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The fighting in July and August wasn't a stalemate! British forces advanced, held ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans. The Germans had a temporary local success on the Gheluvelt Plateau assisted by the weather. This isn't a stalemate. The modest success around Langemarck in the 16 August made the emphasis on the plateau inevitable. I will back this up with sources later today. Keith-264 ( talk) 08:06, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
Quoted text should be used rather sparingly. However, I find no issue in placing quoted text as notes. A good suggestion that comes out of WP:LONGQUOTE is to place longer quotations as footnotes thus still facilitating "verification by other editors without sacrificing readability".-- Labattblueboy ( talk) 18:43, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
I read the article but couldn't find a definition of a long quote. Here's something I wrote earlier
I'm a beginner at doing more than writing the odd paragraph and moaning about people starting sentences with 'and' so I think it would be premature, as there's still much to do; finding out what GA is and how to do a dash instead of a hyphen for starters ;O). I think Menin Road needs a page and some of the material on the main page needs moving to the ones about particular operations (like Menin). I'd like to do something detailed about attacking and defensive developments at 3rd Ypres and how they fit into the trends either side. It's much clearer now that there was a convergence of methods and equipment - echeloned defence met echeloned attack, 'quiet' periods between attacks got more and more 'noisy' so the utility of position (no longer really 'trench') warfare to the Germans diminished considerably, hence staying on the defensive in 1918 wasn't really practical alternative (see Rupprecht's comments on the Cambrai page about there being no quiet sectors anywhere where tank operations were feasible after Cambrai) so this bit feeds into the strategic-economic context of the war. My next move is to try to be systematic about the air war over Ypres. As usual sources about the German side written in English are rarer so I'm stuck with the RAF and Canadian OHs and a couple of monographs from Archives org for the German side. Keith-264 ( talk) 20:17, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
Red blue green. AOH. 909. Keith-264 ( talk) 17:14, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
12 Oct: Harington, ... personally reconnoitred all the ground under the most appalling conditions and I feel sure that if he had been with me on the Gravenstafel Ridge, the most violent critic of Passchendaele would not have voted for staying there for the winter, or even for any more minutes than necessary. Keith-264 ( talk) 14:26, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
I have revised the page with such gleanings as I could find. I would be grateful if interested parties could read it and make recommendations. The previous version is here /info/en/?search=User_talk:Keith-264/sandbox2 for the moment. Thanks. Keith-264 ( talk) 16:56, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
There's this http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-WH1-Fran.html which I found very helpful, as was http://www.awm.gov.au/histories/first_world_war/volume.asp?levelID=67890 for the Dominion effort. The OH is very sketchy for 9 and 12 October and draws on the NZ and A OH's, usually it's the other way round. I had the impression that Edmonds was forced to throw the book together after the description of Broodseinde, although 2nd P has a little more detail. Sheldon and the AOH have tended to agree with the OH that Haig wasn't wrong about German disarray after 4 October, the PhD on BEF intelligence (Beach, 2004) says the same. I'll have a delve for the domestic consequences in NZ. As for the article ratings, I'd like to get them all to B first. Keith-264 ( talk) 19:44, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
Did the hard number form as suggested. Does this converter act as a hard whatsit too? {{convert|25|-|40|yd|m}}, thanks. Keith-264 ( talk) 11:05, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
Added two, removed tags. Keith-264 ( talk) 09:22, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
9th 19th Div, 37th Div
10th 14th Div, 23rd Div
1st ANZAC 4th (Australian) Div 5th (Australian) Div
2nd ANZAC 3rd (Australian) Div, New Zealand Div
5th
14th Guards Div, 4th Div, 17th Div
18th 9th Div, 18th Div
Tidied page and cleaned up the maps. Keith-264 ( talk) 00:12, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
There's a need to resolve the claim associated with this battle being the single largest loss of life in New Zealand history. Newzild has identified some potential issues of the claim. Other than this event, is there another event that is commonly associated with the claim. It can't be original research.-- Labattblueboy ( talk) 10:17, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
The party reached the Bay of Islands on 11 July 1821 and, shortly afterwards, Hongi began to prepare for his campaign. On 5 September 2,000 Ngapuhi, armed with 1,000 muskets, laid siege to Mauinaina pa at Tamaki. It was taken with great slaughter – Te Hinaki and 2,000 of his men, as well as many women and children, being killed.
Seems fair enough, unless you consider New Zealanders to not include European invaders. Keith-264 ( talk) 12:15, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I think the article is starting to look pretty good an close to submission for GA. I 'm going to go through Sheldon's book today and see if I can incorporate any material from that into the article. The article's main weakness is the battle section are almost entirely from the British perspective. The air operations section seems a bit out of place but I'm happy to see what a GA reviewer might have to say in terms of constructive criticism.-- Labattblueboy ( talk) 13:26, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Quite agree, even when I looked in the German OH there wasn't much. Sheldon had a few details but I think I added most of them. I don't think we should delete the air operations because of a lack of German detail but we could add the details to the main section and note that there isn't any coverage of the Germans in English if you like. Keith-264 ( talk) 14:09, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
I found a little bit more in Bean about the Germans, which I've added, copied in some page references separated during the last big CE and I found that Sheldon's coverage of 9 and 12 October was sometimes difficult to distinguish. Do you really want to keep the headings in the battle section? How about II Anzac Corps, XVIII Corps and XIV Corps? Keith-264 ( talk) 15:33, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Everything below the introduction is superb. However, if this should be submitted for feature article, in my opinion the introduction might be improved. What is already there describes very well the overall picture. But something more seems to be needed to link the basic summary (the Allied attack was stopped with heavy losses on both sides) with the intricate detail of the narrative. Perhaps in a third introduction paragraph it would be helpful to add one or two sentences to summarize each of the Battle sections and the Analysis section. Djmaschek ( talk) 21:10, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
Obviously, a lot of diligence has gone into copying out the operational minutiae, and I’m sure almost all of it is right apart from minor slipups. My interest is really is analysis and top-level decision making, and it’s there that the problems lie, and its probably best to flag them up now before the article progresses any further along the beatification process. The reader is still being invited to draw a somewhat exaggerated picture of how much pain it was putting on the Germans (relative to Germany’s total war effort etc) and to downplay the much more serious and arguably unsustainable strain which – at this point in the war – it was putting on the BEF. And – to deal with this point first – obviously it is good to include German information where this is available. Provided – and this is an important caveat - one does not make the mistake of falling for the cherry-picked “evidence” and special pleading which has been a staple of a certain kind of British WW1 writing since about 1916. Many of us fall for this sort of stuff when we first start studying WW1 seriously - then we read more, grow out of it, and realise why the popular myths about WW1 (that the attacks were nothing but disasters, or that Haig was a moron) grew up in the first place. It is also good to include French information, and funnily enough when one does so the BEF contribution gets rather cut down to size (some modern Australian writers like Greenhalgh and Roy Prete are good on this). That does not mean that the coverage needs to be exactly equal, any more than it would for, say, the Battle of Normandy or Arnhem – for both those battles it matters most when, why and how the Allies decided to attack, not how the Germans reacted. History is what historians have chosen to write about, and usually for perfectly good reasons.
