visitors center and that is the exact spot where the troops mustered before they engaged the enemy. We stood exactly where James would have stood. 

There were about 100,000 Canadians who fought at Vimy Ridge and 3,600 of them died in that battle. That means that James had a 3.6% chance of dying. That doesn’t seem too bad but I’d be really worried if someone told me that I had an a 1 in 30 chance of dying today. There were also 7,000 wounded so his odds of being wounded were 7%. The odds of being wounded or dying were over 10%. If he had 10 friends there with him, one of them was wounded or dead by the end of the battle.

Vimy Ridge was part of a larger plan of what was called the “Spring Offensive” that covered a large area along the front running from just north of the Belgium border near the coast, down through half of France towards Paris. The task of taking Vimy Ridge was given to the Canadians who up until now had been just a part of the British army. The Canadians were divided into four divisions and James was a part of the 3rd Division. This was the first time that all four of the Canadian Divisions fought together as a single entity.

In order to get closer to the German trenches, tunnels were dug up to just a few yards from where the Germans were located. We know exactly which tunnel the 3rd Division used to enter the battle. We were able to tour the very same tunnel that James used. Alex could be James except that James wouldn't have had to hunch over like Alex is doing.

At 5:30 in the morning, James ran down this tunnel and exited right next to these German trenches. The sand bags and the boards in the bottom of the trenches are concrete but the trenches are otherwise pretty much how they would have looked on the morning of April 9, 1917. They are the actual original trenches, just restored.

The Canadians led with a heavy artillery barrage just prior to the attack, and at 5:30 in the morning, during all the confusion, the Canadians rose out of the ground right next to these very trenches and attacked. This is a picture of one of the craters from a mine that had been placed under the German trench.

The French army had been trying to take Vimy Ridge for some time. It was a real problem for the Allies since it had such a commanding view of the entire area.

The British commander assigned Vimy Ridge to the Canadians. Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng, the guy in charge of the Canadians, drilled his troops endlessly so that every soldier knew his job perfectly. In most battles, the commanding officers are targeted by the enemy because when they fall the remaining troops fall into disarray. A big part of the Canadians success is that they knew their tasks so well that if their officer fell, they didn’t falter but continued to do their job.

We know exactly where James exited the tunnels, and he would have run up this very hill. The trees have grown since the battle, the original trees were completely obliterated, those shell holes would have been new and a lot more treacherous.

A big reason why the battle of Vimy Ridge is not well known outside of Canada is because the overall offensive failed, but Vimy Ridge was an amazing success. On April 12th, after four days of bloody battle and the loss of 10,000 solders, either killed or wounded, they took Vimy Ridge. One of the few battles to succeed and to the surprise of many. The Canadians suddenly had the admiration and respect of the entire offensive. They were now invited to the planning table.

The death toll would have been much worse, but the Canadians went to great lengths to save the lives of their wounded.

The memorial sits on top of Vimy Ridge and consists of two tall pillars which I’ve always thought was an odd memorial, but when you’re there it gives you a real sense of awe. It has several absolutely gorgeous statues spread around the memorial.

This statue represents “Mother Canada” morning the loss of so many of her sons. It seems appropriate.

The Tunnels of Arras

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

On February 21, we woke up in the City of Arras and found ourselves in a very beautiful apartment.

The first tunnels in Arras were dug shortly after the time of Christ, when the local population realized that the chalk rock about six feet beneath the ground was easy to cut and made great structural material. As a side note, these local people were actually Flemish but that is a different story.

As the city grew, they decided that it wasn’t all that smart to dig these huge caverns below your city, so they started a new quarry outside the city walls. As the city continued to grow, they continued to move the quarries. One of these quarries was the Wellington Quarry and that is where we went for our tour.

When the Allies moved into town during WW1, they realized that these tunnels would be great bomb shelters and some of the tunnels already lead most of the way to the German trenches. They conscripted miners, who mostly came from New Zealand, to connect the tunnels and continue them on to the German front.

The tunnels were amazing. They had built walkways, and the entire area was lit so we could see the work that had been done. The tour projected images on the stone walls which made for a poor image, but the effect was amazing.

Since the maze of tunnels was so vast and confusing, getting lost was a real risk. To help navigate, each support pillar was given a number. If you look carefully at this picture, you can see a #3 written on this pillar. They have maps with all the pillars and exits marked.

In the picture before the above picture, you can see stairs leading up to exit #10. On the walls they have projected images of soldiers running up the stairs. This tunnel led right to the German front line and the exit opened up yards from the Germans. In the middle of the night the soldiers ran up the stairs and attacked the Germans catching them completely off guard.

During this time, everyone (not just the soldiers) lived in the tunnels. The Germans continually shelled the city, and no one was safe so everyone who hadn’t left town, lived in the tunnels. They had stores, beds, kitchens, and even church, all in the tunnels.

And then, during the night, when the shelling stopped, everyone came to the surface and the city thrived with a vibrant nightlife of dancing and the markets all opened.

After touring the Wellington tunnels we took a self-guided walking tour of the city. We saw some pretty amazing things.

This picture of me and Alex is on the grounds of a big, beautiful cathedral.

Here are the three of us in the courtyard of an old convent. It is now a bunch of offices, but the exterior of the building has been preserved.

The older parts of this city were not made for people like me.

This is the grand market. Our room was in one of the buildings in the middle of the far-right side. Do you see that black structure in the middle of the parking lot? That is an elevator and a set of stairs leading down to underground parking.

Our room was on the top floor of the building painted blue.

After our self-guided tour, we decided to check out the clock tower.

Of course, my greatest interest was trying to figure out how all the internal mechanisms worked.

Once we got to the top of the tower we could walk around the outside of the tower. The views were amazing but boy was it windy. You can see the Grand Market in this picture.

The hands on the clock were so close I could have touched them if some spoil sport hadn’t installed the plexiglass shield to prevent people like me from damaging the clock hands.

Directly below the clock tower is the Little Market. It is surrounded by a bunch of cool little shops.

After the clock tower, we decided to take a tour of the tunnels below the city itself. At one time these tunnels were all connected, but since WW1 some have collapsed, and it is no longer possible to walk them from downtown Arras to the Waverly tunnels.

These tunnels are right below the city and so they were the original ones made during the Middle Ages and earlier. Over the years, merchants have fixed them up and used them for storing inventory and wine. 

This picture is taken looking straight up. That is a trap door that opens into a shop on the small market.

There are several entrances into the city above us.

For the tourists, they had several lights illuminating features that they found interesting. I don’t remember exactly what this light was supposed to illuminate. It may have been a storage area or something, but I found it fascinating that plants could grow thirty feet below ground just from a light that is on for a few hours every day. Nature is amazing.

Once again, these tunnels were not made for people like me.