The Battle front would be a line about 15 miles long ... reaching from the River Lys in the south to just north of Boesinghe.
The battle lasted from the 31st July 1917 to the 10th of November. The village of Passchendaele was taken by a Canadian force on the 6th
and the ridge was secured during the next few days. The battle is variously considerd to have been finally concluded between the 10th and 20th November.

During the 12 months before this battle 21 tunnels, each around a mile in length had been painstakingly and silently dug until they were up to, and 30 metres below, the German line.
The 21 final chambers were filled with a total of over 4.5 million kgs, of fused explosives.
The mines were detonated in the early hours of June 7th.
19 mines detonated. The 20th exploded in 1955 ... but the 21st remains lost.

Thousands of Germans died and, in the attack that followed, thousands, dazed and shocked, surrendered to the allies.
Attack and counter attack followed but a week later and the ridge had been secured by the allied forces.

Battle of Pilckem Ridge (Boesinghe) ................31st Jul.to 2nd Aug
Langemarck, ........................................................16th Aug to18th Aug
Menin Road Ridge ...............................................20th Sep to 25th Sep
Polygon Wood .....................................................26th Sep to 3rd Oct
Broodseinde ...........................................................4th Oct
Poelcapelle .............................................................9th Oct
First Passchendaele ............................................12th Oct
Second Passchendaele .......................................26th Oct to 10th November

Plus there were around 230,000 German casualties.

Altogether I now have the names of 427 men, including about 80 who were not local to our townships but were in one of the Oldham Battalions ie., the 10th and 24th Manchesters.

Unfortunately, even so, the real number can't be known, as so many men didn't have a 'home location' in their 'Additional Information' on the CWGC website and / or were not reported in the newspaper or were seriously injured and hospitalised at a distance from the Ypres area, dying of their wounds at a later date. Consequently, none of those men can be positively identified in the searches.

There were 3 Oldham battalions in the salient differing periods time during the months of the Battle.

They were :
• The 24th Battalion Manchester Regiment (The Oldham Comrades)
who were in the Ypres area from 30th August until mid November ...
• The 1st/10th Battalion Manchester Regiment (The Oldham Territorials)
who were in the area for 3 weeks ... from the 1st until the 20th of September,
• The 2nd/10th Battalion Manchester Regiment Initially they were only in the Ypres area from the 26th of September to the 11th October but returned in mid November, just as the Battle of 3rd Ypres was considered to be over.

I'm still in the process of transcribing their war diaries for this period but on the website HERE you will find an account of their experiences throughout the war as recounted by Sergeant Maurice Bradbury MM and published in instalments in the 'Oldham Standard'.

Soldiers sent out in the drafts, to bring the front line battalions back up to strength, were frequently conscripts, not only from Oldham but from other areas of Lancashire and even further afield.

They now included men who had failed to get exemption from Tribunal boards and even men who, in the earlier part of the war, had been deemed physically unfit for active duty.

The 2nd and 3/10th Battalions were the training Battalions, remaining in England ... BUT, there was now an urgent need for soldiers in France after the terrible losses on the Somme in 1916.

It was now the turn of the 2/10th, and other 2nd line battalions, to prepare for active service

The 2/10th Manchester Regiment were some of the last to go, not arriving in France until early 1917. They were on the Western Front for some months before they were sent to the Salient

Initially, they were in the Ypres area from the 10th September to the 11th October. However, in those few weeks, their losses were much greater than those of the 1/10th and the 24th, numbering over 60 deaths ...
it was in those weeks that 4 of the Battles for Passchendaele took place.

Finally, there were the local men who enlisted in, or were drafted into, any number of other regiments, adding a further 330 or so local men who were identified as killed. But it's not hard to imagine how many more were seriously wounded and / or died elsewhere, probably a very great number.

In the photo Edward is on the right ... the cap badges of the other soldiers are all of different regiments.

The Whiteheads were a tall family ... fairly unusual in those times and Edward was 6ft. tall, as was his older brother and one of his sisters, my own grandmother.

He enlisted in the Grenadier Guards ... Why?

It might have been suggested that he join the Grenadiers because he was tall ... Grenadiers had a minimum height restriction and a number of local men, possibly known to him, had already joined the guards and might have encouraged him to do likewise.
All conjecture ... but no proof!

