Customer Reviews

A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have a long-standing interest in history in general and military history in particular. After reading dozens if not hundreds of these books, I have found that the ones that stick with me are the ones that are beautifully written.

"A Storm in Flanders" is such a book, focusing on the British experience in the Ypres Salient during World War I. Groom wrote "Forrest Gump," as well as several history books. He knows how to put a sentence together and how to tell a gripping story. Once I picked this book up and started reading, I was hooked.

Much as Stephen Ambrose has done in his elegant books about World War II, Groom moves seamlessly between the generals in their chateaus and the grunts in their trenches. He makes use of diaries and poetry to tell the human story of a struggle that is all too often reduced to an abstract description of maneuver and battle. And he is very fair in his assessments--he acknowledges the criticisms of General Haig and many of the other leaders of the war, but he is always careful to balance these views with other considerations. The result is a well-told tale, fair and sympathetic to everyone involved.

The story of the Ypres Salient is not pretty. Groom does not pull his punches and does his best to give the reader, sitting in a comfortable armchair, some sense of just how horrible the Great War was. In a passage that I found especially memorable, Groom quotes Lieutenant Alfred J. Angel of the Royal Fusiliers during Third Ypres: "The stench was horrible, for the bodies were not corpses in the normal sense. With all the shell-fire and bombardments they'd been continually disturbed, and the whole place was a mess of filth and slime and bones and decomposing bits of flesh."

How anyone could live and fight in this hell on earth without going mad is simply beyond my comprehension, yet many British, French and German soldiers managed to do just that for four years running. Groom doesn't delve too deeply into the psychology of the soldiers, observing that "the search for 'why' and 'how' remains elusive and any effort to reason it out is to fashion a mirror of hell itself." He is probably right in saying that "[a] truly sobering thing would be a glimpse of what was actually going on in their minds during the fighting. That would not only be sobering; it would be perfectly frightening."

If you like a "A Storm in Flanders," I would recommend two other books. The first is "Face of Battle" by John Keegan, which tries to explain how soldiers keep fighting despite the horrors of war and the threat of instant death. The second is Sir Martin Gilbert's "The First World War," which describes the entire war using a relentless chronology that is truly compelling. Neither of these books is as well written as Groom's "A Storm in Flanders," but both are well worth the effort to read.

Winston Groom's latest historical work 'A Storm in Flanders', offers the reader an interesting and satisfying overview of the fighting around the Ypres Salient between 1914 and 1918. The book is 276 pages in length of which over 260 is text. This account cannot be considered comprehensive in its study of the Ypres Salient in the Great War, for that you will need to look elsewhere. However what Mr Groom does offer is a compelling look at the numerous battles fought around the Ypres Salient, including one of the most dreadful battles of World War One, Passchendaele, the Third Battle of Ypres.

The author has attempted to give you, the reader, an insight into the lives of the soldier huddled in his wet trench under constant artillery fire, where thousands of soldiers lost their lives in daily 'wastage', even during quiet periods. The story is told mainly from the British point of view, with numerous first-hand accounts offered throughout the book. The narrative is fast paced and you never get tired or bored with the story. I have read many books on the Great War and I never cease to wonder why these brave men endured what they did and for so long.

The author provides the reader with details about the introduction of new weapons of destruction unleashed for the first time during the Great War. Stories of how poisons gas was utilized by the Germans and then the Allies, followed by accounts of the victims and witnesses to the effects of gas are truly horrendous. Then follows the introduction of massive underground mines and the flame-thrower to combat the trench systems and machine gun posts of the enemy. The author doesn't spare you the details of what happened to men during the fighting in the trenches and the terrible affects of an artillery bombardment or a underground mine exploding under a trench packed with soldiers.

The beauty of this book is that it really gives you an idea what these poor men, from both sides of the conflict, had to live through. The oft told story about Lieutenant General Kiggell viewing the battlefield after Passchendaele fell, breaking down into tears, crying out "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that." still saddens me, regardless of how many times I read it.

If nothing else this, book will offer the first time reader of the fighting around Ypres a good understanding of the terrible battles fought there and will entice many to follow up with further reading. As such I can recommend many good titles to follow through on with for those who may be interested:

'In Flanders Fields' by Leon Wolff
'They Called it Passchendaele' by Lyn MacDonald
'Passchendaele: The Untold Story' by Robin Prior & Trevor Wilson
'Passchendaele: the Sacrificial Ground' by Nigel Steel & Peter Hart
'Passchendaele: The Story Behind the Tragic Victory of 1917' by Philip Warner

Of these Lyn MacDonald's account is one of the more interesting in that she utilises many accounts of the soldiers who fought during that terrible battle. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's account also offers much new information and has received much acclaim of late.