In Para 3: “On 7 October, the afternoon attack, which was to have reached the far side of Passchendaele village and the Goudberg spur to the north, was cancelled by Haig because of the heavy rain. The final plan for the attack of 12 October, was decided on the evening of 9 October.”
This is a bit unclear on first reading. I assume it should read “An afternoon attack planned for 7 October, which was to have …”
“Encouraged by the unusually high German losses during the Battle of Broodseinde and reports of lowered German morale, Haig sought quickly to renew the Allied offensive and secure Passchendaele Ridge, as British Intelligence indicated that the German forces opposite Ypres were close to collapse.” This is sourced to Beach p222
This is a bit of an exaggeration and so far from what Beach pp222-7 is saying as to be misleading
What Beach actually writes:
After 4 October (Broodseinde) Charteris (Haig’s intelligence advisor) hoped to be in Ostend before Christmas and “the war will be won”. Anecdotal reports of the poor state of German prisoners. Haig’s infamous appraisal, sent to the War Cabinet on 8 October, implicitly acknowledged that the war would go on into 1918 but claimed that the Germans were “near to breaking point”. Beach points out that there was “very little intelligence to justify its assessments”. The only substantial bit of intelligence was the absence of large numbers of the German 1919 Class from the frontline and “patchy” evidence for the callup of the 1920 Class, so there would be no German manpower crisis until mid-1918. Beach points out that this was a more pessimistic prediction than the earlier ones that Germany would break by the end of 1917 – Beach is presumably referring to the June assessment in which Haig had, contrary to Robertson’s express advice, told the government that he might win the war that year and of which Robertson had refused to pass on Charteris’ statistical predictions to the government.
However, Charteris briefed Haig (15 October) with new anecdotal evidence about German morale problems. On that day Haig read Macdonogh’s 1 October appraisal (McD was Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office) stating that German morale was “no cause for anxiety” – Haig then infamously vented in his diary (15 October) that Macdonogh was biased as he was relying on Roman Catholic sources. Haig had Charteris prepare another paper to rebut Macdonogh, somewhat exaggerating the evidence for the presence of the German 1919 Class “in the ranks” and of the callup of the 1920 Class, and citing 10 examples, drawn from prisoners and documents. Robertson passed on the Haig/Charteris paper to the War Cabinet, but wrote privately to Haig (18 October) that the stuff about morale was “largely guess-work”, that false predictions about German collapse had now been made “by various people” for three years, that there would be no German manpower crisis for at least another year, that German soldiers’ morale was probably rather better than that on the German homefront, and that it was unwise to read too much into the pronouncements of prisoners (you can see why Haig was starting to feel by this stage that Robertson was no longer “One of Us”, as the late Mrs Thatcher used to describe her cronies). For the rest of October Charteris continued to crank out anecdotal accounts of poor German morale, described as “dubious” by Beach. In his conclusion Beach criticises the over-optimistic nature of Charteris’ intelligence, although implying that he was telling Haig what Haig wanted to hear (Leon Wolff quotes Charteris’s own diary in which he was privately more dubious, but Beach does not specifically mention this).
Now, none of this is “new”. Beach’s account is mostly derived from well-known documents and tells a story familiar to some of us, and which needs to be at least mentioned. If he is to be used as a reference, a more accurate rendering would be:
“Although Intelligence no longer predicted a German manpower collapse until some point in late 1918, Haig was encouraged by the unusually high German losses during the Battle of Broodseinde and a small number of anecdotal reports of lowered German morale, and sought quickly to renew the Allied offensive and secure Passchendaele Ridge before the winter. The reports of German morale on which Haig was acting were regarded with increasing concern by senior generals in London, and have been described as “dubious” by their most thorough modern analyst”
The detail will find its way into the appropriate biography articles eventually, but I have a lot less time for wiki writing at the moment than I would like.
For what it’s worth, a good discussion of comparative German and British morale can be found in “Enduring the Great War” by Alexander Watson. British morale held up well through the Somme, Arras and 31 July 1917 but then grew alarmingly hairy as Third Ypres dragged on – and then at Cambrai there were serious instances of British units “breaking” altogether. German morale grew a bit strained amongst those serving in the Ypres Salient, but these units usually recovered quickly once transferred elsewhere. Neither British nor German morale was ever anything like as bad as French or Russian. No surprises there, but then “History only ever seems new to the man learning it for the first time” as the saying goes.
Plumer’s biographer G Powell gives as midnight on 6/7 October. Wolff p294 gives it as the evening of 6 Oct and cites it to Bean. I don’t have a copy of Bean to hand, nor Gough's memoirs, so cannot check further.
“On 13 October, the British decided to stop the offensive until better weather returned and roads and tracks had been repaired”
Probably worth pointing out that Gough and Plumer (who had perhaps been a bit over-optimistic during Poelcapelle and First Passchendaele) had to stand solid to get Haig to agree to this.
