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Age-23

53, Cowley Road, Mortlake

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.

On 9th September, 1917, the 2/4th Oxford & Bucks Light Infantry battalion of 184 Brigade, 61st Division moved into the front line at Pommern Castle in the north-east sector of the Ypres salient. At 4pm on the following day, 10th September, A and D Companies attacked Hill 35 and like the six previous attempts to capture this position, they failed. The attack was held up some 30 yards from their objective by fierce machine-gun fire from Iberian Farm and Aisne House and they could go no further even after reinforcements had been sent across. The men went to ground and were only able to return back to their own trenches after dark. This fruitless operation resulted in over fifty casualties, sixteen of them killed. John Golding was one of those who did not survive.