Download or read book Through the Bloody Mud Passchendaele 1917 written by Penny Burton and published by Blurb. This book was released on 2019-05-22 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the Third Battle of Ypres and the days preceding it told through the words of the soldiers. The book is based on eyewitness accounts, official documents, newspapers, photos, and interviews with the soldiers themselves.

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 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A timely re-appraisal . . . a masterpiece' General Lord Richard Dannatt 'Sweeps aside mythology and provides a rational explanation and cool description of what took place' Max Hastings, Sunday Times _________________________________ 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. _________________________________ 'Meticulously researched . . . A harrowing and important history' PD Smith, Guardian 'He brings the battle and its political context vividly to life . . . a model of what a work of military history should be, this is now perhaps the definitive account of this phase of the war on the Western Front' Simon Heffer, Telegraph

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 The Passchendaele Campaign 1917 written by Andrew Rawson and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2017-07-30 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an account of the British Expeditionary Forces battles in the summer and autumn of 1917. It begins with the Allied plan to free up the Flanders coast, to limit German naval and submarine attacks on British shipping.The opening offensive began with the detonation of nineteen mines on 7 June and ended with the capture of the Messines Ridge. The main offensive started with success on 31 July but was soon bogged down due to the August rains. Three huge attacks between 20 September and 4 October had the Germans reeling, but again the weather intervened and the campaign concluded with futile attacks across the muddy slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge.Each large battle and minor action is given equal treatment, giving a detailed insight into the most talked about side of the campaign, the British side. There are details on the planning of each offensive and the changing tactics used by both sides. There is discussion about how the infantry, the artillery, the cavalry, the engineers and Royal Flying Corps worked together. Over sixty new maps chart the day-by-day progress of each battle and action.Together the narrative and maps provide an insight into the British Armys experience during this important campaign. The men who made a difference are mentioned; those who led the advances, those who stopped the counterattacks and those who were awarded the Victoria Cross. Discover the Passchendaele campaign and learn how the British Armys brave soldiers fought and died fighting for their objectives.

Download or read book Passchendaele 1917 written by Chris McNab and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2016-05-21 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle of Passchendaele has come to epitomize the mud and blood of the First World War. Passchendaele is perhaps one of the most iconic campaigns of the First World War, coming to symbolize the mud and blood of the battlefield like no other. Fought for over three months under some of the worst conditions of the war, fighting became bogged down in a quagmire that made it almost impossible for any gains to be made. In this Battle Story, Chris McNab seeks to lift the battle out of its controversy and explain what really happened and why. Complete with detailed maps and photographs, as well as fascinating facts and profiles of the leaders, this is the best introduction to this legendary battle.

Download or read book At G H Q written by Brigadier-General John Charteris and published by Naval & Military Press. This book was released on 2023-04-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A controversial day-to-day account, by Haig's Chief of Intelligence, at the British Expeditionary Force General Headquarters throughout the war on the Western Front. Charteris had not kept a diary at the time, so 'At GHQ' consists of papers, notes and letters from the time, rewritten into diary form. He confessed to sometimes amplifying from memory but by and large the reconstructed 'diary' is consistent with records which he kept at the time, e.g. his entry for the First Day of the Somme which he states was "not an attempt to win the war at a blow", and that "weeks of hard fighting" lay ahead. This is an important and interesting work containing much interesting material and revealing gossip.

Download or read book The Defeat of Imperial Germany 1917 1918 written by Colonel Rod Paschall and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 1989-08-27 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Defeat of Imperial Germany, 1917-1918 by Rod Paschall is the first volume in the Major Battles and Campaigns series under the general editorship of John S. D. Eisenhower. Designed for the "armchair strategist," this book offers striking proof of the inaccuracy of the conventional depiction of the trench warfare of the First World War, in which commanding generals are seen as mediocre and unimaginative, having stubbornly sent hundreds of thousands of troops over the top to be mowed down by the lethal weaponry of modern war. Paschall builds a compelling case that the generals on both sides invented ingenious new strategies that simply failed in the context of a war of attrition. In a series of vivid analyses of successive offenses, Paschall describes the generals' plans, how their plans were aimed at dislodging the entrenched enemy and restoring maneuver and breakthrough on the Western Front, and what happened when the massed soldiery under their command sought to carry out their orders. Though these strategies and tactics largely failed at the time, they would prove successful when implemented twenty years later during World War II. Dozens of photographs, many never before published, as well as theater and battlefield maps help make The Defeat of Imperial Germany, 1917-1918 an outstanding and original contribution to the body of knowledge of the Great War.