Leon wolff pp235-40 has some useful material
The return of clear weather on 10-11 October worried the troops, as it meant an attack might be imminent. A New Zealand general wrote “I do not feel as confident as usual. Things are being rushed too much … the objectives have not been properly bombarded”
P237 Charteris confided to his diary “(Haig) was still trying to find some grounds for hope that we might still win through this year … the great purpose “we ha(ve) been working for all year has escaped” Haig told press correspondents that the BEF was “practically through the enemy’s defences” and faced no more blockhouses. (He was either lying or desperately misinformed).
P238 after the war “an official historian” (presumably Bean) complained of the men being sent in without artillery protection
P239 an Australian officer (Lt W G Fisher) recorded finding 50 men of the Manchesters cowering by a German pillbox (presumably their officers and senior NCOs were dead although the quote doesn’t specifically say so) “never have I seen men so broken or demoralised”
This is the quote in Bean pp 906-907: The slope . . . . was littered with dead, both theirs and ours. I got to one pillbox to find it just a mass of dead, and so I passed on carefully to the one ahead. Here I found about fifty men alive, of the Manchesters. Never have I seen men so broken or demoralised. They were huddled up close behind the box in the last stages of exhaustion and fear. Fritz had been sniping them off all day, and had accounted for fifty-seven that day-the dead and dying lay in piles. The wounded were numerous-unattended and weak, they groaned and moaned all over the place . . . some had been there four days already. . . . Finally the company came up-the men done after a fearful struggle through the mud and shell-holes, not to speak of the barrage which the Hun put down and which caught numbers. The position was obscure -a dark night-no line-demoralised Tommies-and no sign of the enemy. So I pushed out my platoon, ready for anything, and ran into the foe some 80 yards ahead. He put in a few bursts of rapid fire and then fled. We could not pursue as we had to establish the line, which was accomplished about an hour later. I spent the rest of the night in a shell-hole, up to my knees in mud and with the rain teeming down. Keith-264 ( talk) 10:11, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
P245, 294 a Bavarian officer (Rudolph Binding) wrote “although the battle rages constantly in incomprehensible confusion around Poelcapelle and Passchendaele, there is nothing frightening about that. We have been fighting the last summer flies, which attack one so unkindly, almost as much as the English, the morale of the men appears to be excellent” General Sixt von Arnim told the German press on 24 October “the Battles of Flanders, in spite of partial successes, remain bloody defeats for the English (sic) … as long as the enemy continues his pressure at this point, he is exposed to our flanking fire and to the danger of being threatened from all sides in the rear”
"Nobody can possibly calculate what he or we have got to face.... the odds against us are too big...." "... one cannot say that morale is low or weak. The regiments simply show a sort of staggering and faltering, as people do who have made unheard of efforts."
Evidently Binding had mixed feelings Keith-264 ( talk) 10:11, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
At the moment, the article infobox appears to suggest that casualties were nearly equal, which set my alarm bells ringing, as every schoolboy (although not, perhaps, every Wikipedia editor) knows that Poelcapelle and First Passchendaele were disasters. My second, admittedly churlish, thought, was that the BEF losses were for one day (12 Oct) and that some serious monkey business was going on in comparing ten days’ worth of German losses with one day of British losses.
The article gives German 12,000 losses over a ten day period. Over what area were these losses incurred?
The article gives 13,000 BEF losses, but gives no area, time period or source. I guess this is probably lifted from Prior & Wilson, who give 13,000 for First Passchendaele but give no source. The Official History (p345) gives Fifth Army casualties as 10,973 for the period 9-14 October (a six day period). My guess is that Prior & Wilson may have extrapolated from this. Did they include some Second Army casualties as well? Or are they measuring over a slightly longer period? Impossible to say. If you take the OH figure and extrapolate it from a six day period up to ten days (to match the time period of the German figure) you are looking at a ball park guesstimate of 18,000 BEF losses. That may be an overestimate as some of the days may have been quieter, but nonetheless it seems reasonable to suppose that once we are comparing like with like BEF casualties exceeded German considerably.
Note that the calculations I’ve done above are quantitative adjustments, to ensure that we are comparing like with like, so that the casual reader is not being misled. I am not going to go down the route of qualitative adjustments like trying to massage the German figures upwards because they don’t include men who had stubbed their toes, cut themselves shaving, pulled a muscle etc.
Ludendorff divided the Third Battle of Ypres into five periods. In the "Fourth Battle of Flanders", from 2–21 October, he described German "wastage" as "extraordinarily high". [1] Hindenburg wrote later that he waited with great anxiety for the wet season. [2] In Der Weltkrieg, the German Official Historians recorded 12,000 casualties including 2,000 missing for the period 11–20 October. [3] The 4th Australian Division suffered c. 1,000 casualties and the 3rd Australian Division c. 3,199 casualties. [4] From 9–12 October, the German 195th Division lost 3,395 casualties. [5] There were 2,735 New Zealand casualties, 845 of whom were killed or mortally wounded and stranded in no man's land. [6] Calculations of German losses by J. E. Edmonds, the British Official Historian, have been severely criticised for adding 30% to German casualty figures, to account for different methods of calculation. [7] The New Zealand Memorial to the Missing at Tyne Cot, commemorates New Zealanders killed during the Battle of Broodseinde and the First Battle of Passchendaele, who have no known grave. The death toll made this the worst day in New Zealand history. [8]
Did you even read this? Keith-264 ( talk) 02:08, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
Footnote 1. I really don’t see what this footnote is driving at. “British losses in October 1917 were the third highest of the war after July 1916 and April 1917” and “which show that refraining from attacks did not avoid high losses in the salient” The first part does indeed come from Sheffield and Bourne and is correct (120,000 losses in 10/17, about the same as Arras 4/17 although nothing like the monstrous 196,000 of 7/16 – not just the First Day of the Somme but the month of hell which followed. Aug 17 and Sep 17 had been about 80,000 losses apiece). The second clause is somebody’s editorialising and needs to come out.
