LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Passchendaele: Germans
built 123 days ago
Passchendaele cost over half a million lives over its 3 months. The Germans lost about 250,000 lives and the British 300,000 of whom 36,500 were Australian. 90,000 British or Australian bodies were never identified, 42,000 were never recovered; these had been blown to bits or had drowned in the dreadful morass. Many of the drowned were exhausted or wounded men who had slipped or fallen off the duckboards and were unable to escape the filthy, foul-smelling glutinous mud, sinking deeper to their deaths as they struggled.
Source:
On 12 October the allies try to take Passchendaele but the Germans repel the attack with machine gun fire from their bunkers. Next day Haig gives the order to stop the attack. He has the depleted Anzacs largely relieved by Canadians.
Source:
The carnage on the Western Front at Passchendaele, where 275,000 Allied and 200,000 German soldiers fell, was neither inevitable nor inescapable, the authors of this gripping book insist. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson here offer the most complete account of the campaign ever published, establishing what actually occurred, what options were available, and who was responsible for the devastation.
Source:
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 by the Allies in four desperate months were won back by Germany in only three days the following March. The devastation at Passchendaele, the authors argue, was neither inevitable nor inescapable; perhaps it was not necessary at all. Using a substantial archive of official and private records, much of which has never been previously consulted, Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior provide the fullest account of the campaign ever published.
Source:
By the time of Vimy, the Canadian corps became known as an elite fighting force, an idea reinforced by the victories at Hill 70 and Passchendaele, among others. Then-British prime minister Lloyd George once said, "Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line they prepared for the worst."
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Germans