This Day in World War 1 History: NOVEMBER 06, 1917 : BRITISH VICTORY AT PASSCHENDAELE

After more than three months of bloody combat, the Third Battle of Ypres effectively comes to an end on November 6, 1917, with a hard-won victory by British and Canadian troops at the Belgian village of Passchendaele.

Launched on July 31, 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres was spearheaded by the British commander in chief, Sir Douglas Haig. After a major Allied offensive by the French failed the previous May, Haig determined that his troops should launch another one that same year, proceeding according to his mistaken belief that the German army at this point in World War I was on the verge of collapse, and could be broken completely by a major Allied victory. As the site for the offensive Haig chose the much-contested Ypres Salient, in the Flanders region of Belgium, a region that had seen two previous German-led offensives. Ostensibly aimed at destroying German submarine bases located on the north coast of Belgium, Haig’s Third Battle of Ypres began with significant Allied gains but soon bogged down due to heavy rains and thickening mud.

By the end of September, the British were able to establish control over a ridge of land east of the town of Ypres. From there, Haig pushed his commanders to continue the attacks towards the Passchendaele ridge, some 10 kilometers away. As the battle stretched into its third month, the Allied attackers reached near-exhaustion, while the Germans were able to reinforce their positions with reserve troops released from the Eastern Front, where Russia’s army was in chaos. Refusing to give up the ghost of his major victory, Haig ordered a final three attacks on Passchendaele in late October.

On October 30, Canadian troops under British command were finally able to fight their way into the village; they were driven back almost immediately, however, and the bloodshed was enormous. “The sights up there are beyond all description,” one officer wrote weeks later of the fighting at Passchendaele, “it is a blessing to a certain extent that one becomes callous to it all and that one’s mind is not able to take it all in.” Still Haig pushed his men on, and on November 6 the British and Canadian troops were finally able to capture Passchendaele, allowing the general to call off the attacks, claiming victory. In fact, British forces were exhausted and downtrodden after the long, grinding offensive. With some 275,000 British casualties, including 70,000 dead—as opposed to 260,000 on the German side—the Third Battle of Ypres proved to be one of the most costly and controversial Allied offensives of World War I.

Article Details:

November 06, 1917 : British victory at Passchendaele

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  November 06, 1917 : British victory at Passchendaele

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-victory-at-passchendaele

• Access Date

  November 06, 2015

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  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: NOVEMBER 02, 1917 : THE BALFOUR DECLARATION

On November 2, 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour writes a letter to Britain’s most illustrious Jewish citizen, Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, expressing the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Britain’s public acknowledgement and support of the Zionist movement emerged from its growing concern surrounding the direction of the First World War. By mid-1917, Britain and France were mired in a virtual stalemate with Germany on the Western Front, while efforts to defeat Turkey on the Gallipoli Peninsula had failed spectacularly. On the Eastern Front, the fate of one Ally, Russia, was uncertain: revolution in March had toppled Czar Nicholas II, and the provisional government was struggling against widespread opposition to maintain the country’s disintegrating war effort against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Although the United States had just entered the war on the Allied side, a sizeable infusion of American troops was not scheduled to arrive on the continent until the following year.

Against this backdrop, the government of Prime Minister David Lloyd George—elected in December 1916—made the decision to publicly support Zionism, a movement led in Britain by Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had settled in Manchester. The motives behind this decision were various: aside from a genuine belief in the righteousness of the Zionist cause, held by Lloyd George among others, Britain’s leaders hoped that a formal declaration in favor of Zionism would help gain Jewish support for the Allies in neutral countries, in the United States and especially in Russia, where the powerfully anti-Semitic czarist government had just been overthrown with the help of Russia’s significant Jewish population. Finally, despite Britain’s earlier agreement with France dividing influence in the region after the presumed defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Lloyd George had come to see British dominance in Palestine—a land bridge between the crucial territories of India and Egypt—as an essential post-war goal. The establishment of a Zionist state there—under British protection—would accomplish this, while seemingly following the stated Allied aim of self-determination for smaller nations.