Of course it is true that casualties were always high in the Ypres salient, but October 1917 not only includes Broodseinde (27k, as opposed to Menin Road and Polygon Wood which had been about 20k each) but also Poelcappelle 11k, and 1st Passchendaele 13k. So 10/17 BEF offensives cost 51k in total. In winter months and quiet months (e.g, the hiatus between Georgette and Amiens) you’d expect 25-35,000 BEF losses. That gets us up to about 85k casualties tops - to get us up to the magic 120k casualties for that month there’s about 35,000 “excess” casualties still to account for. To sum up, far from suggesting that high British losses were inevitable (and so one might as well attack), my back-of-a-fag-packet analysis suggests that the Germans, far from being as near ruin as Haig deluded himself, were in fact very much alive, kicking and giving the BEF a good hiding to the tune of 35,000 “excess” casualties in October 1917, presumably by shelling and counterattacking rather more heavily into the salient than they would have been had not a major battle been under way for over two months. British monthly casualties are for the whole Western Front, taken from the Official Statistics quoted by Churchill in “The World Crisis”. Figures for individual battles taken off wikipedia as life is too short to verify further.
The conclusion is one of the first things people are going to look at. Very few people are going to pore through the fine detail of the article. The body of the article seems reasonably fair but the conclusion includes German quotes of questionable relevance and omits the opinions of British historians which are much more critical and much more directly relevant.
Geoffrey Powell and Philip Warner are predictably (and correctly) rude about this battle, but don’t really say anything quotable.
Prior & Wilson devote a chapter to it so I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to extract a quote suitably scathing about British generalship and the ultimate pointlessness of the attack.
Haig’s most recent serious academic biographer J.P.Harris describes First Passchendaele as “an almost unmitigated defeat”. Not a book which brought delight to the Western Front Association but that's not really the point.
Beach P223, 227 “the subsequent attacks on 9 and 12 October were failures” although he concedes “In retrospect it is obvious that the German Army found itself in serious difficulties in Flanders during the autumn of 1917.”
Leon Wolff writes P238 that First Passchendaele “almost crossed the line which divides war from murder”. He is referring to knowingly sending in men without proper artillery cover – at some points the British bombardment was indistinguishable from the enemy’s or from the random sporadic shelling which went on at intervals on most days. Other Leon Wolff quotes above.
"Ludendorff divided the Third Battle of Ypres into five periods. In the "Fourth Battle of Flanders", from 2–21 October, he described German "wastage" as "extraordinarily high"." So what? That includes Broodseinde. Was it any higher than you’d have expected it to be during a major offensive? It is also the case that BEF wastage was extraordinarily high, almost as high as it ever got during the war – yet that piece of information is tucked away in a footnote! And all this, let us not forget, at a time when German manpower and morale still had a year or more of life left in them, whereas Britain was running short of manpower (relative to what was politically feasible – Britain mobilised a much smaller proportion of her manpower than Germany or France) at the very moment when government and press were running out of patience and it was beginning to become clear that Germany was about to be massively reinforced from the East.
I don’t see what the Hindenburg quote is doing there at all, except to mislead the casual reader. I dare say he did long for the return of the rainy period. By 12 October, it had already returned, which was one of the main reasons why this attack failed. Paulturtle ( talk) 16:53, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
References
Altered them again to try to satisfy all concerned by putting the main and supporting attack information into the text below. Any better? Keith-264 ( talk) 10:50, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
Apparently maps and drawings should be uploaded as png not jpg so I redid it yesterday as a png and nominated the original for speedy deletion [1] see here for the replacement. Keith-264 ( talk) 17:08, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
Having a single subheading which is right at the start of a subheading, as currently within the background section, makes no sense at all. Think of it as a set; there is nothing within "Tactical developments" that isn't within background and, crucially, vice-versa too. As it is, it's just confusing and unnecessary.— Brigade Piron ( talk) 19:38, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
"Beyond the railway, the advance of the 51st Brigade veered slightly south, away from a German strong-point which caused many casualties, LOSING LOST TOUCH with the Guards Division." (all caps mine). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.52.96.14 ( talk) 19:47, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
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@ Archon 2488: It's imperial first and metric second as per [ [2]] unless I missed something? Keith-264 ( talk) 13:44, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
Because the RS say so? You can't rewrite history on Wikipedia. Keith-264 ( talk) 21:14, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
I would have thought the fact that the battle was primarily a British Empire operation would give a stronger national tie to the UK than any tie accrued to Belgium by virtue of being fought on its soil. Has consensus been reached on this specific issue anywhere? I'd be interested to read it. FactotEm ( talk) 22:33, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
An article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation should use the (formal, not colloquial) English of that nation.") so that only leaves the UK in this case. -- DeFacto ( talk). 17:51, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps the people who made this policy need to be taken to task for failing to publicise the fact of the discussion just as you have been overruled here for trying to impose a plainly wrongheaded opinion as if it's a fact. Perhaps the conclusion of the discussion would have been different if more people has participated? Keith-264 ( talk) 22:18, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
I have attempted to edit this article towards what I understand to be the style prescribed by WP:MOSNUM. As an article describing an event that occurred outside the UK/USA, I do not see that it has strong national ties in the relevant sense (note that STRONGNAT implies stringent requirements) to either of those countries, and therefore per MOSNUM it should use the metric-first unit presentation style.
