Passchendaele in Perspective: The Third Battle of Ypres (PARTIALLY pos

[catfishmo]

I was in Google books looking for weather charts of 3rd Ypres and came across Passchendaele in Perspective: The Third Battle of Ypres. A good part of it is posted online.

The part I scanned has info on weather forecasts originating in civilian Meteorological Office in London (bottom p 143), then went on to talk about how in June 1915, the job was assigned to a Royal Engineers team. Lots of detail follows about the history of weather in area, the mistakes made, etc. Goes on and on with a lot of specifics, but unfortunately, no chart.

On p 152, there is an extensive list of acknowledgements and bibliography which may provide further resources for others looking for detailed info the weather and soil conditions of Ypres during 3rd Ypres and Passchendaele offensives.

A lot more of the book is available there, but what I mentioned above is the only part I looked at. Searching http://books.google.co.uk/ for any war related topic can be a good place to get hits on a topic. In the advanced search mode, you can search publications BY YEAR and other elements like a particular phrase. Thus you can find primary sources as well as odd info like if a certain word or phrase was authentic to the era.

~Ginger

[Guest]

The European Weather Reports were available, but not sure if these links still work?

Edit-Can't get them to work, I'm glad I downloaded them all.

Mike

[catfishmo]

From Skipman's idea, I contacted the Met office and they sent me some original weather charts for June - November 1917 from the Ypres area (so it would cover the Messine's Ridge incident through 3rd Ypres Passchendaele offensives.) Data was recorded several times a day.

Unfortunately the files are too big to upload here, and they are a tad hard to interpret. I was mostly interested in exactly which days it rained, and the key provided shows one way to show rain, but it appears they used 'r' on the chart for rain or 'rr' for heavy rain. There are some other symbols used on the chart which I can't seem to interpret.

Other non-decipherable letters: d = drizzle? A squiggly line which could be an M (another key showed a similar symbol which could indicate smoke--perhaps from heavy shelling?) e? p? dq? pq? qd? f=fog? T=Thunder? z? (or maybe it is a 2?) TLR= Thunder Lightning Rain. If you know what these letters mean, I would appreciate your help.

If you would like me to forward the files to you, email me offline.

~Ginger

[Guest]

I gave the wrong link the last time, and the Met Office daily reports are still available Click probably not as detailed as the ones you might have?

Mike