Belgium 2015 - Day 5 - Sanctuary Wood

The Sanctuary Wood Museum Hill 62, 3 km (1.9 mi) east of Ypres, Belgium is a private museum located in the neighbourhood of the Canadian Hill 62 Memorial and the Sanctuary Wood Cemetery.

After the First World War a farmer returned to reclaim his land in and around what was left of the wood he had left in 1914. A section of the original wood and the trenches in it were cleared of debris and casualties but generally the farmer left a section of a British trench system as he found it. 

This site is now one of the few places on the Ypres Salient battlefields where an original trench layout can be seen in some semblance of what it might have looked like. Elsewhere the trenches were filled in and ploughed over by returning farmers leaving only the occasional chalky outline of what had once been there.(greatwar.co.uk)

First stop was the museum which had a large collection of weapons and other relics from the war. Most of it has been collected from the local battlefields.

 Great collection of rifles

And Machine guns

German Equipment

Trench Art

It was during the First Battle of Ypres in October and November 1914 that the British Army used the cover of a large wood south of the Ypres-Menin road near Hooge for tending to their casualties. At that time the wood was to the west of and behind the British fighting line. It is believed to have been given its name on the 1914-1918 British Army battlefield maps, called Trench Maps, for that very reason; it was providing a place of sanctuary to the wounded. 

By mid November 1914 the First Battle of Ypres drew to a close and the British and German front line trenches became static in the eastern part of Sanctuary Wood. Front line and support trenches for both the German and the British Armies remained in and around the wood until July 1917 when the British launched an offensive on the German lines for the Third Battle of Ypres (known as the Battle of Passchendaele) on 31 July 1917.

In 1918 the German Army pushed the Allied Armies back towards Ypres again and the two front lines were located to the west of Sanctuary Wood close to Ypres. This meant that the Sanctuary Wood area was now east of and behind the German front line. The movement of front lines backwards and forwards over the same ground is typical of the WWI fighting during the four years of war in the Ypres Salient. This accounts for the absolute destruction of parts of the landscape over and over, and the reason why the bodies of so many thousands of soldiers from all sides have never been found.

There is some debate over the authenticity of these trenches but they do give a very good feel for what it must have been like to live in the trenches in those days especially, due to the amount of visitors there is little vegetation (bar the trees) around them.

This pano gives you an idea of the zig zag layout of the trenches.

The reason for the zig zag layout was to stop a blast in one part of the trench travelling along the line and killing or wounding more men.

Much, if not all of the corrugated iron has been replaced over time.

In the early 1980s some ground collapsed and revealed the previously undiscovered 4 foot high 'L' shaped tunnel built by British Army engineers.

The tunnel has been cleared and lighting installed making it possible for people to walk through. We didn't.

  

This tin was used as overhead tin cover. The spikes with the circles are barbed wired holders.

War debris stacked around 

These were shells and shell cases 

The big bundles are barbed wire with more shells in the background.

These are German grave markers reclaimed from the battlefields. These were removed from their original burial location after the burials were presumably moved from outlying battlefield burial plots into a formal German military cemetery during the battlefield clearance after 1918.

Around 100 metres the further along from the museum (that is, uphill), is the Canadian Memorial at Hill 62. This memorial commemorates the actions of the Canadian Corps in defending the southern stretches of the Ypres Salient between April and August 1916. Unfortunately we didn't have time to visit. 

(Image ww1battlefields.co.uk)

On the road back towards Ypres about 100 metres from the museum is the Sanctuary Wood Cemetery.

There were three Commonwealth cemeteries at Sanctuary Wood before June 1916, all made in May-August 1915. The first two were on the western end of the wood, the third in a clearing further east. All were practically obliterated in the Battle of Mount Sorrel, but traces of the second were found and it became the nucleus of the present Sanctuary Wood Cemetery.
At the Armistice, the cemetery contained 137 graves. From 1927 to 1932, Plots II-V were added and the cemetery extended as far as 'Maple Avenue', when graves were brought in from the surrounding battlefields.
Most of these burials were from the 1914 Battles of Ypres and the Allied offensive of the autumn of 1917.
There are now 1,989 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in the cemetery. 1,353 of the burials are unidentified. Many graves, in all five plots, are identified in groups but not individually.

 (Image ww1battlefields.co.uk)