However, these edits have been disputed by other editors, as can be seen on the talk page above. In order to clarify the interpretation of the MOS for articles related to Belgium (and other countries which are not the UK or USA), I would like to hear from other editors on this matter. Archon 2488 ( talk) 23:02, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
My reasoned and reasonable comment is WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 11:05, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
Nothing much has changed here as far as positions or substantive arguments go. Let's take a deep breath and deescalate. I ask that all parties who have already commented hold their fire until some new editors weigh in with new perspectives. I'd ask that any additional editors add their comments here, below the break. If no new editors weigh in over the next few days I'll ask an uninvolved editor to close this to prevent any further, unnecessary escalation. Let's not let an RfC over date formatting turn into something ugly. LargelyRecyclable ( talk) 19:57, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
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The fighting in July and August wasn't a stalemate! British forces advanced, held ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans. The Germans had a temporary local success on the Gheluvelt Plateau assisted by the weather. This isn't a stalemate. The modest success around Langemarck in the 16 August made the emphasis on the plateau inevitable. I will back this up with sources later today. Keith-264 ( talk) 08:06, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
Quoted text should be used rather sparingly. However, I find no issue in placing quoted text as notes. A good suggestion that comes out of WP:LONGQUOTE is to place longer quotations as footnotes thus still facilitating "verification by other editors without sacrificing readability".-- Labattblueboy ( talk) 18:43, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
I read the article but couldn't find a definition of a long quote. Here's something I wrote earlier
I'm a beginner at doing more than writing the odd paragraph and moaning about people starting sentences with 'and' so I think it would be premature, as there's still much to do; finding out what GA is and how to do a dash instead of a hyphen for starters ;O). I think Menin Road needs a page and some of the material on the main page needs moving to the ones about particular operations (like Menin). I'd like to do something detailed about attacking and defensive developments at 3rd Ypres and how they fit into the trends either side. It's much clearer now that there was a convergence of methods and equipment - echeloned defence met echeloned attack, 'quiet' periods between attacks got more and more 'noisy' so the utility of position (no longer really 'trench') warfare to the Germans diminished considerably, hence staying on the defensive in 1918 wasn't really practical alternative (see Rupprecht's comments on the Cambrai page about there being no quiet sectors anywhere where tank operations were feasible after Cambrai) so this bit feeds into the strategic-economic context of the war. My next move is to try to be systematic about the air war over Ypres. As usual sources about the German side written in English are rarer so I'm stuck with the RAF and Canadian OHs and a couple of monographs from Archives org for the German side. Keith-264 ( talk) 20:17, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
Red blue green. AOH. 909. Keith-264 ( talk) 17:14, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
12 Oct: Harington, ... personally reconnoitred all the ground under the most appalling conditions and I feel sure that if he had been with me on the Gravenstafel Ridge, the most violent critic of Passchendaele would not have voted for staying there for the winter, or even for any more minutes than necessary. Keith-264 ( talk) 14:26, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
I have revised the page with such gleanings as I could find. I would be grateful if interested parties could read it and make recommendations. The previous version is here /info/en/?search=User_talk:Keith-264/sandbox2 for the moment. Thanks. Keith-264 ( talk) 16:56, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
There's this http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-WH1-Fran.html which I found very helpful, as was http://www.awm.gov.au/histories/first_world_war/volume.asp?levelID=67890 for the Dominion effort. The OH is very sketchy for 9 and 12 October and draws on the NZ and A OH's, usually it's the other way round. I had the impression that Edmonds was forced to throw the book together after the description of Broodseinde, although 2nd P has a little more detail. Sheldon and the AOH have tended to agree with the OH that Haig wasn't wrong about German disarray after 4 October, the PhD on BEF intelligence (Beach, 2004) says the same. I'll have a delve for the domestic consequences in NZ. As for the article ratings, I'd like to get them all to B first. Keith-264 ( talk) 19:44, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
Did the hard number form as suggested. Does this converter act as a hard whatsit too? {{convert|25|-|40|yd|m}}, thanks. Keith-264 ( talk) 11:05, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
Added two, removed tags. Keith-264 ( talk) 09:22, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
9th 19th Div, 37th Div
10th 14th Div, 23rd Div
1st ANZAC 4th (Australian) Div 5th (Australian) Div
2nd ANZAC 3rd (Australian) Div, New Zealand Div
5th
14th Guards Div, 4th Div, 17th Div
18th 9th Div, 18th Div
Tidied page and cleaned up the maps. Keith-264 ( talk) 00:12, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
There's a need to resolve the claim associated with this battle being the single largest loss of life in New Zealand history. Newzild has identified some potential issues of the claim. Other than this event, is there another event that is commonly associated with the claim. It can't be original research.-- Labattblueboy ( talk) 10:17, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
The party reached the Bay of Islands on 11 July 1821 and, shortly afterwards, Hongi began to prepare for his campaign. On 5 September 2,000 Ngapuhi, armed with 1,000 muskets, laid siege to Mauinaina pa at Tamaki. It was taken with great slaughter – Te Hinaki and 2,000 of his men, as well as many women and children, being killed.
Seems fair enough, unless you consider New Zealanders to not include European invaders. Keith-264 ( talk) 12:15, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I think the article is starting to look pretty good an close to submission for GA. I 'm going to go through Sheldon's book today and see if I can incorporate any material from that into the article. The article's main weakness is the battle section are almost entirely from the British perspective. The air operations section seems a bit out of place but I'm happy to see what a GA reviewer might have to say in terms of constructive criticism.-- Labattblueboy ( talk) 13:26, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Quite agree, even when I looked in the German OH there wasn't much. Sheldon had a few details but I think I added most of them. I don't think we should delete the air operations because of a lack of German detail but we could add the details to the main section and note that there isn't any coverage of the Germans in English if you like. Keith-264 ( talk) 14:09, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
I found a little bit more in Bean about the Germans, which I've added, copied in some page references separated during the last big CE and I found that Sheldon's coverage of 9 and 12 October was sometimes difficult to distinguish. Do you really want to keep the headings in the battle section? How about II Anzac Corps, XVIII Corps and XIV Corps? Keith-264 ( talk) 15:33, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
Everything below the introduction is superb. However, if this should be submitted for feature article, in my opinion the introduction might be improved. What is already there describes very well the overall picture. But something more seems to be needed to link the basic summary (the Allied attack was stopped with heavy losses on both sides) with the intricate detail of the narrative. Perhaps in a third introduction paragraph it would be helpful to add one or two sentences to summarize each of the Battle sections and the Analysis section. Djmaschek ( talk) 21:10, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
Obviously, a lot of diligence has gone into copying out the operational minutiae, and I’m sure almost all of it is right apart from minor slipups. My interest is really is analysis and top-level decision making, and it’s there that the problems lie, and its probably best to flag them up now before the article progresses any further along the beatification process. The reader is still being invited to draw a somewhat exaggerated picture of how much pain it was putting on the Germans (relative to Germany’s total war effort etc) and to downplay the much more serious and arguably unsustainable strain which – at this point in the war – it was putting on the BEF. And – to deal with this point first – obviously it is good to include German information where this is available. Provided – and this is an important caveat - one does not make the mistake of falling for the cherry-picked “evidence” and special pleading which has been a staple of a certain kind of British WW1 writing since about 1916. Many of us fall for this sort of stuff when we first start studying WW1 seriously - then we read more, grow out of it, and realise why the popular myths about WW1 (that the attacks were nothing but disasters, or that Haig was a moron) grew up in the first place. It is also good to include French information, and funnily enough when one does so the BEF contribution gets rather cut down to size (some modern Australian writers like Greenhalgh and Roy Prete are good on this). That does not mean that the coverage needs to be exactly equal, any more than it would for, say, the Battle of Normandy or Arnhem – for both those battles it matters most when, why and how the Allies decided to attack, not how the Germans reacted. History is what historians have chosen to write about, and usually for perfectly good reasons.
