They Called It Passchendaele

What They Called It Passchendaele Actually Covers and How to Watch It Properly

Passchendaele was the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, and it remains one of the most grinding, poorly understood campaigns of the First World War. The documentary They Called It Passchendaele, released in 2017 and directed by Paul Crowder, is the most substantial single film treatment of the battle available. It runs roughly 53 minutes and was produced in association with the Australian War Memorial, which gives it a slightly different angle than the usual British-centric accounts because a large number of Australian and New Zealand troops were caught in the maelstrom alongside Canadians and British formations. The film is available through several legal channels. The Australian War Memorial has hosted it on their website at times, and you can usually find it on the Australian War Memorial's YouTube channel or through their VHS/DVD catalogue. It also appears on Amazon Prime Video and other UK/Australian streaming platforms depending on your region. If you are outside Australia, check your local library system—several state libraries carry the DVD. I would avoid any site offering a direct .zip download or torrent, since most of those are either pirated copies of questionable quality or malware vectors disguised as documentary files. The official source gives you the proper 1080p remaster with accurate audio mixing, which matters because the sound design in the Crowder version is intentionally restrained and the narration carries real weight when it is not compressed through some third-party upload. Most general accounts of Passchendaele fixate on the mud. That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The documentary does something better: it tracks the command failures across multiple national armies simultaneously. Haig's assumption that the German lines would collapse after the initial breakthrough, the repeated postponement of the offensive due to weather, Plumer's careful shift to a methodical "bite and hold" approach after Haig was temporarily sidelined, and the catastrophic impact on the Canadian Corps in October all get screen time in roughly equal measure. The film also gives proper attention to the German defensive doctrine under General von Kuhl, which was not passive trench holding but active counter-attack tactics that bled attacking waves repeatedly. This is counter-intuitive for most people who learn about Passchendaele only as a story of British stupidity against mud. The reality is messier and more interesting.

One specific detail the documentary handles well is the artillery preparation. Conventional wisdom says the British fired 3 million shells before the July 1st attack. What most people do not know is that a significant percentage of the shells were duds due to fuze failures, and the craters they created did not break the German wire as intended because the Germans had dug deep dugouts that survived the bombardment. The film shows this through the testimonies of surviving German machine-gunners who simply waited out the barrage and emerged to mow down infantry walking through their own shell craters. I remember watching this section and realizing how many history documentaries skip the fuze failure problem entirely. It is a small technical detail that explains almost everything about why the first day went so badly.

Edge Case: The Australian and New Zealand Perspective That Most Viewers Skip

If you watch this documentary, pay attention to the sections on the Australian divisions, particularly the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions at Pilckem Ridge and later the New Zealand Brigade at Poelcappelle. I ran into a problem the first time I used this film for a presentation: my audience was primarily American and had zero context for why Anzac troops mattered in a Western Front battle. I solved it by pulling two specific clips—the passage on the 2nd Australian Division's attack at Pilckem Ridge in late July and the New Zealanders' disastrous push at Poelcappelle where they lost roughly a third of their effective strength in under two hours. Those two sequences are self-contained enough that even someone who has never heard of Passchendaele understands the scale of the loss within five minutes. The documentary does not over-explain the order of battle, which is both a strength and a weakness. You need some baseline knowledge of how the BEF was structured, or you will lose track of who is attacking whom. It is not a perfect film. The greatest limitation is its treatment of the political context. Haig's relationship with Lloyd George, the pressure from the French who had mutinied after Verdun, and the strategic reasoning behind choosing the Flanders coast instead of a breakthrough toward the Belgian rail ports are all glossed over. If you want the full picture, you need to read Mike Crankshaw's The Third Ypres or Albert Seagrim's work on the 1917 campaigns alongside the film. The documentary also has a tendency to present the mud as the primary antagonist, which can mislead viewers into thinking the terrain alone caused the casualties. It was the combination of rain, shell craters, destroyed drainage, and competent German defense that created the conditions, not the mud in isolation. I have seen too many people cite Passchendaele as proof that weather alones battles, which is a flawed takeaway. Another limitation is the running time. At 53 minutes, the film has to compress the entire July to November campaign into a tight narrative. Some important episodes, like the Tank Corps' limited but technically significant role in the mud, get barely a mention. The Battle of the Scherpbekel ridge and the final Canadian capture of the Passchendaele ridge itself are covered but not given the depth they deserve. If you are doing serious research on the October 26th Canadian assault, this film is a starting point, not a source. You will need primary documents and unit diaries for that level of detail.

How to Use This Documentary Effectively

Do not watch it straight through on first viewing if you are unfamiliar with the Western Front. Pause between the major phases: the July opening, the July-September grind under Plumer, and the October Canadian phase. Each phase has a different character and different command dynamics. The film is structured chronologically but the tactical situation changes drastically between phases, and watching it in one sitting blurs those distinctions. I usually recommend watching it once quickly, then rewatching it in three segments with a map open. A good map of the Ypres salient from 1917 will show you how the front line barely moved for most of the campaign despite the enormous casualties. That visual alone changes how you understand the entire operation. The documentary includes interviews with military historians like Gary Sheffield and William Philpott, whose assessments are generally sound. Sheffield tends to defend Haig more than most modern historians and Philpott is more critical, so their presence creates a useful tension in the film rather than a single authoritative voice. That is one of the stronger production choices in They Called It Passchendaele—it does not pretend there is one agreed-upon interpretation of the battle. The disagreement between historians is part of the story, and the film lets that show. If you want the DVD, check the Australian War Memorial shop or Amazon AU. The Blu-ray version, when available, has a noticeably better picture quality on the archival footage sequences, which matters because much of the visual material is early 16mm film that benefits from a higher-resolution encode. The streaming versions on some platforms are heavily compressed and lose detail in the darker scenes, which are the most important ones for understanding the conditions. I learned that the hard way by watching a compressed YouTube upload first and then comparing it to the official release, where the difference in visible detail in the trench footage was immediately apparent.