WW13+Passchendaele

=Overview of strategies and tactics to break the stalemate including key battles: Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele=

The Battle of Passchendaele


//Third Battle of Ypres. 7 June – 10 November 1917, a British, Canadian and Australian offensive, opening with the explosion of nineteen mines tunnelled under the German positions around Messines and ending in the mud of Passchendaele.// //Passchendaele. A village on a ridge eight miles east of Ypres, being the furthest point reached by British and Empire troops in the Third Battle of Ypres, 31 July – 10 November 1917. The Passchendaele Ridge was among the first objectives in the plan of Haig for a breakthrough in Belgium, but it was not possible to launch an attack on Passchendaele itself until 12 October, a second attack failing on 26 October and the ruins of the mud-caked village falling to the Canadians only on 9 November, when it was too late to sustain an offensive in appalling weather with weary and demoralised troops. A wet August, with twice the normal rainfall, combined with the low-lying Flanders plain to make Passchendaele a battlefield of mud. Allied troops suffered 300,000 casualties in creating a dangerously exposed salient of five miles, speedily evacuated five months later when the Germans launched their spring offensive. Passchendaele, in which the German defenders used mustard gas for the first time, remained the supreme hell-hole of horror among the British and the Canadians much as Verdun did so for the French.// Alan Palmer, //Dictionary of Twentieth Century History//, Penguin, 1979, pp.406 and 305


 * A British offensive against German lines.
 * Date: June – November 1917
 * Place: Ypres, Flanders in Belgium. This was the Third Battle of Ypres.


 * Aim**:
 * to relieve the French after losses and mutinies during the year.
 * to take the Belgian ports of Ostende and Zeebrugge.
 * to further wear down the German through attrition.
 * It is suggested by J. Laffin in British Butchers and Bunglers of World War I that Haig pushed on with the offensive, even after it was bogged down in the Flanders mud, to avoid sharing glory for the defeat of the Germans with the Americans who would be arriving in battle in 1918.


 * The Battle**:
 * Before the battle began, 19 mines were exploded on the Messines Ridge. Two failed to explode. One of them exploded during a thunder storm in 1955. The other remains buried somewhere near Ypres.
 * The pre-battle bombardment tore up the land beyond the allied trenches and the August rains turned the battlefield into a quagmire.

//He [Haig] was proposing to push his men through a slimy, corpse-filled swamp so dreadful that infantry units took five hours to cover one mile, even without having to fight. Supplies and ammunition could only be taken forward by donkeys or men, who collapsed under the effort. Up to a dozen bearers were needed to get one stretcher case to the rear.// Laffin, J., //British Butchers and Bunglers of World War I//, 1988, p.115


 * The British took Passchendaele on 9 November 1917.


 * Result**: little gain at great cost. The Germans, in their Spring Offensive in 1918, retook all the territory taken by the British during the Battle of Passchendaele.

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Watch this scene from the 2008 Canadian film "Passchendaele". media type="youtube" key="zJZttzblHFQ?fs=1" height="385" width="640" Below is the trailer for the film "Beneath Hill 60". This film is about an Australian tunnelling corps who set the mine under Hill 60. 21 mines were set under German trenches. When they were exploded on 7 June 1917, it signalled the start of the Battle of Messine Ridge, which preceded the Third Battle of Ypres. media type="youtube" key="HH1lr2nLrd0?fs=1" height="385" width="640"

=Commonwealth War Graves Commission=


 * After the Armistice: making today’s cemeteries**

By 1919, the Ypres Salient was a desolate place, thickly sown with hundreds of soldiers’ cemeteries, many more than can be seen here today. Most were little more than bare expanses of trodden earth, just a few untidy rows of graves marked by battered pieces of wood. There were little clusters of graves in fields, canal banks, by roadsides, and countless bodies still lay out on the old battlefields.

With the civilian population anxious to return to rebuild their lives, the grisly business of bringing order to the dead began. Most of the more substantial cemeteries were left where they were, but numerous small ones were gathered into larger cemeteries nearby.

The bulk of this work was carried out by Army Graves Concentration Units who also undertook the massive task of clearing the battlefields. Their meticulous searches brought in thousands more bodies, those of soldiers killed in the major actions that could not be recovered in the heat of the fight. Many had lain unburied for years and all clues to their identity had been lost. These unidentified dead – more than 40,000 – account for one third of the marked burials in the Salient’s cemeteries today. Their headstones, inscribed **A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR, KNOWN UNTO GOD**, can be found in profusion, particularly in the new ‘concentration’ cemeteries made for them after the war.

Once filled and closed, the cemeteries passed into the care of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission, who completed the work of construction, turning them into the permanent memorials you see today. (//from Commonwealth War Graves Commission, __The Ypres Salient__//)

**Tyne Cot Cemetery**

Tyne Cot Cemetery near Zonnebeke is the large Commonwealth War Cemetery in the world with over 12,000 graves. 8,000 of these are unidentified.