In Para 3: “On 7 October, the afternoon attack, which was to have reached the far side of Passchendaele village and the Goudberg spur to the north, was cancelled by Haig because of the heavy rain. The final plan for the attack of 12 October, was decided on the evening of 9 October.”
This is a bit unclear on first reading. I assume it should read “An afternoon attack planned for 7 October, which was to have …”
“Encouraged by the unusually high German losses during the Battle of Broodseinde and reports of lowered German morale, Haig sought quickly to renew the Allied offensive and secure Passchendaele Ridge, as British Intelligence indicated that the German forces opposite Ypres were close to collapse.” This is sourced to Beach p222
This is a bit of an exaggeration and so far from what Beach pp222-7 is saying as to be misleading
What Beach actually writes:
After 4 October (Broodseinde) Charteris (Haig’s intelligence advisor) hoped to be in Ostend before Christmas and “the war will be won”. Anecdotal reports of the poor state of German prisoners. Haig’s infamous appraisal, sent to the War Cabinet on 8 October, implicitly acknowledged that the war would go on into 1918 but claimed that the Germans were “near to breaking point”. Beach points out that there was “very little intelligence to justify its assessments”. The only substantial bit of intelligence was the absence of large numbers of the German 1919 Class from the frontline and “patchy” evidence for the callup of the 1920 Class, so there would be no German manpower crisis until mid-1918. Beach points out that this was a more pessimistic prediction than the earlier ones that Germany would break by the end of 1917 – Beach is presumably referring to the June assessment in which Haig had, contrary to Robertson’s express advice, told the government that he might win the war that year and of which Robertson had refused to pass on Charteris’ statistical predictions to the government.
However, Charteris briefed Haig (15 October) with new anecdotal evidence about German morale problems. On that day Haig read Macdonogh’s 1 October appraisal (McD was Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office) stating that German morale was “no cause for anxiety” – Haig then infamously vented in his diary (15 October) that Macdonogh was biased as he was relying on Roman Catholic sources. Haig had Charteris prepare another paper to rebut Macdonogh, somewhat exaggerating the evidence for the presence of the German 1919 Class “in the ranks” and of the callup of the 1920 Class, and citing 10 examples, drawn from prisoners and documents. Robertson passed on the Haig/Charteris paper to the War Cabinet, but wrote privately to Haig (18 October) that the stuff about morale was “largely guess-work”, that false predictions about German collapse had now been made “by various people” for three years, that there would be no German manpower crisis for at least another year, that German soldiers’ morale was probably rather better than that on the German homefront, and that it was unwise to read too much into the pronouncements of prisoners (you can see why Haig was starting to feel by this stage that Robertson was no longer “One of Us”, as the late Mrs Thatcher used to describe her cronies). For the rest of October Charteris continued to crank out anecdotal accounts of poor German morale, described as “dubious” by Beach. In his conclusion Beach criticises the over-optimistic nature of Charteris’ intelligence, although implying that he was telling Haig what Haig wanted to hear (Leon Wolff quotes Charteris’s own diary in which he was privately more dubious, but Beach does not specifically mention this).
Now, none of this is “new”. Beach’s account is mostly derived from well-known documents and tells a story familiar to some of us, and which needs to be at least mentioned. If he is to be used as a reference, a more accurate rendering would be:
“Although Intelligence no longer predicted a German manpower collapse until some point in late 1918, Haig was encouraged by the unusually high German losses during the Battle of Broodseinde and a small number of anecdotal reports of lowered German morale, and sought quickly to renew the Allied offensive and secure Passchendaele Ridge before the winter. The reports of German morale on which Haig was acting were regarded with increasing concern by senior generals in London, and have been described as “dubious” by their most thorough modern analyst”
The detail will find its way into the appropriate biography articles eventually, but I have a lot less time for wiki writing at the moment than I would like.
For what it’s worth, a good discussion of comparative German and British morale can be found in “Enduring the Great War” by Alexander Watson. British morale held up well through the Somme, Arras and 31 July 1917 but then grew alarmingly hairy as Third Ypres dragged on – and then at Cambrai there were serious instances of British units “breaking” altogether. German morale grew a bit strained amongst those serving in the Ypres Salient, but these units usually recovered quickly once transferred elsewhere. Neither British nor German morale was ever anything like as bad as French or Russian. No surprises there, but then “History only ever seems new to the man learning it for the first time” as the saying goes.
Plumer’s biographer G Powell gives as midnight on 6/7 October. Wolff p294 gives it as the evening of 6 Oct and cites it to Bean. I don’t have a copy of Bean to hand, nor Gough's memoirs, so cannot check further.
“On 13 October, the British decided to stop the offensive until better weather returned and roads and tracks had been repaired”
Probably worth pointing out that Gough and Plumer (who had perhaps been a bit over-optimistic during Poelcapelle and First Passchendaele) had to stand solid to get Haig to agree to this.
