Third Battle of Ypres Officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele became
infamous not only for the scale of casualties, but also for the mud.
Ypres was the principal town within a salient (or bulge) in the
British lines and the site of two previous battles: First Ypres
(October-November 1914) and Second Ypres (April-May 1915). Haig had
long wanted a British offensive in Flanders and, following a warning
that the German blockade would soon cripple the British war effort,
wanted to reach the Belgian coast to destroy the German submarine
bases there. On top of this, the possibility of a Russian withdrawal
from the war threatened German redeployment from the Eastern front to
increase their reserve strength dramatically.
The British were further encouraged by the success of the attack on
Messines Ridge on 7 June 1917. Nineteen huge mines were exploded
simultaneously after they had been placed at the end of long tunnels
under the German front lines. The capture of the ridge inflated Haig's
confidence and preparations began. Yet the flatness of the plain made
stealth impossible: as with the Somme, the Germans knew an attack was
imminent and the initial bombardment served as final warning. It
lasted two weeks, with 4.5 million shells fired from 3,000 guns, but
again failed to destroy the heavily fortified German positions.
The infantry attack began on 31 July. Constant shelling had churned...
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Sir Douglas Haig called off the attacks and did not resume the
offensive until late September.
Attacks on 26th September and 4th October enabled the British forces
to take possession of the ridge east of Ypres. Despite the return of
heavy rain, Haig ordered further attacks towards the Passchendaele
Ridge. Attacks on the 9th and 12th October were unsuccessful. As well
as the heavy mud, the advancing British soldiers had to endure mustard
gas attacks.
Three more attacks took place in October and on the 6th November the
village of Passchendaele was finally taken by British and Canadian
infantry. The offensive cost the British Expeditionary Force about
310,000 casualties. Sir Douglas Haig was severely criticised for
continuing with the attacks long after the operation had lost any real
strategic value.
damage to the areas vital to the British war effort and to try to take
The Canadians advanced behind a creeping barrage, which is a precise line of intense artillery fire advancing at a set rate, timed to the minute. This allowed other soldiers to capture German positions in the moments after the explosions, before the enemy soldiers emerged from their underground bunkers. By the afternoon, Canadian forces had taken all of their objectives, except for one where troops were facing the worst terrain and toughest enemy defences. It took three more days of fighting before the Canadians were finally able to gain control of this last part of the front. The Battle of Vimy Ridge was over, and the Germans were forced to withdraw three kilometres.
The battle started when the British sixth air born division went in at ten minutes after midnight. They were the first troops to go into action. The second attack was by the eighty second in the one hundred and first division of air born attacks. They were less successful than the first division.
Vimy Ridge was a key to the German defence system. It rose 61 m. above
the capture of the ridge as a necessary diversion, and he declined to. modify his plans: evidence, some say, of an inflexible strategy. No Man's Land, Flanders 1919However, numerous factors are cited to. support the decision taken to continue the offensive into the autumn. With the Russian withdrawal from the war, British vulnerability to submarine attacks launched from the Belgian coast, and weakened French.
The Generals and politicians thought the war was going to end very quickly where every I gets to go home on Christmas. Generals and Politicians said “A few quick campaigns and a few decisive victories would “bring the boys home by Christmas, “perhaps even by the fall” (Overfield, James H. Sources of Twentieth-century Global History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Print.) , p74. They were definitely wrong on that note. The war lasted 4 years in the hell the soldiers called the battlefield. One of the first major battles on the western front was called the Battle of Marne. The battle that halted the Germans from entering France into a long standing stalemate. The trench warfare started here, where soldiers dug deep into the ground and settled down to fight off the enemy soldiers. It was a stalemate for man...
Have you ever been a part of something big? Maybe a it was a big game or
At dawn of 19th August 1942, six thousand and one hundred Allied soldiers, of whom roughly
The Battle of Normandy was a turning point in World War II. Canada, America, and Great Britain arrived at the beaches of Normandy and their main objective was to push the Nazi’s out of France. The Invasion at Normandy by the Allied Powers winning this battle lead to the liberation of France and Western Europe. Most importantly Hitler’s was being attacked from both the eastern and western front, and caused him to lose power. If the Allied Powers did not succeed in D-Day Hitler would’ve taken over all of Europe.In a document written by General Dwight Eisenhower he persuades the allied powers to invade Normandy. Dwight Eisenhower was born on October 14, 1890. Eisenhower became the 34th president of the United States. He served as the president from January 20, 1953 through January 20, 1961. Before his presidency Dwight participated in World War I and was moved up to captain. Dwight would then take part in World War II and work his way up to becoming a General.
