The next stop on my tour of Ypres was the Battle of Mont Sorrel, 2-13 Jun 1916. As with other tours, this adventure is following Norm Christie’s For King and Empire. The You Tube program of this Battle is Episode 4, Mont Sorrel and Hill 70.
Battle of Mont Sorrel
The 2nd Canadian Division arrived in France in September 1915, and the 3rd Division joined the Canadian Corps in December 1915. In March 1916, the 3rd Division commanded by Maj-Gen Malcolm Mercer, considered the best General Canada had to offer. The 3rd Division was assigned to the Ypres Salient from Hooge to Mont Sorrel.
This was the most dangerous portion of the Salient, as the Canadians controlled the only high ground in Allied Hands, Hill 62, Observatory Ridge, and Mont Sorrel. The Germans wanted these positions as they were only 3 km from Ypres.
On 29 May1 916, just prior to the battle Gen Alderson, the British Officer who had commanded the Canadian Corps from the start of the war was replaced by Gen Julian Byng (future Governor General of Canada) due to a political battle with Sam Hughes, the Canadian Minister of the Militia.
Concerned about the German buildup, Gen Byng sent Maj-Gen Mercer, along with 8th Brigade commander BGen Victor Williams and 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles (CMR) Battalion Commander LCol Usher forward to investigate the situation. The CMR were former calvary units, converted to Infantry.
Unfortunately, this took place on 02 June, the morning of the German Attack. Mercer was pinned down by artillery fire, unable to escape or call for artillery support. Later that day, the Germans blew 4 mines at Mont Sorrel, destroying the front line and many of the 4th CMR. The Germans pushed through a 1200 m gap from Mont Sorrel to Sanctuary Woods.
The 1st CMR suffered 557 casualties, and the 4th CMR suffered 626 casualties, an 89% casualty rate. At the northern end of the line, the PPCLI fought valiantly under oppressive shelling, and as the Germans advanced, the Germans effectively used flame throwers to clear out the troops. The PPCLI stood firm, suffering more than 400 casualties. The PPCLI were replaced in the line at Hooge by the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR).
By the end of the day, the Germans had pushed the Canadians off Mont Sorrel, Hill 62 and Observatory Ridge.
General Byng ordered an immediate counterattack to go in at 0200 03 June, but the Canadians were disorganized and unable to mount the attack before 0700. At that point the flares to signal the attack did not function properly, so the attack was piecemeal. In addition, the Germans bombarded the assembling troops with artillery and gas and the confusion caused many friendly fire losses from Canadian artillery. The counterattack failed miserably, and the Canadians suffered 3750 casualties.
The fates of MGen Mercer and BGen Williams were still unknown. Williams was wounded and later taken prisoner. Mercer had his leg shattered by gun fire, then was ultimately killed by shrapnel. Mercer’s aide de camp, Capt Gooderham, stayed with the body, and when the Germans advance the ADC insisted that the General be buried. His body was not discovered until 21 Jun when further artillery fire unearthed the body along with 20 other corpses. MGen Mercer is buried in Lijssenhoek Military cemetery, Poperinghe, 10 km west of Ypres. This was a hospital cemetery, so the men were buried in chronological order and there was a separate plot for officers. MGen Mercer was the highest-ranking Canadian Officer killed in the war. I visited his grave site during this visit.
Lijssenhoek Military cemetery is the second largest cemetery in Belgium, second only to Tyne Cot near Passchendaele. Lijssenhoek has more than 10,600 burials, including 1058 Canadians, 658 French and 211 German soldiers. As this was a hospital cemetery, there are only 35 unknown soldiers in this massive cemetery.
Outside the Cemetery, there is a long row of posts, shown on the right, dated for each day of the war.
I wasn’t sure of their significance, but as I walked along, I saw notches on some posts which I guessed were the casualties for each day of the war. I looked at 01 Jul 1916 expecting to see massive numbers, but there were only a few. It turns out the posts indicate the number of people in the cemetery killed on a specific day. From the cemetery records, during the Battle of Passchendaele, the following casualties were recorded:
04 Oct 1917 78
05 Oct 1917 102
06 Oct 1917 76
07 Oct 1917 56
After the failed counterattack, the 28th Battalion of the 2nd Division replaced the RCR at Hooge. At 1505 on 06 June, the Germans set off 4 mines under the outpost positions at the north of the line at Hooge obliterating a company of 200 men. The Germans quickly captured the front lines and dug in. My buddy Wine Bob’s great uncle William Smith was in the 29th Battalion, and they were rushed forward to stem the assault. On 08 June 1916 Private William Smith was killed in action at Hooge, somewhere between positions 74R and 60R on the map.
The 4 craters at Hooge shown in an aerial photo taken the day after the craters were blown. The larger crater to the left was blown in July 1915.
