Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Battle of Passchendaele About this episode In partnership with Findmypast, Dan narrates the extraordinary story of the Western Front at its most unforgiving. Passchendaele became a byword for the futility, endurance and industrialised slaughter of the First World War.
In a battle that lasted from July to November 1917, men, horses and equipment trudged through a swampy moonscape of shell holes in an attempt to crack the German line in Flanders. It became a relentless, attritional push along a low ridge east of Ypres through constant rain, gas attacks and hurricane barrages.
Genealogist and specialist researcher for Findmypast, Jen Baldwin, joins Dan to share incredible details about what Passchendeale was really like for the men who were there through the records, newspaper accounts and diaries left by the men in the Findmypast archives.
You too can search the incredible records in the Findmypast archive to piece together your own family’s forgotten heroes. To mark Remembrance Day, millions of military records are completely free to access and explore from 7th -13th November. Visit findmypast.co.uk/remembrance https://www.findmypast.co.uk/remembrance?utm_source=history-hit&utm_medium=passchendaele-podcast-description&utm_campaign=remembranceto start delving into your family’s war stories.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges, Jen Baldwin, and edited by Dougal Patmore.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:31 Dan Snow? In the summer of 1917, young men from cities and towns and villages across Britain and its massive empire found themselves waiting, as soldiers are wont to do, in trenches around the city of Ypres in Belgium. There was a massive attack in the offing, and these young men would fight, and many would die, as soldiers are wont to do.
1:03 Dan Snow? Some carried postcards from home, pictures of loved ones, a small cake baked by a mother or sister. The men joked with one another, they lit cigarettes in the drizzle, they sure tried not to think about what the next whistle would mean.
1:26 Dan Snow? The battle that followed was the Third Battle of Ypres. We call it Passchendaele today. It opened on the morning of the 31st of July 1917, when British and Imperial forces, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and others, with support from the French, attacked the German army. The main assault went in after about two weeks of bombardment, more than 4 million shells were fired. It's very difficult for me to describe the landscape that they advanced over, and it's hard sometimes to even call it landscape. Even before the hundreds and thousands of tonnes of explosives that had been poured onto that ground that summer, that terrain was smashed, it was devastated, it was dead.
2:14 Dan Snow? The landscape in that part of Belgium has always been a liminal space on the edge of Europe. For centuries, the sea and the land have battled for supremacy and fought themselves to a swampy stalemate. In more recent centuries, clever human engineers have drained it. But what human hands can build and dig out, they can certainly destroy. In 1914, in 1915 and 16, explosives, shovels and the boots of millions of men had undone the work of those drainage engineers. Ditches were filled in with rubble, sluice gates smashed, dikes blown to pieces. The ground had reverted into a swamp, a sea of mud, punctuated by mounds of barbed wire
2:58 Dan Snow? and grotesque limbs of the unburied dead from previous assaults.
3:08 Dan Snow? The Battle of Passchendaele lasted from the end of July to the middle of November. And it really was the Western Front at its most unforgiving. It's the kind of Western Front that you've seen in the movies. Men and guns and horses, even tanks, were swallowed up in a moonscape of shell holes and liquid mud, while all the time artillery thundered, day and night. The intention, the hope, had been to perhaps crack the German line in Flanders, this top end of the Western Front, force the Germans to send in reserves of men they didn't really have, so grind down those reserves, push forward, threaten the U-boats, which were based along the coast. But actually, it just became a relentless, attritional wrestling match
3:52 Dan Snow? along a low ridge to the east of Ypres.
3:59 Dan Snow? All that high-fluting geo-strategy was forgotten as the men slogged it out through rain, in clouds of gas, amidst concrete pillboxes. When Canadian troops finally took the ruined village of Passchendaele in early November, well, the ridge was won, it was a success. But it was at a cost so stark that Passchendaele has become a byword for futility, for human endurance, for industrial slaughter of total war.
4:39 Dan Snow? As with so many battles in the First World War, the casualty figures are hard to comprehend. But each of those digits, each of those individuals was a man with a family, friends and a community. Each of them left a gaping hole when he didn't return home.
4:55 Dan Snow? Today, over 100 years later, we're going to be piecing together the stories of some of those men who gave their lives in the First World War. In today's episode, we're going to tell the story of the Battle of Passchendaele as it happened, and we're going to be looking at the testimonies and records that have been found in the Find My Past Military Archives. The person who's done this incredible research is the genealogist and research specialist for Find My Past, Jen Baldwin. She has painstakingly shifted through documents, newspaper tippings and diaries to piece together the human stories to make sure they are not forgotten. And if you want to uncover your own family connections to the Great War, findmypast.co.uk is the place to go. Their detail-rich records and newspaper archives and family tree-building
5:37 Dan Snow? features help you delve deeper into your ancestors' lives to really understand their stories and the world they lived in. Just a warning before we proceed, some of this stuff, some of this testimony is pretty harrowing. There are detailed accounts of human suffering here, so proceed with caution. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. This is The Battle of Passchendaele.
