Brookwood Military Cemetery – The Non-Commonwealth Nations

I’m afraid to say that I fibbed last post.  I did mention that we would see what’s what in the civil cemetery this time, but it subsequently occurred to me that I could show you some of the less well-known sections of the military cemetery on the way, rather than just tack them on at the end of this series of posts.

 

The first photograph was taken from the blue dot (the current memorials we visited last post are off the map to the left) looking north east(ish) towards the Italian Plot, marked in orange.  Several plots were created after the Second World War to accommodate casualties of Allied countries who had died in the United Kingdom, but the Italian Plot is the only dedicated Axis plot, although there are German Second World War burials in Plot 15 in the western corner of the main Commonwealth section, as I have shown you before, and a few Great War German casualties in Plot 12.  We’ll see this map a couple more times, with added colours, as we go on, but initially our route follows the red line along Long Avenue.

The white building you can see through the trees is the American Chapel, and during the Second World War this whole area was used for American burials, some 3,600 American casualties being buried here between April 1942 & August 1944.  Post-war, all were either returned to the United States or moved to Cambridge American Cemetery, this section of the cemetery then being used as a concentration cemetery, the burials brought here from their original burial sites, for Italian prisoners of war who had died in the United Kingdom.

A Roman column overlooks the burials,…

…inscribed with the words ‘To the Italian fallen’.

The Italian headstones all feature clipped edges on either side at the top, this the southern half of the plot,…

…and this the northern half.  You can see the Brookwood 1914-1918 Memorial we visited last post in the left background.

Moving on, if we stop briefly at the yellow dot on the map and look north, this is the entrance to the American cemetery with the American Chapel at the far end; we shall be taking a look inside in a later post, but not yet,…

…our route continuing along Long Avenue…

…past this small plot of graves that I have never, now I think about it, looked at closely,…

…next to which we find the French Plot with, at the far end,…

..the French Memorial, here seen from the other side looking through to the French graves.

Memorials to the Free French forces, on the left, ‘To the memory of those of the free French air forces who sacrificed themselves for the liberation of France’, and, on the right, ‘In memory of the officers, petty officers, quartermasters and volunteer sailors of Free France who disappeared in action from 18 June 1940 to 8 May 1945 at sea, on land and in the Alps, particularly to those whose supreme sacrifice was also marked by the loss of their units’.

To the south of Long Avenue this is the Czechoslovakian plot & memorial,…

…followed by the Polish plot & memorial,…

…and the Belgian plot & memorial,…

…all marked at the bottom of the map.  Passing by the Royal Air Force Shelter, and marked as a mauve square down in the bottom right,…

…this small plot, just beyond the boundary of the military cemetery and not administered by the CWGC, is the Czechoslovakian Ex-Servicemen’s Plot, and if we then backtrack a few yards to the end of the red line on the map,…

…this is, or was, the view looking north towards the Cross of Sacrifice in the main Commonwealth section of the cemetery, this shot taken some fifteen years ago.  The graves on either side are all airmen, mostly R.A.F. casualties, and if we wander a short distance towards the Cross,…

…this is the view looking back towards Long Avenue with the Royal Air Force Shelter in the background.

Fast forward to 2017, and this is the view looking north once again,…

…many of the trees now gone and replaced by a host of saplings.

Beyond the R.A.F. graves and the saplings is an area known as the Military Annexe in which servicemen who have died since 1945 are buried.

Once hidden away, here in the background, beneath the trees,…

…the plot is now open to the sky.  Although, as we saw last post, nothing here stays the same for long these days, so if I were to show you the headstones in the foreground of this shot as they looked just a couple of months ago in late 2023,…

…from the other side,…

…you can see that the saplings are now small trees,…

…and this area appears, for the moment, to be being left to grow wild.

Views from just to the north of the Military Annexe looking west…

…and north.  Note the now-demolished 1914-1918 Memorial in the background of both this and some of the previous shots.  And if we head that way,…

…through the South African Plot (above, and marked in light green below),…

…we will arrive at Plot 2A, marked in light blue,…

…a plot that we have visited briefly before, a long time ago, and which we shall look at more closely next post, when we shall also cross over into the civil cemetery (honest, guv), which just happens to be beyond the bush and trees on the right of this shot.