Leon wolff pp235-40 has some useful material
The return of clear weather on 10-11 October worried the troops, as it meant an attack might be imminent. A New Zealand general wrote “I do not feel as confident as usual. Things are being rushed too much … the objectives have not been properly bombarded”
P237 Charteris confided to his diary “(Haig) was still trying to find some grounds for hope that we might still win through this year … the great purpose “we ha(ve) been working for all year has escaped” Haig told press correspondents that the BEF was “practically through the enemy’s defences” and faced no more blockhouses. (He was either lying or desperately misinformed).
P238 after the war “an official historian” (presumably Bean) complained of the men being sent in without artillery protection
P239 an Australian officer (Lt W G Fisher) recorded finding 50 men of the Manchesters cowering by a German pillbox (presumably their officers and senior NCOs were dead although the quote doesn’t specifically say so) “never have I seen men so broken or demoralised”
This is the quote in Bean pp 906-907: The slope . . . . was littered with dead, both theirs and ours. I got to one pillbox to find it just a mass of dead, and so I passed on carefully to the one ahead. Here I found about fifty men alive, of the Manchesters. Never have I seen men so broken or demoralised. They were huddled up close behind the box in the last stages of exhaustion and fear. Fritz had been sniping them off all day, and had accounted for fifty-seven that day-the dead and dying lay in piles. The wounded were numerous-unattended and weak, they groaned and moaned all over the place . . . some had been there four days already. . . . Finally the company came up-the men done after a fearful struggle through the mud and shell-holes, not to speak of the barrage which the Hun put down and which caught numbers. The position was obscure -a dark night-no line-demoralised Tommies-and no sign of the enemy. So I pushed out my platoon, ready for anything, and ran into the foe some 80 yards ahead. He put in a few bursts of rapid fire and then fled. We could not pursue as we had to establish the line, which was accomplished about an hour later. I spent the rest of the night in a shell-hole, up to my knees in mud and with the rain teeming down. Keith-264 ( talk) 10:11, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
P245, 294 a Bavarian officer (Rudolph Binding) wrote “although the battle rages constantly in incomprehensible confusion around Poelcapelle and Passchendaele, there is nothing frightening about that. We have been fighting the last summer flies, which attack one so unkindly, almost as much as the English, the morale of the men appears to be excellent” General Sixt von Arnim told the German press on 24 October “the Battles of Flanders, in spite of partial successes, remain bloody defeats for the English (sic) … as long as the enemy continues his pressure at this point, he is exposed to our flanking fire and to the danger of being threatened from all sides in the rear”
"Nobody can possibly calculate what he or we have got to face.... the odds against us are too big...." "... one cannot say that morale is low or weak. The regiments simply show a sort of staggering and faltering, as people do who have made unheard of efforts."
Evidently Binding had mixed feelings Keith-264 ( talk) 10:11, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
At the moment, the article infobox appears to suggest that casualties were nearly equal, which set my alarm bells ringing, as every schoolboy (although not, perhaps, every Wikipedia editor) knows that Poelcapelle and First Passchendaele were disasters. My second, admittedly churlish, thought, was that the BEF losses were for one day (12 Oct) and that some serious monkey business was going on in comparing ten days’ worth of German losses with one day of British losses.
The article gives German 12,000 losses over a ten day period. Over what area were these losses incurred?
The article gives 13,000 BEF losses, but gives no area, time period or source. I guess this is probably lifted from Prior & Wilson, who give 13,000 for First Passchendaele but give no source. The Official History (p345) gives Fifth Army casualties as 10,973 for the period 9-14 October (a six day period). My guess is that Prior & Wilson may have extrapolated from this. Did they include some Second Army casualties as well? Or are they measuring over a slightly longer period? Impossible to say. If you take the OH figure and extrapolate it from a six day period up to ten days (to match the time period of the German figure) you are looking at a ball park guesstimate of 18,000 BEF losses. That may be an overestimate as some of the days may have been quieter, but nonetheless it seems reasonable to suppose that once we are comparing like with like BEF casualties exceeded German considerably.
Note that the calculations I’ve done above are quantitative adjustments, to ensure that we are comparing like with like, so that the casual reader is not being misled. I am not going to go down the route of qualitative adjustments like trying to massage the German figures upwards because they don’t include men who had stubbed their toes, cut themselves shaving, pulled a muscle etc.
Ludendorff divided the Third Battle of Ypres into five periods. In the "Fourth Battle of Flanders", from 2–21 October, he described German "wastage" as "extraordinarily high". [1] Hindenburg wrote later that he waited with great anxiety for the wet season. [2] In Der Weltkrieg, the German Official Historians recorded 12,000 casualties including 2,000 missing for the period 11–20 October. [3] The 4th Australian Division suffered c. 1,000 casualties and the 3rd Australian Division c. 3,199 casualties. [4] From 9–12 October, the German 195th Division lost 3,395 casualties. [5] There were 2,735 New Zealand casualties, 845 of whom were killed or mortally wounded and stranded in no man's land. [6] Calculations of German losses by J. E. Edmonds, the British Official Historian, have been severely criticised for adding 30% to German casualty figures, to account for different methods of calculation. [7] The New Zealand Memorial to the Missing at Tyne Cot, commemorates New Zealanders killed during the Battle of Broodseinde and the First Battle of Passchendaele, who have no known grave. The death toll made this the worst day in New Zealand history. [8]
Did you even read this? Keith-264 ( talk) 02:08, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
Footnote 1. I really don’t see what this footnote is driving at. “British losses in October 1917 were the third highest of the war after July 1916 and April 1917” and “which show that refraining from attacks did not avoid high losses in the salient” The first part does indeed come from Sheffield and Bourne and is correct (120,000 losses in 10/17, about the same as Arras 4/17 although nothing like the monstrous 196,000 of 7/16 – not just the First Day of the Somme but the month of hell which followed. Aug 17 and Sep 17 had been about 80,000 losses apiece). The second clause is somebody’s editorialising and needs to come out.
