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REVIEW BY PATRICK MERCER
Stand on any part of the battlefield of Passchendaele and you will be struck by how unremarkable it looks. Gentle slopes are topped by woods, while hedges, villages, and small towns pepper the area, which is easily flooded by streams and becks. There is one outstanding feature, however: the handful of concrete blockhouses that still exist, more than a century after the end of the First World War.
These crumbling strongpoints hint at the sheer numbers of troops who struggled over this compact battlefield during the Third Battle of Ypres between July and November 1917. Where one might expect a company to deploy, a brigade was used, or a division rather than a battalion. But, despite the preponderance of manpower and artillery, the success of manoeuvres and breakthroughs were measured in yards rather than miles.
Into this new type of war were thrust commanders who had no experience of such things. Nor could they have. In its title, Nicholas Ridley’s Far from Suitable? Haig, Gough and Passchendaele: a reappraisal names two of the crucial architects of what was described by the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart as a campaign ‘so fruitless in its results, so depressing… a synonym for failure – a name black bordered in the records of the British Army’.
Sir Douglas Haig was the Commander-in-Chief of the Passchendaele campaign, while General Sir Hubert Gough, commander of Fifth Army, was charged initially with its execution. There were other officers ‘with sufficient authority for planning the battle or directing its course’, the author tells us. But not that much went to plan.
The epithet ‘far from suitable’ comes from a 1946 assessment of the battle and refers squarely to Gough. Most modern criticism falls squarely on his shoulders – yet when General Sir Herbert Plumer took over from him in late August, the plan still failed. There’s a danger in examining this period, as Ridley points out, of unrealistic expectations from officers used to horse and veldt, and to flanking and exploitation over grand distances, but not to the unprecedentedly bloody grind of industrial warfare in an area as compact as the fields of Passchendaele.
The author dissects Gough’s background, pointing out that he came from a deeply distinguished military family in which it sometimes seems easier to find a member with a Victoria Cross rather than without one. Gough’s own dash as a cavalry commander in South Africa, and then his vainglorious behaviour during the stain of the Curragh Mutiny in Ireland in early 1914, underlines the later observations about his ‘impatience, impetuosity, and hustle’. An excellent, searching assessment of Gough is fundamental to the rest of Ridley’s thesis.
But this splendid piece of work is not simply another narrative of Passchendaele that examines move, barrage, and counter-move. It is a dissection of the commanders’ motives, misapprehensions, and recklessness. To my mind, the best part is the examination of Haig’s plan for the battle, hatched as early as Christmas 1915. With the relative success in the summer of 1917 of the battles of Arras and Messines, which buoyed Haig’s optimism, this plan inexorably became an obsession.
Ridley’s clever approach is to focus on the first month of the campaign, which failed to achieve – or even come close to achieving – the objectives set for the first day. Those objectives were still being pursued in November, by which time the fighting was taking place in horrendous conditions of rain and mud, making any kind of significant advancement even more difficult than it was initially.
Passchendaele continues to evoke strong memories. Official histories judge it as a qualified success, while popular memory remembers it as an unqualified failure. This continuing interest is fed by mostly hysterical or simply dull assessments.
Ridley’s work is neither. Instead, he takes the reader into the minds of the commanders and expertly reveals the pressures and hopes that affected their many fatal decisions.
Far from Suitable? Haig, Gough and Passchendaele: A reappraisal
Nicholas Ridley
Helion Books, hbk, 314pp (£29.95)
ISBN 978-1915113658
