CEREMONY IN BELGIUM HONOURS AUSTRALIANS ON FLANDERS FIELDS
On the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Alan Griffin, was in Belgium to honour the Australians who fought and died in the battlefields of Flanders.
Representing the Australian Government at the early morning Remembrance Day ceremony at Ypres, Minister Griffin laid a wreath to commemorate more than 12,000 Australians who died in Belgium in 1917. At 11am he read the Ode at a ceremony at the Menin Gate.
Mr Griffin said the battlefields in Belgium were the scene of some of the darkest days for Australia during the First World War.
“Belgium had been divided between German and Allied forces since 1914. Like those who had fought there in the First and Second battles of Ypres in the war’s earlier years, the Australians who took part in the Third Battle of Ypres during 1917 also fell in their thousands,” Mr Griffin said.
“In just over five months, more than 12,000 Australian servicemen perished and thousands more were wounded at places including Messines, Menin Road, Poelcappelle, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde and Passchendaele.
“Between June and November 1917 all five Australian Divisions of the Australian Imperial Force fought in the Flanders Offensive – the Allied offensive to drive the German forces out of Belgium.
“More than half of those who died lie in unmarked graves in the Flanders countryside and are remembered on memorials to the missing.”
Mr Griffin said each year services are held at memorials in Belgium to commemorate the service and sacrifice of the allied forces who fought to reclaim Belgium from the Germans.
“At 8pm every night the Last Post can be heard at the Menin Gate in Ypres. Hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, including thousands of Australians, marched through the original Menin Gate on their way to battle,” Mr Griffin said.
Today the names of more than 52,000 Allied men who have no known grave, including 6,000 Australians, are listed on the stone panels of the gate.
While in France and Belgium for activities to mark the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, Minister Griffin attended the re-dedication of the Australian Corps Memorial Park at Le Hamel and inspected the site of a new Commonwealth war cemetery where the recently discovered remains of more than 400 Australian and British soldiers from the Battle of Fromelles will be interred.
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