Newton-le-Willows and Earlestown War Memorial

The Rcecapture of the Bluff

March 1916

The Official History, gives the following account:

“Finally, it was decided at a conference at l7th Division headquarters, during which General Plumer was present, that on the evening of the lst March a bombardment should begin at 5 P.M. and last 45 minutes, with subsequent lift and barrage, but should then stop, every effort being used to make it appear that an attack had been intended, but had failed to materialize. After a complete pause, Br.-General Pratt was to decide at 2 A.M., according as the enemy had or had not shown signs of activity in making repairs, whether or not there should be a preliminary bombardment of twenty minutes before the assault.

The plan was not only to recover what had been lost, but to improve the British position by consolidating a line across the Bean in front of the old re-entrant portion. There were to be three battalions in front line: the 2/Suffolk on the right, to assault New Year Trench, the Bluff, and Loop Trench; the 8/King's Own in the centre; and the 1/Gordon Highlanders on the left; all with sections of the 56th and East Riding Field Companies R.E. and small parties of tunnellers attached to them. The 10/Royal Welch Fusiliers was to be in support of the Suffolks, and the 7/Lincolnshire (51st Brigade) divided to support all three front line battalions, two companies being behind the centre. The 10/Sherwood Foresters (51st Brigade) would be in reserve. On the extreme right of the attack a raid was to be made along the bank to destroy all the German mine shafts found there.

The British bombardment on the 1st March was most effective; the trench and Stokes mortars available, though small in number, enabled all parts of the enemy's works which the howitzers could not reach to be dealt with. A reconnaissance in the afternoon established the fact that the Bluff defences were almost destroyed, but that the trenches further north were not only far from levelled, but had been improved and provided with fresh wire. The intense bombardment was carried out, as arranged, from 1.5 P.M. to 5.45 P.M., an 18-pdr., pushed close up to the front, being used to blow in 40 yards of the German front line on the left of the part to be attacked, so as to form a "block". Then the guns and mortars kept up a slow rate of fire during the night to prevent the enemy from repairing his trenches or putting out fresh wire: snipers and machine gunners fired at the same rate as usual. The night was fine and clear, and the enemy remained quiescent, there being no gun or machine-gun fire, while his sentries hardly fired a shot. At 2.15 A.M. on the 2nd, Br.-General Pratt reported that he would not require the 20-minute preliminary bombardment, and that the infantry was moving up into its assembly positions. This operation was completed by 8.45 A.M. without attracting any attention from the enemy's infantry or artillery.

At 4.15 A.M. the troops began to move forward in small groups, guided by men of the battalions of the 52nd Brigade in the line, and punctually at 4.80 A.M. the assault was launched. The only mishap was the explosion of a store of fireworks, collected with great difficulty by Major-General Pilcher in order to direct artillery fire. At 4.82 A.M. the British artillery began the barrage fire behind the front attacked. The surprise was complete, except on the extreme left, where a half-company of the Gordons was shot down almost to a man by a German officer machine-gunner, eventually killed, with his crew, by an officer, 2nd. Lt. C. Sanderson who was awarded the D.S.O. for his gallantry. Everywhere else the front waves advanced a considerable distance, trampling down what remained of the wire without hindrance from the enemy.

There had been a somewhat interesting preliminary to the assault. It was agreed at the conference at which an attack without bombardment was discussed, that the advance against the Bluff itself would be impossible unless there was covering fire to force the Germans to keep their heads down during the movement from the assembly trenches across No Man's Land; this would take two minutes. General Uniacke then offered to "drill the enemy" for the purpose. A 60-pdr. battery was detailed to fire a salvo on the Bluff trench, followed by a second after two minutes' interval, at irregular periods by day and night. The ruse was entirely successful; at zero hour a salvo was fired, and when the 2/Suffolk entered the defences of the Bluff, it found the sentries under cover, expecting no doubt the second salvo, and most of the garrison in the dug-outs excavated in the western face of the big crater. The 8/King's Own overran its objective, and, finding no Germans in the first two lines, reached the third across the base of the Bean, which it used as a covering position until next evening, whilst the objective was being consolidated. Some of the battalion went on beyond without finding any Germans. Subsequently a party of sixty Germans behind the King's Own front, in the old British front trench, began firing, but it was soon compelled to surrender. The 1/Gordon Highlanders was held back for a time by the resistance it encountered on the left; but after reinforcing twice, with the assistance of a company of the 7/Lincolnshire, and of the 9/Duke of Wellington 's (52nd Brigade) which had remained in the line and was protecting the left of the attack, it obtained possession of all its objectives by 5.10 A.M.

Many of the Germans encountered had no equipment on and were without rifles. Not a bayonet was fixed, and there was no rifle fire from the enemy's old front trench of the 14th February after the assault. Five officers and 248 other ranks were taken prisoner, but this total includes, 47 who remained in the Bluff dug-outs all day and were extracted from them in the evening.

The raiding party destroyed the enemy gallery in No Man's Land leading to the Bluff, but all the men of the 172nd Tunnelling Company employed were killed by machine-gun fire.

It was not until 9.30 A.M. that the enemy's artillery opened, and the bombardment did not become intense until 11 A.M. By that time the British front line had been thinned by Lieut.-Colonel G. S. G. Crauford of the Gordons, the senior officer in the line, and the work of consolidation was well under way; but, as the fire continued heavy until 3.15 P.M., in spite of British retaliation, both the old and new trenches were badly damaged and required much work before they could be made secure. One of the old trenches became known as International Trench, because it contained bodies of men of three nationalities who had fallen in the 1914 battles. Some attempts at bombing attacks were made in the evening by the enemy on the British left, but they failed completely; for once the British bombers, equipped with plenty of Mills grenades, enjoyed the mastery.

The battalions which took part in the action were relieved on the night of the 3rd/4th by the 8th Brigade, the operation being difficult owing to the state of the trenches, and a snowstorm which by midnight rose to a blizzard leaving the ground thick under snow. The casualties from noon on the 1st March to noon of the 4th had been 62 officers and 1,560 other ranks. (The German losses were 124 killed, 438 wounded and 346 missing, of whom 93 must have been killed, as only 253 prisoners were taken.)

The operations at the Bluff were subsequently confined to mining, with the result that on the 11th December 1916 the Bluff was reported safe from underground attack. In consequence of information given to the Intelligence by a prisoner, who drew a plan of the galleries, the German workings were cut off by driving a deep system of mining through difficult ground out to and behind the German lines and then firing heavy camouflets, under-charged mines calculated to blow in enemy workings, but not to form craters on the surface. The German galleries were then captured and annexed to the British shallow system. Thereafter the Bluff was beyond molestation, until on the 7th June 1917, in the great Messines offensive, the Germans were driven from the area.