Anybody see Long Lost Family - Unknown Soldiers tonight? Anything related to war history fascinates me but I'll tell you, it really tugs my heart that thousands upon thousands of young kids fell in fields in the war, were buried there, if they were lucky to get a burial, and have laid there for 100 years, unknown, and without their family ever getting to know their whereabouts. The remains of around 60 are found by accident every year apparently. I find myself thankful and grateful that we have a team of people at the MoD dedicated to investigating each set of remains found and moved that they put so much effort into tracing each one so they can be buried with a name on a headstone. These kids were 18 or 19 years old. Never fails to move me. Heroes, every one of them.
I watched the program and was shocked to learn that half a million of the fallen still remain unknown. Shocking statistic.
I watched it as well. My wife and myself once visited Ypres in Belgium to see the Menin Gate and the Tyne Cot Cemetery. It's absolutely staggering when you come to realise how many soldiers gave their lives and never recieved a Christian burial.
I've been doing a lot of work on the WW1 casualties in and around the area over the last couple of years, partly to help (in a small way ) a friend who has been writing a couple of books ' From Pit Town to Battlefields' about the Mexborough lads, but also to help people who wanted to know more about their ancestors contribution and experiences...we all know the numbers of it but it's not until you start delving into details and newspaper records that the scale of personal and family tragedies dawns on you...some of the stories are absolutely heart breaking. I came across one recently where the newspaper ran a story about a lady who had three sons Fred, Harry and Arthur...wounded in 1915, she had letters from Harry and Arthur in hospital, and a letter from a comrade of Fred telling her he had lost a leg. She had said that she was so grateful to be having them home soon. We now know that Fred was actually killed in action and both Arthur and Harry subsequently died of wounds. One typical story that you can see online is that of Katie Morter from Manchester... https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01tcxp4
Visiting relatives in very small isolated North Wales village recently came across the memorial to the 4 young men from that tiny village who were killed in WW1 and WW2. I believe there are virtually no UK communities who didn't lose someone in either WW1 or WW2. It's good that the graves in France/Belgium and other countries are so well looked after as are the memorials to those who died. And those whose remains are now discovered are buried with full Military Honours.
Through the national archive and CWGC website I was able to find the grave of my great uncle James in a tiny, immaculately-kept war cemetery in Northern France. He was a career soldier from Silkstone Common. Corporal in the 10th Hussars, killed in 1916. My 15 year old son Joe and I were the first members of the family to visit his grave, in 2008. We took a bag of soil from Silkstone to dig in around his headstone. We sat with him, took him some flowers and had a picnic lunch. Very touching few hours. Strange how you talk to someone you never knew. Lest we Forget.
Although many of those killed were completely lost ie buried or simply blown to pieces, many thousands were recovered and buried behind the front line, unfortunately as the war ebbed back and forth the graveyards were obliterated by shellfire in later actions. At the end of the war the Govt employed a quarter of a million Chinese labourers for the unenviable task of clearing the battlefields and recovering the dead, sadly the British Govt only issued our troops with cardboard dog tags which perished and made it very difficult to identify individual men. It left them recovering often dozens or more lads of the same regiment with no form of ID.
I would recommend it DSL. It's well worth it. If you do go, make sure you check out any local museums. When we were there we visited one showing photographs taken at the Battle of Passchendaele. While we were in Belgium we also visited the "Venice of the North" Bruges. Hotels were a bit pricey so we booked in at Ostend and used the train to get around, although for Ypres, we took the service bus from Ostend bus station. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menin_Gate
My Grandad died in North Africa in 1942 fighting Rommel, I've checked the war graves web sites before and he's not listed as having a grave anywhere :-(.
Put a request into WW2 talk forum....tell them everything you know and the experts on there will try and help out.