6:10 Dan Snow? Hindsight is a wonderful thing. After the monstrosity of the First World War, people engaged in a huge round of trying to explain, to vindicate, to blame, to wriggle out of it. In 1934, there was a particular bout of hindsight and the argument that it always brings. The British people became focused on a battle that had taken place in the summer of 1917 around Ypres, and it was a battle so nightmarish and bloody that it reignited discussions in pubs and in newspaper columns and even in the Houses of Parliament almost 20 years later. These debates were sparked by the publication of the former Prime Minister David Lloyd George's memoir, in which remarkably, he condemned the Passchendaele offensive as a disaster.
6:56 Dan Snow? He said he regretted it during his time in office, and he devoted huge chunks of his book to explaining how he'd attempted to stop the offensive but to no avail. He wrote, "Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of the war, the battle which, with the Somme and Verdun, will always rank as the most gigantic, tenacious, grim, futile and bloody fights ever waged in the history of war." Strong words there from my great-great-grandfather, my great-great-tide, as they say in North Wales. I'm one of his many descendants. At the time of the battle, though, back in 1917, the public didn't know the Prime Minister harbored these reservations, and they really didn't know much about what was going on at Passchendaele. The government, the military had to censor the horror of those three months.
7:40 Dan Snow? The details were just too grisly, too depressing, and it was worried that they might just simply destroy the national will to go on. Instead, newspapers and communiques gave coverage that was optimistic and emphasized progress and heroism, rather than talk about the horrific conditions. In the wake of Lloyd George's memoir, a national newspaper ran a submission from an anonymous soldier who wanted to share with the nation his experience of the Battle of Passchendaele. And by doing so, he demonstrated considerable bravery once again. So through this episode, as we take you through the battle, you'll hear details of that testimony brought to life by the wonderful Martin Esposito. The anonymous submission starts.
8:21 Speaker 01 It happened to be my misfortune to be in the salient on the day we took Passchendaele. And the memory of that day and those which preceded and followed it will always be with me.
8:35 Speaker 01 There were days such as I wished no man to see again, lived in conditions of hardship and terror such as no man should ever again be asked to face.
8:49 Speaker 01 I was with the eighteen-pounder guns in positions some 2,000 yards behind the front line. Probably we faced, day after day, a greater concentration of shell fire than the infantry did, and we were in the line not for three days, but for weeks on end without relief.
9:10 Speaker 01 The time we spent in front of Passchendaele was sheer unmitigated hell.
9:20 Dan Snow? In the summer of 1917, Field Marshal Haig, who was the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium, he wanted to strike a mighty blow against the tiring Germans. He wanted to wear down their manpower even further, that just meant kill and wound more Germans than they could kill and wound of us. He also wanted to shore up the tenuous hold of the Allies on the city of Ypres by securing the Guevelles to Passchendaele Ridge. He was optimistic, oh, Haig was often optimistic, that the Allies would be able to push even further, they'd be able to push along the Belgian coast, perhaps take hold of some of those ports and stop German U-boats operating out of them, relieve the pressure on British imports, on British shipping.
10:01 Dan Snow? Now, to be fair to Haig, though, determined attempts had been made to learn the bitter lessons from the Battle of Somme the previous year. He was more cautious in his objectives. He sought a step-by-step, it's called a bite-and-hold strategy. There'd be a creeping barrage, this is a massive artillery fire to subdue the enemy, which moves forward, the targets slowly extend away from the guns, and behind that moving curtain of flame and explosives, the infantry advance. They then take an objective, everyone stops, you dig in, and then the inevitable German counter-attack is repelled by the infantry with their weapons, but also by the artillery, which knows exactly where to fire to break up this German advance. It's
10:45 Dan Snow? all carefully pre-programmed. Then, the process starts again. The infantry training manual was rewritten after the Battle of Somme to absorb the lessons. Tanks had been trialled at the Somme, and Haig wanted to deploy large numbers of those in the summer of 1917. The problem was that the Germans had been learning too. So Haig's forces would be facing probably the strongest offensive line in history. Gone were the long lines of trenches. Instead, the battlefield looked very different. There'd be concrete pillboxes, deep bunkers, machine-gun nests, a web of barbed wire that channeled attackers into killing zones. Vast numbers of heavy guns, which were pre-sighted, so they're pre-programmed if you like, they
11:29 Dan Snow? would unleash unspeakable volumes of high explosives, or gas, poison gas, directly into the line of the British attack, into these killing zones where they knew the British would be. As I've already said, by July 1917, the battlefield was a viscous bog where men and horses and guns and tanks just sink into the quagmire. Any trees, well, that's laughable. The trees have been stripped bare by shell fire. You might get a few sort of blackened stumps that survive, the odd skeleton on the horizon. But any cover was gone. Along the line, they were forced to use miles and miles of duckboards. These are just wooden planks, wooden walkways. They'd been laid down and they were essential. They're the only way of moving around the battlefield. People could walk along them,
12:13 Dan Snow? machinery, horses. Stepping off that duckboard was extremely dangerous. You could go down to your waist or even worse. And as a result, movement was really complicated and arduous and slow. And particularly, evacuating the wounded could take hours, if not days.