When Edward enlisted, he would become Guardsman No. 21718,
and be placed in the newly created 4th Battalion. Like most of the early volunteers for the army, the recruits would be in training until late summer of 1915, and Edward was no exception.

It took me a while to realise that the Machine Gun Guards is a completely separate unit from the Machine Gun Corps (or Company which was deployed across the rest of the British forces.
The Machine Gun Guards were kept within their own Guards Division ... useful for we family historians as their movements can be tracked more easily.

Edward landed in France on the 5th October 1915 and on the 9th he arrived, with his 4th Battalion draft of 290 men, at Vermelles on the Western Front where the Battle of Loos had been raging and the Guards Division were in the thick of the fighting, sustaining heavy casualties.

After a period of training in England, the newly created 4th Machine Gun Guards Company arrived to join the Guards Division, on the Western Front in March 1917 as events leading up to the Battle of Messines Ridge were unfolding, preparatory to Haig's ambitious 'Big Push' in the Ypres Salient. In April the four M-G Guards Companies were brought together as one unit for the Division, instead of being attached to each Brigade. In Mid June, just a few weeks later, the Guards Division were moved up to the Ypres area.

Initially, the Guards made good progress towards their objective although suffering significant losses.

The 2nd Battalion had, as their first objective, the crossing of the Steenbeck river.

This, I believe, was my Great Uncle Edward's team.

The photo on the left was taken when my grandmother and great aunt visited the war graves in the early 1920s.

The Oldham Battalions might be running short of local men but there was no shortage of them in other regiments.
A good majority of those were in one or other of the Manchester and Lancashire Regiments with a fair few in the Duke of Wellington's (West Riding) Regiment.

Too many to mention all by name in this narrative so just a few random names and details. A full list is HERE

The first day of August had seen the rains start again and they continued until, by the middle of August, roads were quagmires and the shell holes of the salient were filled with water that was more like a thick, sticky, glutinous soup; undrained and with any number of unseen horrors lying beneath the surface.

Still in August, and there were 72 more local deaths before the end of the month.

* Tom Heywood, age 19, was a Grenadier Guardsman.
Born in Clarksfield, Tom lived on Sharples Hall Street, in Oldham. On the 1911 census he is shown as one of 6 brothers - 2 older and 3 younger. He was described as a paper tube maker.

Joseph had lived on Ashworth Street, in Shaw.
Before enlisting under the Derby Scheme in November 1915, Joseph had worked as Secretary of the Crompton Spinning Company but, following a breakdown, had found employment as a sorting clerk and telegraphist at Oldham Post Office.

The photo and page are from a memorial autograph book from St. Paul's, at Shaw. All the pages have been scanned and are on the website HERE

*Edwin Mallalieu age 31
*Horace Pemberton, MM, age 20 was in the Manchester Rgt., 22nd Bn. From Oldham, he is remembered on the Tyne Cot Memorial.
*William Ashton age 23 was in the Royal Field Artillery, 'A' Battery, 311th Bde. He was from Failsowrth and had enlisted on the 7th September 1914.

It took 3 and a half months of continuous attrition, to achieve a distance, to the furthest point, of about 5 miles ... much less on other sections of the approximately 15 mile line.

The following day the 24th received further notice that another 265 men were to be transferred and be deployed to another 4 Manchester battalions.

Were they so good at what they did, and totally reliable, that there expertise had to be shared with other battalions?

Whatever the reason, this all led to urgent and angy exchanges between the Battalion CO and his superior officer but apparently to no avail and the first group of transfers left the Battalion.
However, circumstances must have changed as, the following day, new orders came that some of the transfers were to be delayed.

By then another 7 men had been killed, including :
Joseph Taylor age 21, from Oldham
Thomas Henry Fardell age 36, a married man and also from Oldham.

Soon after, at the beginning of November, the 24th were moved to Ascot Camp, Westoutre where there was re-organisation and inspection of the Companies, followed by several days of training then back to routine work. On the 11th November they received the order to entrain at Ouderdom thereby beginning their long journey to Italy, where they would spend the remainder of the war.

The Oldham Territorials had arrived at Watau, near Ypres, from the area of the Somme, on the 1st of September.

Initially, there were a few days of intensive training ie., how to storm concrete emplacements, all of which was carried out against a disconcerting background of roaring guns, night-time flares, ambulances and the rumble of limbers.

