The New Zealanders in Flanders

 
 Passchendaele Fields (Copyright Memorial Museum Passchendaele)
The battles of Messines and Passchendaele are among the most iconic events in New Zealand history. Less well known today than Gallipoli, they were, however, just as devastating if not more so. Flanders 1917 touched virtually every family the length and breadth of the land. It left a legacy that exists to this day.

Messines was a great victory - a rarity on the Western Front. It came at no small cost. In the three days historians assign to the battle, New Zealand alone, with a total population of just over one million, sustained 3,660 casualties, 700 of those killed. Many of those casualties occurred not in the attack itself, which was fast and successful, but from shell fire the following day.

Four months later, just the other side of Ypres, there was another costly success - this time in the Battle of Broodseinde, part of the Third Battle of Ypres and the build-up to what is now known as Passchendaele. Eight days later, the First Battle of Passchendaele became the country's most tragic day. It remains so.

Casualty tolls

Shoulder to shoulder with the Australians, the men of the New Zealand Division began their attack in gales and driving rain, faced with a morass of mud, uncut barbed wire up to 13 metres deep, an erratic and ineffectual artillery barrage to protect them and withering machine-gun fire. Slowed by the weather and struggling through thick mud, they died in their hundreds.

In four hours on the morning of October 12, 1917, New Zealand suffered a casualty toll of 60% of those who took part - 3,296 men of whom 1,190 were killed. It took two and a half days to clear the New Zealand wounded from the battlefield.

And, of course, the war didn't simply stop between the dates of the major battles - it carried on. La Basseville, close to Messines and where Leslie Andrew won the Victoria Cross, came after Messines and before Broodseinde, for example. In fact, the New Zealanders were still in Flanders at the end of the year, when Henry Nicholas won his Victoria Cross at Polderhoek Chateau near Zonnebeke.

 Prowse Point Cemetery near Messines
Today, more than 4,600 men who served with the New Zealand forces have their graves or, for those with no known grave, their names on memorials in some 80 Commonwealth War Graves Commission or communal cemeteries in Flanders. Almost 2,800 more New Zealanders served with Australian, British and Canadian forces and a number of those also died - 86, for example have their names on the Menin Gate at Ypres.

Tyne Cot Cemetery at Passchendaele is the Commission's largest. It is also the largest New Zealand cemetery outside New Zealand itself. There are now 11,953 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in the cemetery itself  - 520 are the graves of New Zealanders and 322 of these are unidentified.

The Tyne Cot Memorial, which covers the upper slope of the cemetery, commemorates nearly 35,000 servicemen from the United Kingdom and New Zealand who died on the Ypres Salient after 16 August, 1917, and whose graves are not known. The New Zealand Apse in the Memorial commemorates 1,166 New Zealanders whose remains were never recovered.

At ‘s Graventafel nearby is a New Zealand Memorial, one of two in Flanders. The other is at Messines, the focus of the traditional Anzac Day New Zealand service in Belgium. At the Messines Ridge Cemetery there is also a New Zealand Memorial to the Missing with 839 names inscribed.

In addition to the two Memorials to the Missing at Tyne Cot and Messines, another Memorial to the Missing at Buttes New British Cemetery, Polygon Wood, also bears the names of 378 New Zealanders who have no known grave.