Winston Groom, most known for Forrest Gump, tells the sombre story of the battle at the Ypres Salient from an American perspective. Groom provides historical details and personal accounts of the "gigantic corpse factory" that the Belgium land became during the four year battle.

The Ypres Salient in Belgium Flanders was the most notorious and dreaded place in all of the First World War, probably of any war in history.

Written with flourishes and cringe-worthy imagery often found in fiction, Groom relates the terrible events that occurred over the course of four years (1914-1918). Everything from the German's first use of poisonous gas in warfare to Britain's detonation of mines in the Battle of Messines, A Storm in Flanders doesn't skip a beat. The land becomes littered with corpses throughout the tug-of-war for control of the land to the extent that statisticians can only estimate the total number of lives lost. Groom's detailed narrative has reader's seeing, hearing and smelling the battle on a physical level.

It was said you could smell the battlefield miles before you ever reached it.

Groom gives enough background story to make the cause of the war understandable without giving too much detail to lose the reader in politics. Incorporating soldiers' diaries and personal letters to home is a constant reminder of the truth in the horrific details.

It was in this small confine of Belgium from 1914 to 1918 that more than a million soldiers were shot, bayoneted, bludgeoned, bombed, grenaded, gasses, incinerated by flamethrowers, drowned in shell craters, smothered by caved-in trenches, blown to pieces by artillery shells. It became one of the most vast graveyards on earth.

Readers learn of what the soldiers on both sides had to endure and the grave cost of a country at war. The tactics and strategies that were born in Flanders would be used again in future wars. If history books were written in a similar fashion, even the most unenthusiastic scholar would have no difficulty recalling historical events. The result is known beforehand, but the path to the destination is haunting and a tale that needs to be told and remembered because the consequences of war are long-lasting.

Today Belgian farmers are still plowing up tons of old shells and explosives each year.

My personal reflection:
I'm not one to typically read historical nonfiction only because every single time I've tried, I get bored and find myself daydreaming while reading. I'm not a history buff and don't pretend to be and that is, in part, due to the fact that I lose interest when reading history texts. Movies, there's enough explosions to keep me watching, but books the explosions are a little different.

Winston Groom, however, is a wonderful writer. He knows just when to provide terrifying images and just when to insert personal accounts of the war. The balance of those along with the details of the battle that can be found in any history book had me turning pages (clicking my Kindle if we're being honest) until the wee hours of the morning.

I had heard of the Ypres Salient, but did not know much about what happened there or how difficult the battle had been or the large number of lives lost. I knew it was one of the moments that changed the war and all future wars because strategies, like using flamethrowers and poison gas, were first used in the Ypres Salient, but repeated later on in history.

Honestly, there were parts of this book that gave me nightmares. I cannot even begin to relate to what those soldiers must have felt when they saw walls of flames from flamethrowers coming their way or the constant barrage of artillery shells. The near escapes from being blown to bits and pieces by grenades and the fear of watching men slowly suffocate because of inhaling poison.

The images in this book are not only haunting because of their descriptions but also because they're real. These events really happened. It is a part of history and it should never be forgotten.

Groom truly did an amazing job telling the story of the Ypres Salient in a way that had me on the edge of my seat and cringing while I read. ( )

Winston Groom is probably best known as a novelist – the author of Forrest Gump – but he probably considers himself a military historian, since that’s what most of his books are. In his preface, he apologizes as an American for writing A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918, about the most quintessentially British (well, Commonwealth) campaign of WWI.


I found this a straightforward, fairly prosaic account. It’s not the Illiad, but then again even Homer probably couldn’t make anything epic out of this material. The story can’t even really be called a “tragedy”, although Groom’s subtitle is “Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front”; trench fighting at Ypres, if we can compare it to any kind of modern material, is probably most similar to a B-movie gorefest involving chainsaws, razors, and guys in masks – except it was machine guns, barbed wire, the masks were gas mask, and all the blood was real.


