May | 2014 | Letters from the Front

Friday 23 May, 2014 by John T Adams

Preparing for the trip

We are off to Flanders on Monday. Which means the house is full of maps and plans for what we want to see. I’ve been able to overlay some of the trench maps used in Blacker’s Boys on top of modern French and Belgian 1:25000 and 1:20000 maps. That means we can have a fair idea where the 9th RIF were at key moments.

Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916

We are most interested in four events:

Battle of the Somme 1 July 1916 – John Adams missed this because he had been wounded earlier in the spring. That probably saved his life.
Battle of Langemarck 16 August 1917 – an ultimately futile event in the bloody muddy swamp east of Ypres.
Shoddy Farm Raid in 1918, where John Adams won a bar to his MM.
The events of 29-30 September 1918 in Dadizeele, where John Adams was seriously wounded.

The weather isn’t looking too good for the Ieper and Albert areas next week so it means we may get a bit wet while exploring the battlefields and cemeteries. Maybe a bit of mud will be appropriate…

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Friday 23 May, 2014 by John Adams

Roger, Mark and John Adams are visiting the Flanders and Somme area in May 2014, following in John Adams’ footsteps. We will update our progress here.

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Monday 26 May, 2014 by John T Adams

Bandaghem

Today was our first day in Belgium. We did the usual tourist things like visiting the In Flanders Fields Museum in the restored Ypres Cloth Hall, and attending the moving Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate.

But the most surprising thing of the day was visiting the Bandaghem cemetery at Haringhe, just inside the Belgian border. Roger spotted this last night while researching where Granda was evacuated after his serious injury in September 1918.

Entrance to Bandaghem cemetery

We knew from the telegram that he had been evacuated to the 3rd Australian Casualty Clearing Station. At the time the CCS was based at the “Bandagehem” hospital site. This is about 20 km from Ypres, and not far from the other aptly named “Mendinghem” and “Dozinghem” hospitals.

Several of the members of Granda’s battalion were less fortunate and died at the hospital, and are buried in the nearby cemetery.

RIF graves in Bandaghem cemetery, of people fatally wounded at the same time as Granda.

It was sobering to realise that others wounded in the same action as Granda didn’t make it.

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Tuesday 27 May, 2014 by John T Adams

The Somme landscape tells a story

At 0730 on the 1st July 1916, the first wave of soldiers from the 9th Royal Irish Fusiliers climbed out of their trenches just north of the River Ancre and began to move towards the heavily defended German lines a few hundreds metres away. Over 500 men of the Battalion were killed or wounded that day.

The Somme was different to how we expected it to be.

All three of us grew up with “The Somme” as one of the base narratives of our Ulster Protestant culture and the 1st July as a significant date in the calendar. After all, our grandfather’s generation were the young men who fought there, but, for obvious reasons, they didn’t tell their story. So the myth grew out of the facts of mud, slaughter and heroism. And we built our own narrative on top of that.

Growing up and leaving that culture leads to a more objective view. But being in the actual landscape changes perspective even more. Here are some reasons why:

The trenches were dug into solid chalk, about 15cm below the surface. Yes, the continual shelling would have churned it up a bit, but it wasn’t the sea of mud that we associate with Passchendaele (more of that tomorrow). The advance was over relatively dry terrain, and that was probably why the leading companies made it so far.
Ulster Division trench from Thiepval Wood
There is significant relief over the battlefield. Being on chalk, the landscape is remarkably similar to parts of Hampshire. The Ancre is a chalk stream not unlike the Test or the Anton. And that means rolling hills. That relief caused significant problems on 1 July 1916 as it meant that the Germans could fire machine guns and shells from great vantage points (enfilading fire).
The 9th RIF attacked along the slope from left to right in this image, taken from the German position on the other side of the valley.
The ravine where the Ancre Cemetery lies now was a significant barrier to cross. Many soldiers who got into the ravine found relative safety there but couldn’t break out. Many didn’t make it back. Some have their graves in the Ancre ravine, many many more are listed on the Thiepval memorial to the missing.
Graves of men from the 9th RIF in Ancre cemetery, the ravine where they died.
And finally, the landscape shows the potential for post-conflict restoration. The fields we walked across today are being used to grow rape, peas and wheat, and there are few clues that such terrible events took place 98 years ago.

Many thanks to Teddy from the Ulster Tower (Somme Association) for the tour of Thiepval Wood. I would highly recommend it if you want to know more about the real rather than mythical Somme.

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Wednesday 28 May, 2014 by John T Adams

Ypres

We spent most of today following Granda’s war in 1917, in two key places:

Battle of Messines 7 June 1917
This was one of the very few tactically successful battles of the war. The attack commenced with the detonation of 19 large mines followed immediately by an attack up the low ridge from Wijtschates to Mesen. The 9th RIF were involved as a Reserve Battalion so were not directly involved in the fighting but relieved the Royal Irish Rifles following the first day’s fighting. The little cemetery at Spanbroekmolen is full of RIR soldiers killed that day.

Royal Irish Rifles graves at Spanbroekmolen, Battle of Messines

We have very little from Granda during that time, mainly a few field postcards.

Today, one of the mine craters in the sector where Granda was has become a Pool of Peace, as a memorial to the people killed in that area.

Spanbroekmolen Pool of Peace, a filled in mine crater

Battle of Langemarck 16 August 1917
This was a different story. The 9th RIF were almost completely wiped out and were forced to retreat to their original lines. It is impossible to imagine the horror of the liquid mud of the Passchendaele battlefield from the fertile farmland (arable, a lot of cabbages) of today. But the one thing we did notice was how dominating even a little relief was – a few metres made all the difference.

This is taken from the flanks of Hill 35. The 9th RIF attached towards us here, but the landscape was a sea of mud.”

The horror becomes more tangible in Tyne Cot cemetery and memorial, where there are 168 names of men from Granda’s Battalion on 16-18 August alone.

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Wednesday 28 May, 2014 by John T Adams

William McKnight

In a side-stop during the day, we found the memorial reference to Granda’s cousin William McKnight, killed in November 1914. He is the only relative I know of who was killed in the Great War, although I’ve not researched my mother’s side of the family in detail.

William McKnight on the Ploegsteert Memorial

He is listed on the memorial at Ploegsteert Wood. He had only been in France 2 weeks.

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Friday 30 May, 2014 by John T Adams

Shoddy Farm

Granda was awarded the second of his Military Medals during the raid on Shoddy Farm during the night of 22 July 1918. We knew very little about Shoddy Farm until Blacker’s Boys came out last year.

Trench raids were brutal affairs involving hand-to-hand fighting in the dark – this one resulted in the killing of 30 German soldiers and the capture of one for intelligence purposes. As a Lewis Gunner, Granda would likely have been providing machine gun cover for the raiding party. The raid lasted less than 1 hour.

For the final stop of our Flanders tour and using the detailed maps in Blacker’s Boys, we were able to trace the plan of the raid on Shoddy Farm and get a feeling for the terrain, distances and potential challenges. It was a surreal experience to be walking along a track where our Granda once fired a machine gun at other human beings.

View of Shoddy Farm from the approximate line of the RIF trenches. The “trenches” would likely have been isolated outposts rather than a fully developed trench system.

View from the position of the Lewis guns during the raid. Obviously during the raid it would have been dark, but there were crops in the fields.

Shoddy Farm today. As a German strongpoint, it would gave been rubble on top of cellars.

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