Sarevok
Civ3 Scenario Creator
Im just curious out of knowledge, but since the end of the Battle over Passcendale's anneversary is coming (11-10). Who knows about that famous and considered the most notorious battle of WW1?
Passchendale
- Thread starter Sarevok
- Start date
Mongoloid Cow
Great Khan
To be honest, I've never heard of it, but I might have heard of the details.
Kryten
Smeee heeeeed
Ossric
Hedonistic Ruler
off course i know about it, WWI had more impact on the Belgian psyché then WWII...
Sarevok
Civ3 Scenario Creator
It was indeed a slaughter, thanks for the great details on the fight for passcendale (3rd Ypres) Kryten!
joespaniel
Unescorted Settler
Passchendaele, like most of the battles of the Great War, was sheer murder. Not one time did any British Staff Officer visit the front, to see the ocean of mud they were sending the infantry off to die in.
Horrific.
Horrific.
Ossric
Hedonistic Ruler
like some guy said on BBC2 today when he was walking on some cemetary:
"In WWI, the brittish Army lost it's innocense. No longer could the willpower or the patriotism of it's soldiers win from machineguns & bombs"
off course, this goes for every army involved...
"In WWI, the brittish Army lost it's innocense. No longer could the willpower or the patriotism of it's soldiers win from machineguns & bombs"
off course, this goes for every army involved...
joespaniel
Unescorted Settler
I would venture to say Verdun was probably the most notorious battle of the Great War.
Probably of ANY war.
Ossric
Hedonistic Ruler
hard to say, there's never much talk about the eastern front or about the battle between Austria & Italian forces in the Alpes (soldiers had their camp & sleeping quarters literally carved into glaciers. they lived for 4 years under the ice)
It's difficult & a little meaningless to say which was the worst battle. Whether it was on the Western, Eastern front or in the Alpes, conditions were sub-human with massive meaningless casualties all around...
TrailblazingScot
I was kittenOFchaos
At Bradford Grammar I went on a "WW1 Battlefields Trip" which was run by the History Department. We visited many of the major battlefields in France in Belgium where British & Commonwealth, French and German soldiers lost their lives.
The battles covered in greatest depth were "The Battle of the Somme" and "Passchendale" so I've walked on the same ground the battles were fought, seen the graves of many of the servicemen (mainly British graveyards as we are British and because they are more numerous) and read the history of the battles, mainly from source material like the letters of soldiers there at the time.
It was an remarkable, emotional and demanding experience (the history teachers worked us like slaves!) and I think something that would be good for all school-children to experience.
One of the first places we visited was the "Newfoundland Beaumont-Hamel Memorial Park" which also contains a memorial to the Highlanders of the 51st Division. The site has memorials, grave and a preserved piece of the battlefield, minus most of the munitions etc as it was left after the war.
After being told what happened here and doing an exercise in our vast taskbooks we walked as a group (must of been around 40 of us) acriss the seemingly vast and empty space from the British lines to the German lines past danger tree. We were told to walk, in a line and in silence across the cratered ground. That was a pretty scarey and exciting...I felt like running, but then my imagination has always been vivid, but to think that on that first day along most of the line men resisted what must have been a natural urge and walked across is incredible and just like us school kids was because we had been told to.
I think it is interesting that I found this site more atmospheric than Vimmy Ridge where the trenches are recreated and the lines are just 10 metres apart and include subterranean trenches etc. I think the open space and vistas is what made it as well as it being a lovely day, though cold.
I looked online and I've found a relevant website to the above two paragraphs:
Photos and Footage - Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial
Link: http://www.firstworldwar.com/today/beaumonthamel.htm
Danger Tree:
The German Trenches (as they remain today):
Memorial to the 51st Highlanders!
Passchendale as we were taught it was a battle that almost was a great victory for the British, but then the rains came down and the ground turned to mud. Rather than cut and running with the success of the first 3 days (if memory serves me right) they continued the battle on and on and on despite the weather and hardships placed on the nerves of the men. It became one of the greatest battles of attrition and was probably up there with the worst of the fighting. As per usual, the Germans were on the ridge in excellently placed and prepared trenches and the Allies felt the need to attack these trenches rather than finding a nice ridge of their own and letting the Germans do the attacking
If you or your kids gets the chance to go on a "Battlefields Trip" to France and Belgium as run by a good History Department, jump at the chance. It does make you appreciate alot more what those men suffered and how it wouldn't be too incredible to imagine yourself in the same spot.
