Download or read book Passchendaele written by Philip Warner and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2005-07-30 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly ninety years ago, on 31st July 1917, the small Belgian village of Passchendaele became the focus for one of the most gruelling, bloody and bizarre battles of World War 1. By 6th November, when Passchendaele village and the ridge were captured, over half a million British, French, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and Germans had become casualties. Philip Warner, the noted historian of twentieth-century warfare and the author of over fifty books on military history, many published by Pen and Sword, has skilfully brought together all the elements of this horrific campaign - the historical background, personal accounts, strategies and tactics, the personalities and the political manoeuvres. He investigates the issues which had a crucial effect on the course of the battle, including the mutinous state of the French army, the bombardment which destroyed the drainage system, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig's determination to continue operations despite the appalling weather and ground conditions, and the stormy relationship between Haig and Lloyd George. However, it is the determined fighting ability and the bravery of the allied soldiers, rather than the tactical plans of the commanders, that dominate this detailed and totally absorbing account of the harrowing four-month campaign called the Battle of Passchendaele. Passchendaele is a masterly and timely analysis of one of the most important battles in history.

Download or read book Passchendaele 1917 written by Lee Ingelbrecht and published by Lannoo Publishers. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1914 the area around Ypres was a verdant landscape thick with vegetation, formed and transformed both by nature and human intervention. Before the First World War began, the landscape had already been the setting for multiple battles and military manoeuvres, and was known as 'the Battlefield of Europe'. In 'Passchendaele 1917' Lee Ingelbreght approaches the Great War and the Battle of Passchendaele from a unique angle. Why was the Westhoek such a popular place to fight wars, and what traces have all those military conflicts left on this landscape? AUTHOR: Lee Ingelbreght has a postgraduate degree in landscape development. Since 2010 he has been a scientific officer at the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917. He is responsible for the project The Legacy of Passchendaele. SELLING POINTS: * Commemorates the centennial anniversary of the most terrible battles of the First World War * Examines the 'Battlefield of Europe' from a fresh ecocritical perspective * Contains reports from eyewitnesses, and dozens of images of the landscape before, during, and after the war 100 colour, 100 b/w

Download or read book Passchendaele written by Nick Lloyd and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2017-05-04 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between July and November 1917, in a small corner of Belgium, more than 500,000 men were killed or maimed, gassed or drowned - and many of the bodies were never found. The Ypres offensive represents the modern impression of the First World War: splintered trees, water-filled craters, muddy shell-holes. The climax was one of the worst battles of both world wars: Passchendaele. The village fell eventually, only for the whole offensive to be called off. But, as Nick Lloyd shows, notably through previously unexamined German documents, it put the Allies nearer to a major turning point in the war than we have ever imagined.

Download or read book 1917 The Passchendaele Year written by Achiel Van Walleghem and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unusual work offers a personal documentary and highly individual witness to the terrible events in Flanders in 1917. The Battle of "Third Ypres" - popularly known as "Passchendaele" - epitomized the worst slaughter on the western front of the First World War Many thousands killed, to no avail; the trenches full of mud; the total annihilation of the landscape; attempts to break through to victory which only produced minor movement forward, and at a terrible cost. This book tells the previously untold story of daily life immediately behind the frontline during the tragic year of 1917. The author, who kept a detailed record of events and attitudes, was a village priest, Achiel Van Walleghem. He lived in Reninghelst, just west of Ypres, and kept an extensive day-by-day account. He was very well informed by the officers lodging in his presbytery. And, urged by his innate curiosity, he witnessed and noted the arrival of the first tanks and the increasing importance of the artillery. He also visited the camps of the Chinese Labour Corps and the British West Indies Regiment. On 7 June 1917 he awoke early to see the enormous mines of the Battle of Messines exploding. And he was present when a deserter was shot at dawn. He records all this - and much more - with an unusual humanity. As a bystander living amidst the troops, he often had a special view of the events that unfolded before his eyes. Van Walleghem notes much that mattered to the soldiers there, and to the local people. This includes the influence of bad weather on the mood and morale of both troops and civilians, as well as military events. His comments on the different attitudes of English, Irish, Australian or other Empire troops and divisions are often priceless. But Van Walleghem equally records the misery of the local Flemish population and their relationship with the British rank and file: in bad times such as when a local is accused of spying, but also in good times when a village girl gets married to a British soldier. This diary is not just a forgotten source of the western front, it is one that will forever change our views on the conflict, and on how men and women tried to cope. In a year when many works will be published about Passchendaele this is a unique book.

