Download or read book Passchendaele written by Nick Lloyd and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of Passchendaele, the months-long battle that epitomizes the immense tragedy of the First World War Passchendaele. The name of a small, seemingly insignificant Flemish village echoes across the twentieth century as the ultimate expression of meaningless, industrialized slaughter. In the summer of 1917, upwards of 500,000 men were killed or wounded, maimed, gassed, drowned, or buried in this small corner of Belgium. On the centennial of the battle, military historian Nick Lloyd brings to vivid life this epic encounter along the Western Front. Drawing on both British and German sources, he is the first historian to reveal the astonishing fact that, for the British, Passchendaele was an eminently winnable battle. Yet the advance of British troops was undermined by their own high command, which, blinded by hubris, clung to failed tactics. The result was a familiar one: stalemate. Lloyd forces us to consider that trench warfare was not necessarily a futile endeavor, and that had the British won at Passchendaele, they might have ended the war early, saving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. A captivating narrative of heroism and folly, Passchendaele is an essential addition to the literature on the Great War.

Download or read book Passchendaele in Perspective written by Peter Liddle and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2017-01-30 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passchendaele In Perspective explores the context and real nature of the participants’ experience, evaluates British and German High Command, the aerial and maritime dimensions of the battle, the politicians and manpower debates on the home front and it looks at the tactics employed, the weapons and equipment used, the experience of the British; German and indeed French soldiers. It looks thoroughly into the Commonwealth soldiers’ contribution and makes an unparalleled attempt to examine together in one volume ‘specialist’ facets of the battle, the weather, field survey and cartography, discipline and morale, and the cultural and social legacy of the battle, in art, literature and commemoration. Each one of its thirty chapters presents a thought-provoking angle on the subject. They add up to an unique analysis of the battle from Commonwealth, American, German, French, Belgian and United Kingdom historians. This book will undoubtedly become a valued work of reference for all those with an interest in World War One.

Download or read book The Battle for Passchendaele written by Ian Finlayson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle for Passchendaele on 12 October 1917 was one of the epic struggles of the First World War. British Field Marshal Douglas Haig allocated II ANZAC Corps to capture Passchendaele village, with Major General Monash’s 3rd Australian Division and the New Zealand Division leading the attack. For both divisions the battle was a bloody debacle. Monash’s division started the battle with 5800 men and, just 24 hours later, could only muster 2600, suffering horrendous losses for a small territorial gain which was later relinquished. The New Zealand Division was trapped in front of the German wire and barely moved from its start line, suffering one of its highest casualty rates of the war. Fought in conditions which seemed to preclude any chance of success, the battle has become a metaphor for pointless sacrifice. After the battle the British and Australian leadership were unanimous in placing blame for the defeat on the all-pervasive mud. Monash, writing to his wife, believed that his plan ‘would have succeeded in normal conditions’. Yet, two weeks later, in similar weather and terrain, Lieutenant General Currie’s Canadian Corps succeeded where Monash and Godley’s II ANZAC Corps did not. The central focus of this book is a detailed analysis of the 3rd Australian Division’s plan and execution of the attack on Passchendaele. By examining the differences between the Australian and Canadian plans for the capture of Passchendaele, the author casts this iconic battle in a completely different light. It is a re-examination that is long overdue.

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 A Moonlight Massacre written by Michael Locicero and published by Helion. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Third Battle of Ypres was officially terminated by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig with the opening of the Battle of Cambrai on 20 November 1917. Nevertheless, a comparatively unknown set-piece attack - the only large-scale night operation carried out on the Flanders front during the campaign - was launched twelve days later on 2 December. This volume is a necessary corrective to previously published campaign narratives of what has become popularly known as 'Passchendaele'. It examines the course of events from the mid-November decision to sanction further offensive activity in the vicinity of Passchendaele village to the barren operational outcome that forced British GHQ to halt the attack within ten hours of Zero. A litany of unfortunate decisions and circumstances contributed to the profitless result. At the tactical level, a novel hybrid set-piece attack scheme was undermined by a fatal combination of snow-covered terrain and bright moonlight. At the operational level, the highly unsatisfactory local situation in the immediate aftermath of Third Ypres' post-strategic phase (26 October-10 November) appeared to offer no other alternative to attacking from the confines of an extremely vulnerable salient. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the affair occurred at the political and strategic level, where Haig's earnest advocacy for resumption of the Flanders offensive in spring 1918 was maintained despite obvious signs that the initiative had now passed to the enemy and the crisis of the war was fast approaching. A Moonlight Massacre provides an important contribution and re-interpretation of the discussion surrounding Passchendaele, based firmly on an extensive array of sources, many unpublished, and supported by illustrations and maps.