Wine Bob and I visited the craters during our January tour. The craters are on the former site of Hooge Chateau, briefly the British 1st and 2nd Army Headquarters in 1914 before it was destroyed.
There is a hotel called Kasteelhof ‘T Hooghe on the site of the original chateau grounds and was where I stayed for my Ypres visit. I was fortunate to have a balcony overlooking the craters, now one large pond.
Adjacent to the craters is a small open-air museum, and some unreclaimed land. There are a number of bunkers, trenches and war detritus right next door to the hotel.
The size of the craters is more visible from ground level.
The museum has some very well-worn trenches that look like they could have been occupied yesterday.
There are a number of collections of shells, barbed wire pickets and other war garbage located around the museum.
And the caretakers are always busy keeping the grounds well trimmed.
The Canadians under Byng and Arthur Currie carefully planned a second counterattack to regain the lost high ground. They gathered more than 200 guns to pound the Germans for 4 nights in a row. Each night they had an extended barrage, then stopped as if an attack was imminent. Finally on the fourth night at 0200 on 13 June 1916, primarily 1st Division troops attacked in a well-planned and well executed assault. Since the British were preparing for an assault on the Somme, no additional troops were available, so Byng decided not to recapture Hooge. The Canadians regained most of the rest of their lost territory, and the Germans did not try an additional counterattack. They were content to shell the high ground.
The Canadians lost over 8000 men killed or wounded, with an additional 358 prisoners. This was a very high price to regain the land they had held two weeks earlier. However, they had successfully planned and executed a night attack, regaining their self-confidence and starting the development of the Canadians as Shock Troops, largely due to the skills of their leader Gen Byng. He was a hard man, but fair and an excellent trainer. He developed the Canadian Corps into a cohesive unit that would excel throughout the rest of the war.
Tour
The first stop on the tour was the Canadian Hill 62 memorial, one of the spots of high ground held by the Canadians on 02 June 1916.
The guide shows the Canadian front line prior to the attack of 02 June.
Hill 62 was a key piece of high ground just 3 km from Ypres, as shown in the picture.
Trust me, that’s Ypres in the distance. It is often foggy in the morning, so I went back to Hill 62 at the end of the day.
The memorial stone is shown below.
I recently discovered you can take pictures with the GPS app, and the location will be overlaid on the image. I kind of fell in love with this feature for a bit, so you may be seeing a few of these shots in the near future.
View of Ypres (3 km away).
This image is overlooking Sanctuary Wood.
The next stop was at Sanctuary Woods Cemetery, just down the hill from the memorial. The cemetery was built in 1915, but badly damaged during the battle of Mont Sorrel. By the end of the war there were 137 graves. The concentration efforts after the war raised the total to 1989 with 144 Canadians, 71 unidentified.
Many of the headstones say, “Buried near this spot”. This means a group of graves were found, but the individuals could not be identified. The markers are usually placed in alphabetical order over the burials.
I usually keep an eye out for Suffolk Regiment headstones, as the Goodfellow brothers all served in the Suffolk Regiment. I came across an interesting crossover headstone. Wine Bob’s Great Uncle William Smith was killed on 08 June 1916, and this headstone happened to be William Smith of the 2nd Suffolk Regiment, the same regiment of Henry who died in Aug 1914, and Thomas who was the only brother to survive the war. Not the same guy but a good mash up of our War Stories. There was also another William Smith a Lt in the Australian Imperial Force.
The view from the back of the cemetery shows Mont Sorrel on the left. It also shows the good Flanders mud in a plowed field after a few days rain. The ground would have been covered in shell holes and made trying to advance an ordeal.
The next stop was Maple Copse Cemetery. The cemetery was built in the spring of 1916, and heavily damaged during the battle of Mont Sorrel. There are 154 British and 154 Canadians buried here.
The cemetery is in low lying land and has a small moat around it to drain the water.
Only 26 of the burials are marked, 230 of them have the inscription “Known to be Buried in this Cemetery”.
The view back up towards Hill 62 from the Cemetery Gate.
In the cemetery registry, there were two poems that touchingly summed up the lot of missing soldiers. Both poems were written by Robert Tate, a Gunner who survived the carnage.
Although the first poem is called, Another Headstone Without a Name, it is really about the bodies that were never found.
The second poem is about the soldiers still buried on the battlefields, called Somewhere on the Battlefield, making the case that all of the Battlefields are sacred ground.
The next stop was along Observatory Ridge, the high ground behind the front lines that was taken on 02 June 1916.
The 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders) has a very active association and in 2007 they took on the task to raise memorials to commemorate the battalion in action. This memorial was dedicated in October 2011, and the latest at Hill 60 was dedicated in August 2023. There are a total of 11 memorials to the battalion. Wine Bob and I had seen this one in our January tour, and I noticed a similar memorial at Hill 60. I came across a third memorial at Gravenstafel Ridge near Passchendaele on this trip. The Canadian Corps fought together for much of the war, so the memorials are all in places that the Canadians saw a lot of action.
