Operation Hush - Background

Background

The German occupation of the Belgian coast in 1914 caused the Admiralty to swiftly advocate their removal. On 26 October 1914 the First Lord, Winston Churchill wrote to Sir John French, commander of the BEF "We must have him off the Belgian coast.", Churchill offering naval fire support for such an army operation. French adopted the idea for the main effort of 1915; the army would advance between Dixmude and the sea while the navy provided fire support and a surprise landing near Zeebrugge. Eventually the plan was shelved by the British government in favour of the Gallipoli campaign. In early 1916 the idea was revived and talks began between Sir Douglas Haig the new BEF commander-in-chief and Rear Admiral Reginald Bacon, commander of the Dover Patrol. Haig appointed Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston who had been involved in the Gallipoli campaign to work with Bacon. An offensive from Ypres and the landing operation in support of it superseded the offensive on the coast. Bacon proposed a landing from six monitors and 100 trawlers of 9,000 men in Ostend harbour, with decoys towards Zeebrugge and Middelkirke, when a coastal assault began from Nieupoort. Hunter-Weston rejected the plan because it was on a narrow front, Ostend harbour was in range of German heavy guns and the exits from the harbour were easy to block. This led to Bacon producing a revised plan for a beach landing near Middelkirke.

Events in June 1916 forced Haig to postpone the offensive from Ypres to 1917. Bacon began work on a new plan which incorporated Hunter-Weston's recommendations and Haig's suggestion that tanks be incorporated into the landings. A recommendation from Lieutenant-Colonel C. Macmullen (Haig's advisor) to delay until a general advance had begun from Ypres and had reached Roulers was accepted. To land troops swiftly so as to benefit from surprise, Bacon designed flat-bottomed craft which could land on beaches. The pontoons were 550 feet (170 m) long and 32 feet (9.8 m) wide, to be loaded with men, guns, wagons, ambulances, box-cars, motor-cars, hand-carts, bicycles, Stokes carts and side-cars plus three tanks (two males and one female) were specially built and lashed to pairs of Monitors. HMS General Wolfe and the other monitors would push the pontoons up the beach, tanks would unload, climb the sea-walls (an incline of about thirty degrees), surmount a large projecting coping-stone at the top and then haul the rest of the load over the wall. The Belgian architect who designed the wall was in France and supplied his drawings. A replica was built at Merlimont and a detachment of tanks under Major Bingham reharsed on it using 'shoes' on the tank tracks and special detachable steel ramps carried by the tanks, until they could climb the wall. In experiments on the Thames estuary the pontoons performed exceptionally well, riding out very bad weather and being easier to manoeuvre than expected, suggesting that they could be used again to land reinforcements. Night landings were also practiced with wire stretched between buoys to guide the pontoons to 100 yards (91 m) of their landing place.