Welcome to the video series Site Study: Ypres Salient, my name is Brad Manera.
The Great War evolved very quickly into a war on 2 fronts, the war in the east between the Germans and the Russians and the war in the west between Germany and its enemies, France, Belgium, Britain and the Dominions.
The term Western Front emerged, very early in the war, to describe a 700 kilometre long line of trenches running from the Swiss border, all the way to the North Sea. It wound through France and the western part of Belgium. And it was the scene of some of the bloodiest actions of the Great War.
By the end of 1914 a line of trenches, indeed 2 parallel lines of trenches, faced each other across deadly ground known as No Man's Land.
As the years went by there were constant attempts to break this deadlock but the generals didn't know how. They'd never encountered a battlefield like this. How do you break through trench after trench, protected by barbed wire with field artillery and then heavy artillery in the background?
The ancient town of Ypres, in the western part of Belgium, became one of the great symbols of the First World War. In 1914, early in the war, the Germans decided to try and outflank the French by sweeping through Belgium. The early German strategy required movement. To keep soldiers moving they had to go around major points of resistance, flank them and leave those places behind so that they can be cut off and knocked out by support troops who are mopping up. This strategy failed. The German troops who swept around Ypres were then stopped and forced to dig in. Ypres was not mopped up. It remained in British hands and so created a bulge in the line of the front, which we call a salient.
An easy way to understand the problems of fighting around the Ypres Salient is to think about the town of Ypres as the center of a bicycle wheel, with a rim surrounding it, made up of a line of hills that give you high ground to look over the town.
On the Western Front, and in war in general, ownership of the high ground is essential. If you own the hills then you can see where the enemy are massing for an attack and you can bring your artillery fire to bear on them. You can bring your artillery fire to bear on their lines of communication and you can see what the enemy is doing and when they are preparing to fight.
So, returning to Ypres, the British hold the town and the flat ground around it but the Germans dominate the high ground overlooking them. This means that the British have to live in the mud and the Germans can fight from the hilltops with unlimited observation and dry socks. That really makes an extraordinary difference.
Australians remember the Ypres Salient for the bloody battles that occurred there in the second part of 1917.
The Ypres Salient became a byword for blood and mud and just mass murder on an industrial scale because the British were desperate after the massive losses on the Somme in 1916 to try and find a weak point in the German line. And in 1917 they thought they'd try their luck in the Ypres Salient. The tragedy was that the winter came early and with such a high water table, and flat country in that part of Belgian Flanders, both armies got bogged down in the mire. The Australians are a part of a British Army that attempts to break out of there between June and November 1917. Thirty eight thousand Australians are killed or badly injured in those battles. Almost half a million British and Commonwealth soldiers are killed or wounded in the Ypres Salient in the second half of 1917.
Ypres is a wonderful medieval town that was completely destroyed by the war.
It is remembered by Australian soldiers for the incredible suffering at the hands of sophisticated weapon systems and also the miserable and early winter of 1917.
Indeed the ground swallowed the dead and wounded. Almost 80% of those who died in the Ypres Salient have no known grave because the mud was so pervasive.
I wish I could find a word that could describe mud that would swallow men and horses and equipment.