Over the course of 1917, a vigorous anti-Zionist movement within Parliament held up the progress of the planned declaration. Led by Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India and one of the first Jews to serve in the cabinet, the anti-Zionists feared that British-sponsored Zionism would threaten the status of Jews who had settled in various European and American cities and also encourage anti-Semitic violence in the countries battling Britain in the war, especially within the Ottoman Empire. This opposition was overruled, however, and after soliciting—with varying degrees of success—the approval of France, the United States and Italy (including the Vatican) Lloyd George’s government went ahead with its plan.

On November 2, Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild, a prominent Zionist and a friend of Chaim Weizmann, stating that: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” By the time the statement was published in British and international newspapers one week later, one of its major objectives had been rendered obsolete: Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks had gained power in Russia, and one of their first actions was to call for an immediate armistice. Russia was out of the war, and no amount of persuasion from Zionist Jews—who, despite Britain’s belief to the contrary, had relatively little influence in the country to begin with—could reverse the outcome.

Nonetheless, the influence of the Balfour Declaration on the course of post-war events was immediate: According to the “mandate” system created by the Versailles Treaty of 1919, Britain was entrusted with the temporary administration of Palestine, with the understanding that it would work on behalf of both its Jewish and Arab inhabitants. Many Arabs, in Palestine and elsewhere, were angered by their failure to receive the nationhood and self-government they had been led to expect in return for their participation in the war against Turkey. In the years after the war, the Jewish population in Palestine increased dramatically, along with the instances of Jewish-Arab violence. The area’s instability led Britain to delay making a decision on Palestine’s future. In the aftermath of World War II and the terrors of the Holocaust, however, growing international support for Zionism led to the official declaration in 1948 of the State of Israel.

Article Details:

November 02, 1917 : The Balfour Declaration

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  November 02, 1917 : The Balfour Declaration

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-balfour-declaration

• Access Date

  November 02, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: October 30, 1918 : Ottoman Empire signs treaty with Allies

On October 30, 1918, aboard the British battleship Agamemnon, anchored in the port of Mudros on the Aegean island of Lemnos, representatives of Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire sign an armistice treaty marking the end of Ottoman participation in the First World War.

Though the Ottoman Empire—in a period of relative decline since the late 16th century—had initially aimed to stay neutral in World War I, it soon concluded an alliance with Germany and entered the war on the side of the Central Powers in October 1914. The Turks fought fiercely and successfully defended the Gallipoli Peninsula against a massive Allied invasion in 1915-1916, but by 1918 defeat by invading British and Russian forces and an Arab revolt had combined to destroy the Ottoman economy and devastate its land, leaving some six million people dead and millions more starving.

As early as the first week of October 1918, both the Ottoman government and several individual Turkish leaders contacted the Allies to feel out peace possibilities. Britain, whose forces then occupied much of the Ottoman territories, was loath to step aside for its allies, particularly France, which according to an agreement concluded in 1916 would take control of the Syrian coast and much of modern-day Lebanon. In a move that enraged his French counterpart, Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his cabinet authorized Admiral Arthur Calthorpe, Britain’s naval commander in the Aegean Sea, to negotiate an immediate armistice with Turkey without consulting France. Though Britain alone would engineer the Ottoman exit from the war, the two powerful Allies would continue to grapple over control in the region at the Paris Peace Conference, and for years beyond.

Negotiations between Calthorpe’s team and the delegation from Constantinople, led by the Ottoman Minister of Marine Affairs Rauf Bey, began at 9:30 on the morning of October 30, 1918, aboard the Agamemnon. The Treaty of Mudros, signed that evening, stated that hostilities would end at noon the following day. By its terms, Turkey had to open the Dardanelle and Bosporus straits to Allied warships and its forts to military occupation; it was also to demobilize its army, release all prisoners of war and evacuate its Arab provinces, the majority of which were already under Allied control. Bey and his fellow delegates refused to paint the treaty as an act of surrender for Turkey—later causing disillusionment and anger in Constantinople—but in fact that is what it was. The Treaty of Mudros ended Ottoman participation in World War I and effectively—if not legally—marked the dissolution of a once mighty empire. From its ruins, the victors of the First World War attempted to use the post-war peace negotiations to create a new, more unpredictable entity: the modern Middle East

Article Details:

October 30, 1918 : Ottoman Empire signs treaty with Allies

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  October 30, 1918 : Ottoman Empire signs treaty with Allies

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ottoman-empire-signs-treaty-with-allies

• Access Date

  October 30, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks