 | |
Tyne Cot Cemetery
and Memorial,
Zonnebeke, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium. 'Tyne Cot' or 'Tyne Cottage' was the name
given by the Northumberland Fusiliers to a barn which stood near the level crossing
on the Passchendaele-Broodseinde road. The barn, which had become the centre of
five or six German pill-boxes, was captured by the 3rd Australian Division on
4 October 1917 in the advance on Passchendaele. One of these pill-boxes was unusually
large and was used as an advanced dressing station after its capture. From October
to the end of March 1918, 343 graves were made here. Tyne Cot Cemetery
was in German hands again from 13 April to 28 September, when it was finally recaptured,
with Passchendaele, by the Belgian Army. The cemetery was greatly enlarged after
the Armistice when remains were brought in from the battlefields of Passchendaele
and Langemarck, and from a few small burial grounds. It is now the largest Commonwealth
war cemetery in the world in terms of burials, with 11,954 Commonwealth servicemen
of the First World War buried here. Some 8,367 of the burials are unidentified.
Tyne Cot Memorial forms the north-eastern boundary of the cemetery and commemorates
nearly 35,000 servicemen from the United Kingdom and New Zealand who died in the
Ypres Salient after 16 August 1917 and whose graves are not known. The memorial
stands close to the farthest point in Belgium reached by Commonwealth forces in
the First World War until the final advance to victory. This is one of four memorials
to the missing in Belgian Flanders. Information
sourced from Commonwealth War Graves Commission www.cwgc.org.
| |