Veterans...Get the hell in here now!

raratt

raratt

Well-Known Member
USA TODAY
Veterans, Gold Star families, 5th graders to get free entry to national parks
On Nov. 11 the department will permanently waive entrance fees for veterans and Gold Star dependents. The department currently waives the fees for active-duty military service members, and disabled veterans have been able to apply for a lifetime park access pass.

Veterans can use four kinds of ID to access the benefit. Park employees will take Gold Star families at their word, Everson said. Gold Star dependents have a loved one who was killed in military service.
 
too larry

too larry

Well-Known Member
raratt said:
The Navy students at Keesler looked like they were doing a group wander, the AF students didn't get away with that.
Click to expand...
After bootcamp, while I was waiting for my schools to start, we marched to the mess hall. After I got into school, never marched again.
 
BarnBuster

BarnBuster

Virtually Unknown Member
Today in Military History:

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On 6th November 1917, after three months of fierce fighting, British and Canadian forces finally took control of the tiny village of Passchendaele in the West Flanders region of Belgium, so ending one of the bloodiest battles of World War I. With approximately a third of a million British and Allied soldiers either killed or wounded, the Battle of Passchendaele (officially the third battle of Ypres), symbolises the true horror of industrialised trench warfare.

The Passchendaele campaign was preceded by what was then the largest planned explosion in history. For months, British, Canadian and Australian tunnellers had burrowed underneath the German defences on Messines Ridge in the Ypres Salient, where they planted 21 massive explosive mines. At 3 a.m. on June 7, 1917, 19 of them were detonated in rapid succession. The resulting blasts knocked waiting British troops off their feet; the rumble could be heard as far away as London. An estimated 10,000 German soldiers perished and the cratered landscape was soon in Allied hands. Amazingly, two of the mines failed to explode. One was detonated by lightning in 1955, killing a cow. The other, its location since discovered, lies underneath a Belgian farm. Authorities have declared it too difficult and dangerous to dismantle even 100 years later.

General Sir Douglas Haig, the British Commander in Chief in France, had been convinced to launch his forces at the German submarine bases along the Belgian coast in an attempt to reduce the massive shipping losses then being suffered by the Royal Navy. General Haig also believed that the German army was close to collapse and that a major offensive …“just one more push”, could hasten the end the war.

Thus the offensive at Passchendaele was launched on the 18th July 1917 with a bombardment of the German lines involving 3,000 guns. In the 10 days that followed, it is estimated that over 4¼ million shells were fired.

(WW1 artillery shells had a 30% detonation failure rate. Coupled with the fact that they buried themselves sometimes yards deep, areas of WW1 battlefields are off limits still today and farmers regularly turn up UXO (unexploded ordinance)/ERW (explosive remnants of war) The “Iron Harvest” is the annual “harvest” of war remnants including UXO, barbed wire, and shrapnel collected by Belgian and French farmers after ploughing their fields; see Red Zone below bb.)

The actual infantry assault followed at 03.50 on 31st July, but far from collapsing, the German Fourth Army fought well and restricted the main British advance to relatively small gains.

Shortly after the initial assault, the heaviest rains in more that 30 years began to fall on Flanders, drenching the soldiers and the low lying fields over which the battle was taking place. The artillery shells that had bombarded the German lines only days before had not only torn up the land but had also destroyed the drainage systems that were keeping the reclaimed marshland dry. With the continued pounding, the rain drenched ground quickly turned into a thick swamp of mud.

Even the newly-developed tanks made little headway; unable to move, they quickly became stuck fast in the liquid mud. With each new phase of the offensive the rain kept falling, filling the shell holes with water. The clinging mud caked the soldier’s uniforms and clogged their rifles, but that was the least of their worries as in places the mud had become so deep that both men and horses were drowned, lost forever in the stinking quagmire. It took six men to stretcher a wounded soldier across the glue-like surface. Many survivors recalled stumbling along, their boots being sucked off their feet and then came the sensation of sinking up to their waists in mud. Additionally, thousands of exhausted horses and mules died attempting to haul gun carriages across the devastated, cratered landscape which had been churned up by shelling.

The only solid structures in this sea of desolation were the enemy’s concrete pillboxes; from here the German machine-gunners could scythe down any Allied infantry that had been ordered to advance

With the hopelessness of the situation apparent, General Haig temporarily suspended the attack.

A fresh British offensive was launched on the 20th September under the command of Herbert Plumer which eventually resulted in some small gains being made including the capture of a nearby ridge just east of Ypres. General Haig ordered further attacks in early October which proved less successful. Allied troops met stiff opposition from German reserves being poured into the area, and many British and Empire soldiers suffered severe chemical burns as the Germans employed mustard gas to help defend their position.

Unwilling to accept failure, General Haig ordered three more assaults on the Passchendaele ridge in late October. Casualty rates were high during these final stages, with Canadian divisions in particular suffering huge losses. When British and Canadian forces finally reached Passchendaele on 6th November 1917 hardly a trace of the original village structures remained. The capture of the village did however give General Haig the excuse to call an end to the offensive, claiming success.

In the three and half months of the offensive the British and Empire forces had advanced barely five miles, suffering horrendous casualties. Perhaps their only consolation was that the Germans had suffered almost as badly with around 250,000 killed or injured. In the aftermath of the battle, General Haig was severely criticized for continuing the offensive long after the operation had lost any real strategic value.

Perhaps more than any other, Passchedaele has come to symbolize the horrors and the great human costs associated with the major battles of the First World War. British Empire losses included approximately 36,000 Australians, 3,500 New Zealanders and 16,000 Canadians – the latter of which were lost in the last few days / weeks of the final bloody assault. Some 90,000 bodies were never identified and 42,000 never recovered.

61 Victoria Crosses were awarded during the entire Passchendaele campaigns

These battles and the British Empire soldiers that perished in them are today commemorated at the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, the Tyne Cot Cemetery and Memorial to the Missing.

medium.com

Passchendaele: they called it ‘the Battle of the Mud’

Officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele became infamous not only for the scale of casualties, but also for the mud…
medium.com medium.com
www.baltimoresun.com

In Flanders fields, old shells kill For salvage team, World War I goes on

YPRES, Belgium — All is not quiet on the Western Front. Here on one of World War I’s busiest and bloodiest battlefields, unexploded artillery shells stir from an 80-year slumber, rising…
www.baltimoresun.com www.baltimoresun.com
www.nationalgeographic.org

Red Zone

France's Zone Rouge is a lingering reminder of World War I's Battle of Verdun.
www.nationalgeographic.org www.nationalgeographic.org
militaryhistorynow.com

Passchendaele – Inside the First World War's Infamous Slaughter in the Mud - MilitaryHistoryNow.com

“The appalling casualties, the mud and the overall futility of the offensive have made Passchendaele an emblem of the mind-boggling waste of the First World War.” By Darrell Duthie “I DIED IN HELL,” wrote famed...
militaryhistorynow.com militaryhistorynow.com
 
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