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kips 4:01 Wed Jul 26
100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Next Monday sees the 100th anniversary of this truly dreadful World War One battle.
The Battle of Passchendaele was fought July 31 to November 6, 1917
At 3:50 AM on July 31, Allied forces began advancing behind a creeping barrage. The focus of the offensive was General Sir Hubert Gough's Fifth Army which was supported to the south by Plumer's Second Army.
To the south, attempts to drive east on the Menin Road were met with heavy resistance and gains were limited.
Any further advance was then quickly hampered by heavy rains which descended on the region. It turned the scarred landscape into deep mud, a situation that was worsened by the preliminary bombardment that had destroyed much of the area's drainage systems.
Within a few days, the heaviest rain for 30 years had turned the soil into a quagmire, producing thick mud that clogged up rifles and immobilised tanks. It eventually became so deep that men and horses drowned in it.
An improvement in the weather prompted another attack on 20 September. The Battle of Menin Road Ridge, along with the Battle of Polygon Wood on 26 September and the Battle of Broodseinde on 4 October, established British possession of the ridge east of Ypres.
Further attacks in October failed to make much progress. The eventual capture of what little remained of Passchendaele village by British and Canadian forces on 6 November finally gave Haig an excuse to call off the offensive and claim success.
A controversial topic, the Battle of Passchendaele has come to represent the bloody, attritional warfare that developed on the Western Front. In the years after the war, Haig was severely criticized by David Lloyd George and others for the small territorial gains that were made in exchange for massive troop losses.
No definitive record of casualty figures exist, most war experts put the casualty figures at approximately 16,000 Canadian Troops, 280,000 British and other commonwealth troops,10,000 French and 220,000 German troops.
Athough the Somme took a greater toll of British and German soldiers, the appalling conditions which faced the troops at Passchendaele remains unsurpassed in British military history in this respect. Probably only the Battle of Stalingrad compares in modern times.
Lest we forget
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Replies - In Chronological Order ( Show Newest Messages First)
Far Cough
4:12 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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That drowning in mud bit, fucking hell
RIP to all on both sides
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kips
4:19 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Far Cough
By the summer 1917 the procedure for removing injured men from the battlefield had improved. Unfortunately in those conditions if a man fell badly injured face down in the mud he died of drowning.
Awful
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Northern Sold
4:34 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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http://www.iwm.org.uk/sites/default/files/history/listing/E_AUS_001220.jpg
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/07_03/passcMS2807_468x268.jpg
Like something out of your most horrific dreams….
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chim chim cha boo
5:38 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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I walked the Western Front a few years ago including Passchendaele and when I got home I talked to my mum about my 'holiday'.
'Your Great-Grandad Wally (who was a mustard bare-knuckle fighter who they called The Chicken Of The Northumberland because it was the boozer he drank in in Hackney and he was a Bantemweight) fought on the Western Front. He always used to tell us that he fought in a place called Passchendaele'
'Really'? I said. 'I was literally walking the battlefield two days ago. What did he say about it'?
'He said he loved it. He got to wear his first set of new clothes, three square meals a day and all he had to do was kill Germans. He couldn't believe they were paying him and his pals to do it. He said it was like a holiday. I'll always remember him laughing as he told me the story about being issued with socks and pants and him and his pals had absolutely no idea what they were. The storesman had to show them how to put them on.
He said it was rough at times but it was a fuck sight easier than trying to get by in the East End'.
I read a bit about it and a captain who had never come across East-Enders before wrote home something like 'The London boys are complete savages- have no fear and fight like lions'.
If I've got 1% of the stock of my great-grandad I'm a proud man indeed.
6
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Saul Bollox
5:46 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Attritional trench war reared it's ugly head in the siege of Petersburg in the American civil war 1864/5. It was known then that defenders of entrenched positions could hang on for long periods killing attackers in their thousands. The generals in 1914/18 were doomed to repeat the lessons that they appear not to have learned from history
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crazy col
5:50 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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A great use of modern VR technology for Google Cardbox, virtual 360 videos on the RBL website
http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/remembrance/ww1-centenary/passchendaele-100/
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Swiss.
