Sunday Stamps: commemorating a battle or disaster

Today's theme of Sunday Stamps is 'commemorating a battle or disaster'.

Personally I consider each battle, each war, a disaster. After so many decades, centuries, millennia, many people still invent the disastrous wheel of 'fight-against-them' and still didn't learn that 'them' and 'we' always is 'us', 'humans', 'world citizens', having a lot more in common than differences.

Searching my stamps collection, I couldn't find stamps which commemorate a single battle. So let me first share with you this postcard instead, showing the result of the four battles that have taken place here.
My dear ones had taken this postcard home for me. Last Thursday they happened to visit Ieper in Belgium, while I had to stay home and go to work. The postcards (I got more) and their stories increased my attention to WW1.



This postcard shows a painting by the Australian born artist William Longstaff. He painted it in 1927, after attending the unveiling of the Menin Gate Memorial in Ieper. This memorial records the names of nearly 55,000 of the missing of the Ypres Salient. At first sight it looks like a common painting of a memorial and its surroundings. But if you look close, do you see the ghost soldiers, too?!

An other postcard shows an other kind of devastation by war. The beautiful Lakenhalle in Ieper (Ypres Cloth Hall) was virtually destroyed by artillery during this First World War:



The picture has been made by one of the brothers Antony of Antony d'Ypres.
Fortunately the building has been reconstructed, between 1933 and 1967, to its prewar condition.

Back to stamps, as the theme is Sunday Stamps! And forward to the Second World War, and north to the Netherlands.

The battles which took place in the Netherlands in WWII have been relatively short, from 10 to 14 May 1940 in the greater part of the country, and until 17 May in the province Zeeland.
The battles are commemorated, especially in this '75 years after' year. However, as far as I know there haven't been issued Dutch commemorating stamps on these battles.

However several interesting stamps have been issued on various themes concerning WWII.
Of which I only have the following four:

This one on "verzet" (resistance):



And on the "geallieerden" (allies):



Operation Market Garden, in September 1944:



Operations Manna and Chowhound, end of April and first week of May 1945, in which food was dropped into the still occupied western part of the Netherlands, where the Dutch famine took a lot of victims:




Back to WWI, southward to Ieper, Belgium.
Ieper was the place where in 1915 the Canadian army physician and poet John McCrae wrote his poem 'In Flanders Fields'. The museum here is named after this poem, and the Poppies became an important symbol of this sad war. You can see a stamp in honour of the poppy on Eva's blog post of today.



For anyone who is curious to know where this museum is: it is located in the reconstructed Lakenhalle, the fore-mentioned Cloth Hall:



See more stamps on battles and disasters at today's Sunday Stamps and the links under the posts.