Current Information:

Age-26

 25, Arthur Street, Silvertown

Born-Fulham

Third Battle of Ypres

This was a campaign fought between July and November 1917 and is often referred to as the Battle of Passchendaele, a village to the north-east of Ypres which was finally captured in November. It was an attempt by the British to break out of the Ypres salient and capture the higher ground to the south and the east from which the enemy had been able to dominate the salient. It began well but two important factors weighed against them. First was the weather. The summer of 1917 turned out to be one of the the wettest on record and soon the battlefield was reduced to a morass of mud which made progress very difficult, if not impossible in places. The second was the defensive arrangements of concrete blockhouses and machine gun posts providing inter-locking fire that the Germans had constructed and which were extremely difficult and costly to counter. For 4 months this epic struggle continued by the end of which the salient had been greatly expanded in size but the vital break out had not been achieved.

Whilst the early battles of 3rd Ypres were taking place, 2/7th London of 174 Brigade, 58th Division, were out of the line, resting near Arras. Their escape from the horrors of war lasted until the last week in August, 1917 when they travelled north to play their part in the campaign. On 27th August they moved into dug-outs on the Yser Canal near Essex Farm and the next evening they moved further forward into the front line trenches around St Julien. However, to use the term “trenches” for the positions they now found themselves in is a gross exaggeration. A month of intense artillery fire by both sides and one of the wettest summer periods recorded had reduced the land to a quagmire. The banks of the River Steenbeck that ran close by and the many drainage ditches that fed into it had been destroyed and the water had flowed out onto the surrounding land transforming it into a sea of mud. Progress was only possible by moving along duckboards, the positions of which were well known to the German gunners who regularly targeted them and to move off of these duckboards risked drowning in the mud. It was impossible to dig trenches in any conventional sense so the soldiers held an outpost line of shell holes, often standing in water and mud up to their waists all day, for relief was only possible at night. The support and reserve companies were holed up in various reinforced concrete gun emplacements that had been captured from the Germans during the initial advances in August. Opposite them the enemy held a  position known as the Blunt salient and it was obviously regarded as an strategically important by the Germans who defended it vigorously. In their shell holes and blockhouses 2/7th London were subjected to all that the Germans could throw at them. Artillery, mortar, machine-gun and sniper fire were a constant danger and their casualty list, which grew longer every day, included Frederick West who was killed on 1st September, the day they were relieved.