P.S You'll notice also what a amazing job the "Commonwealth War Graves Commision" has done with the construction and maintainence of the British & Commonwealth graveyards. They are extremely well kept, presented (lovely white marble), small, pretty and numerous. British soldiers were generally buried near where they fell and were given graveyards accordingly rather than the massed graveyards of French and Germans.
joespaniel
Unescorted Settler
Very few battles in the recorded history of the world approach the degree of slaughter at Verdun.
However, I couldn't agree more with you on the last point. Those generals should have been shot.
Sarevok
Civ3 Scenario Creator
I have a battle that hasd been compared to verdun in its sheer slaughter and it probalb ywas the most notorious battle in history... Stalingrad.
Speaking of this, I ought to Make a poll
Speaking of this, I ought to Make a poll
Ossric
Hedonistic Ruler
if you visit the battlefields in Belgium, make sure to visit the different graveyards from various nationalities. Another "beautifull" graveyard you should visit is that of the Germans in Langemark, very different in style from the Brittish cemeteries...
This cemetery was never designed to be as 'uplifting' as the British ones but instead it reminds of the true cost of war to all sides involved. Langemark (or Langemarck) Cemetery is the only German cemetery in the Ypres Salient. The 44,292 (of which 11,813 are un-named) burials are a collection of all the smaller cemeteries that occurred during the war. After the war, there was less sympathy towards the Germans, from the French and Belgian Governments, as they had been the aggressors in this conflict. Land was given over for German burials grudgingly.Unlike the Allies, whose burial sites became proper cemeteries, the Germans had to dig up their burial sites and move them to allocated sites. One such site is Langemark.
If you compare Langemark and Tyne Cot Cemeteries, Tyne Cot is many times larger yet Langemark has four times as many burials.
Langemark :
most burials are in mass graves, one containing 24,917 alone
ps: hundreds of unexploded bombs are still found today in many farm-fields & on the beaches which got stuck in the mud during WWI. Often, the army is called upon to detonate these devices
This cemetery was never designed to be as 'uplifting' as the British ones but instead it reminds of the true cost of war to all sides involved. Langemark (or Langemarck) Cemetery is the only German cemetery in the Ypres Salient. The 44,292 (of which 11,813 are un-named) burials are a collection of all the smaller cemeteries that occurred during the war. After the war, there was less sympathy towards the Germans, from the French and Belgian Governments, as they had been the aggressors in this conflict. Land was given over for German burials grudgingly.Unlike the Allies, whose burial sites became proper cemeteries, the Germans had to dig up their burial sites and move them to allocated sites. One such site is Langemark.
If you compare Langemark and Tyne Cot Cemeteries, Tyne Cot is many times larger yet Langemark has four times as many burials.
Langemark :
most burials are in mass graves, one containing 24,917 alone
ps: hundreds of unexploded bombs are still found today in many farm-fields & on the beaches which got stuck in the mud during WWI. Often, the army is called upon to detonate these devices
Ossric
Hedonistic Ruler
images of Passchendaele:
'There was not a sign of life of any sort. Not a tree, save for a few dead stumps which looked strange in the moonlight. Not a bird, not even a rat or a blade of grass. Nature was as dead as those Canadians whose bodies remained where they had fallen the previous autumn. Death was written large everywhere. Where there had been farms there was not a stick or a stone to show. You only knew them because they were marked on the map. The earth had been churned and re-churned. It was simply a soft, sloppy mess, into which you sank up to the neck if you slipped from the duckboard tracks - and the enemy had the range of those slippery ways. Shell hole cut across shell hole. Pits of earth, like simmering fat, brimful of water and slimy mud, mile after mile as far as the eye could see. It is not possible to set down the things that could be written of the Salient. They would haunt your dreams.'