Groom depends heavily on first person accounts of the fighting, with paragraph-long quotes. He recounts, in his introduction, how he became interested in the battle after finding an old Michelin guide, but there’s no evidence that he has ever actually visited the battlefield; if so he didn’t incorporate any of his own accounts in his book. The writing tends to be repetitive: here’s a description of the results of a British mine detonating under Hill 60 in April 1915:


“At exactly 7 p.m. a plunger on an electric detonator was pushed and an enormous eruption went off: dirt, lumber, sandbags, rifles, ration boxes, Germans, and parts of Germans were sent hurling more than 100 yards into the air.”


Now here’s a mine under the Hooge chateau in July 1915:


“The blast shook everything for miles around and sent a massive cloud of debris twirling and whirling hundreds of feet into the air: earth, concrete, corrugated iron, bricks, trees, pots, pans, rifles, and, as at Hill 60, hundreds of Germans and hundreds of parts of Germans – some of which landed within the British lines.”


Now here’s the mine – several mines – at Messines Ridge in June 1917:


“As the mine explosions began to die out and the inevitable debris of dirt, equipment, timber, helmets, boots, pots and pans, Germans and parts of Germans began to fall back to earth, a breathtaking artillery barrage issued from the British batteries.”


Admittedly there’s only so many ways to describe an explosion, but I got the “parts of Germans” bit after the first one.


The basics of the Ypres Salient were pretty simple; when the Schlieffen Plan ran out of steam in front of Paris, the German and Allied armies tried to outflank each other until they ran into the coast. Then both sides settled in for trench fighting. Unfortunately for the British, the Germans had no particular interest in territory in the area and thus withdrew from advanced positions to what passed for “high ground” in Flanders, while the British, committed to not giving up one square inch of French soil, were stuck below. Not only could the Germans exploit their position for artillery observation, the British couldn’t dig proper trenches since groundwater was only two to three feet below the surface. Thus most British “trenches” were actually built up out of sandbags rather than dug down into the soil.


So it remained for four years, with British, Canadians, and ANZACs throwing themselves into barbed wire and machine guns for pitiful gains (one mathematically inclined officer calculated that at the rate of Allied advance, they would be on the Rhine in 180 years). The only time the British had any success was when they drafted “clay kickers” from the London utilities companies. Then, as now, the utility companies didn’t want to cause major traffic disruptions when they tunneled for new lines. Nowadays this problem would be handled by horizontal drilling machines; back then it was done by sending down a couple of non-claustrophobic diggers. One had a pair of spades strapped to his boots and lay on his back “kicking” at the work face; the other, alongside on his stomach, threw the cut lumps of clay backward over his shoulders to a bucket brigade of tunnelers. This allowed digging a tunnel that was about three by three feet in section. A chamber at the end was packed with ammonal (at one point the supply board back in England confused this with ammonol, a sex-drive suppressor, and wondered why the Royal Engineers needed a million pounds of it. Obviously they didn’t know anything about engineers.). Although, as the quotes above describe, the mines were generally spectacular, there were never reserves in place to exploit the “breakthroughs”, and by the time things got sorted out the Germans had rebuilt their defensive lines and it was just a matter of another few hundred yards of soggy Flanders changing hands.


Worth a read as an introduction; good maps and decent photographs. ( )

A vivid, engrossing history that is particularly effective in conveying the horrific loss and inexplicable futility of World War I. ( )

http://gr4c5.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/storm-in-flanders/ ( )

3979. A Storm in Flanders The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front, by Winston Groom (read 26 Jan 2005) This book, by the author of Forrest Gump (which I've never read), tells the story of World War One, concentrating on the four Ypres battles. Because of its subject it is an awesome book, though without footnotes or a real bibliography. In Flanders Fields, by Leon Wolff, which I read June 8, 1965, and was overwhelmed by--and which was my Best Book Read this Year for 1965--is called by the author of this book a diatribe against General Haig, and this book is not quite as hard on Haig as Wolff was. As you can guess, this book was the best book I read this month. ( )