In Flanders Fields

[svandamme]

Originally Posted by SemperFi1977m

Wow, thanks for the great write-up! They dropped so many shells in that war, that you all will likely still be turning them up with the plow another 100 years from now.

What wasn't mentioned is...at the onset of WWI, the small Belgian Army (70,000 men)ferociously resisted the most powerful military in the world single-handedly, the Germans (a 320,000 man invasion force). They held out in a ring of 12 forts for 11 days, until the Germans finally brought forward heavy enough artillery to literally reduce the forts into dust.

The Germans gave Belgium the opportunity to sit back and let the German army peacefully pass through on it's way to France, but Belgium chose to stand and fight. Their selfless courage in the face of unbeatable odds saved Paris from the German war plan to out-flank the entire French Army through Belgium, pinning it between the German Army and Germany itself in a classic hammer & anvil scenario. If this occured, the Western Front would have been lost before it even formed....leaving the Russians facing the entire German and Austrian Armys alone on the eastern front (where they would have surely lost under such odds). Just this one small delay made by the greatly outnumbered Belgian Army, allowed the British Expedionary Force to get in place to stop the northern German advance and changed the entire course of World War I.

a big part of Flanders is below the sea, or at least vulnerable to high tide.
So during the Battle of the Yser (the river in Flanders), the 2 sluice gate watchers opened the sluices,
allowing the sea and high tide to take back the land.. thus narrowing the front by many miles.



You can see the King Albert (commanding officer of the Belgian Army at the time)memorial in the background




The 2 sluice gate watchers , who became national heroes in the process

Henri Geeraert


Karel Cogge



The Battle of the Yser was a Belgian Victory against the German forces, with the help of the French.. pretty much they flooded 50 % of the remaining bit of unoccupied Belgium, thus creating the last bit around Ypres...Germans could not push through because of the flooding... giving the BEF time to come up from Dunkirk and the rest is 4 years of bloody history...