7 June in military history: Battle of Messines, 1917

7 June 1917 · 109 years ago

A ridge over Ypres

The Messines-Wytschaete ridge was, in the words of the Australian official historian Charles Bean, "the intruding height from which the Germans looked down on the Second Army's line south of Ypres". According to Laurence Kirkpatrick of Queen's University Belfast, the Germans had held the hills since November 1914 and could shell the low-lying Ypres salient from them.¹

The Second Army was commanded by General Sir Herbert Plumer. According to Bean, Plumer had put forward the capture of the ridge as worth undertaking for its own sake, while Sir Douglas Haig made it part of a larger plan, a thrust that would force the Germans to leave the Belgian coast. Early in May 1917, Bean writes, it was decided to deliver this southern attack first, the most important reason being the urgent need to help the French; the main thrust from Ypres was given to General Sir Hubert Gough.²

Two years underground

The attack rested on mines. Tunnelling beneath the German front line had begun in 1915. According to the Durand Group, Major Norton Griffiths first proposed a deep mining attack on the ridge, Plumer approved an all-out effort in January 1916, and at the peak nine tunnelling companies, among them all three Canadian ones, worked on it; many of the mines were in place by mid-1916 and had to be guarded for a year or more.³

The Durand Group counts 25 mines laid: one lost to German counter-mining, one abandoned after a tunnel collapsed and four at the southern end of the ridge, the Birdcage sector, not used for tactical reasons. Kirkpatrick writes of twenty-two tunnels packed with 500 tons of ammonal. The German command, Bean writes, knew that an attack was coming but was totally unaware of the existence of the great mines.⁴

According to Kirkpatrick, the bombardment before the attack lasted eight days, and 2,230 guns fired more than 3.5 million shells.⁵

3.10 a.m.

Bean describes the last minutes: at 3.05 the first tinge of dawn appeared over Messines, and an Australian observer noted: "Last 5 minutes. Things must be right now. One feels as if it were a won battle".⁶

At 3.10 the mines went up. In Bean's account a huge bubble swelled from the earth near Wytschaete and burst, and during twenty seconds the same thing happened again and again from right to left; the Durand Group writes that all nineteen were fired within 30 seconds of each other, and that the explosions were heard clearly in London. According to Bean, the craters were as much as 300 feet wide and 50 to 70 feet deep, and each shattered or buried the garrison of some 150 yards of trench.⁷

Behind a heavy artillery barrage the infantry went forward. Bean counts nine attacking divisions; Kirkpatrick writes of eleven in the first wave. In Bean's account the New Zealanders fought their way through the village of Messines itself.⁸

Farther north the nationalist 16th (Irish) Division and the unionist 36th (Ulster) Division attacked side by side, with Wytschaete among their objectives. According to Kirkpatrick, they had reached their objectives at Wytschaete by eight in the morning. By evening the ridge was in British hands.⁹

Redmond and Meeke

Major Willie Redmond, a nationalist MP and brother of John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, went over the top that morning with the 6th Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment. He was MP for East Clare and was 56. When he volunteered in 1914 he had urged other Irishmen to follow him with the words "Don't go, but come with me". According to Ronan McGreevy of The Irish Times, Redmond had pressed to be allowed to take part in the attack, and Major-General Sir William Hickie, commanding the 16th Division, let him go in the third wave.¹⁰

He was wounded twice soon after leaving his trench. Private John Meeke of the 11th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, a battalion of the 36th (Ulster) Division, went to his aid, was wounded himself and stayed with him until other soldiers reached them. Meeke received the Military Medal.¹¹

Redmond was taken to the dressing station of the 36th Division's 108th Field Ambulance at Dranoutre and died there that evening. His fellow MP Stephen Gwynn, also an officer, wrote, as McGreevy quotes him: "His wounds were not grave, but he had overtaxed himself and in a few hours he succumbed to shock".¹²

Redmond was buried in the grounds of the convent at Locre, now Loker, and his grave remains there, apart from the war cemeteries. Kirkpatrick, by contrast, writes that the grave was moved in 1918 to its present site near Locre Hospice Cemetery. According to John Green of the Western Front Association, a silhouette of Meeke carrying Redmond was put up at Wytschaete in 2017, on the road that had marked the boundary between the two Irish divisions.¹³

The cost

According to Bean, the British side suffered about 26,000 casualties in the battle, more than half of them in the II Anzac Corps on the southern flank. British General Headquarters, Bean adds, estimated German casualties at 39,000. Figures that Bean later obtained from the German Reichsarchiv give 19,923 for 1 to 10 June, including 7,548 missing, and he puts the German loss for 1 to 14 June, the period of most of the British figures, at about 23,000.¹⁴

Bean quotes the German official history, in his English rendering, as saying that the British stroke "fully succeeded", that the Messines salient "had been lost with dreadful casualties" and that "French confidence began to grow again". General von Kuhl, chief of staff to Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, called the battle, again in Bean's English, "one of the worst tragedies in the world war".¹⁵

Before Passchendaele

On 10 June the German command decided to pull back, and with the withdrawal that night, Bean writes, the battle practically ended. For Bean, from both the German and the British point of view it was "only a preliminary operation, a clearing of the flank for the great thrust that was to be made presently from Ypres".¹⁶

According to the Durand Group, Messines hastened the move of all armies toward defense in depth, and afterwards there was hardly any chance for another mining attack. The group adds that one of the unused Birdcage mines exploded in a thunderstorm in July 1955, and that five fully charged mines remain in the ground. The offensive that followed is told in our article on Passchendaele.¹⁷