Mud, death and tears

New Zealand's worst day at war was not the baptism of fire at Gallipoli or Crete or Cassino. GREG DIXON discovers it was another northern hell.

A grim harvest of a thousand corpses lay near the German barbed wire. In the No Man's Land killing zone before them, other bodies had disappeared beneath the mud and sludge of a marsh and beside what passed for a road in that brutal section of Flanders Fields.

Unsated by the slaughter, the German machine-gunners, snipers and artillery continued their fiery work, their hot metal hunting for those left alive on the water-sodden, shell-holed ground below their positions.

Above the butchery, the air stank of cordite and of death and of failure.

In that place, on one day, in the hours after the hard grey dawn of October 12, 1917, more New Zealanders were killed or wounded than on any other single day of military action before or since.

The 23,000-strong New Zealand Division, the soldiers of a then tiny dominion of fewer than 1.1 million, had suffered casualties (wounded or killed) totalling 117 officers and 3179 men within a few hours.

The division's final death toll for that day - nearly a third of all casualties - was akin to losing the passengers from three jumbo jets. A total of 1190 New Zealanders had been killed to gain as little as 180 metres of ground.

Some of the division's units had lost 85 per cent of their men to death or injury. And the ratio of the dead to the wounded had been greater than was usual even for the killing fields of the First World War.

Most who would be listed as missing after the abortive action had, in fact, been killed. But their bodies would never be found in the mud and debris of war.

Ernest Langford, a private with the 2 Otago battalion who had "hopped the bags" that miserable morning, survived to record the horror in his diary.

"Attack a failure on account of wire encountered," he wrote. "Casualties extremely heavy. Hun machine guns and snipers play havoc. Absolute hell ..."

Absolute hell, but not Gallipoli or Crete or Cassino, the battles and defeats which conjure that image in New Zealand's collective imagination.

This absolute hell, this most disastrous of days for New Zealand, was fought and lost near a place few of us associate with New Zealanders at war, a small Belgian town called Passchendaele.

We should not be surprised by our ignorance. Passchendaele appears only sporadically on this nation's many war memorials. Those who survived it rarely uttered its name and, until now, it has never appeared on the spine of a New Zealand book.

It's almost as if the nation erased the horrific carnage from memory - and Lieutenant Colonel Glyn Harper, the author of the first New Zealand book to put the name on its cover, has a theory on why that might be.

Passchendaele, he contends in his book, Massacre At Passchendaele: The New Zealand Story, was a different sort of disaster from Gallipoli.

"Gallipoli, Crete and Cassino, they are all heroic failures where we nearly did it, we almost succeeded, it didn't quite come off and it wasn't our fault it didn't. The blame for failure could be quite conveniently passed on to somebody else," the historian says by phone from his office at the New Zealand Army's Military Studies Institute at Trentham.

"But Passchendaele is not like that. It's not an heroic failure, it's just a dreadful failure. It is a massacre."

Certainly the New Zealand government of the time thought so. According to Harper's book, at a meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet in London in June 1918, an angry New Zealand Prime Minister, William Massey, berated his British counterpart, Lloyd George, about the tragedy.

"They were sent to Passchendaele," Massey said, "to a swampy locality where it was almost impossible to walk and where they found themselves up against particularly strong wire entanglements, which it was impossible for them to cut. They were ... simply shot down like rabbits. These are the sort of things that are going to lead to serious trouble."

Trouble was, says Harper, that the British weren't necessarily to blame.

"If you delve beneath the surface on an historical investigation, there are some curly questions that have to be asked and answered. You can't really shoot the blame home totally to those stupid British generals who are committing New Zealand boys on these types of campaigns.

"You've got to ask the question why did [New Zealand-born commander of the division] Major General Andrew Russell allow this to happen? Why wasn't he vocal in his protests? Why didn't he conduct a reconnaissance before the attack, and why did he use a brigade that was totally exhausted even before the attack began?

"There were all these curly questions."

Across 119 pages (the book also includes the names of those whose bodies were never found during the Passchendaele campaign; it adds 71 pages), Harper seeks to contextualise, analyse and answer these curly questions.

The background of the battles near Passchendaele, just outside the British-held Ypres Salient (a salient being an outward bulge in a military line), was this: After the slaughter of the Somme in 1916 (the first day of the battle set the bloody 20th century's record for the most men killed or wounded on a single day - 60,000), the British high command sought to break the deadlock of trench warfare with a big push through Flanders in 1917.

Britain's top soldier, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, fancied that breaking the German defences in the region would be the springboard needed to take the ports of the Belgian coast, to outflank the enemy and to perhaps even push through to Germany's industrial hub, the Ruhr.

