Current Information:

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 28th October, 1917, two days after the opening of the Second Battle of Passchendaele, 5th Division relieved 14th Division and 1st East Surrey of 95 Brigade moved  into the front line north of the Menin road and east of Veldhoek. As was ever the case in the salient in the autumn of 1917, conditions were awful. The rains had returned, the recently won ground that the battalion occupied was a shell battered quagmire where men made do in rain filled shell holes and where the enemy artillery and snipers were a constant threat. It is no surprise that the main task for the men of 1st East Surrey during the four days they remained here, was digging new trenches. On 30th October, the Canadians resumed their attack on the Passchendaele Ridge and along with other units, 1st East Surrey were ordered to simulate an attack in the hope of diverting the enemy’s attention. This required them to open up a machine-gun barrage at 5.50am while the big guns behind them did likewise. The diversion worked inasmuch as there was a retaliatory barrage on the British trenches and as a result a number of men were either killed or wounded. This is the probable explanation for the death of Thomas Marshall.