Download or read book Passchendaele 1917 written by Robert J. Parker and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new centenary history of the infamous Western Front campaign for the Belgian village of Passchendaele fought from 31 July - 10 November 1917.

Download or read book The First World War written by Michael Howard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-25 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time the First World War ended in 1918, eight million people had died in what had been perhaps the most apocalyptic episode the world had known. This Very Short Introduction provides a concise and insightful history of the 'Great War', focusing on why it happened, how it was fought, and why it had the consequences it did. It examines the state of Europe in 1914 and the outbreak of war; the onset of attrition and crisis; the role of the US; the collapse of Russia; and the weakening and eventual surrender of the Central Powers. Looking at the historical controversies surrounding the causes and conduct of war, Michael Howard also describes how peace was ultimately made, and the potent legacy of resentment left to Germany. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book 1917 The Passchendaele Year written by Achiel Van Walleghem and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle of "Third Ypres"--Popularly known as "Passchendaele" - epitomized the worst slaughter on the western front of the First World War Many thousands killed, to no avail; the trenches full of mud; the total annihilation of the landscape; attempts to break through to victory which only produced minor movement forward, and at a terrible cost. This book tells the previously untold story of daily life immediately behind the frontline during the tragic year of 1917.

Download or read book Battle Story Passchendaele 1917 written by Chris McNab and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passchendaele 1917 is the story of one of the most pitiless and iconic battles of the First World War, known today as Third Ypres. Fought over three tortuous months in 1917, the fighting raged through some of the worst physical conditions of the entire war, across battlefields collapsing into endless mud and blood. Eventually, more than 500,000 casualties bought front-line changes measured only in hundreds of yards. If you truly want to understand what happened and why – read Battle Story.

Download or read book Passchendaele written by Philip Warner and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Passchendaele and the Somme a Diary of 1917 written by Quigly Hugh Quigly and published by . This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Haig s Enemy written by Jonathan Boff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne. In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war--the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare. Providing a fresh viewpoint on the history of the Western Front, Boff draws on extensive research in the German archives to offer a history of the First World War from the other side of the barbed wire. He revises conventional explanations of why the Germans lost with an in-depth analysis of the nature of command, and of the institutional development of the British, French, and German armies as modern warfare was born. Using Rupprecht's own diaries and letters, many of them never before published, Haig's Enemy views the Great War through the eyes of one of Germany's leading generals, shedding new light on many of the controversies of the Western Front. The picture which emerges is far removed from the sterile stalemate of myth. Instead, Boff re-draws the Western Front as a highly dynamic battlespace, both physical and intellectual, where three armies struggled not only to out-fight, but also to out-think, their enemy. The consequences of falling behind in the race to adapt would be more terrible than ever imagined.

Download or read book From Bapaume to Passchendaele 1917 written by Philip Gibbs and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 1965-01-01 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1917.... I suppose that a century hence men and women will think of that date as one of the world's black years flinging its shadow forward to the future until gradually new generations escape from its dark spell. To us now, only a few months away from that year, above all to those of us who have seen something of the fighting which crowded every month of it except the last, the colour of 1917 is not black but red, because a river of blood flowed through its changing seasons and there was a great carnage of men. It was a year of unending battle on the Western Front, which matters most to us because of all our youth there. It was a year of monstrous and desperate conflict. Looking back upon it, remembering all its days of attack and counter-attack, all the roads of war crowded with troops and transport, all the battlefields upon which our armies moved under fire, the coming back of the prisoners by hundreds and thousands, the long trails of the wounded, the activity, the traffic, the roar and welter and fury of the year, one has a curious physical sensation of breathlessness and heart-beat because of the burden of so many memories. The heroism of men, the suffering of individuals, their personal adventures, their deaths or escape from death, are swallowed up in this wild drama of battle so that at times it seems impersonal and inhuman like some cosmic struggle in which man is but an atom of the world's convulsion. To me, and perhaps to others like me, who look on at all this from the outside edge of it, going into its fire and fury at times only to look again, closer, into the heart of it, staring at its scenes not as men who belong to them but as witnesses to give evidence at the bar of history—for if we are not that we are nothing—and to chronicle the things that have happened on those fields, this sense of impersonal forces is strong. We see all this in the mass. We see its movement as a tide watched from the bank and not from the point of view of a swimmer breasting each wave or going down in it. Regimental officers and men know more of the ground in which they live for a while before they go forward over the shell-craters to some barren slope where machine-guns are hidden below the clods of soil, or a line of concrete blockhouses heaped up with timber and sand-bags on one of the ridges.