12:28 Dan Snow? The offensive opens on the 31st of July. There's a colossal bombardment. The British, Imperial troops and some French troops advance forward on a broad front. They took parts of the Pilchalm Ridge and Steenbeck, but as dangerous for the Germans was the rain. The rain started falling almost at once and then the German counterattacks began to bite as well. Among those advancing was Private James Morby of the Wiltshire Regiment. He was 19 years old. He was actually from Buckinghamshire. And he was now marching out into the hellscape that was No Man's Land. Jen, you've been looking into the story of Private James Morby through the Find My Past records. What have you learned about, tell me about who he was and I guess, well, his life before the war?
13:08 Speaker 02 He was 19 when he joined up and fought in France. He's from Buckinghamshire. He's the youngest son of William and Matilda Morby. And when I was researching James and his family, actually, what I found is you could really trace the Morby family through census records on Find My Past, decade after decade. So they're living on Spencer Street in Stantonbury. You see the parents there, William and Matilda, all the children listed together. And then in a very kind of slow and heartbreaking way, as the war unfolds, their names start to reappear in military records and memorials. You just kind of watch this entire family unravel in the documents. But at the same time, that's the power of these records. They don't just give us facts. They show us how the war reached into these ordinary homes.
13:52 Dan Snow? He was so young. He was a teenager when he went to war. What do we know about him, well, on the first day of Passchendaele?
14:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, so he's injured on the first day of Passchendaele, and it's actually pretty tragic. So his attack really starts in kind of a moment of promise. He is pushing forward, he gains ground along Pilcom Ridge with his unit. Of course, the rains start, as we know, and so the shell holes are filling with water. All of this kind of happening in a short period of time. That that hope turns quickly into struggle. But James himself was in a somewhat unique situation, I think mentally and emotionally. His family had already suffered in this same field of battle. One of his brothers was killed earlier in the war at Ypres. His other brother was wounded at the first battle of Ypres and ended up with his leg amputated.
14:44 Speaker 02 So here's James now with the Wiltchers pushing forward in a no man's land, probably knowing full well that his brother was lost here, that his other brother was injured. So you kind of wonder how much that history impacted his mental and emotional status on that day. And there's all sorts of ways you can think of that, right? He might have been out to avenge his brother's death. He might have just been quite sad or not quite focused. There's all of those kind of elements built into his wartime story, but you wouldn't understand that just from military records alone, right? You have to use the full collection of historical records available to us on Fund My Past to really understand that concept in that context.
15:21 Dan Snow? And actually, we've got a quote here from our anonymous gunner from his newspaper submission. He describes what James experienced.
15:28 Speaker 01 We made our wagon lines in what had presumably once been a field, but was now quagmire. The horses stood up to their hocks in mud. The guns were buried to the hubs in it. And we simply spread our ground sheets on the mud and slept there. At least, we would have slept, but shells began to pour into the camp. We could do nothing but crouch close to the ground and hope the next one wouldn't reach us.
15:57 Dan Snow? He's wounded but survives?
15:58 Speaker 02 He actually passes away a couple of days later. So he ultimately is killed through his injuries.
16:03 Dan Snow? So the family lost not one, but two of their boys in that battlefield in Flanders.
16:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, and the tragedy of that being a couple of years apart, knowing that you're sending your sons to the same battlefield kind of repeatedly has to be, as a parent, I'm not sure that I can really comprehend what that would have felt like or that experience would have been like.
16:24 Dan Snow? Was he taken back to dressing station? So was he properly buried or is he missing?
16:28 Speaker 02 He's actually missing. He's one of the more than 54,000 men that are commemorated on the Men in Gate. So most of those men have no known grave. And of course, each evening today, the last post still stands beneath its arches. So this daily act of remembrance for men like James, who never came home.
16:46 Dan Snow? It's one of the most moving sort of historical experiences, if you like, that you can have. So I highly recommend going to Ypres and standing at the Men in Gate. They do it every night. It's a very special place indeed. Huge credit to the local people who keep up that tradition. Do we know what the impact on the family was?
17:01 Speaker 02 We know that, just like so many other families, they just kind of had to keep marching forward, right? So the brother who has his leg amputated, of course, comes home, continues to live out his life. We never found any evidence of his marriage or any children. The parents continue their life, just kind of work and live through the rest of their life and the family continues on. But that process of mourning and grieving, I'm sure is something that was with them for the rest of their life. And of course, that constant reminder in the brother, because he's had his leg amputated and his life has completely changed as a survivor of the war. There's no escaping this battle or this field in France for this family.