On October 9, 1781, General George Washington surrounded General Lord Charles Cornwallis at the Virginia port city of Yorktown with 8,500 American soldiers and around 10,000 French soldiers. The bruised up British army contained only around 8,000 soldiers. The Siege of Yorktown lasted eight days, and Cornwallis had to surrender to American forces. The British loss crushed their southern army and forced them to give up on the war. The surrender of Yorktown could easily be one of the greatest moments in American history. Not only did the surrender signal the end of the war, but it also signaled that independence had been won by the colonies. No longer would the colonies have to answer to Great Britain and the tyrants that ruled it.
After a two year stalemate, both the Russians and Germans awaited major confrontations that would define the momentum for either side. Up until this point in the war, although the Germans had captured many European countries and were victoriously advancing with their keen tactics, such as the blitzkrieg and their cogent weapons, battles on the Eastern front seemed impossible to win. Upon a dismal loss at the Battle of Stalingrad earlier in 1943, German morale was greatly lowered and the German forces finally apprehended the strength of the Russian troops. The momentum would finally be settled with the decisive battle near the town of Kursk, a town on the Moscow-Rostov railway, in Southern Russia. The goal of the Battle of Kursk was to regain German morale and to pinch off a large salient in the Eastern front, which would make Russians much more vulnerable to German attack. Being such an important battle to the overall success of the Germans, they formulated several unique plans; however, due to the lack of good judgement, these plans were doomed from the very start.
The battle of Stalingrad was one of the bloodiest and massive battles of World War 2. On June 22, 1941, over two and a half million Russians had been killed,wounded or captured by Germans within one month. Many Russian and German soldiers were killed.
It began to emerge the differences in tactics. The question was whether to continue so far the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces Europe, General Eisenhower’s tactics attacking on a broad front, or due to problems of supply to take just one mighty blow. In that period Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery developed a new operation plan, which would include the use of 1st Airborne Army (Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton), actually 1st Airborne Corps (Lieutenant General Frederick Browning). The Corps comprised of 82nd US Airborne Division (Brigadier General James M. Gavin), 101st US Airborne Division (Major General Maxwell D. Taylor), and 1st British Airborne Division (Major General Robert “Roy” E. Urquhart) supported with, under his command, 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade (Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski). These units should be dropped along the roa...
From July 1942 to February 1943, Soviet forces defended the city of Stalingrad from Nazi attack. The battle began during the summer offensive of 1942, Nazi Army groups A an B had already pushed past Stalingrad to take oil fields in south west Russia, when Hitler ordered Stalingrad be attacked (Trueman, n.d.). “Some historians believe that Hitler ordered the taking of Stalingrad simply because of the name of the city and Hitler's hatred of Joseph Stalin. For the same reason Stalin ordered that the city had to be saved” (Trueman, n.d.). Stalingrad was also the center of Soviet communications and manufacturing in the south. Since Stalingrad had such a significance to the soviet war effort and because the Soviets could not allow the Nazi's to hold the oil fields in south-west Russia, Stalin issued the “Not a step back” order (Trueman, n.d.). The battle would eventually turn into one of the bloodiest in World War II with enormous civilian and military casualties.
Before the landings were to begin, the coastal German defenses had to be adequately prepped, and softened by a combination of a massive battering by United States ships, and bombing by the United States Air Force. Between the hours of 0300 and 0500 hours on the morning of June 6, over 1,000 aircraft dropped more than 5,000 tons of bombs on the German coastal defenses. As soon as the preliminary bombing was over, the American and British naval guns opened fire on the Normandy coastline (D' Este 112). A British naval officer described the incredible spectacle he witnessed that day: "Never has any coast suffered what a tortured strip of French coast suffered that morning; both the naval and air bombardments were unparalleled. Along the fifty-mile front the land was rocked by successive explosions as the shells of ships' guns tore holes in fortifications and tons of bombs rained on them from the skies. Through billowing smoke and falling debris defenders crouching in this scene of devastations would soon discern faintly hundreds of ships and assault craft ominously closing the shore.