RA Colwell, Private, Passchendaele, January 1918
'There was not a sign of life of any sort. Not a tree, save for a few dead stumps which looked strange in the moonlight. Not a bird, not even a rat or a blade of grass. Nature was as dead as those Canadians whose bodies remained where they had fallen the previous autumn. Death was written large everywhere. Where there had been farms there was not a stick or a stone to show. You only knew them because they were marked on the map. The earth had been churned and re-churned. It was simply a soft, sloppy mess, into which you sank up to the neck if you slipped from the duckboard tracks - and the enemy had the range of those slippery ways. Shell hole cut across shell hole. Pits of earth, like simmering fat, brimful of water and slimy mud, mile after mile as far as the eye could see. It is not possible to set down the things that could be written of the Salient. They would haunt your dreams.'
RA Colwell, Private, Passchendaele, January 1918
Richard III
Duke of Gloucester
Thanks for the pics all, especially Kitten. As a strange sort of historical refresher for the arrival of Paradox's games "Victoria," I've been doing a one-a-day historical something to try to see more history from the period than usual, and this is sort of like taking a free day. Poignant stuff. Always important, too, I think, to add color to the picture; the b and w's of WWI make it seem too remote to remember it properly, giving it a science-fiction look that makes it easy for this generation to pretend it could never happen to us.
R.III
R.III
Ossric
Hedonistic Ruler
no comments needed:
Sarevok
Civ3 Scenario Creator
thanks for the pictures, i tried to find some but i never could find any online.
Ossric
Hedonistic Ruler
no thread about Passendaele would be complete without the poem from John McCrae (1872-1918)
background:
As a surgeon in the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, he spent seventeen days treating injured men in Ypres -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, Germans. It was an experience he thought would be impossible to survive. McCrae later wrote of it: "I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."
Major McCrae was personally affected by death. A young friend of McCrae's, and a former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer, had been killed by a shell burst on May 2nd, 1915. Helmer was buried later that same day in a little cemetery. McCrae performed the funeral ceremony.
The next day McCrae vented his grief by composing a poem. In the nearby cemetery where wild poppies sprang up, McCrae spent twenty minutes scribbling fifteen lines of verse. A friend and fellow soldier, Cyril Allinson spotted McCrae and expressed the following, "His face was very tired but calm as he wrote. He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."
When finished, McCrae handed his pad to Allinson without saying a word. Allinson was moved by what he read: "The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word 'blow' in that line because the poppies actually were blown in that morning by a gentle east wind.
The poem describes the cemetery where soldiers were buried, but the subject also has a greater meaning - soldiers fear that in death they will be forgotten, that their deaths will have been in vain. Remembering the soldiers, with the symbol of a poppy, is seen as removing that fear of being forgotten.
In Flanders Fields (May 3rd, 1915)
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are dead. Short days ago
We, lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
(McCrae died of pneumonia while on active duty in 1918)
background:
As a surgeon in the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, he spent seventeen days treating injured men in Ypres -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, Germans. It was an experience he thought would be impossible to survive. McCrae later wrote of it: "I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."
Major McCrae was personally affected by death. A young friend of McCrae's, and a former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer, had been killed by a shell burst on May 2nd, 1915. Helmer was buried later that same day in a little cemetery. McCrae performed the funeral ceremony.
The next day McCrae vented his grief by composing a poem. In the nearby cemetery where wild poppies sprang up, McCrae spent twenty minutes scribbling fifteen lines of verse. A friend and fellow soldier, Cyril Allinson spotted McCrae and expressed the following, "His face was very tired but calm as he wrote. He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."
When finished, McCrae handed his pad to Allinson without saying a word. Allinson was moved by what he read: "The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word 'blow' in that line because the poppies actually were blown in that morning by a gentle east wind.
The poem describes the cemetery where soldiers were buried, but the subject also has a greater meaning - soldiers fear that in death they will be forgotten, that their deaths will have been in vain. Remembering the soldiers, with the symbol of a poppy, is seen as removing that fear of being forgotten.
In Flanders Fields (May 3rd, 1915)
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are dead. Short days ago
We, lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
(McCrae died of pneumonia while on active duty in 1918)
Sarevok
Civ3 Scenario Creator
i never heard of that poem, but these poems and writeups clearly show that this battle was definetly one of the worst in tihe great war.
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