17:43 Dan Snow? Tell me about Private Stanley Toya. That's been one you've been looking at.
17:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, Stanley is quite interesting. He is 27. His impact actually is felt on the 3rd of August, 1917. That's actually when he dies. It's another one who passes away a couple of days after his injuries. He's from Luton in Bedfordshire. And like so many in his town, he works in the straw hat trade before the war. His father Alfred was a hat blocker, his mother Martha, a straw hat sewer. Stanley joins the Lincolnshire Regiment in 1916, so he leaves behind, of course, his work, his family, but also his cycling club in Luton, which is one of those interesting little details that the newspapers on fun my past tell us that we wouldn't otherwise know about. So on the first day of battle, a shell explodes in the trench beside him. He was mortally wounded. He dies on the 3rd of August.
18:30 Speaker 02 His injuries linger for just over three days, and his mother later receives a small pension as his dependent, which is one of the ways in which military records help us understand the full story because, of course, the military record process doesn't stop at his death. There's actually pension records that go on for several more months, so we can understand a little bit more of the impact of his death on the family.
18:52 Dan Snow? He's mortally wounded. Was he evacuated or was he lying out in no man's land?
18:57 Speaker 02 He was lying out in no man's land. It was, as far as we can tell, quite kind of a lingering three days, probably in a shell hole or in a trench, and of just days of lingering pain. And sadly, his story is quite ordinary, right? But that's precisely why it matters. He's a young man from a family trade swept up by the war, carried off to Belgium, killed in the mud, like so many others.
19:22 Dan Snow? Through August, the offensive was just, well, deeply painful. The British troops repeated their attempts to push forward in appalling mud, but had very limited gains. I think the ground, actually, even more than the Germans, was their worst enemy. Private James Morby and Stanley Toya, of course, sadly did not live to see the hell of those endless wet August days, but our anonymous gunner did. He wrote this.
19:46 Speaker 01 We drew again into action in the mud, facing the Germans with infinite toil over mud to keep our guns supplied with shells. Day and night, there were shells to carry and shells to fire. Our bodies moved automatically. We became dead to our fear and our suffering. Every feeling was submerged in the dull misery of those awful days. Sometimes we could get no water for days at a time and drank the green, gas-inoculated slime from the shell holes. My body was covered with boils and I could scarcely drag one leg before the other, but
20:28 Speaker 01 day and night, there were shells to carry and shells to fire. The toil was incessant.
20:41 Dan Snow? Significant action that month took place around the 16th of August with the Battle of Langermark. Waves of British attackers crashed against concrete pillboxes. They experienced heavy machine gun fire. There were well timed, skillful counter attacks. British gains were small, they were uneven. North of the village, the French actually did better. They battered these blockhouses, they suppressed the fire and they pushed up to the canal junction at Dri Grachten. But the attackers in whole failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough. It was another costly offensive of very little return. It's estimated by the end of August, the Allies had already suffered well over 100,000 casualties, the Germans around the same amount.
21:20 Dan Snow? There were already conservatively hundreds of thousands of men killed, wounded and missing on both sides. And there was very little movement in the front line to show for it. By late August, the Battle of Passchendaele had slowed into almost stalemates. There's a slow grind going on. The ground was so waterlogged that each shell would blow a crater and that would just instantly fill with water. Our anonymous gunner writes:
21:45 Speaker 01 At least we would have slept in spite of mud and cold. For we were dog tired and terribly dispirited in this land of grey mud and skeleton trees. We could have slept. But no sooner had dawn fallen than shells began to pour into the camp.
22:06 Speaker 01 In a stationary line in complete darkness, except for the flashes of the bursting shells, we could do nothing but crouch close to the ground, clutch at the gunlimbers, hoping against hope that the next projectile would not reach us. All night, arms and cartridges piled between us. The few who slept, slept in fits and starts and without rest.
22:34 Dan Snow? Into this nightmare stepped Captain Edwin Vaughan. He was of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was not yet 20. He'd been to a Jesuit school in London. He joined the Artists Rifles, which sounds probably more romantic and glamorous than it was, before taking a commission in the Warwickshires. His diary survives, and it's one of the most haunting accounts of Passchendaele. Jen Baldwin, you've come across this extraordinary diary during your research. I mean, that's the dream, isn't it?
22:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, and this diary in particular is actually readily available for everybody. It was published by the soldier's family in the 1980s. It's actually considered to be one of the reads of World War One because it's such a compelling account of the battle and this particular soldier's experience. Actually, I should probably say it's quite difficult to read. It's not very long, it's just incredibly emotional. And the way that he writes, it's very true. Obviously, it's not written for publication, it's a diary, so it's his thoughts and his emotions. And it really makes the battlefield very real. So we should probably introduce our author of this diary, Captain Edwin Vaughan. At this point, it's late August when he writes his diary. "The ground is so waterlogged that each shell kind of creates this crater that fills with
23:44 Speaker 02 water, in some cases instantly, but in other cases it takes a little bit longer." So, Dan, I'm just going to read you one of his entries. This was written on the night of the 27th of August. And in this, he says, "From other shell holes from the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men, faint, long, sobbing moans of agony and despairing shrieks. Powerless to move, they were slowly drowning. Horrible visions came to me with those cries of men lying maimed, out there trusting that their pals would find them, and now dying terribly, alone amongst the dead in the inky darkness, and we could do nothing to help them." So, as they retreat, he says, quote, "The water was right over the tops of the shell holes.
