Battle of the Yser
The Menin Road
Some fine souvenirs – Hooge Crater Cemetery
At Hooge on the Menin Road today the traffic passes at speed down towards Ieper and the visible spire of St Martin’s and the belfry of the Lakenhalle. But there is one carefully tended reminder of the devastated battlefield that lay all around here in 1917 – the Hooge Crater. The crater, caused by a British mine in 1916, in symbolic form lies at the entrance to Hooge Crater Cemetery with its nearly 6,000 war graves. All that remains of that great wound in the earth is a circle of sunken lawn in the middle of which is the Stone of Remembrance with its sombre message – ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’. Many Australians lie here, most of them, as their headstones reveal, casualties of the fighting in September 1917 when the divisions of the AIF were heavily involved in battles hereabouts which formed part of the British ‘Flanders offensive’. One date on a number of Australian headstones is 20 September 1917, the day of the Battle of the Menin Road.
Aerial view of the Hooge area along the Menin Road over which the Australians advanced at the Battle of the Menin Road on 20 September 1917. [AWM J00274]
Key to the aerial photograph of the Hooge area along the Menin Road over which the Australians advanced at the Battle of the Menin Road on 20 September 1917. [AWM J00274A]
When the battle began, at 5.40 am, the battalions of the First and Second Australian Divisions lay spread out along a 1.8 kilometre line about a kilometre east and slightly north of the cemetery. Protected by an intensive artillery screen, they were to advance, in three stages, about 1.3 kilometres to the seizure of the German defensive positions, mainly concrete pillboxes where the enemy machine gunners and bombers took shelter during the British bombardments. By 10.15 that morning the Australians had seized all their objectives aided significantly by the success of the covering artillery barrage and softening up bombardments on the days leading up to the attack. Indeed, the artillery also crushed German counter attacks when their soldiers were seen assembling later that day beyond the captured Australian positions. ‘The advancing barrage’, wrote Charles Bean, ‘won the ground; the infantry merely occupied it, pouncing on any points at which resistance survived’. However, that resistance cost many casualties, both killed and wounded.
Hooge Crater Cemetery [DVA]
In Plot V, Row G, Grave 4, at Hooge Crater cemetery lies Private Thomas Strut, 18th Battalion (New South Wales), age 37, of Port Macquarie, New South Wales. Strutt’s unit on 20 September 1917 captured a number of German pillboxes on the extreme north–east of the Australian line north of Polygon Wood. One of these blockhouses was a two–storey affair known as ‘Anzac’, the second storey being used by the enemy as an artillery observation post. The British bombardment badly shook the garrison of ‘Anzac’ and 15 of them, with two machine guns, surrendered with little opposition. Captain Arthur Hull, 18th Battalion, famously climbed to the top of this structure and planted an Australian flag there until heavy German shelling knocked it down the next day. Earlier the capture of these pillboxes had taken its toll of the 18th Battalion and one of those casualties was Private Thomas Strutt. One witness, Private Vincent Lee, recalled how Strutt had been killed as they surrounded a pillbox near Polygon Wood while other witnesses described how Strutt had been shot by a sniper from this pillbox – ‘We found that sniper and put four bayonets into his chest’.
Headstone of Private Thomas Strutt, 18th Battalion (New South Wales), Hooge Crater Cemetery, Hooge. [DVA]
Postcard showing the planting of the Australian flag on a German pillbox by Captain Arthur Hull, 18th Battalion (New South Wales), during the Battle of the Menin Road on 20 September 1917. The postcard, wrongly entitled ‘The Battle of Polygon Wood …’ was sold to raise money for the Australian Comforts Fund. [AWM H00563]
All told, on 20 September 1917 the AIF suffered in excess of 5,000 battle casualties, about one quarter of the total British loss for the battle. As always in these great artillery battles of the Western Front many deaths were caused by shelling. Charles Bean draws attention to the 3rd Battalion (New South Wales) who, as reserves, were not even in action but were in support positions close up towards the front behind Chateau Wood where they suffered from German shelling during the whole period of the Menin Road battle. Lance Corporal Stewart Hackett, 3rd Battalion, killed in action on 21 September 1917, lies in Plot IV, Row E, Grave 12 at Hooge, and he may be one of those killed by the German bombardments.
Australian official photographers, Captain Frank Hurley and Lieutenant Hubert Wilkins, were out on the Menin Road battlefield on the day of this great Australian success. They took a series of memorable photographs which convey a sense of what war had done to the area around Hooge and the awful conditions of a Western Front battlefield. Hurley wrote:
Bodies of Australian soldiers killed by shell fire during the Battle of Menin Road on 20 September 1917. AWM E04677
I pushed on up the duckboard track to Sterling Castle, a mound of powered brick and from where there is to be had a magnificent panorama of the battlefield. The way was gruesome and awful beyond words. The ground had been recently heavily shelled by the Boche [Germans] and the dead and wounded lay everywhere. About here the ground had the appearance of having been ploughed by a great canal excavator and then reploughed and turned over again and again. Last night’s shower too made it a quagmire and through this the wounded had to drag themselves, and those mortally wounded pass out their young lives.
Frank Hurley, diary 20 September 1917, http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/
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Australian official photographers on the Menin Road, 1917
Headstone of Private Patrick Bugden, 31st Battalion (New South Wales), Hooge Crater Cemetery, Hooge. Bugden was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery during the Battle of Polygon Wood fought north–east of Hooge on 26 September 1917. [DVA]
For the survivors, however, it had been a successful day of soldiering. One of them, Private George Radnell, 8th Battalion (Victoria), summed up the Battle of Menin Road in a few words:
Hop out and lads done well. Hogg pushed up to a pillbox in Glencorse Wood. Collected some fine souvenirs there … gas in one pillbox. Two wounded Fritzs in one and helped them to the dressing station.
Private George Radnell, diary 20 September 1917, in Peter Liddle (ed), Passchendaele in Perspective: The Third Battle of Ypres, London 1997, p.234
Hooge Crater Museum, Hooge. [DVA]
Australian soldiers, somewhere beyond Ypres, 17 September 1917. [AWM E00732]
Outside exhibits, Hooge Crater Museum, Hooge [DVA]
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© 2008 Department of Veterans' Affairs and Board of Studies NSW :: Last update - November 2008