World War I: The Frontline

Source: The Canberra Times

A pill-box was a squat, concrete structure, square in shape. The murmur of guttural German voices filtering through to the ears of an Australian officer as he cautiously approaches. 



Not a Hun "pill-box" on the Passchendaele Ridge, but a half-completed concrete cottage at Blandfordia, in which half-a-dozen German workmen are complacently eating lunch.

The village of Voormezeele in the Ypres Salient was immediately behind the British lines at St. Eloi before it finally fell to advancing German forces during the great Spring push of April 1918. The village was subsequently retaken by American troops of the 30th Division on 31 August 1918.

The major operations of the British ‘Flanders Offensive’ began on 31 July 1917 when British forces, with two French divisions, attacked the German defences along a 16-mile front east of Ypres. For fifteen days before that the British artillery, which included Australian batteries, fired more than four million shells from 3,000 guns. The German defence of the area stretched all the way back to the long sickle-shaped ridge between three and ten kilometres from the town. It was a defence in depth; the front was lightly held and beyond it were arrays of deep concrete shelters or ‘pillboxes’ in which soldiers could shelter from bombardment and emerge to mount machine guns to fire at advancing infantry. Barbed wire was carefully positioned to funnel the advancing men into the fields of fire of the machine guns. Well back, out of sight beyond the ridge, were the German artillery and infantry reserves ready to mount counter-attacks.