| Ypres
(now Ieper) is a town in the Province of West Flanders. The
Memorial is situated at the eastern side of the town on the
road to Menin (Menen) and Courtrai (Kortrijk). Each night at
8 pm the traffic is stopped at the Menin Gate while members
of the local Fire Brigade sound the Last Post in the roadway
under the Memorial's arches.
The
Menin Gate is one of four memorials to the missing in Belgian
Flanders which cover the 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. There was little more significant activity on this
front until 1917, when in the Third Battle of Ypres an offensive
was mounted by Commonwealth forces to divert German attention
from a weakened French front further south. The initial attempt
in June to dislodge the Germans from the Messines Ridge was
a complete success, but the main assault north-eastward, which
began at the end of July, quickly became a dogged struggle against
determined opposition and the rapidly deteriorating weather.
The campaign finally came to a close in November with the capture
of Passchendaele. The German offensive of March 1918 met with
some initial success, but was eventually checked and repulsed
in a combined effort by the Allies in September. The battles
of the Ypres Salient claimed many lives on both sides and it
quickly became clear that the commemoration of members of the
Commonwealth forces with no known grave would have to be divided
between several different sites. The site of the Menin Gate
was chosen because of the hundreds of thousands of men who passed
through it on their way to the battlefields. It commemorates
those of all Commonwealth nations except New Zealand who died
in the Salient before 16 August 1917. Those United Kingdom and
New Zealand servicemen who died after that date are named on
the memorial at Tyne Cot, a site which marks the furthest point
reached by Commonwealth forces in Belgium until nearly the end
of the war. Other New Zealand casualties are commemorated on
memorials at Buttes New British Cemetery and Messines Ridge
British Cemetery. The YPRES (MENIN GATE) MEMORIAL now bears
the names of more than 54,000 officers and men whose graves
are not known. The memorial, designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield
with sculpture by Sir William Reid-Dick, was unveiled by Lord
Plumer in July 1927.
Some
of the Regimental lists
have been photographed and are available for viewing. |