24:29 Speaker 02 They had drowned." So he realizes why the cries of these men have reduced. He's realized, of course, that these people have drowned, right, in these holes. So he goes back into where the base camp is supposed to be, where he's supposed to report back in, and he gets into this situation where he's realized that the base camp has actually been bombed as well. So he has to actually climb over this mound of bodies that have been hit, that... The headquarters had been hit by shell after shell and its entrance was this long mound of bodies. So he has to climb over this pile of people to get inside. And as he does this, a hand reaches out from the pile and actually grabs his leg. So there's a living man kind
25:13 Speaker 02 of buried among these dead. When dawn breaks, he goes back to his tent and he counts his company. Out of 90 men, only 15 have remained.
25:23 Dan Snow? And he also describes gas, doesn't he?
25:24 Speaker 02 Yeah. So the Germans had been using gas in the war already. They'd been using chlorine and phosphine. But at Passon Dell, they employed mustard gas on a large scale, really for the first time. They have shells that are marked with a yellow cross. So if you see that, you know it's coming, or you can see the stockpiles. The shells unleash this chemical, but it is far more destructive than what they've used before. It doesn't just suffocate men, and it certainly isn't instantaneous, at least not in every case. It clings to your skin and clothing. It contaminates the ground for days. It could incapacitate men long after the shells had fallen. So it turns parts of the battlefield into these no-go areas,
26:06 Speaker 02 adding this secondary layer of terror to these already horrific conditions. So men have gas that clings to their uniforms. They have blistered skin, they have burned lungs. They would cough up blood, stumble blindly, or even just collapse into the mud and then drown as a result of the weather conditions.
26:23 Dan Snow? There were lots of ways to die on the Western Front. But do you think there was something about gas that affected the morale of men as well? Were they particularly nervous about it?
26:32 Speaker 02 I couldn't imagine that you wouldn't be. Mustard gas especially didn't kill outright. It just kind of burned any part of the body it touched. So if it gets in your skin and you have a gas mask going, you rip the gas mask off to try and get that out. Your eyes are swelling shut, your throats and your lungs are being blistered, your skin comes up in these raw sores. So even a tiny dose could blind or disable a man for weeks. The psychological toll must have been absolutely immense. And many men described the pain of the gas as worse than being shot. So there's this entire environment where men are out and exposed, right? So the whole area has been reduced to a moonscape. There's no trees, there's no cover, there's just craters and kind of this shattered drainage. So in this
27:15 Speaker 02 really open space, this gas is just drifting freely and then pooling into the shell holes and the low ground. So if you're injured and you're seeking cover in these craters, Picture yourself on the battlefield, you run in or you dive into a crater. It feels a little bit theatrical almost, and you finally get to the point where you can open your eyes and look around and take sense of what's going on around you. And you see this gas sitting at the bottom of the crater. So now you're stuck, you have no escape. You can't go back into no man's land, but you also know that this gas is slowly creeping towards you and probably the pain is already starting.
27:49 Dan Snow? Extraordinary testimony from one who would not survive the battle. Edwin Vaughan has written this diary that was published. How have you been able to find out so much about him, Jen?
27:59 Speaker 02 So there's a lot of information about Edwin Vaughan because he has this published diary and, and his diary puts us there, right? In the darkness, in the mud, surrounded by these cries of these men drowning in shell holes. His words make the scale of the disaster so much more personal and vivid, really unforgettable. I don't think I'll ever forget Vaughan's diary. Most families don't have that, right? So for Vaughan and his colleagues on the field, we have other opportunities for research. We have records on Find My Pass that set a soldier into context, right? His parents, where he grew up, what his schooling was like. And that's often how we bring someone's story back to life. Find My Pass has such depth in British and Irish records that you can really just start with a name and then delve deeper to gain this richer understanding of the entire
28:43 Speaker 02 community, their childhood, their military experience, the aftermath of that experience. Can look through the Find My Pass newspaper archives to delve into his community and his military unit. And then of course, we add on to that all of the traditional resources for academic research and we understand on a much broader scale what family history can actually add to the depths of the World War One story.