The 10th had known what to expect. Awareness of the results of a month of disastrous campaigning had left names burned into their minds ... Hell Fire Corner, Shrapnel Corner and Menin Road Ridge ... conjuring up the horrifying images of mud, shelling and death. They could only hope to endure; and somehow survive the appalling misery.

On the 5th of September it was their turn to move to the Front. They trudged through the mud towards Railway Wood, carrying rations and shells to forward posts, and carry out more work on the duckboard tracks.

It would be their job, not to fight, but to prepare the sector for a later offensive - but that just made them the target for German gunners.

Between the 6th and the 14th of September, another 10 men from the Battalion were killed, including:
*John Willie Jackson, age 31 from Oldham
*Granville Rourke age 24, who was from Werneth, Oldham.
* James Pollitt, age 25 from Chadderton.
*Reuben Crompton age 22 , who was also a Chadderton man.

The deployment of the 2nd/10th, to France, had seemed imminent but, as it turned out, they were kept in training at Colchester until early March 1917 when they entrained for Southampton ... destination the Western Front and the La Bassee area.

Their turn for the Front line came in mid March 1917. They were never required to 'go over the top', or carry out raids on the enemy lines, but, even so, 2 men were killed on their first night in the trenches.
By June, another 17 men had died and a significant number been injured.

Two large drafts of men brought their numbers up to the 750 level but few of the new men were from Oldham itself.

It was in June that they moved to coastal defence duties near Nieuwpoort and again, there were a number of casualties through enemy action.

On arrival, in the first few days of October, the battalion 'camped' in a field although 'camped' hardly describes the situation as there were no tents, no shelter and just a wasteland of shell holes filled to overflowing with mud and unburied bodies beneath the suface.

And it was raining ... there was no hot food, nowhere to attempt a makeshift brew. There they sat and shivered, half drowned, for the next 24 hours.
The following nights they were with working parties, laying duckboards and track mats, and carrying stores and equipment.

It was on the 7th that *Sgt. Herbert Cecil Mills, age 22, was killed. he was a married man age 22, from Oldham.

Progress was painfully slow, too slow, and for 11 hours they struggled foward as shells rained down on them and the shattered duckboards had to be repaired constantly before they could move on again towards the ridge.

When they finally neared the attack area, the covering barrage had been lost and, even worse, 'friendly' shells began to land around the battalion.

Beyond all endurance the troops waded further, across marshy ground then, unable to go on, they came to a halt, sinking into what little cover they could find.

All around them shells continued to fall and enemy machine- guns set up a barrage on their positions.
There they endured for two days, with shrapnel raining down on them, machine guns targeting any likely cover, and with no fresh food or water.

48 men, in the 2nd 10th Manchesters, lost their lives on the 9th; many were injured and at least 5 more died in the next couple of days. Amongst them were at least 10 local men: Walter Ashton,
*Arthur Dinwoodie age 20, from Moorside
*James Patrick Walsh, from Shaw
*William Dolan, age 33 from Chadderton / Oldham
*Cpl. Robert Hill, age 26 from Hollinwood.
*Charles Ellis Smethurst, age 20 from Oldham.
*Alfred Heald, age 27, from Oldham.
*Cpl. William Monkhouse age 22 from Longsight, Oldham.
*John Kenyon from Chadderton
*Nicholas Dyer age 20 from Royton.

Eventually, on the 11th/12th of October, the Australian troops moved up to relieve the survivors of the 66th Division.

But, for the 2nd 10th, there was to be no respite from duties ...
and it was the 17th of October before the men were allowed to march to the rear for rest and re-organisation.

The 2/10th Battalion had suffered around 250 casualties, at least 53 of whom died and, seemingly, without firing a gun in anger or ever being anything other than 'sitting ducks' for enemy target practice.
Many of their dead have no known grave ... they disappeared into the morass that was the battle ground of the Salient.

However, the Battalion would be returning to the Salient once more, only a month later, to face the misery of that coming winter.

The greatest, and saddest irony is that, only five months later, almost all of the ground gained was recaptured by the German Army during their Spring offensive in 1918.

And today, a picture reflecting tranquility, taken from that same road out of town which saw so many thousands march along it .... never to return.

on the Memorial Wall are the names of 34,000 men who fell in the salient from mid August to November 1917, and have no known grave.

When the church was rebuilt in 1928, the people of Lancashire donated money for a stained glass window to commemorate the Lancashire men who died there.

The photo is the detail from the middle window depicting St. George, England's patron saint.