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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… The
notorious 2nd Battle Of Passchendaele came to a sudden conclusion as Allied
forces, led by the Canadians, executed their planned phases three and four of
the advances they’d begun on October 26. The Canadians captured the village of
Passchendaele itself a mere three hours into the designated day (November 6),
then they drove on (10) 1,000 yards beyond that before a successful German
action to split a supporting British advance caused the attack to ultimately fall
short of Field Marshall Haig’s aim to take the whole of the
Passchendaele-Westrozebeke ridge and hold it as a pre-winter position. (Casualty
figures for 2nd Passchendaele 43,600 Allied troops, German 30,000; for the 3rd
Battle Of Ypres overall – July 31-November 10 – various accounts say Allied
200-448,000, German 217-410,000.)
On
the Eastern Front, the war continued semi-stalled as the Russian Revolution
proceeded to its next stage, with a Bolshevik coup in Petrograd ousting
Kerenski, leaving Lenin to install himself as Premier and Trotsky as Foreign
Minister.
Down
south at the 12th Battle Of The Isonzo/Battle Of Caporetto (October 24-November
19 or December 26, according to terminology), the Italians plunged deeper into
the worst defeat in the nation’s military history. Despite stretched resources,
German and Austrian forces drove them back across the River Tagliamento (5) to
the River Livenza (7; at this point the Italian Government relieved General
Cadorna of the command he’d held since July, 1914, and replaced him with
General Armando Diaz), and finally to the River Piave (11; it runs from the
Alps to the Adriatic just east of Venice). There the Italians joined with
reinforcements in the shape of six French and five British Divisions withdrawn
from the Western Front. However, the Austrian Army still advanced down the
Piave from Belluno. (Casualties for the whole battle: Italian 40,000 plus
265,000 taken prisoner, Austrian/German 70,000.)
Meanwhile,
in the continuing war against the Turks/Ottoman Empire, the Egyptian
Expeditionary Force of British, French and Italian troops did well. The 3rd
Battle Of Gaza ended (November 7) with the Turks pushed back from Gaza itself
and along a line east to Beersheba. Although the Turks fell back in good order,
they were pursued by the war’s old and new, cavalry and bomber planes.
(Casualties: Allies 2,696, Ottomans 1,000 dead, no figure for wounded.) And
over in Mesopotamia, the last battle of the campaign, the “Action” of Tikrit
(5-6) saw a successful attack on the first day followed by occupation of an evacuated
town the next day.
[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers
volunteer and Gallipoli veteran (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016),
had
fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25,
2016)…
until
officialdom spotted his real age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for
the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until
he turned 19. He took up the offer, though with an enduring sense of guilt. By
December, 1916, he ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again,
this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion, along with a bunch of other under-age
Tommies until such time as they severally became eligible for the trenches again… An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a
meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then a
few summer weeks stomping around Yorkshire on a route march… which in due
course led him to hospital again, to recover from some lurking effects of
trench warfare and prepare him for more (he was 19 on July 6 while in hospital).
In recent weeks, because material from Sam’s “year out”at home didn’t stretch
to weekly blogs, I’ve rewound excerpts from his experiences of Gallipoli and
the Somme. But now we return to the this-week-100-years-ago narrative.]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, the “Somme Rewind” excerpts
concluded. Now we’re back to “the present” 100 years ago… roughly. That is,
autumn 1917, my father gave no specific dates/months in this section of his Memoir until he came to December.
We
left him in Blog 163, on August 20, back in Sheffield because his chronic gut
problems, brought on by terrible conditions in the trenches of Gallipoli and
the Somme (the doctors reckoned), had landed him in hospital again – following
a route march around Yorkshire and into Nottinghamshire which lasted several
weeks including a substantial sojourn encamped at a “ducal estate” (almost
certainly the Duke Of Portland’s Welbeck Abbey).
The
hospital stay brought him back into contact with his kind-of girlfriend Nurse
Flo, which was nice, and, as he recovered, allowed him once more to bask in the
sweetly ordinary civilian life he’d come to appreciate fully via missing it for
18 months. But such joys also nagged at his sense of guilt over taking the
chance to leave the Front in September/October, 1916, because, as of the Somme,
he remained under-age for the battlefield.