29:07 Dan Snow? By September, the battle was like a metronome. Strike, stop, dig in, replenish, go again. A general, Sir Hubert Plummer, took charge and ordered smaller, more carefully planned surgical attacks instead of the big push approach. First came the offensive for the men in Road Ridge, then Polygon Wood, and then sites were set on Brudseiner in early October. Troops would just advance a short distance behind heavy, well-timed artillery fire. Then they would stop, they would dig in, and then they would meet that German counterattack. Small groups were taught to sort of work around German bunkers rather than trying to charge straight at them and suppress them. At Polygon Wood, which I think is one of the best battlefields in the sector, it's
29:50 Dan Snow? such an interesting place to explore and see the old German concrete pillboxes. Australian units grabbed their goals and held them bitterly, and step by step they got closer and closer to the main ridge. And this approach gave the Allies some momentum. German counterattacks that formed up were massacred by the huge Allied artillery fire that was brought down on the areas where they knew those Germans would be gathering to counterattack. The cost was still huge, but for the first time in weeks, the Allies felt like they had a plan that was working. And that momentum on the battlefield relies on lots of moving parts, a sort of kaleidoscope of different factions and crews and units, that's modern warfare.
30:32 Dan Snow? Artillery, machine gunners, infantrymen, pilots, tank crews, the engineers who have to lay the track for the light railways, they have to build bridges, signalers and runners laying down repairing field telephone lines so that all these different units can talk to each other. People who are sending and receiving the pigeons that are carrying the messages between posts as well. There are men running the mule trains and the horse trains, there's vets who take care of those animals. There's teams figuring out how on earth to get water and rations to thousands of men, isolated, perhaps even stranded on the front line. Then there are the medics and stretcher bearers, the chaplains, there's the burial teams. My great-grandpa was one of those doctors. My grandma just said he was a very hard man after the war, we didn't really like talking about him.
31:15 Dan Snow? The carnage must have been overwhelming for him and for all of them. He and his fellow doctors had to play god there, it was triage, they decided within an instant who they would help when so many voices were screaming out. They had to dismiss those who were beyond help. There were moments when they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of casualties, the blood in their guts and the death that he and all of them had to deal with every day. It's just too much to comprehend, in fact. William Eli Bacon had been an insurance clerk from London before the war. At Passchendaele, he drove horse-drawn ambulances with a field ambulance unit of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Jen Baldwin, tell me about William Eli Bacon's letter that he wrote home.
31:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, so he writes this letter home and ultimately it ends up in the hands of the local newspaper, which is where we access it on the Find My Past Newspaper archive. It's been digitized and made available now. Like so many letters, it's sent to a family, a loved one, and it ends up with these local papers, which is something they actively recruited and were trying to obtain during the war. So his letter gives us kind of a firsthand account of what it was like to drive one of these ambulances. And I just want to read you a snippet of the letter itself. He says, "Here is a horse ambulance proceeding slowly to hospital wards. It is full of wounded prisoners, just such a lot as I myself brought down the line a while ago.
32:37 Speaker 02 That poor devil, half sitting, half lying inside the ambulance. Surely life must be a bitter thing for him. His mouth has been blown away. By his side is one with both legs smashed and a wound in the head, and a third with both hands swabbed in bandages. Another lies on a stretcher behind my seat. His clothes and face are plastered with mud, and he moans and mutters in his delirium." So in this letter, he really brings us to his ambulance.
33:03 Dan Snow? That's just one trip. You'd have been doing that day in, day out. It's hard to see how he could cope with that.
33:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, he tries to put a bit of a positive spin on the circumstances. And possibly this is him writing to his family and trying to say it's not all totally bad and I'm okay. But he talks about how his last load of wounded and the other work of his colleagues, "the last of our own casualties on this section have been cleared to hospital, which, quote, 'speaks in volumes for the efficiency of our medical arrangements here.'" So they really try to find themselves in kind of the routine of it and the job of being an ambulance driver versus the emotional toll.
33:44 Dan Snow? I find it extraordinary that it was a horse-drawn car, but I guess that is the fascinating thing about the First World War, its particular timing.
33:50 Speaker 02 It must have been really brutal, right? So you're thinking about the chaos of battle and the idea of triage, which is... A relatively new concept to the military field. Medics had to make these decisions really in seconds. So who can survive if I carry them back? But who is beyond saving? I can't imagine actually just walking past someone or running past a soldier who's injured and crying out and knowing I can't help you. So I'm literally just going to keep going. So they're looking for signs of life, wounds. They know they could stabilize and try to move those men first. But it's all part of the trauma that these stretcher barriers carry, these just impossible choices that they had to make every day.
34:27 Dan Snow? You talked about looking for the positives in a way. The medical science was making giant strides forward in this war. I mean, it was utterly tragic. But the sheer volume of injury, the sheer volume of practice that people were getting and the funding coming in from the government, from the armed forces, to get people back on the battlefield meant that they were learning, they were improving so much the whole time.
34:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. The history of medicine development actually during this period is absolutely fascinating. This is really the first military engagement where a field ambulance is being set up or a casualty clearing station. And these are often just a couple of tents or maybe a few huts, but they are surprisingly effective. And then they have this whole system of hospitals behind that. So the casualty clearing station could stop the bleeding, set broken bones, maybe perform emergency surgery, give basic pain relief. If a man could be stabilized there, he had a good chance of making it to a base hospital further back. And then from there, sometimes even home to Britain for recovery. There's actually an incredible record set available on Find My Pass that we digitized in partnership with the National Archives.
35:32 Speaker 02 And it's the records of these soldiers, medical records. And many of them are created at these hospitals. So you have records from the casualty clearing stations, from the stationary hospitals, the general hospitals, and then again, back home in England. And you see the variety of injuries, everything from, you know, on a single page, you might see a sprained ankle, shell shock, a gas wound to the face, gunshot wounds, obviously, broken arms. And that's all just documented there, ready for us to understand and see. And it's a really eye opening way to understand the medical experience of World War One.
36:07 Dan Snow? Superb resource. Fascinating. Interestingly, in that description, he's helping Germans, that he's gathering up the wounded prisoners from the battlefield.
36:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, he specifically refers to Germans that he puts in his ambulance. And I think this is universal, medics and stretcher bearers were kind of bound to help anyone they found, whether it was friend or enemy. So you see that in the letters and diaries that are written home. All these German soldiers lying in the mud, right alongside the British forces, all of them suffering in the same way. For the medics, there was really no difference. They're just men that have a need and they can help them.
36:39 Dan Snow? Tell me one more thing about Eli Bacon before we move on. Tell me something striking about him.
36:43 Speaker 02 I think what really struck me when I looked into Bacon's life is his experience before the war. And kind of alluded to this earlier in the podcast, that he's just this ordinary person, right? He's an insurance clerk of all things. He's newly married. He's got a brand new wife at home. So the census and the marriage registers show this ordinary life just before everything is upended. But again, that's what these records do on Find My Past, to remind us that each soldier is this whole person with a family and a future. And this all happens, of course, long before he becomes part of this historic battlefield.
37:24 Dan Snow? By October, the British were nearing their final objective, the ruined village of Passchendaele. The activity now was really all in the Canadian Corps. It was under Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie. He studied the ground closely and he told his superiors the truth. He could take the ridge, but only in very small bits, one bite at a time and at a very heavy price.
37:47 Dan Snow? He asked for more guns. He asked for more duck boards, more carrying parties. Every inch of that approach had to be laid with planks so that they could move more shells and ammunition, rations up to the front.
37:59 Dan Snow? The plan would be, again, a staircase, if you like, of assaults, each with very tight objectives. Each followed by consolidation until the village itself was within reach.
38:11 Dan Snow? Initially, there were very small, unit-level attacks to clear certain German strongholds before a slightly wider assault could take place. Second Lieutenant Douglas St George Pettigrew was one of the men chosen to undertake those attacks. He came from Penarth, the only surviving son of his family, from a long line of soldiers. He'd already been badly wounded, Tippval, on the Somme in 1916. Jen, tell me about Pettigrew. What does he tell us about the kind of men that were fighting here?
38:39 Speaker 02 So, this man is Douglas St George Pettigrew. His story really comes alive in October, when the British are kind of nearing their final objective, right, that ruined village of Passchendaele itself. Canadians are going to take the lead on this part of the campaign, but in the days before, there's these smaller attacks that they use to try and clear these German strong points. And Second Lieutenant Pettigrew is one of those people that's kind of chosen. He comes from Penarth, and he's from a long line of soldiers. He's with the Sherwood Foresters. His great-great-grandfather actually fought through the Peninsular War, and he was at Waterloo. And Pettigrew himself is actually born in County Waterford in Ireland, but he's educated in Bath. So, all of these little facts, right, we've got Wales, Ireland,
39:22 Speaker 02 Bath, it's all mixing together to tell us that he really has this family tie through the military.
39:29 Dan Snow? Tell me about the mission that he and his men were given that day.
39:33 Speaker 02 So, they're tasked with one of the most dangerous jobs on the battlefield, which is storming these German pillboxes. The positions had to be taken if there was really any hope of advancing towards the village itself. Artillery couldn't destroy them. Really, the only way to handle this was to get in close and kind of fight it out. So Pettigrew and his platoon were specially selected to lead that attack on the 22nd of October.
39:55 Dan Snow? Did they get lots of preparation for that?
39:57 Speaker 02 So, we know that he was right there at the front of the assault. His role was to lead his unit up against the pillbox through this mud and relentless fire. There's all kinds of small but essential operations that are happening all over the field like this that allow these Canadian corps to make the final push. So he leads his men quite literally. He's at the front of the attack and they do take the pillbox, but in the process, he's mortally wounded and he actually dies the next morning on the 23rd of October, 1917, at the age of 25. So it's quite tragic to think that after surviving all these earlier battles and having been through all these experiences throughout the war, recovering from his wounds, his life ends here in kind of this brutal push for just a few hundred yards of ground.