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 Mud Blood and Poppycock written by Gordon Corrigan and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2012-12-20 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of how Britain won the First World War. The popular view of the First World War remains that of BLACKADDER: incompetent generals sending brave soldiers to their deaths. Alan Clark quoted a German general's remark that the British soldiers were 'lions led by donkeys'. But he made it up. Indeed, many established 'facts' about 1914-18 turn out to be myths woven in the 1960s by young historians on the make. Gordon Corrigan's brilliant, witty history reveals how out of touch we have become with the soldiers of 1914-18. They simply would not recognize the way their generation is depicted on TV or in Pat Barker's novels. Laced with dry humour, this will overturn everything you thought you knew about Britain and the First World War. Gordon Corrigan reveals how the British embraced technology, and developed the weapons and tactics to break through the enemy trenches.

Download or read book Mud Blood and Determination written by Simon Peaple and published by . This book was released on 2024-08-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking modern history of the 46th (North Midland) Division draws upon a vast array of largely neglected sources from a variety of archives, and challenges some comfortable assumptions. University historians' increasingly positive views of Haig are challenged by primary evidence of his own blatant willingness to change his mind to protect his promotion prospects. The overall theme is of how the ordinary Tommies of 46th Division learnt to fight more effectively and ultimately stormed the Hindenburg Line. In dealing with the Somme, the book effectively rewrites our understanding of Third Army's experience; the book demonstrates that Middlebrook was mistaken in accepting the claim by Major General Stuart-Wortley that he was sacked for saving his men from further slaughter. That chapter concludes with the evidence of young subalterns, bringing to life moments in history that illuminate a generation's experience of the carnage of war. All previous large-scale studies have focused on elite units, but this book follows this un-fancied, often belittled, division along the learning curve of the British Army. The book therefore develops the view put forward in studies of the Canadian Corps, and reflected in modern biographies of leading commanders, that the British Army gradually developed the system of "bite and hold". The poignant chapter on a "Shot at Dawn" and the concluding chapter on the poor postwar treatment of the many miners make this book more than a purely military history by linking the First World War to its social, political and economic context.

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 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 Philip Warner and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2005-07-30 with total page 408 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 & 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 Canada s Great War Album written by Canada's National History Society and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 885 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, Canada's Great War Album is an unprecedented and remarkable collection of Canadian photographs, memorabilia, and stories of the war. Two years ago, Canada’s History Society invited Canadians to tell their family stories from the First World War. The response was overwhelming and assembled for the first time are their personal stories and photographs that together form a compelling and moving account of the war. Canada's Great War Album also includes contributions from Peter Mansbridge, Charlotte Gray, J. L. Granatstein, Christopher Moore, Jonathan Vance, and Tim Cook. In the spirit of the bestselling 100 Photos That Changed Canada, the war that changed Canada forever is reflected here in words and pictures.

Download or read book Vimy written by Pierre Berton and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2012-11-19 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling, award-winning author of The American Invasion of Canada “has given great drama and immediacy to that turning point in Canadian history” (Maclean’s). On Easter Monday 1917 with a blizzard blowing in their faces, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps in France seized and held the best-defended German bastion on the Western Front—the muddy scarp of Vimy Ridge. The British had failed to take the Ridge, and so had the French who had lost 150,000 men in the attempt. Yet these magnificent colonial troops did so in a morning at the cost of only 10,000 casualties. The author recounts this remarkable feat of arms with both pace and style. He has gathered many personal accounts from soldiers who fought at Vimy. He describes the commanders and the men, the organization and the training, and above all notes the thorough preparation for the attack from which the British General Staff could have learned much. The action is placed within the context both of the Battle of Arras, of which this attack was part, and as a milestone in the development of Canada as a nation. “This wonderful book brings to life the amazing men who came across the Atlantic nearly a century ago and won a famous victory which helped change a nation forever . . . the wonderful prose of Pierre Berton is all from the heart and you should share in it.” —War History Online “The cinematic writing plunks the reader in the midst of the actual battle, and a judicious use of quotes from soldiers’ diaries and letters helps provide a ground-level perspective.” —Quill & Quire

Download or read book Forgotten Voices Of The Great War written by Max Arthur and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous and important task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing WWI veterans and interviewing them at length in order to record the experiences of ordinary individuals in war. The IWM aural archive has become the most important archive of its kind in the world. Authors have occasionally been granted access to the vaults, but digesting the thousands of hours of footage is a monumental task. Now, forty years on, the Imperial War Museum has at last given author Max Arthur and his team of researchers unlimited access to the complete WWI tapes. These are the forgotten voices of an entire generation of survivors of the Great War. The resulting book is an important and compelling history of WWI in the words of those who experienced it.