His
last words when we left him were: “I thought about the mates I’d left behind on the
Somme staring sightless at that great big moon on the night of the final search
for survivors. They would be just bones in earth now.”
And he’d passed the crucial age, 19, on July 6, 1917 – during one
of his hospital stints as it happened, which may have delayed Army admin.
spotting his availability…
‘I
forget how it happened, but my past caught up with me. Someone noticed that
although I was drawing proficiency pay as a Lance Corporal Signaller**, I had
not done that sort of work since I joined my present mob – in fact, since
before the Somme. So I was to proceed to faraway Sussex to a School Of
Signallers near Crowborough – only 40 miles south of London, so I should be
able to get a weekend pass now and then and visit my family.
My father had written several interesting letters to me in recent
months, telling me of his better-paid and quite agreeable new job as manager of
a London store’s export department, supervising a team of clerks and packers.
Even in my small experience of work, I had seen how, in peacetime, through agents,
British firms did business in all parts of the world with undertakings needing
reliable suppliers. More important than price, to many customers, was the
quality of the goods, together with correct packing which took into account
extremes of climate as well as possible rough cartage and handling. Assembling
the goods as invoiced and seeing them right through to their delivery to the
ships, perfectly packed, insured and documented, was ultimately Pa’s
responsibility.
Just once, I spent an hour watching him and his merry men at
work. His desk stood in the middle of a large, long floor-space; three or four
clerks sat on tall stools at high desks on each side of the room. Pa received
orders and invoices from the incoming-mail desk and recorded and apportioned
the resulting work to his staff. Occasionally, we went through sliding metal
doors into a place of noisy activity where packers filled cases, some with
sheet-metal linings, and nailed their lids down.
Together, we pondered how much of all this stuff would finish up
at the bottom of the sea, German U-boats*** being so active still.
The Signals School turned out
to be but a small part of a large Army depot devoted to putting recently
conscripted recruits through a rapid course of training prior to sending them
into battle. We all lived in large, wooden huts, the food plain and plentiful,
the training thorough.
None of the trainees and few of their instructors had experienced
the trenches, the battlefield. Recently released from the cares of civilian
life with its rents and food to be paid for, children to be clothed, the
recruits seemed keen and contented with their new circumstances – their burdens
now assumed by Authority. All they had to do was become good soldiers and, at
some unspecified date, cross the Channel to join the gallant lads at the Front.
Looked at that way, it wasn’t so bad, I guess. An insurance
actuary might not have assessed their “expectation of life” possibilities very
highly, but each man had his own hopes and plans for survival.’
**
Signaller first-class, no less – he’d learned the rudiments as a Boy Scout then
the more complicated stuff in Malta, spring-summer 1915 while waiting (not
eagerly) with his original Battalion, the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers, for their war
to start. After Gallipoli, during four months rest and retraining in Egypt, he
got an update. But then, on the Somme with the Kensingtons, his skills proved
surplus to requirements and he served there as plain front-line PBI, earning
unwanted promotions to Corporal and Acting Sergeant. Which reminds me that
during his “year out” from the battlefield he “reverted”, as the records put
it, to Private. This may have been an oddly generous response to his repeated
requests to be divested of any rank (because he so disliked ordering men
around), or it could have been rather miscalculated spite from his worse than
unpleasant Battalion Captain in Harrogate (see Blog 160, July 30, 2017), whose
offer of the chance to step up to commissioned rank my father rejected. (By
this period of the war, the supply of young upper/middle-class second and full
lieutenants to replace those killed in the front line was running low so the
Army cast its gaze towards the lower orders for likely candidates).
*** After
some toing and froing on the rules of engagement for submarines (Unterseeboot), on January 31, 1917,
Germany lifted all restrictions on attacking merchant vessels; new tactics of
convoying with Naval escort ships somewhat reduced their effect, but U-boats
sank about 11 million tons of Allied shipping 1914-18.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam royally entertained at Crowborough
camp: sumptuous canteens and bars, concerts, silent movies, and expert lectures
including one by local resident Conan Doyle who elucidates the Battle of the
Somme… to Somme veteran Sam.
* In his 70s, Sam
Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance,
a Memoir of his life from childhood
through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919
Peace parade.
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