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Tyne Cot Cemetery and Memorial, Passchendaele, Belgium

Photographs Copyright © Martin Edwards 2018

This area on the Western Front was the scene of the Third Battle of Ypres. Also known as the Battle of Passchendaele, it was one of the major battles of the First World War. Tyne Cot or Tyne Cottage was a barn named by the Northumberland Fusiliers which stood near the level crossing on the road from Passchendaele to Broodseinde. Near the town of Ieper in Belgium is Tyne Cot Cemetery and memorial, the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world. It is now the resting place of more than 11,900 servicemen of the British Empire from the First World War; the memorial bears the names of some 35,000 men of the British and New Zealand forces who have no known grave, nearly all of whom died between August 1917 and November 1918.

The barn, which had become the centre of five or six German blockhouses, was captured by the 3rd Australian Division on 4 October 1917, in the advance on Passchendaele.

One of these pillboxes was unusually large and was used as an advanced dressing station after its capture. From 6 October to the end of March 1918, 343 graves were made, on two sides of it, by the 50th (Northumbrian) and 33rd Divisions, and by two Canadian units. The cemetery was in German hands again from 13 April to 28 September, when it was finally recaptured, with Passchendaele, by the Belgian Army.

Tyne Cot Cemetery is in an area known as the Ypres Salient. Broadly speaking, the Salient stretched from Langemarck in the north to the northern edge in Ploegsteert Wood in the south, but it varied in area and shape throughout the war.

The Salient was formed during the First Battle of Ypres in October and November 1914, when a small British Expeditionary Force succeeded in securing the town before the onset of winter, pushing the German forces back to the Passchendaele Ridge. The Second Battle of Ypres began in April 1915 when the Germans released poison gas into the Allied lines north of Ypres. This was the first time gas had been used by either side and the violence of the attack forced an Allied withdrawal and a shortening of the line of defence.

[Extract from the Commonwealth War Graves Commision website]

Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium

Entrance to Tyne Cot Cemetery
Photographs Copyright © Martin Edwards 2018
Bedfordshire Regiment Memorial
King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Memorial
Sherwood Foresters Memorial
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium
Tyne Cot Cemetery,  Passchendaele, Belgium

 

Last updated 29 August, 2021

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