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You know how you see stuff about how the trench warfare of World War I could teach things that suck how to suck? Nothing epitomized that more than the muddy murderfest known as the Battle of Passchendaele.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 31, 1917--
What a waste of fucking time. And people. It was a no-giggity quagmire. Also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, it began on July 31, 1917 when the British launched a new offensive in an attempt to break through German lines and capture strategically important ridges surrounding the already-bombed-to-shit village of Passchendaele in Belgium. The offensive did not go well.
It was another one of those “hey the Germans are ready to break all we need to do is throw hundreds of thousands of young men in their prime into a hail of gun and artillery fire and we can end this war” ideas that had proven false before, and would prove false yet again. Germany was far from ready to collapse, and most of what the offensive accomplished was a metric shit-ton of muddy death.
We don’t know how many died, but each side suffered somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 casualties. Bodies sank into the mud, never to be seen again, or were literally blown to bits. The Germans also began using this nasty stuff called mustard gas that is both cytotoxic and a blistering agent. Between August and November of 1917, Passchendaele ranks near the top of places you did not want to fucking be.
By September, British commander Sir Douglas Haig was under political pressure to halt the offensive because it was accomplishing the square root of fuck all other than death and dismemberment. Haig’s reply was to say fuck it, let’s throw some Australians and New Zealanders into it, but it was more of the same: no ground gained, just more bodies piled up. Then he said well those Canadians did a good job at Vimy Ridge. How about them? The Canadian commander, General Arthur Currie, said dude this is a bad fucking idea just stop it. Haig said you’re not the boss of me send your boys to die for the cause.
Currie said okay fine asshole but we’re gonna at least remove the dead and repair these roads first so we can launch a semblance of an organized assault. Throughout late October and early November the Canadians launched assault after assault, and they died by the thousands. And yet, the Canadian troops did meet their objectives, but with the death toll few would call it a victory. Two decades later British Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote, “Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of the war ... No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign.”
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Mum’s mother’s cousin’s military record from the National archives. Is a Military Cross better than a Military Medal?
https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=1944319