EUCOM Battle Knowledge Centers

Passchendaele is perhaps one of the most iconic campaigns of the First World War, coming to symbolize the mud and blood of the battlefield like no other. Fought for over three months under some of the worst conditions of the war, fighting became bogged down in a quagmire that made it almost impossible for any gains to be made. Complete with detailed maps and photographs, as well as fascinating facts and profiles of the leaders.

No conflict of the Great War excites stronger emotions than the war in Flanders in the autumn of 1917, and no name better encapsulates the horror and apparent futility of the Western Front than Passchendaele. By its end there had been 275,000 Allied and 200,000 German casualties. Yet the territorial gains made in four desperate months were won back by Germany in only three days the following March.

The third battle of Ypres, culminating in a desperate struggle for the ridge and little village of Passchendaele, was one of the most appalling campaigns in the First World War. A million Tommies, Canadians and Anzacs assembled at the Ypres Salient in the summer of 1917, mostly raw young troops keen to do their bit for King and Country. This book tells their tale of mounting disillusion amid mud, terror and desperate privation, yet it is also a story of immense courage, comradeship, songs, high spirits and bawdy humour.