Carnage at Passendaele

On October 14, 1914, German forces attacked allied forces stationed in the small Belgium town of Ypres. The first real act of stupidity occurred during this battle. The Belgium troops opened the gates to the dyke protecting the Low Countries from the sea. This flood encompassed ten miles of trenches in the far north of Belgium. Even though this stopped the first German offensive, which was terribly unlucky for themselves, it also severely hindered the Allied offensive later on in the war as troops and equipment found it neith

er impossible to cross this terrain. On the German side this act was completely unlucky for their cause. The Germans had to recover from this and launch another offensive that the Allies knew was coming, and they were unable to ever capture Ypres. Overall the first battle of Ypres cost the British over sixty thousand BEF (British Expeditionary Force) which destroyed them as a fully professional army as England could not afford to keep the infrastructure of this outfit. I believe that even though the Belgians flooded the ten mile stretch of German trenches, the flooding demobilized the Allies later on in the war.

On July 31st, 1917 the third battle of Ypres began in a little town of Passchendaele. Whereas the first two battles were started by the Germans, the third battle was intended by Sir Douglas Haig to breakthrough the Germans lines and become the turning point of the war. Earlier in the year of 1917, a warning delivered from a British General stated that due to the high shipping losses, that Britain would not be able sustain war past 1918. Armed with this information Haig decided that he needed to act fast in destroying the Germans. This was his first mistake. He believed that the will of the German army was near collapse. This was a faulty view that he had similarly held at the battle of the Somme. On July 18, allied bombardment started on the German offensive, this completely took away the element of surprise, and the Germans knew a major offensive was imminent. Once the offensive started the Generals soon realized that the major bombardment destroyed the drainage system, as well as destroying the very ground the soldiers needed to traverse across in order to capture the German front lines. British attempts to

Some topics in this essay:
Expeditionary Force, Somme July, Low Countries, Douglas Haig, Somme November, Passchendaele Germans, , Ypres Belgian, Allied German, Somme Haig’s, battle ypres, battle somme, major offensive, bad luck, terribly unlucky, third battle, ten minutes, fierce fighting continued, germans brink, germans major, haig mistake, and/or bad luck, germans brink exhaustion, bad luck plays, sir douglas haig,