40:42 Dan Snow? When you read about a guy like that, you think his chances of surviving the war were so slim. I mean, he seems to have done more than his fair share of time on the front line, leading these attacks, and yet the war would rumble on for another year. So these young men, the toll must have been extraordinary on them.
40:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, and the cycle was relentless. So you could have a man who fought in all these major engagements, be wounded, spend months recovering, and as soon as he's fit enough, he's just sent right back. So that process just repeats itself so often. And the physical toll is really obvious. We can see that in the records. The part we have to infer for ourselves is the mental exhaustion, the emotional exhaustion, which would have been staggering. Many of these men were asked to endure more than any human being reasonably could, and yet they just kept going until their bodies or their luck gave out.
41:29 Dan Snow? You say led from the front because you actually know that. That's interesting. So the records tell us that, do they?
41:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, the military records don't give indication of that kind of activity, but of course, the newspaper reports do. So when we're reading newspaper accounts, we can see the quotes from his men, that he led from the front alongside his platoon, that he was admired, that he shared their risks. And of course, that ultimately cost him his life. But there are quotes that tell us that he was actually idolized by his men, and that's all available through the archives on Front My Past.
41:59 Dan Snow? The front line edged ever close to the village. Passchendels in their sights. By the village, I mean, there were ruthless outlines, shells of houses, barely anything left standing at all. Behind the front, light railways screech through the darkness with mortar shells, ammunition, and mortar bombs for the offensive. Stretcher parties fought the same battle in reverse. They were trying to get people away from the front line, hauling the wounded back over the slick boards, one lurch at a time. On the 6th of November, in the half-light of dawn, the barrage began. The Canadians moved up in a coordinated way. The German counter bombardment luckily fell behind many of the advancing troops.
42:42 Dan Snow? And almost everywhere that attack went quite well for the Canadians. They encountered the most opposition from pillboxes at the north end of the village of Passchendaele. But in less than three hours, the village had been secured, or rather, what was left of it was now in Allied hands. In the aftermath of that capture, Haig called for an end to the offensive. He deemed it a success. But it is very difficult to see it that way. Over three and a half months, British and Imperial forces advanced barely five miles while suffering horrendous losses. In the aftermath, Haig was heavily criticised for persisting long after the operation had lost its real strategic value. I think he was very lucky to keep his job at the end of 1917.
43:26 Dan Snow? And certainly Passchendaele has come to epitomise the First World War's horror and human cost. Our anonymous gunner wrote of it:
43:35 Speaker 01 "In the morning, we carried our dead and dressed our wounded and betook ourselves elsewhere. In succeeding days, when exhaustion was returning, I felt the pain of my boils and the awful pricking behind my eyes and the fearful weariness of my soul. That was Passchendaele, and to me, nothing can ever justify its like again."
44:08 Dan Snow? It's estimated that both sides lost about a quarter of a million casualties. Some 90,000 bodies were never identified. Tens of thousands more, of course, were never recovered. Jen, I guess it was the nature of the landscape in part, but just a huge number of those that were killed at Passchendaele were never... Well, they're never identified, but many never even recovered. And I suppose you're searching in your own way in the archives to bring that information to light, to give them back their identities.
44:41 Speaker 02 It is, and it can be quite difficult research to pursue, right? These are men that often are kind of forgotten to history a bit. When we think about family history in a website like Find My Past, we often think of kind of that traditional pedigree, right? I want to know about my grandfather, my great grandfather. But trees don't just only grow up vertically, they also grow out. So as we explore the history of World War I and our direct ancestors, we can think about all of those men who never came home. So it might be your great grandfather's cousin or your great grandmother's brother, somebody who never had a descendant to do their research, to carry their family line forward and to kind of remember them and honor them
45:24 Speaker 02 and to record the legacies that they really deserve by discovering and sharing these remarkable stories.
45:30 Dan Snow? And you mentioned that those trees go, I guess the exciting thing is if somebody finds something out, it can actually have a huge impact on another family's story. Perhaps, you know, these newspaper articles, whatever, it might mention other names. How can people find that forgotten hero in their family tree?
45:45 Speaker 02 So it's a relatively straightforward process. You can start with yourself and your own family and then start to expand. It's a real opportunity because Find My Past military records are completely free to explore from November 7th through the 13th. So you have this chance to really delve into these records, into the history, to really explore and understand the environment, the family setting, not just the paper records, but also kind of explore some of these emotional angles that we've talked about and really think about and expose these men who have never come home.
46:19 Dan Snow? Thank you so much, Jen Baldwin.
46:25 Dan Snow? It really is the most astonishing archive of records, so please go and check out your family's forgotten heroes on Find My Past. And to mark Remembrance Day, millions of military records are completely free to access and explore until 13 November. Visit findmypast.co.uk/remembrance to start delving into your family's war stories. Thank you very much for listening. See you next time.
47:12 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history.com/subscribe.
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