Of course it is true that casualties were always high in the Ypres salient, but October 1917 not only includes Broodseinde (27k, as opposed to Menin Road and Polygon Wood which had been about 20k each) but also Poelcappelle 11k, and 1st Passchendaele 13k. So 10/17 BEF offensives cost 51k in total. In winter months and quiet months (e.g, the hiatus between Georgette and Amiens) you’d expect 25-35,000 BEF losses. That gets us up to about 85k casualties tops - to get us up to the magic 120k casualties for that month there’s about 35,000 “excess” casualties still to account for. To sum up, far from suggesting that high British losses were inevitable (and so one might as well attack), my back-of-a-fag-packet analysis suggests that the Germans, far from being as near ruin as Haig deluded himself, were in fact very much alive, kicking and giving the BEF a good hiding to the tune of 35,000 “excess” casualties in October 1917, presumably by shelling and counterattacking rather more heavily into the salient than they would have been had not a major battle been under way for over two months. British monthly casualties are for the whole Western Front, taken from the Official Statistics quoted by Churchill in “The World Crisis”. Figures for individual battles taken off wikipedia as life is too short to verify further.
The conclusion is one of the first things people are going to look at. Very few people are going to pore through the fine detail of the article. The body of the article seems reasonably fair but the conclusion includes German quotes of questionable relevance and omits the opinions of British historians which are much more critical and much more directly relevant.
Geoffrey Powell and Philip Warner are predictably (and correctly) rude about this battle, but don’t really say anything quotable.
Prior & Wilson devote a chapter to it so I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to extract a quote suitably scathing about British generalship and the ultimate pointlessness of the attack.
Haig’s most recent serious academic biographer J.P.Harris describes First Passchendaele as “an almost unmitigated defeat”. Not a book which brought delight to the Western Front Association but that's not really the point.
Beach P223, 227 “the subsequent attacks on 9 and 12 October were failures” although he concedes “In retrospect it is obvious that the German Army found itself in serious difficulties in Flanders during the autumn of 1917.”
Leon Wolff writes P238 that First Passchendaele “almost crossed the line which divides war from murder”. He is referring to knowingly sending in men without proper artillery cover – at some points the British bombardment was indistinguishable from the enemy’s or from the random sporadic shelling which went on at intervals on most days. Other Leon Wolff quotes above.
"Ludendorff divided the Third Battle of Ypres into five periods. In the "Fourth Battle of Flanders", from 2–21 October, he described German "wastage" as "extraordinarily high"." So what? That includes Broodseinde. Was it any higher than you’d have expected it to be during a major offensive? It is also the case that BEF wastage was extraordinarily high, almost as high as it ever got during the war – yet that piece of information is tucked away in a footnote! And all this, let us not forget, at a time when German manpower and morale still had a year or more of life left in them, whereas Britain was running short of manpower (relative to what was politically feasible – Britain mobilised a much smaller proportion of her manpower than Germany or France) at the very moment when government and press were running out of patience and it was beginning to become clear that Germany was about to be massively reinforced from the East.
I don’t see what the Hindenburg quote is doing there at all, except to mislead the casual reader. I dare say he did long for the return of the rainy period. By 12 October, it had already returned, which was one of the main reasons why this attack failed. Paulturtle ( talk) 16:53, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
References
Altered them again to try to satisfy all concerned by putting the main and supporting attack information into the text below. Any better? Keith-264 ( talk) 10:50, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
Apparently maps and drawings should be uploaded as png not jpg so I redid it yesterday as a png and nominated the original for speedy deletion [1] see here for the replacement. Keith-264 ( talk) 17:08, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
Having a single subheading which is right at the start of a subheading, as currently within the background section, makes no sense at all. Think of it as a set; there is nothing within "Tactical developments" that isn't within background and, crucially, vice-versa too. As it is, it's just confusing and unnecessary.— Brigade Piron ( talk) 19:38, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
"Beyond the railway, the advance of the 51st Brigade veered slightly south, away from a German strong-point which caused many casualties, LOSING LOST TOUCH with the Guards Division." (all caps mine). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.52.96.14 ( talk) 19:47, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
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@ Archon 2488: It's imperial first and metric second as per [ [2]] unless I missed something? Keith-264 ( talk) 13:44, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
Because the RS say so? You can't rewrite history on Wikipedia. Keith-264 ( talk) 21:14, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
I would have thought the fact that the battle was primarily a British Empire operation would give a stronger national tie to the UK than any tie accrued to Belgium by virtue of being fought on its soil. Has consensus been reached on this specific issue anywhere? I'd be interested to read it. FactotEm ( talk) 22:33, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
An article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation should use the (formal, not colloquial) English of that nation.") so that only leaves the UK in this case. -- DeFacto ( talk). 17:51, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps the people who made this policy need to be taken to task for failing to publicise the fact of the discussion just as you have been overruled here for trying to impose a plainly wrongheaded opinion as if it's a fact. Perhaps the conclusion of the discussion would have been different if more people has participated? Keith-264 ( talk) 22:18, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
I have attempted to edit this article towards what I understand to be the style prescribed by WP:MOSNUM. As an article describing an event that occurred outside the UK/USA, I do not see that it has strong national ties in the relevant sense (note that STRONGNAT implies stringent requirements) to either of those countries, and therefore per MOSNUM it should use the metric-first unit presentation style.
However, these edits have been disputed by other editors, as can be seen on the talk page above. In order to clarify the interpretation of the MOS for articles related to Belgium (and other countries which are not the UK or USA), I would like to hear from other editors on this matter. Archon 2488 ( talk) 23:02, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
My reasoned and reasonable comment is WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 11:05, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
Nothing much has changed here as far as positions or substantive arguments go. Let's take a deep breath and deescalate. I ask that all parties who have already commented hold their fire until some new editors weigh in with new perspectives. I'd ask that any additional editors add their comments here, below the break. If no new editors weigh in over the next few days I'll ask an uninvolved editor to close this to prevent any further, unnecessary escalation. Let's not let an RfC over date formatting turn into something ugly. LargelyRecyclable ( talk) 19:57, 18 October 2017 (UTC)