Relics from Passchendaele at The Hooge Crater Museum and Cemetery

Today we're at the Hoog Crater Cemetery and Museum, an area which saw fighting right the way through the Great War. This really is an area that was fought over again and again through the different years of the war. Today we're going to have a look around the cemetery and we're going to go to a fascinating museum, in my opinion the best museum in the Ypres salient, the Hoog Crater Museum. So we're going to start off just having a little look around the Hoog Crater Cemetery which is just here, it's opposite the museum, the museum's on the other side of the road. I find this a really interesting cemetery, there's lots of kind of little bits here which always kind of spark my interest every time I come here and I really recommend you doing that as well. So let's have a little look around and then we're going to head over the road to the Hoog Crater Museum. So the Hoog Crater Cemetery is about four miles east of Ypres, there's nearly 6,000 burials here and about three and a half thousand of those are unidentified. There's also a few slightly unique, and I don't mean unique as in the only examples on the western front or even in the Ypres salient area, but just slightly different graves that we'll have a look at and there's a couple of special memorials here as well to men who are known to be buried in and around this cemetery but their specific grave hasn't been identified. So let's go and take a little look. Now one of the first bits which I always find fascinating when I come here to Hoog Crater is these three graves together here. So here we have a grave which says 10 soldiers of the great war, just next to it we have another one with nine soldiers of the great war and just next to that another one with 10 soldiers of the great war. So just in these three graves 29 unknown soldiers lying here together at Hoog Crater Cemetery. Now you might wonder in what kind of circumstance that would happen, well there's several different reasons why it could happen but one of the most important things to think about is unfortunately the grim reality of the warfare that went on in this area. You could have a circumstance where maybe there was a group of men together, perhaps they came under heavy artillery fire, that then left a situation where different bits of bodies couldn't be identified or couldn't be separated to identify which belonged to which man and that could be one grim circumstance which would lead to a grave such as that one. So just come over to the left hand side as you come into the cemetery, we have these few grave markers on the side. Now something slightly different with these is these are men who are believed or in some cases known to be buried in this cemetery but the specific location of their grave isn't known. Now that's probably going to have happened because they would have been buried in this area in this cemetery and then their grave was destroyed somehow perhaps artillery fire or something that happened after the burial which then means it's a situation where they're known to be buried here but their exact grave isn't known. Now in some cases they're not necessarily a hundred percent sure that they're buried in this cemetery but records that suggest that they are. That leaves you a situation like this for private homes of the Middlesex Regiment killed on the 8th of March 1918 so that would be during the German spring offensive and he is believed to be buried in this cemetery. You then have somebody like Lance Corporal Stairmond of the Durham Light Inventory killed on the 13th of October 1917. He is known to be buried in this cemetery so there will be a burial record of him being buried here but then his exact grave was lost. So as we walk down the left hand side of the cemetery we've got this path on the other side. Now this is interesting because this is a site as we head down this direction we're moving into the area where the Germans used flamethrowers against British troops for the first time in the Great War. Now rather than me telling too much of that story I'm going to really recommend Paul Reed, the old front line, he's got a video on his YouTube channel where he walks this area and talks about that in a lot of detail so make sure you go check that out because it's really interesting and I learned that bit of detail from his video so go check that one out. So again we've talked about the fact that more than half of the graves here are unknown well just when we look at this little row here again we've got a similar situation to what we saw before. We've got four soldiers of the Great War all unknown, three soldiers of the Great War, four soldiers of the Great War, three soldiers of the Great War, four soldiers of the Great War, all just in this little section. Okay so just finish taking a look around the fascinating Hoog Crater Cemetery. Now we are going directly over the road here to go and have a look at the Hoog Crater Museum, a really fascinating museum. I've been there several times and I really do love it. I'm here with someone else on their first trip to this area today and they haven't been in there so we're going to go in and have a look around. I think it'll be really good. They're going to film a few clips and have a little bit of a look at what we've got in there. Let's go. One of the first things when you come in here straight away they've got this recreation of a British trench. It's really interesting. It's not just the soldiers and the uniforms and stuff, all the equipment as well. They've got a little machine gun and various other bits. Telephone over there in the back. Wow. So much stuff in here. It's another interesting piece is they've got a recreation of a field kitchen, a German field kitchen. Of course when you think about the war you think about all the weaponry and the soldiers and the animals. They've got a horse over here on the left. But also just all the equipment. I mean if you want to have hot food you've got to have a way of