5:59 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Saul
Before that at Fredericksburg 1862 where confederate forces massacred union forces from entrenched positions
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chim chim cha boo
6:06 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Saul Bollox 5:46 Wed Jul 26
What else could they do with technology as it was back then?
What seems to go over a lot of people's heads (maybe not yours though) is that the Germans were an army of occupation. Their whole idea was that they were not going anywhere so dug their trenches and reinforced them for that purpose.
The British and her allies however had to try and force the Germans out. Our trenches were never meant to be static like the Germans. Our best trenches tended to be the ones dug for miners and sometimes it could take a year to slowly and quietly dig under the German trenches and blow them up.
Some of the scariest fighting (for me anyway) was when the allies were tunnelling one way and the Germans the other, sometimes the two tunnels would fall in on each-other and there would be a short and brutal fight to the death with knives and coshes in the absolute dark and cramped conditions. Fuck that!
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SurfaceAgentX2Zero
6:08 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Haig was an aristocratic cunt with no thought for the lives of his men.
He'd (correctly) calculated that the British and French would eventually outbreed the German and win by force of numbers. However, Russia's capitulation was a massive blow. If the Yanks hadn't have entered the war, they would still have been at it in 1925, although Lloyd George was getting very shitty about the whole thing by the end.
It is at once a travesty and insult to the dead and wounded that every poppy sold and worn in November bears Haig's name. I suppose, though, it does serve the purpose of naming the guilty man.
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Russ of the BML
6:14 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Good post, kips.
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Helmut Shown
6:21 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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I was there last week. The sheer scale of the conflict is quite shocking. The Lenin gate is covered with 54000 names and those were the people missing in action and there are a further 34,000 on the memorial at the Tyne Cott cemetery. The whole region is dotted with graveyards with thousands of named graves and "unknown warrior" graves. I was lucky enough to find my great uncle's grave in the Lijssenthoek hospital cemetery. I am the first of my family to visit it in what will be 100 years in August. The graveyards are absolutely pristine and a great deal of respect is shown to the fallen
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Helmut Shown
6:22 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Menin gate fucking predictive text
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Eddie B
6:23 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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The poppies used to have his name on them (HAIG FUND) but not for about 30 years now.
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BRANDED
6:42 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Been over to Belgium several times since 2014. Will go again to see the grave of my Dad's uncle who is in a grave east of Ypres.
1914-1945 was the very lowest of the low for mankind.
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The Stoat
6:46 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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My Grandad and Great Grandad both fought in Ypres
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=21jaykg&s=9#.WXi-aulGmUl
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Far Cough
6:50 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Gavrilo Princip, what a cunt
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ironsofcanada
7:24 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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SurfaceAgentX2Zero 6:08 Wed Jul 26
Haig's name was dirty word amongst members of the Canadian military even 3/4 of a century after the fact (ie. when I started to get to know some of them.)
Had to have his symbolic victory.
The guys I knew where mostly from the Loyal Eddies of the PPCLI. One Eddie and one PPCLI received the VCs for their role in the final assault during the second battle.
All that said, avoid the eponymous movie, PC party of Alberta dumped a bunch of tax payer money into it and still came out a romantic mess.
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SurfaceAgentX2Zero
7:27 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Eddie B 6:23 Wed Jul 26
Thanks Eddie - delighted to be corrected on that.
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Far Cough
7:34 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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Does this mean Surf hasn't bought a poppy in the last 30 years?
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TJ
7:40 Wed Jul 26
Re: 100 year anniversary of The Battle of Passchendaele
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My maternal granddad, was on the Somme and I believe at this battle too.
He was gassed on the Somme but survived somehow. He was also shot twice in WW1, once at one of the Ypres battles. He survived it all and fought all the way to the end of it.
He was only a little fella from Marylebone. Nothing of him. I remember him dying in 1965. I was about 7
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