It began as a battlefield cemetery around a German blockhouse which had been captured on 4 Oct 1918. 343 burials were made in an irregular pattern during the war. After the war it became a concentration cemetery – bodies were moved there from the nearby battlefields. In 1922 King George V suggested the Cross of Sacrifice be placed on the German blockhouse at the centre of the cemetery.


 * [[image:2844_tyne_cot_cemetery.jpg]] || [[image:0710_ypres_tyne_cot.jpg]] ||


 * The Menin Gate and Tyne Cot Memorials**

The names of over 100,000 missing soldiers are recorded on memorials in the Ypres Salient. The two largest memorials are the Menin Gate and Tyne Cot:
 * Menin Gate: 54,896 names of soldiers who died with no known remains found.
 * Tyne Cot: 34,984 names of soldiers who died with no known remains found.
 * [[image:0868_ypres_menin_gate.jpg]] || [[image:0655_ypres.jpg]] ||

Menin Gate


 * Buttes New British Cemetery** in Polygon Wood contains a memorial to 5th Division AIF, a New Zealand Memorial; and the graves of five Australian soldiers found and buried in 2008
 * [[image:0810_ypres_polygon_wood.jpg]] || [[image:0805_ypres_polygon_wood.jpg]] ||
 * [[image:0781_ypres_polygon_wood.jpg]] || [[image:0790_ypres_polygon_wood.jpg]] ||


 * Langemark German Cemetery** (Soldatenfriedhof) contains individual graves in which eight German soldiers are buried. As well there is a mass grave containing the remains of 24,917 German soldiers. In total, 44,234 German soldiers are buried or commemorated in the cemetery.
 * [[image:2769_german_cemetery.jpg]] || [[image:2771_german_cemetery.jpg]] ||
 * [[image:2762_german_cemetery.jpg]] || [[image:2752_german_cemetery.jpg]] ||


 * Essex Farm** cemetery is next to an Advanced Dressing Station. A Canadian doctor, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrea, wrote “In Flanders Fields” while stationed here in 1915.

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 * Cloth Hall** – The famous 14th Century Cloth Hall in Ypres was totally destroyed by German artillery during the war. It has been meticulously reconstructed to its former condition. It now contains the “In Flanders Fields” World War One museum.
 * [[image:2854_ypres.jpg]] || [[image:4760_cloth_hall_1020_small.jpg]] ||


 * [[image:james_gooley_wwi_portrait.jpg align="right"]]James Gooley**


 * Enlisted: || 3 July 1916 at Victoria Barracks ||
 * Age: || 21 years 6 months ||
 * Height: || 5 feet 7 inches ||
 * Weight: || 135lbs. (9st.7lbs. / 61kg) ||
 * Chest (when expanded): || 33 inches ||
 * Complexion: || Fresh ||
 * Eyes: || Hazel ||
 * Hair: || Brown ||
 * Address: || 185 Catherine St Leichhardt ||
 * Occupation: || Labourer ||
 * Rank: || Private ||
 * Regiment: || 20th Battalion ||
 * Regimental No.: || 5833 ||
 * Left Australia aboard the Ceramic: 7 October, 1916
 * Disembarked at Plymouth: 21 November, 1916
 * Quartered at Rollestone, U.K.
 * Went **Absent Without Leave** from 2400 18.12.16 until 1400 20.12.16. Forfeited a total of 8 days' pay.
 * Proceeded overseas from Folkestone on 9 May, 1917. Arrived at Etaples, Belgium, the next day. Marched out to unit on 12 May, and joined **20th Battalion in the field on 14 May**.
 * **WOUNDED IN ACTION** (gunshot wound to the chest) at Passchendaele on **8 October, 1917**. Admitted to the Casualty Clearing Station and on 10 October arrived at the 1st South African General Hospital at Abbeville, France.
 * On 2 January, 1918, moved to Cayeux and on 26 January to Le Havre.
 * Rejoined 20th Battalion on 9 February, 1918, and went on leave to England on 16 February.
 * Went **Absent Without Leave** from 7.30am 3.3.18 until 7.30am 5.3.18. Total forfeiture - 7 days' pay.
 * **Rejoined unit in Belgium on 8 March, 1918**.
 * Went to field hospital in France on 5 April with scabies but was sent back to his battalion on 6 April.


 * [[image:james_gooley_wwi_4.jpg align="center"]] || [[image:james_gooley_wwi_2.jpg align="center"]] ||
 * [[image:james_gooley_wwi_1.jpg align="center"]] || [[image:james_gooley_wwi_3.jpg align="center"]] ||