The History of the 36th (Ulster) Division

by Cyril Falls

This action was the only attack made by the 36th Division which suffered complete reverse, for that on the Ancre had been a local victory, of which the fruits were lost through no fault of its troops. It is important to consider what were its causes and what its lessons.

Many of the former will have become apparent in the course of this sketch of the battle and of the days preceding. They may be summarized as, firstly, exhaustion and attrition of units; secondly, weather; thirdly, lack of essential preparation.

The Division had been holding the line for thirteen days. Owing to the dreadful state of the trenches and the heaviness of the German shell-fire, constant reliefs had been necessary. From the "resting" battalions parties totalling sometimes as much as a thousand men a day had been furnished for work on forward areas under constant fire from artillery of the highest calibres. Apart from the question of the huge losses, there were no troops really fit or in a normal state of efficiency when the day of the assault arrived. The personal equation had been overlooked, with disastrous results. The water-logged condition of the ground was another prominent factor. What it was only those who have seen the Flanders plain strewn with shell-holes, sometimes almost lip to lip, can imagine.

But it was the machine-guns in the "pill-boxes," and the excellent fashion in which they were defended, that were by far the most fatal obstacles. The new German methods of defence in depth depended, in Flanders, upon the concrete structures built in and around the foundations of the destroyed farms with which that countryside is studded. They served their purpose admirably. Few that were captured by us were found to have been damaged by artillery. The British heavy artillery was firing from a salient, instead of, as at Messines, upon a salient. It had against it a far greater weight of German metal than in that battle, and suffered far more heavily from counter-battery. The German artillery dominated ours in the early stages of the battle, certainly in position, probably also in actual gun-power. The observation of the latter was almost worthless. And where any could be obtained it was well-nigh impossible to identify the "pill-boxes" from map to ground. An instance given by the G.O.C. 109th Brigade, General Ricardo, is illuminating. A few days prior to the attack he arranged with a liaison officer from the Corps Heavy Artillery a series of three-minute bombardments of certain strong points, with pauses between, so that it should be clear to the observers exactly which was being shelled, to correct the many various readings of maps and photographs. In several cases, he states, the concentration, nominally upon one strong point, covered many hundred yards. The same considerations applied to the cutting of wire, not nearly so effective as at Messines, through no fault of the gunners of the Division and of the batteries working beside them.

The "pill-boxes," which were mainly responsible for the losses of the troops in the attack of July the 31st, were standing intact and garrisoned on the 16th of August. The claims of counter-battery sometimes prevented demands for re-bombardment being fully met.

"We felt," said a distinguished officer after the action, "that the Battle of Messines was won at Zero, and that the Battle of Ypres was lost long before it." In the vast armies of the late war the Army Commander, and even the Corps Commander, was a shadowy personage, not alone to the private soldier, but to the Colonel commanding a battalion in the trenches or a brigade of artillery behind them. But the Second Army and the IX. Corps, under the orders of which the 36th Division fought at Messines, had a subtle power of making their presence felt. The system of liaison was practised by the Second Army as in no other. General Harington's car stopped at every door, and the cheerful young staff officers, who knew every communication trench on the Army front, who drank with company commanders in their front-line dug-outs before coming back to tea with a Brigadier, or with General Nugent at his Headquarters, formed a very real link between the Higher Command and the troops. The private soldier knew the Army Commander and his eyeglass as he knew no Corps Commander under whom he fought. His personality was a real accretion of strength. The difficulties at Ypres were infinitely greater than at Messines; that everyone recognised. But in the former case they did not appear to be met with quite the precision, care, and forethought of the latter. The private soldier felt a difference. He may have been unfair in his estimate, but that estimate was none the less of importance. For what the private soldier felt had a marked effect upon what the private soldier, the only ultimate winner of battles, accomplished.

Of the lessons the most obvious was that the barrage must be slower and of greater depth. General Nugent, in notes written after the battle as a comment upon captured orders of the Fourth German Army, made some interesting suggestions in this regard. He stated in the first case that the Germans could now no longer shell the area over which our troops were advancing, since their own troops were distributed in depth upon it. However much damage their barrage did to our supports, it did little or none to the leading troops. It was, however, more important to facilitate the advance of the latter than to protect the rear area during an attack. If both could not be accomplished, the artillery covering the front of assault should be strengthened at the expense of counter-battery groups. The creeping barrage, he suggested, might be slightly reduced to one 18-pounder per twenty-five yards, and augmented by a sweeping barrage, concentrated to cover about ten yards a gun, each group sweeping right and left along the front allotted to it, with a higher burst and greater searching effect upon shell-holes. The pace of the creeping barrage must be reduced, and there must be more frequent pauses. During these the sweeping barrage and a 60-pounder barrage in front of it might sweep and search. He also made some remarks upon the possibility of control of the barrage by the infantry, the advantages of which are too obvious to merit discussion, and the difficulties of which are equally apparent.

But the most interesting of General Nugent's suggestions were with regard to the formations of the infantry. "With the adoption," he wrote, "of a new form of German defensive tactics, consisting of small parties dotted about a wide area, the disadvantages of long lines of attack are that lines have small manœuvring capacity and lack depth. It is for consideration whether mobile company columns echeloned in depth on a narrow front, each a self-contained tactical unit with a machine-gun and trench mortar, each operating within an allotted zone, would not be a more suitable tactical formation than the present system, which breaks up under machine-gun fire and in badly shelled ground into a number of isolated groups without cohesion or leaders."

It is to be noted that when, on September the 20th, the 9th (Scottish) Division attacked at Frezenberg, the creeping barrage advanced the first two hundred yards in eight minutes; then slowed to a hundred yards in six minutes; halted on the first objective—four to five hundred yards—no less than an hour, and went forward again at the snail pace of a hundred yards in eight minutes. As regards the infantry, the attack was carried out by lines of sections in file at about twenty yards' interval. The system of "leap-frogging" was also employed instead of special groups for "mopping up." This attack was a complete success.[40]