cooking that hot food, right? So here is a German field kitchen. So much equipment that has to be carried around that you just don't even think of sometimes. So this is a really cool thing that they've got here at the Creighton Museum. I know Chris from Running Through History is going to be smiling because he has bought one or at least the poster. This is a map of the British Isles with all the different cabbages and all the different regiments across the whole thing. Fascinating. I mean there's loads of them on there but let's zoom in to the Surrey regiments down here. That's where I'm from, West Surrey, Queens. But they are everywhere across here. Wow. Another really cool thing they've got here is one of the original trench boards down under a piece of glass so you can walk across it up here as you head into the next section of the museum. Okay so this next display is looking at some of the kind of medical bits of course and we know how many men were wounded in the Great War. So you have a bit of a display around some of the medical bits. One of the wagons with the stretchers that would have been taking these guys back from advanced dressing stations back to field hospitals and so on and so on and so on. There's also some bits in here that show some features or some photos of some of the women's involvement in the war. Of course women played a huge role in the medical aspect of the war as nurses and you can imagine some of the stuff they had to do and some of the stuff they saw. Very traumatic you know in a lot of ways equally traumatic as the guys who are out on the battlefield seeing some of these wounds and some of the men in these kinds of conditions that they dealt with right the way through. So it's really cool they've got that here. Okay so this next display is really cool this is taking a look at some of the gas masks and some of these are just creepy and more to the point you imagine wearing some of these things whilst you're in combat having to advance across land attacking under fire artillery fire with something like this and you think how debilitating that would be. Wow some really cool ones here different types as well. Right carry on. So here we're moving to an area with some of the helmets some of the pickle hammer helmets. Now something which is often a misconception is these weren't metal these were leather helmets you can see kind of a little bit closer that they are metal that's right they're not metal they're leather. Later on they moved away from this to the more sort of solid metal German helmet but these are some of the original very decorative pickle helmets. Okay so here we've got a whole lot of guns whole lot of rifles. The Enfield rifle being probably one of the rifles that a lot of people would be very familiar with. Loads of others and lots of different bullets as well. Okay this display case is seriously cool this is so many different artillery shells all different shapes all different sizes just loads of them and have a look at these ones in the front. That is just monstrous you can see the fuse on the top if we have a look in this display case over here we've got lots of different fuses all been kind of polished up and sparkled but you can see them all in there. Now some of the types of shells that used to do an awful lot of damage to men to inventory were shrapnel shells and they were full of these evil looking balls and you've got an idea you can look into one of them just here you can see kind of the way that front section was full of those balls that when that landed that would explode and it would send those little shrapnel balls in every different direction maiming and killing people. Okay we've got a case here with all different types of grenades we've got some of the kind of British grenades we've got some of the sort of ones which will be more kind of recognizable if you see what you think was kind of a German grenade like a potato masher they're often referred to something which is interesting I saw over here these kind of pear-shaped looking ones we actually found one of those out on the battlefield near Verdun. I can't remember who posted I think it might have been Sander, Sander VK history have a look on his Instagram I believe we got that somewhere where we found it we didn't touch it but we found it out there. And speaking of battlefield finds if you look on my own Instagram page on History in the Hand you will see on one of these this is Stokes Mortar and in fact I've found a couple of these out on the battlefield now these can be really dangerous so I have not touched or gone near these when I found them but I have taken photos of them and you can see those photos on my Instagram page History in the Hand this is what they look like when they're not all rusted away and rotten that is a Stokes Mortar. So we kind of did this slightly the wrong way around because one of the things they've got which is really cool is they've got some personal items that belong to some of the guys who are buried over the road and we can create a cemetery where we just came from so for example we've got the personal items of Lance Corporal Thomas Lewis here we have got his medals that is a 1914 star often called the Monstar British War Medal and Victory Medal. Belonging to him and he is buried over the road in the Hoog Crater Cemetery. Okay so just come out of the Hoog Crater Museum, fantastic museum like I said one of my favorites in this area we just had lunch as well fantastic cafe so really recommend checking that out if you're in this area. I hope you enjoyed that look with just a brief look around the museum there's so much in there we could only really touch on some of the highlights of the things that they've got of course combined before the museum with the fascinating look around the Hoog Crater Cemetery. I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did do me a favor do the YouTube stuff right here on the screen we're going to carry on exploring the Ypres Salient and I'll see you on the next video.