Any person who reads this book will not fail to come away impressed with the stolid courage of the officers and men involved in this terrible carnage and if that's the least this book does then that is more than enough as far as I am concerned.

Having read several books about the whole of WWI and getting lost in the maze of battles and strategy and desensitized to the casualty figures, I found this book unique in conveying the horror of the Great War. By focusing on a single place on the western front and inserting a few recurring characters (such as Corporal Adolf Hitler), Groom is able to tell the story as it should be told. At times up close and personal, at others distant and strategic, the information blends seamlessly. He puts Ypres into its proper context by occasionally reporting on the larger war, but does so without losing focus on his primary story. The illustrations are terrific, too. The pictures from the battlefield are chilling and heartbreaking. Not all war histories are pageturners; this one is.

One can't really say that one "enjoyed" a book devoted to one of the most protracted and bloody sequences of battles in a truly terrible war, but I certainly found myself moving through Groom's book with an interest and a speed that I hadn't encountered in many other "histories". From the outset Groom makes it clear that he is NOT interested in writing a "definitive history" rather he wants to introduce a new -and primarily American-audience to an aspect of World War I that seems to have faded from public knowledge. In this I think he succeeds brilliantly. That being said, I do have some serious quibbles with the book. First of all, I never felt that we really got much insight into what the generals and politicians were thinking or how they rationalized four years of slaughter. We get periodic references to tension between French & Haig, Haig and Lloyd George, etc. but Groom never really discusses the cause of these tensions in any detail, nor does he emphasize the often tragic outcomes of staff-level disagreements. The strength of the book is really in the middle, where Groom settles in to describe the horror of trench warfare and the period from 1915-1916. Both the beginning and the end of the book have a feeling of being "rushed". I am not sure how well a reader unfamiliar with any background material will do dealing with the events leading up to the battle, and by the time we get to Passchendale one gets the feeling that Groom is as exhausted as the armies involved -the final (and ultimately decisive) battles are covered in a handful of pages & while Groom quotes various authorities as to their importance, his own description leaves me feeling vaguely disappointed. I appreciated the "what happened to them all" section at the end, it must have been amazing to have gone through Ypres as a young man and to then have lived into one's nineties, long after the whole political & social systems that one had fought for (and against) had disappeared! In all I would encourage readers who have never studied the First World War to perhaps use this book as part of a general jumping-off point, you will need to read additional texts to cover even the Western Front, but Groom has done a major service by providing a taste of a ghastly, tragic, and, yes, heroic episode in military history

No footnotes, a poor bibliography--and still five stars? Yes, this book should have footnotes and a decent bibliography, but it is such a felicitous treatment of its intensely interesting subject that it merits five stars. I have long looked on In Flander Fields, by Leon Wolff (read by me 8 June 1965, and that year winner of my Best Book Read This Year award) as having told me all I needed to know about the Flanders fighting. But that book covered only the 1917 time in Flanders. This book does the first battle of Ypres in 1914, the second (in 1915), the third in 1917, and the 4th in 1918. In fact, this short book does a able job on the war itself--and serves as a bit of corrective to Wolff's damning view of Haig. Not that Haig gets the kind of favorable treatment that John Terraine gives him in his book, Ordeal of Victory (read by me with much appreciation on 16 May 1986), but one can see that there is something to be said for Terraine's thesis that the foundations of victory were laid on the Somme in 1916 and in Flanders in 1917 and that if those battles had not been fought the German drive in 1918 would have won the war for Germany. Groom is a popular historian only but he does an able job in this book, and I found it compelling reading.

This is an excellent history of one of the most costly campaigns in a costly war.

Groom writes this book for American audiences, who are generally ignorant of this battle. As such, English audiences may find much of the material familiar ground. But for us Yanks, this books captures the slaughter of this battle, slaughter on a scale we cannot imagine and that Americans have never seen (to give some perspective, imagine a Gettysburg that lasts over three years, instead of three days).

Groom has the unique (alas) ability in historic writing to combine the strategic, tactical, and human aspects of war in a book. He clearly and simply explains the German plan for conquest, the Allied's plan (if you want to call it that) for defense, and how the stalemate of trench warfare emerged from the early optimism of 1914. This is aided by several EXCELLENT maps.

However, the book also relates forcefully the human cost of war. Through the published recollections of veterans on both sides, a ghastly picture emerges of the Hell that was WWI. Some of the stories are heartbreaking: of young soliders crying for their mothers before recollecting their strength and charging to their death, of poets writing beautiful verse in the trenches, then dying horribly, of thousands of men who died anonymous deaths in tunnels and trenches in and under no man's land. Above all, the constant stink of battle, death, and decay permeates the book as it permeated the battlefield.