Sanctuary Wood was the scene of fierce fighting, but unfortunately it is private land and not accessible for touring.
The final stop was the Hooge Crater Cemetery, just across the road from the Hooge Craters that were blown on 06 June. The cemetery was on the Canadian front line on 02 June, and the site of ferocious fighting on 06 June. The cemetery originally had only 76 graves but was expanded to more than 5800 after the war.
The cross of sacrifice is at the entrance to the cemetery, surrounded by a circular border.
I always look for 1st Battalion graves as my brother in law’s uncle, Sgt Robert Connelly served in the first battalion. There were 22 1st Battalion members killed by a mine explosion on 09 July 1916 at Sanctuary Woods. Their bodies were discovered in 1919 by an Exhumation company. First, they found a cross for Pvt Westover, and kept digging until they found 21 more bodies. They are almost all buried in a single row in the cemetery.
There is also a Victoria Cross winner, Pvt Patrick Bugden, Australian Imperial Force, who won the VC for bravery in Polygon Wood on 28 September 1917.
On two occasions, when held up by intense fire from machine-guns, he led small parties to silence the enemy posts. Five times he rescued wounded men trapped by intense shelling and machine-gun fire. Once, seeing that an Australian corporal had been taken prisoner, he single-handedly rushed to his comrade's aid, shooting and bayoneting the enemy. He kept fighting until he was killed.
The Hooge Crater Cemetery is directly across the road from the Hooge Crater Museum, an excellent private museum with a large collection of uniforms and weapons from the War.
The museum is housed in the Hooge Chapel, where the Pope once gave a sermon. The museum has a new feature called the Hooge Eye, a second story platform that looks over the Cemetery and several of the battle locations in the area.
The Battle of Mont Sorrel was the blooding for the 3rd Division and led to very heavy casualties. Although there were no further major battles, the Canadians lost an additional 1000 men killed before they moved to the Somme in September. This battle is special to me, as the losses the Canadians suffered directly resulted in my Grandfather William Johnston joining the 58th Battalion, and Robert Connelly joining the 1st Battalion. William would be wounded in his first action at Courcelette, and spend the rest of the war in England, where he met and married his bride, Annie Goodfellow. Robert would go on to fight at Vimy, Hill 70, win the Military Medal at Passchendaele and be promoted to Sgt, fight in the battles of the last 100 days at Amiens and Arras before being killed 6 weeks before the end of the war at the Battle of Canal du Nord.
The Canadians did not return to Ypres until the battle of Passchendaele in October 1917, where in 4 weeks they suffered 16000 casualties. The Canadians were only around Ypres for a total of 6 months but had more than 16000 killed, 25% of their losses for the entire war.
I remembered a few years ago finding online an article with excerpts from the personal diary of a 29th Bn stretcher bearer. I don’t have access here to where the article is filed at home but after some creative Google searching, I found it:
http://www.russiansinthecef.ca/29thbattalion/courier.shtml
The stretcher bearer recorded that in June 1916, he was preparing corpses for transport from where they fell - sewing them into blankets - to Reninghelst for burial. For me, this first-hand account of the disposition of 29th Bn kia’s in that sector at that time settles William’s burial place.
Note at the Somme later that summer, the diary says that fatalities were so many that sewing bodies into blankets wasn’t practical. While the article’…
Note from the graveyard photo, William’s comrade H.B. Brindley was killed the day the aerial photograph was taken. I recall that his Circumstances of Death card (missing for William) didn’t provide details of that event.
I don’t recall seeing information that William was initially buried elsewhere than at Reninghelst. I’ll have a look at his pers file again when I get back to see if it records his burial location.
Another great post, Paul. Thanks for mentioning great-uncle Pte William Smith, my paternal Grandmother’s brother.
MGen Mercer being killed at Mont Sorrel but buried at Lijssenhoek illustrates the question of whether William was killed in the line and his body transported to Reninghelst for burial or was he transferred there for treatment where he succumbed to his wounds? I’m afraid we’ll never know.
The aerial photo of the four fresh Hooge mine craters and the surrounding “moonscape” of shell craters the day before William was killed or fatally wounded somewhere along or just off the left edge is special, the new mine craters symbolizing one of the main events leading to his death. Another was the Canadian losses in Apri…
So sad and so much information about the battles. Everything looks so peaceful and beautiful now.
Robert Tates poems must be difficult for loved ones to read who have their soldier killed but whose bodies are not recovered. I tried googling Robert to see if there was any mention of him somewhere.
Did the generals in the early days of the war get to be generals because they could buy fancy uniforms or did they have a military background?