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In Flanders Fields, commando aviators honour WW1 fallen
21 August 2024
Commando aviators and ground crew spent three days in Belgium for a better understanding of the Great War – and their forebears who fought at Ypres.
A ten-strong Commando Helicopter Force team who deliver Operation Clockwork, the annual winter deployment to the Arctic which teaches comrades to operate Merlin and Wildcat helicopters in sub-zero conditions, swapped the fjords for Flanders and the former Ypres salient, scene of four years of horrific fighting in the Great War.
Five battles were fought in and around the historic Belgian cloth town, the grimmest of which was arguably the third, better known as Passchendaele.
The three-and-a-half-month-long battle in the late summer and autumn of 1917 is often regarded as symbolic for the futility of the Great War. Allied armies pushed the Germans back roughly five miles by the time the offensive petered out in November 1917 with casualties on both sides were roughly even: between a quarter of a million and 400,000 dead and wounded apiece.
Sailors and marines of the Royal Naval Division were heavily committed in the closing stages of the battle, thrown into the line just 1½ miles from Passchendaele. In just six days of fighting at the end of October 1917 it suffered 3,126 casualties – 521 souls per day.
It was in and around Passchendaele that the three-day tour concluded as the CHF team followed in the footsteps of the Naval Division – regarded by Winston Churchill as one of the finest fighting forces on the entire Western Front – with briefings on the battle, a visit to the immersive Passchendaele museum with its reconstructed trench systems and dugouts, and tributes at Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth War Graves site in the world.
Beyond sailors and Royal Marines at eternal rest in its grounds, there are also many more named on the Wall of Remembrance alongside 35,000 comrades who have no known grave. The Clockworkers laid a wreath in remembrance of all those who fought on the Western Front.
The team from Yeovilton began their tour of the Ypres battlefields on the edge of the city itself: Essex Farm/Cemetery, where one of the youngest British servicemen to die on the Western Front aged just 15, Valentine Joe Strudwick, is buried.
All personnel went away with a new sense of what our forebears gave for our freedom.
A former aid station, it was here too that Canadian doctor John McCrae wrote In Flanders’ Fields, the poem which has become synonymous with Remembrance – as Leading Hand Jack Marsh explained.
At each site visited by the CHF personnel during their pilgrimage, one of the team was called upon to brief comrades on the significance of the site and the fighting which once raged there.
The team paid their respects at Yorkshire Trench, a preserved stretch of the line near Essex Farm; Langemarck – one of the most sacred WW1 sites for Germans, with more than 44,000 graves and 25,000 men buried in a single mass grave;
There are few more evocative places on the entire Western Front than the Menin Gate memorial in Ypres. Currently under renovation, the huge monument honours all those British and Commonwealth servicemen killed in the Ypres sector with no known grave; Hill 62/Sanctuary Wood, and the gigantic Hooge crater – created by the detonation of explosive charges, designed to blow a hole in the German lines.
Air engineering officer Lieutenant Larry Lambert said everyone returned from Flanders humbled by the experience having seen the vast cemeteries and experienced the scale of the human cost of the Great War.
“The battlefield study tour proved to be a huge success with all those involved learning about and reflecting on the events which took place in the Ypres Salient region between 1914 and 1918,” he added.
“All personnel went away with a new sense of what our forebears gave for our freedom.”