Battle of Passchendaele

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bigwheelzip

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Watching British and German news today (BBC & DW), and saw memorials to the 100th anniversary of a WWI battle whose name I was unfamiliar with, Passchendaele. Probably because US troops were not involved.

The campaign lasted about for about 3 months, and left more than a quarter million dead on each side.

Did you ever hear of this battle?

Before and after aerial photo. One ten-day barrage starting July 18th 1917, by 3000 artillery pieces used four million shells.

passchendaele_before_and_after_orig.jpg
 
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Yes Indeed

The U.S. military got involved late in the war and most of the unbelievably bloody battles such as the Somme and Verdun occurred before our involvement.

ten million dead and both Italy and the UK suffered more killed in in WWI than in WWII.
 
federali said:
... the unbelievably bloody battles ....
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Bloody and muddy. In this one battle, the firepower and mud combined to swallow 42,000 allied soldiers, who never were accounted for in either a marked or unmarked grave.

The Germans had even more soldiers swallowed by that battlefield than the allies did. Maybe 100,000 boys that just disappeared into the mud there. Truly astounding butchery.
 
TheWorld Wars are....

As far as I'm concerned the World Wars are an endless wellspring of stories and I'd like to know all of it, but new stuff is being brought to light and a lot of it has been ignored, like actions w/o American involvement.
 
Many historians consider the Battle of Passchendaele to have been the most horrible fighting of WWI. It was largely fought in a barren muddy swamp. And after over a half-million casualties on both sides over several months, it accomplished nothing of strategic significance. It is fortunate that the Americans were not involved. Had they been, many think they would have been pulled out of France after its conclusion. It apparently had the effect of making General Pershing stand firm in his insistence that all U. S. troops would be under U. S. command, not French or British (both of which mainly just wanted American cannon fodder to throw into battle). Nothing but a huge bloody muddy slaughterhouse.
 
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I remember reading something to the effect that many artillery shells did not detonate upon impact with the soupy mud. If so, the casualty count might have been greater had the battle been fought on dry land.
 
Read a book They called It Passchendaele by Lyn MacDonald.
Look at the pic.
A group of British Staff officers (Red Tabs) went toward the front for a first hand look. Their car became mired in the mud, and a group of Tommies appeared like wraiths out of their holes, picked up the car and turned it around toward the rear. One of the officers, nearly in tears, exclaimed "My God, did we send men to fight in this?" to which one of the Tommies replied "Oh, no Sir, this is the rear, the fightin's at the front about two miles farther up".
The Brits and Anzacs alone had more MIA then we had KIA in WW1.
My grandfather's division, the 42nd (Rainbow) was in combat from February 1918 to the Armistice 11 Nov 1918, and had 15,000 casualties out of their strength of 28,000. Just nine months. Imagine the poor Brits or any other participants who were in that monstrosity for a little over four years.
 

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If you really want to get pissed off at wanton slaughter, find and read reports from actions taken on the 10th and 11th of November 1918. Knowing full well that the War would end at 11am on the 11th, Commanding Generals ordered their men to attack German fortifications that they could walk into after 11am.

One account recalls a dead Tommy wearing a Medal for (if I remember correctly) the Battle of Mons. That means he was there at the beginning and made it all the way to a few hours before the war ended before being killed.
 
DWalt said:
I remember reading something to the effect that many artillery shells did not detonate upon impact with the soupy mud. If so, the casualty count might have been greater had the battle been fought on dry land.
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I watched a documentary on it yesterday which mentioned that also.

Speaking of un-exploded ordinance, during one attack the Brits used miners to dig two dozen tunnels under the Germans, which they packed with between 10 to 50 tons of explosive. Half a dozen of them were not detonated during the attack, and were left there, lost to time. One of them exploded in 1956. :eek:
 
The word Passchendaele became a synonym for a disaster after the war, so that 20 years after the battle you might hear someone describe a cock-up as a real "passchendaele". Since WW2, though, that usage of the word has fallen away.

The action (also known as the Third Battle of Ypres) took place on the Ypres battlefield, which also saw the first use of poison gas during the Second Battle of Ypres back in 1915.
 
jlrhiner said:
Knowing full well that the War would end at 11am on the 11th, Commanding Generals ordered their men to attack German fortifications that they could walk into after 11am.
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In many places along the front, artillery barrages continued right up to 11am. Seems that everyone wanted to lay claim to having fired the last shot of the war.
 
Ivan the Butcher said:
I would like to comment, but the magnitude of this slaughter, leaves me speechless!

Ivan
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To make it even more chilling, apply the numbers of dead and missing to your state population.

The total deaths on both sides are just under 900,000. I live in Nebraska, that is the population of Omaha and Lincoln. The population of two major cities gone. Or to put it another way, Nebraska has a population of 1.9 million. Half the population of this state died in that battle.

The number of German missing is around 100,000. That is the population of the 3 largest cities in central Nebraska. Grand Island, Kearney and Hastings. In fact, their populations are still lower than the German missing so you probably could just say it is the population of the three counties these cities are in would be closer to the total number.

Allied missing would eliminate Columbus and North Platte.

And that is just one battle.
 
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