From the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War to the beaches of Dunkirk, it certainly can’t be said Major William Gordon Mitchell led a quiet life. The centenary of the end of the First World War is a time to commemorate those who paid the ultimate price for their country. Despite the harrowing casualty figures, we often forget that many who served in the First World War did survive the conflict. It is thought nine out of every ten soldiers in the British Army who were in the trenches came home from the war.

One of those men was Major William Gordon Mitchell. After his birth in Port Elizabeth, South Africa to a Scottish father and English mother, he arrived in Britain aged five in 1903. He was commissioned into the 160th (Wearside) Brigade Royal Field Artillery as Second Lieutenant at the age of 19. Mitchell found himself involved in not one but two of Britain’s worst military disasters: the 1918 Spring Offensive of the First World War and the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940.

First World War

Mitchell belonged to a small group of men who were young enough to serve at the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War. A fellow officer from his time in the 160th Brigade, Major Alexander Phelps Hodges MC, arrived in France with the British Expeditionary Force in September 1939. Hodges wrote in the Brigade year book in 1939 that he visited his old 160th Brigade positions and former operating posts, where he even found traces of old gun pits at Heinel in an orchard near a local church.

Mitchell enlisted on 23 August 1916, the day of his 18th birthday. After landing in France on 14 February 1918, he was to be on the Western Front for less than six weeks before he was thrown straight into the action. On 21 March 1918, Mitchell and his comrades in the 160th Brigade were involved in a major offensive where the Allies very nearly lost the war. The 1918 German Spring Offensive consisted of a series of attacks along the Western Front in Northern France. The German objective was to take the Channel ports and force an end to hostilities before American forces made a difference on the battlefield. The German infantry assault covered a 46-mile front with 65 divisions. The 160th Brigade were very much in the eye of the storm in the area around St Leger in Northern France.

At this point in the battle, Second Lieutenant Mitchell was appointed liaison officer to the Northumberland Fusiliers, an important role which included communicating directly with supporting infantry in the midst of battle. Mitchell kept a diary where he revealed his eyewitness accounts of the battle – soldiers were banned from keeping any form of diary in case they were captured. The tiny diary, no larger than a matchbook, is revealed in a recent history of the brigade entitled Idle and Dissolute, The History of the 160th (Wearside) Royal Field Artillery. In the lead-up to the battle he notes it rained the whole day. ‘The next day was unfavourably sunny and warm, followed by a calm and windless night.’ The weather was not in the Allies’ favour, come the morning of 21 March a heavy mist blanketed the whole area. For the British defenders the image was a terrifying one. A miasma haze of fog and gas enveloped the battlefield as the highly trained German Stosstruppen (Stormtroopers) attacked in small groups equipped with light machine guns and mortars, looking to penetrate deep into Allied lines.

The offensive saw 10,000 cannons and over a million shells fired by the German Artillery, one of the worst bombardments in history, only surpassed by the Russian Red Army bombardment of Berlin in the Second World War. The nearby 59th Division, which was operating on the right side of the 160th Brigade, recorded nearly 700 guns and howitzers had registered on their trenches. Major Hodges of ‘A’ Battery, who himself was wounded and evacuated on the first day of the battle, was awoken by the morning bombardment. He revealed his observations in handwritten notes recorded in the 1960s; these notes are collected together in the brigade history. He describes shells passing over like the ‘devil’s own express train’ and the ‘dry cough of the Howitzers, gun flashes, the acrid smell of cordite and gas’.

The German army broke through at Ecoust at 9.30am and the British responded with the chilling call sign – Pregnant with Evil. As the offensive progressed, the gunners of the 160th wheeled their cannons out of their gun pits and fired over open sights facing the enemy head on, effectively using their artillery guns as giant shotguns. The gunners found themselves the new front line. At St Leger Wood, Major Walter Vignoles witnessed the 18 pounders of the 160th Brigade tearing into the fresh waves of the German infantry along an area known as Hogs Back.

Further ahead, Second Lieutenant Mitchell was engaged in action as liaison to the infantry at the Northumberland Fusiliers battalion headquarters at Bunhill Row located outside the village of Croisilles. When the bombardment started, wire lines buried six feet deep underground were destroyed and left communication between infantry and artillery incapacitated. Headquarters were shelled with high explosives and gas by guns of all calibres. An account written by Mitchell supplied to the Thirty Fourth Divisional History describes his attempts, although in vain to restore communications: ‘Mounted men were sent out, but the return of rider less horses told the tale of failure.’ His secret diary concluding ‘bombardment begins at 0500hrs, surrounded at 1400hrs, surrendered at 1930hrs’.

The casualties were to be the worst the 160th Brigade faced over the previous 24 months spent fighting on the Western Front. The 34th Division in which the 160th Brigade were apart, lost over 3,728 officers and men either killed in action, wounded, missing or evacuated sick. Despite a brave rearguard action, the forward sections of the brigade were left surrounded and Mitchell was amongst the nearly 21,000 British soldiers taken prisoner, a huge loss to the allies. He can be found on TheGenealogist as missing in action on 21 March.

Another soldier taken prisoner at Croisilles was Second Lieutenant Ralph Howl who was also recently commissioned. Howl had fought a difficult battle in command of the forward section of ‘D’ battery who were overran by the German forward line. His guns were reported as the last guns firing in the sector. The two young officers, who were both suffering with battle wounds were marched for two days by their captors, an awful journey spent out in the open without food and their wounds unattended. Howl was suffering from a gunshot wound to the arm and Mitchell was struggling with the effects of gas inhalation, they sought refuge under a shared greatcoat that saved their lives. Mitchell’s diary records he ‘marched fifteen miles to a prison camp, spent nights outside, really cold, digged a hole with Howl. French people good to us and give (sic) food as we pass’. After a gruelling journey, the pair including two thousand officers and men arrived in Pforzheim prison camp in south west Germany, where they spent the remainder of the war before they were repatriated to Britain in December 1918.

Second World War
Twenty-two years later Hitler’s Blitzkrieg is sweeping Western Europe and World War Two is underway. Mitchell, now a Battery Commander in the 14th Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery found himself in France fighting another rearguard action, this time at Dunkirk. His battery’s objective was to block the left flank that was exposed by the Belgian surrender.

At this crucial point in the battle and with evacuation imminent, Mitchell instructed his men to destroy their guns at an agreed time. He could hardly believe it when he received a personal order to meet his commander-in-chief Major-General Harold Alexander. Mitchell’s instructions were to provide covering fire for the last formation of troops to leave the beach. His battery was located two miles from Dunkirk at Malo-les-Bains and this meant a dangerous journey back to prevent his battery from destroying their guns. Without Mitchell’s battery, the only defence from German bombers was the Royal Navy ships anchored off the beach. He made it back to the battery with 15 minutes to spare and with 60 of his men they manhandled seven 25mm anti-tank guns back to Dunkirk through tremendous shelling. Under close attention from German Luftwaffe and artillery they escaped the beach amongst the last to leave, with Mitchell very nearly becoming a prisoner of war for a second time.

William Gordon Mitchell, a man ready to answer the call when his country needed him, who like many members of his generation scarcely spoke of his wartime actions. We can all agree he was a man of unquestionable courage.