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Carnage at Passendaele

 

            The three battles of Ypres perfectly demonstrate the extent to which stupidity and/or bad luck plays a role in war. The first battle showed the stupidity of the Belgium soldiers opening up the dyke. The same act proved to be terribly unlucky for the Germans. The second battle showed the stupidity of Sir Douglas Haig. Haig made the mistake of thinking the Germans were on the brink of exhaustion after a preliminary bombardment. During the third battle Haig again made the same mistake he made during the battle of the Somme. Stupidity and/or bad luck play a major role throughout these battles. If it hadn't of rained uncontrollably during Passchendaele, the Germans may have won. We will never know.
             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 neither 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. .
             During the battle of the Somme it became obvious that trench warfare favoured the defender and not the attacker, even armed with this knowledge, all faith was put into preliminary bombing the enemy lines before any major offensive.


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