The Ypres Salient, which was 22km long and 5km deep at it widest point, was an obvious choice to begin this imagined march to victory. The British positions in the Salient were tactically bad, being overlooked from three directions, with the enemy holding the high ground around Passchendaele village.

If the British could take that high ground, Haig calculated, then everything else could follow.

The first of eight battles in the area began on July 31. But it was not until October 4 that units from the New Zealand Division engaged the enemy in the Salient.

This first battle, a carefully planned, textbook success, extended the division's reputation as an outfit which delivered what was asked of it.

But crucial to that success were the dry conditions. In the days leading up to October 12, the weather broke and winter arrived, again turning the fields of Flanders into a hellish quagmire.

If the weather had gone to pot for the New Zealanders' second attack, then so too had the planning. The disaster was set in train by a series of blunders including poor artillery support, over-ambitious objectives and a failure to recognise the strength of the German defences.

The result on October 12, as Colonel H. Stewart noted in his 1921 history of the New Zealand Division, was our boys had "poured out their blood like water."

It was, however, a disaster born of systemic failure rather than the fault of one or more commanders, Harper concludes.

"This was an imperial system of command that we were operating under, which is so rigid and an order is passed down and it's not to be questioned and if you've got any doubts about it you don't openly voice it. It did not encourage flexibility or adaptability. It was the fault of an antiquated command system."

Regrettably, a fault with extreme and wide-ranging consequences.

Harper believes that not one New Zealand family was untouched by this single day.

Even if a family had not lost a son, then their neighbours or friends had. And although local newspapers downplayed the disaster, the casualty lists they printed and the letters that flowed back from the front (many, oddly, untouched by the censors) revealed the true nature of the tragedy in Flanders.

In researching Massacre At Passchendaele, Harper read some 250 of these letters and diaries. It was tough work.

"You'd be reading letters and diaries sharing people's personal thoughts and goals. You were privy to their personal correspondence and then all of a sudden it's cut short and you'd know why it's cut short.

"It was actually quite painful to put together in some ways. I found it quite moving at times, particularly in one case where there was a family from Auckland who had three sons who went away to war and all three were killed, one of them at Passchendaele. That kind of thing absolutely devastated a family.

"Reading the mother's letters, which are in the Alexander Turnbull Library [in Wellington], almost moved me to tears. She'd already lost one son, and she'd really suffered that. She kept saying, 'I try not to weep but I just can't help myself, it's very hard being a mother of soldiers.'

"Then another, her favourite son I think, is killed at Passchendaele. He is a leader of considerable ability and charm. And then to top it all off, another son is killed virtually a year later. That family must have suffered dreadfully."

Yet if October 12, 1917, generated suffering at the front and at home, the day had other legacies.

Harper contends in Massacre At Passchendaele that New Zealanders' suspicion of the military, which was particular strong between the wars, can be traced to that day.

Although most of us now do not remember Passchendaele the battle like we remember the baptism of fire at Gallipoli, we do - rather curiously, concedes Harper - recall the substance of what happened on October 12, 1917.

"People actually perceive the Great War through the experience of Passchendaele, that is the disaster, the occasion where these brave soldiers were sent to die without any chance of securing their objectives or winning. That is the way by which the war is remembered and I think people feel quite bitter and resentful about it."

Which is quite certainly the reason Harper was challenged when he gave a paper on Passchendaele at a conference in Australia.

"Someone said, 'Why are you researching something like this which is obviously going to cause people grief and pain. Isn't it something that we should just forget about?' I didn't actually have a good answer at the time, because it caught me somewhat by surprise.

"But after thinking on it, I would now answer that question by saying two things. First, we really owe it to those soldiers to remember what they went through and to actually try to account for the reasons why they did it.

"The second thing is that we learn by past mistakes. As George Santayana said, those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. The last thing we want for New Zealand is another Passchendaele."

New Zealand political and military leaders clearly thought the same in the aftermath of the first war.

When New Zealanders again went into battle 22 years after Passchendaele, they were not - as they had been in the Great War - under direct British control.

And from the time General Bernard Freyberg took command of the stand-alone New Zealand Division during the Second World War, he had special powers, granted by a government charter, which allowed him to refuse an operational request from the Allied high command if he thought it too risky.

Both these fundamental changes to the way the New Zealand armed forces operated have the beginnings at places like Passchendaele, Harper says.

"We can trace it back to the appalling casualty figures that came out of the Great War and the feeling that was expressed by [Prime Minister] Massey, that at times New Zealanders were committed to operations that had no hope of succeeding."

That is perhaps the only victory of October 12, 1917.