Download or read book Passchendaele written by Nigel Steel and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling account of the battle for Passchendaele from grand strategy at the highest levels right down to the experience of the ordinary infantrymen. In the autumn of 1917, after years of stalemate at Ypres, the British and French armies launched a massive offensive to take Passchendaele Ridge. Following an intensive bombardment the Allies began their attack, but the low ground between the lines had been churned into a quagmire, and the attack was literally bogged down. All surprise had been lost, and the German defence in depth was well organised. For the first time the Germans used mustard gas, while German planes flew low to strafe the British infantry with machine guns. After two and a half months the British finally took the ridge they had been aiming for, but at the cost of over 300,000 Allied lives. German losses in the offensive were estimated at 260,000. Based on the archival holdings at the Imperial War Museum, this book gathers together a wealth of material about this horrific offensive. A history to appeal to the scholar and the general reader alike.

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 688 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 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 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 Canadian Corps Soldier vs Royal Bavarian Soldier written by Stephen Bull and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-29 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1917 the soldiers of the Canadian Corps would prove themselves the equal of any fighting on the Western Front, while on the other side of the wire, the men of the Royal Bavarian Army won a distinguished reputation in combat. Employing the latest weapons and pioneering tactics, these two forces would clash in three notable encounters: the Canadian storming of Vimy Ridge, the back-and-forth engagement at Fresnoy and at the sodden, bloody battle of Passchendaele. Featuring carefully chosen archive photographs and specially commissioned artwork, this study assesses these three hard-fought battles in 1917 on the Western Front, and offers a new take on the evolving nature of infantry combat in World War I.

Download or read book Passchendaele written by Norman Leach and published by Coteau Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fully-illustrated, easily-accessible, account of the battle of Passchendaele presents the background and details of Canada's coming of age in The Great War. During WWI, the battle for the tiny Belgium town Passchendaele was one of the most significant tests of Canadian courage and expertise. British Commander-in-Chief General Douglas Haig had devised one of the most controversial stratagems of the entire war: Allied forces would attack headlong into the heavily fortified German entrenchments, capture the town of Passchendaele and its highlands, and drive toward the coast to destroy German submarine bases. General Arthur Currie's Canadian Corps was called to the front for this attack. After their victories at Vimy Ridge and Hill 70, the Canadians had earned the nickname storm troopers for, like a storm, they could not be stopped. Even for the battle-hardened Canadians, Passchendaele was a living hell. Many drowned in the mud before ever seeing the enemy. Others died from deadly chlorine gas, and others from artillery shells that rained down in numbers over 175 per square metre. The Canadians seized Passchendaele, succeeding where all others had failed, and displaying high standards of leadership, staff work and training.The Corps had suffered 16,000 casualties; nine Victoria Crosses were awarded to acknowledge the extraordinary heroism. Though the actual value of the campaign is debated to this day, one thing is certain: Canadians had been tested against the worst horrors of the Great War, and they had proven their valour.

Download or read book Passchendaele and the Battles of Ypres 1914 18 written by Martin Marix Evans and published by Osprey Publishing. This book was released on 1997-11-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passchendaele and the battles of Ypres stand out amongst the key events of World War 1 as particularly striking symbols of both courage, and death and desolation which the great war brought to an entire generation. Here, Martin Marix Evans presents a moving portrayal of those who fought and died in Ypres, on both sides of the conflict.

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 Paul Gross and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In WWI, a small band of Canadian soldiers challenged an enormous German Army.

Download or read book War Torn Exchanges written by Andrea McKenzie and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura Holland and Mildred Forbes, an inseparable duo, set off from Montreal in June 1915 to serve as nursing sisters in the Great War. Over the next four years, the two cared for each other through sickness and health, air raids and bombings, unrelenting work and adventurous leaves. War-Torn Exchanges offers unprecedented insight into the daily lives of Canada’s First World War nurses – from the privations of Gallipoli to the heavy casualties of Passchendaele and beyond. This carefully curated and contextualized collection of letters challenges the popular myth of nurses as wartime angels. Instead, Mildred and Laura’s letters are filled with the nurses’ fears and frustrations, humour and keen observations – revealing how they relied on friendship, wry wit, and professional ethics to carry on in the face of mismanagement, discrimination, illness, deprivation, and trauma.

Download or read book Hundred Days written by Nick Lloyd and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the difficult and bloody four-month battle that tipped the stalemate on the Western Front in favor of the Allies in 1918 and drove back the Germans, bringing World War I to an end.

Download or read book Nurses of Passchendaele written by Christine E. Hallett and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2017 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ypres Salient saw some of the bitterest fighting of the First World War. The once-fertile fields of Flanders were turned into a quagmire through which men fought for four years. In casualty clearing stations, on ambulance trains and barges, and at base hospitals near the French and Belgian coasts, nurses of many nations cared for these traumatized and damaged men.Drawing on letters, diaries and personal accounts from archives all over the world, The Nurses of Passchendaele tells their stories - faithfully recounting their experiences behind the Ypres Salient in one of the most intense and prolonged casualty evacuation processes in the history of modern warfare. Nurses themselves came under shellfire and were vulnerable to aerial bombardment, and some were killed or injured while on active service.Alongside an analysis of the intricacies of their practice, the book traces the personal stories of some of these extraordinary women, revealing the courage, resilience and compassion with which they did their work.