Jaap van 't Veen's photos with the keyword: Erster Weltkrieg

Sanctuary Wood ( Heiligdombos ) was named by British troops in November 1914 during World War I, when they used the cover of a forest at this location to tend to their wounded during the First Battle of Ypres, so it was literally a ‘sanctuary’ of sorts for those casualties. At the end of the battle the front line stabilized and would remain so until the Third Battle of Ypres, when the Commonwealth troops managed to push the front line a few miles into German-held territory. In the Spring Offensive of 1918, however, the Germans pushed the Allies back towards Ypres and Sanctuary Wood was occupied by the Germans until the final battle and the defeat of Germany. In 1919 the farmer who had owned the land of what became Sanctuary Wood returned to reclaim his property. He decided to preserve some of the British trench system he found. It is one of the very few original sets of World War I trenches left as they were found at the end of the war. Nowadays it is a privately owned museum nearby the Canadian Hill 62 Memorial and the Sanctuary Wood Cemetery.

At the end of October 1914, World War I stalled in Flanders Fields. After the first battle of Ypres (October-November 1914), trenches were dug in a wide arc around the city of Ypres. The second battle followed the first gas attack (April 1915). The front line shrank into the “Little Ypres Salient” at 3.5 to 4.5 km away from the city centre. The front started moving again on 7 June 1917. British troops broke open the Ieperboog (Ypres Salient) at the cost of huge losses during the third battle of Ypres (July-November 1917). However the German spring offensive of 1918 pushed the Ypres Salient back towards Ypres. The German troops were forced to give up the Ieperboog at the end of September 1918, due to exhaustion and the arrival of American troops. These battles almost completely destroyed the city of Ypres, while thousands of citizens and over hundreds of thousands soldiers from around the world lost their lives. More than 150 military cemeteries were built and monuments erected in and around the city in the 1920’s. Cemeteries, monuments, trenches, mine craters and museums nowadays still remind us of the futility of war.