History of War | Issue 45
WAS IT WORTH IT?
One hundred years ago the Ypres Salient was consumed by a battle that became a byword for the futility of industrialised warfare. In August 1917, a German artilleryman called Gerhard Gurtler wrote a letter home. Even though he was not in the front line, he had been unable to escape the thunderous apocalypse that had consumed the salient around Ypres. Four days after writing this vivid letter, however, he was killed. Gurtler’s despair and subsequent death was replicated hundreds of thousands of times over in the bloody fields of Flanders during a gruelling, prolonged battle that would come to be known by just one Belgian village: Passchendaele. Otherwise known as the ‘Third Battle of Ypres’, Passchendaele has come to symbolise the futility of warfare on the Western Front during WWI.
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Articles in this issue
Below is a selection of articles in History of War Issue 45.