And yet what finally emerges is the heroism of the common British soldier, who was sacrificed by the thousands, yet still withstood the final German offensive of 1918. But this victory comes at a terrible cost: the destruction of the old British Army, and the sacrifice of an entire generation.

Even if you are not interested in WW1 history (which I was not before I read this book) read it! It is one of those rare books that rise above common military history into something much grander.

This is a wonderful overview of a critical sector of the western front. Across the region known as Flanders, three particularly brutal battles were fought during the First World War with a horrendous loss of life suffered for minimal territorial gains.

This book provides enough information about these battles to be informative yet unlike many military histories it avoids becoming boring because it is not overly detailed. It also discusses the battles from all perspectives including the high ranking politicians, the often inept generals but especially from the viewpoint of the poor infantrymen who suffered incredible hardships including shelling, bombing, machine gun fire, gas attacks and wretched weather conditions.

In addition the author has a wonderful approach to writing making the book a very absorbing read that is difficult to put down. It is a shame so many historians, including such military writers as David Glantz, do not emulate Groom's style.

My background regarding World War I is minimal, and I wanted to gain some basic information regarding The Great War. I took a chance on A Storm in Flanders since it seemed to be of modest length (262 pages), and was pleasantly surprised. World War I was expected to be a relatively quick war, certainly not into a period of a year or more as happened, but author Winston Groom provides the reader with a horrific description of how horrible war can be. The focus of this book is the area of Flanders in the country of Belgium where the earth was literally fertilized with the bodies of dead soldiers. The history of the poem "In Flanders Field" is here in addition to the British poet Siegfried Sassoon who tossed his Military Cross into the Mersey River and uttered some unpatriotic remarks that could have gotten him court martialed had he not been popular in England and a friend of Winston Churchill. Instead, he was placed into a sanitarium. Throughout the book my thoughts were of what a waste of life on both sides this was, and the thoughts of the soldiers on the futility of war. This is a book that is of interest to World War I historians in addition to those whose knowledge of the Great War is limited. I fit into the latter category, and if you do, also, this is a book that can "fill in the gaps" of your knowledge of World War I.

This book is a tremendous work of story-telling. Winston Groom brings the allied armies WWI experience in the Yres salient alive through use of personal letters and journals, but still keeps us abreast of the larger picture at both the command and theater levels. I have read few accounts that so effectively balances both of these objectives, and I thoroughly enjoyed putting such a small, albeit crucially important, part of the western front under the microscope.
Historically speaking, I am troubled that this book reads like the official British history [read propoganda] of the war. The position that the war was the result of German militarism, and that England and the U.S. were forced into the war by German barbarism are not so much argued as asserted. At every chance Groom seems to take the opportunity to point out the brutality of the German armies and their commanders, but understates or calls into question the same on the opposite side. There is little to no investigation of the German soldier's life in the salient except for the few references to Adolf Hitler, which itself carries a clear connotation, which leaves a vision of the German soldiers as nameless faceless killing machines. This is interesting because it stands in direct contrast to the wonderful photographs contained in the book, which shows the German armies mired in the same desolate wasteland as the allies. I would have even been satisfied with him focusing on the allied soldiers, if not for the clear biased for the allied official history of the war. Since this book was basically a character study of the allied armies in the Ypres salient, rather than a detailed analysis of the war at large, I don't think this was the place for such value-judgements. As a junior arm-chair historian, with a great interest in the broader issues of the Great War, I found this detracted from the overall experience.
In the end I would enthusiastically recommend this book, with the usual historical caveat of know your author, so that the wheat can be separated from the chaff.

In response to one of the reviewer's comments that this book "dumbs down" the information, that is what I love about this book. I enjoy history, especially historical fiction, and this book is light enough for me to read at the pool. It's emphasis on how the war affected people makes it more interesting reading for us stereotypical females than many war books(I hated reading Red Badge of Courage in high school). As to the comment that the dumbing down was done to attract American readers, I think that's necessary. Most of us relate to the Revolution, Civil War and WW II, but see WW I as a footnote in history. One of my husband's scientific colleagues in Great Britain assures him that is not the case there! I had absolutely no interest in WW I, even though my grandfather fought in it, until our family went to Yper to see the Cat Parade in 2000. There our daughter(then 4) and I became much more interested in this particular part of WW I. This book is an enjoyable light summer read which will educate many of us about a topic of which we are woefully ignorant.