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A SERIOUS DISAPPOINTMENT

A SERIOUS
DISAPPOINTMENT

The Battle of Aubers Ridge, 1915

and the subsequent munitions scandal

by

ADRIAN BRISTOW

LEO COOPER
LONDON

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 1995 by
LEO COOPER
190 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8JL
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street,
Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 2AS

Adrian Bristow, 1995

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 85052 462 8

All rights reserved.

Typeset by Phoenix Typesetting, Ilkley, West Yorkshire
Printed by Redwood Books Ltd., Trowbridge, Wilsthire

To the memory of Private J. H. Bristow

(18961986)

4th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment

Such an offensive, before an adequate supply of
guns and high-explosive shell can be provided,
would only result in heavy casualties and the
capture of another turnip field.

LORD KITCHENER, June, 1915
on a future offensive in France

Contents

Sources

It is curious that no detailed narrative of this one-day offensive has been written other than the account contained in the Official History. Little is known or remembered about the actual battle; its name awakes no melancholy echoes like Loos, the Somme or Ypres, echoes that still go ringing down through the generations. I think there are probably three main reasons:

It was brief. Although the offensive was planned to last for several days, severe losses forced Haig to abandon it after one day. It was quickly followed a week later by the resumed offensive at Festubert and the military establishment gratefully allowed an unmitigated disaster to slide, if not into oblivion, at least into obscurity.

Aubers Ridge formed part of a major allied offensive in which the French were by far the dominant partner. It was therefore unlike Neuve Chapelle, for example, which was an independent attack undertaken solely by the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).

The offensive was launched right at the end of the Second Battle of Ypres and soon after the landings at Gallipoli on which, not unnaturally, the newspapers had been concentrating. It thus received very little immediate press coverage though the aftermath of the battle did.

Eventually the failed offensive was officially designated as the Battle of Aubers, but to all those who were involved it was always known as Aubers Ridge. Because it took place near Neuve Chapelle and was followed soon afterwards by the attack at Festubert, it has been variously and confusingly referred to on maps and in accounts as the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the Battle of Festubert and the Battle of Fromelles. The Germans have always called it Das Gefecht bei Fromelles the Fight at Fromelles possibly because their troops were more strenuously involved in beating off the northern part of the two-pronged attack than they were in dealing with the assault by I Corps and the Indian Corps to the south.

British Sources

Like all writers on the battles of the Great War, I am indebted to the Official History, edited by Sir James Edmonds. The two chapters on Aubers Ridge contain a straightforward account of the battle, though some phases of the fighting are dealt with in much more detail than others. The only other account of the battle is contained in Alan Clarks interesting book The Donkeys. Here it forms part of his study of the British offensives in 1915, excluding Festubert; his theme is the destruction of the original divisions of the BEF and the competence, or otherwise, of the senior Army Commanders. I hope I have built further upon his consideration of this particular battle.

For my book I have consulted a number of divisional and regimental histories. The history of the 8th Division and that of the Indian Corps in France (see Select Bibliography) proved most useful; strangely, there appears to be no history of the 1st Division. I have examined the war diaries of all those battalions involved in the action, and specimens of the diaries, which may be unfamiliar to the general reader, are included in the appendices. I have also found a number of eyewitness accounts contained in letters, books and diaries, and I have drawn freely upon these.

German Sources

Unfortunately, the archives of the Imperial German Army were almost completely destroyed in 1945. However, I have consulted the fairly detailed histories of the 55th and 57th Regiments of the 14th Division which were published in 1928 and 1936 respectively. Luckily the archives of the Bavarian Army survived more or less intact at Munich and I have been able to draw upon the battalion war diaries of the 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment (6th Bavarian Reserve Division) and on the regimental history.

My warmest thanks are due to Dr Fleischer of the BundesarchivMilitrarchiv at Freiburg and to Dr A. Fuchs, Archivdirector of the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv-Kriegsarchiv at Munich, for their help in providing photocopies of relevant material.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the following for permission to quote extracts from copyright material:

Constable & Co. Ltd for 1914 by Sir John French and With the Indians in France by General Sir James Willcocks; A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of the Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust for Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves; Messrs Peters, Fraser and Dunlop for Trench Nomenclature by Edmund Blunden; the Peter Liddle Collection; Times Newspapers Ltd for extracts from the issues for 12 and 14 May, 1915; Mrs Elizabeth M. Roy for extracts from the papers of her late husband. Captain W.H. Roy; Mr D. Anderton for extracts from the papers of his father, Private E.H. Anderton; the Society of Authors as the literary representatives of the Estate of John Masefield for The Old Front Line; Herbert Jenkins Ltd for Before the Charge by Patrick MacGill; H.F. & G. Witherby Ltd for Roundabout by Viscount Buckmaster; Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd for Goughie by Anthony Farrar-Hockley.

I should also like to thank the Trustees of the Royal Sussex Regiment Museum Trust and the County Archivist of the West Sussex Record Office for permission to quote from the War Diaries of the 2nd Bn and the 1/5th Bn Royal Sussex Regiment (West Sussex Record Office RSR MS 2/57 and MS 4/64 respectively); the Trustees of the Gurkha Museum Trust for permission to include the War Diary of the 2/2nd Gurkhas for 9 May, 1915; the Regimental Museum Staff of the Duke of Edinburghs Royal Regiment (Berkshire and Wiltshire), the Black Watch and the Worcestershire Regiment and the Sherwood Foresters. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of all the passages quoted in the book.

Finally, I should like to thank the staff of the Imperial War Museum and Peter Liddle of the Peter Liddle Collection for their generous assistance.

I grew up in the thirties in that part of south-east London bordering the Thames which embraces Woolwich, Plumstead and Shooters Hill. Woolwich has a certain historic importance. Its Royal Dockyard, established by the Tudors, was the first and, for centuries, the principal dockyard in the country. The Great Harry was built there in 1562 and the Royal George in 1751, but shipbuilding ceased in 1869 and the Dockyard became a military store depot. A little way downstream from the Dockyard lay the vast expanse of the Royal Arsenal. The Arsenal grew gradually from Elizabethan times, developed rapidly in the early nineteenth century and reached its peak in terms of output and employees during the Great War. Guns, shells, torpedoes, small-arms ammunition and wagons were produced in huge quantities in its workshops to fuel the fighting on the Western Front.

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