Passchendaele — House of Commons, 2017-07-13
Topic: Defense
Alec Shelbrooke (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin). I congratulate him on his maiden speech. I am sure it is the first of many contributions as he represents his community in Bedford and I wish him well Today’s debate is focused on the battle of Passchendaele. It has been described as a long campaign that took place over several months. It was an honour to be in the Chamber to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) describing the fear that he knows at first hand and what it is like to be in combat. He made a very powerful speech, and he has the respect of all of us for what he said I want to focus on a particular time in the battle. At the end of August 1917, Field Marshal Haig decided to replace General Gough With General Plumer. The website "War History Online" reports that General Plumer was an efficient, methodical commander. He had assembled an outstandingly competent staff, who had demonstrated their abilities as a team in a previous operation in Messines Ridge. There would be no rushing a meticulous planner like Plumer. He was told at the end of August 1917 that he was leading the next big attack and he took three weeks to prepare and plan. There was a lull in fighting while he gathered his resources. However, in that lull more than 10,000 men were killed in just over two weeks As my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham said, the weather was atrocious, but for the first time that year it turned to the advantage of the British. The continuous rain that had turned the battlefield into a quagmire let up for 10 whole days. In the relatively dry ground, Plumer’s men dug trenches and repaired roads The skills and techniques of artillerists had been refined over the preceding three years, and Plumer made use of that. When his artillery opened fire at 5.40 on 20 September, they did so in planned formation. Guns were concentrated to provide one for every 5.2 yards of ground to be attacked. Infantry advanced behind the shelter of a creeping barrage, one of the great innovations of the war. A wall of explosions helped to hide them from the fire of their enemies and to force those enemies to keep their heads down Today, we are rightly discussing and commemorating people who sacrificed their lives on the battlefield. However, in my city of Leeds, which I am proud to represent, we have Barnbow armouries. In the first world war, we had the Leeds canaries—women who made the munitions that would have been used in the battle. They were called canaries because the TNT turned their skin yellow. They knew that they were being poisoned and were likely to become sterile. Tragically, on Tuesday 5 December 1916, there was an explosion in which 35 women were killed instantly. They have been commemorated in this place previously, but I want to take the opportunity to do so again. When the explosion happened, the War Office realised that it could not release the names of the women in obituaries at the time because it did not want the enemy to know where the munitions were being made. Over the next year, one woman a week had her obituary in the Yorkshire Post. The obituaries glossed over what the women were doing. There were casualties back home as a result of involvement in the battles as well as people dying on the frontline.