Tyne Cot Cemetery

Tyne Cot cemetery is located just outside the village of Passchendaele (Passendale), which means it’s only a few miles from Ypres in Belgium. Tyne Cot cemetery primarily contains the graves of those who died around Passchendaele in 1917, particularly during the Battle of Passchendaele itself, which became known as the Battle of Mud and went on to be a typical example of battle fought on the Western Front in and around the Ypres Salient.

Tyne Cot is the largest official Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in all of Europe, containing the graves of a total of 11,953 men. It also contains the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing, which is a wall that makes up part of the surrounding stone wall and featured the carve names of men who were killed in the Ypres Salient but have no known grave.

While many of the men with no known grave were put on the Menin Gate instead, it was found that it was too small to have the names of all the missing included on it. As such, the Memorial to the Missing was created at Tyne Cot and contains all the names of the men known to have been killed or to have gone missing after 15th August 1927, including 33,783 men from the British forces and 1,176 men from the New Zealand Army.

Following the Armistice and the end of the war in November 1918, the Tyne Cot cemetery contained just 343 graves. However, officials made the decision to consolidate all the graves from the surrounding region and move the bodies from smaller cemeteries around Passchendaele and the Ypres Salient so they could all rest in one area.

The Cross of Sacrifice, which is built in most Allied war cemeteries, was placed on a German pillbox. Although Sir Herbert Baker designed the cemetery its believed that this decision was the choice of George V, who visited it when it was near completion in 1922.