Download or read book Passchendaele and the Somme written by Hugh Quigley and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Passchendaele written by Paul Ham and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passchendaele epitomises everything that was most terrible about the Western Front. The photographs never sleep of this four-month battle, fought from July to November 1917, the worst year of the war: blackened tree stumps rising out of a field of mud, corpses of men and horses drowned in shell holes, terrified soldiers huddled in trenches awaiting the whistle. The intervening century, the most violent in human history, has not disarmed these pictures of their power to shock. At the very least they ask us, on the 100th anniversary of the battle, to see and to try to understand what happened here. Yes, we commemorate the event. Yes, we adorn our breasts with poppies. But have we seen? Have we understood? Have we dared to reason why? What happened at Passchendaele was the expression of the 'wearing-down war', the war of pure attrition at its most spectacular and ferocious. Paul Ham's Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how ordinary men on both sides endured this constant state of siege, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, wiped out. Yet the men never broke: they went over the top, when ordered, again and again and again. And if they fell dead or wounded, they were casualties in the 'normal wastage', as the commanders described them, of attritional war. Only the soldier's friends at the front knew him as a man, with thoughts and feelings. His family back home knew him as a son, husband or brother, before he had enlisted. By the end of 1917 he was a different creature: his experiences on the Western Front were simply beyond their powers of comprehension. The book tells the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that determined their fate and has foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele lays down a powerful challenge to the idea of war as an inevitable expression of the human will, and examines the culpability of governments and military commanders in a catastrophe that destroyed the best part of a generation.

Download or read book The Road to Passchendaele written by John Terraine and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Passchendaele written by Robin Prior and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No conflict of the Great War excites stronger emotions than the war in Flanders in the autumn of 1917, and no name better encapsulates the horror and apparent futility of the Western Front than Passchendaele. By its end there had been 275,000 Allied and 200,000 German casualties. Yet the territorial gains made by the Allies in four desperate months were won back by Germany in only three days the following March. The devastation at Passchendaele, the authors argue, was neither inevitable nor inescapable; perhaps it was not necessary at all. Using a substantial archive of official and private records, much of which has never been previously consulted, Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior provide the fullest account of the campaign ever published. The book examines the political dimension at a level which has hitherto been absent from accounts of "Third Ypres." It establishes what did occur, the options for alternative action, and the fundamental responsibility for the carnage. Prior and Wilson consider the shifting ambitions and stratagems of the high command, examine the logistics of war, and assess what the available manpower, weaponry, technology, and intelligence could realistically have hoped to achieve. And, most powerfully of all, they explore the experience of the soldiers in the light—whether they knew it or not—of what would never be accomplished.

Download or read book The Battle of Menin Road 1917 written by Roger Lee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Passchendaele Campaign of 1917 is associated with images of slimy, oozing mud: mud deep enough and glutinous enough to drown men, horses and equipment, mud so pervasive that it, rather than the enemy, defeated the British Army’s only major campaign in Belgium. While these images are certainly true for the opening and final months of the campaign, mud was not he defining experience for the infantry of the Australian First and Second Divisions when, for the first time in history, two Australian Divisions fought a battle side by side in the Battle of Menin Road. For them, the defining experience was a well planned, well-conducted attack that saw all the objectives achieved in very short time. Menin Road was the third of the series of battles that together made up the Passchendaele (Third Ypres) Campaign. Intended to capture the high ground of the Gheluvelt Plateau east of Ypres to protect the right flank of the British Army advancing to its north, it was a difficult assignment. Earlier British attempts to clear the Plateau had been repulsed with heavy losses. With overwhelming artillery and air support, sound preparation and with limited objectives, the attack on 20 September surpassed all expectations. It was a classic example of how well-prepared and well-supported infantry could take and hold ground. However, as is explained in the book, it was also a classic example of why this operational method was too slow and would never win the war on the Western Front.