34 replies to this topic

[Perth Digger]

I've been reading a lot of memoirs/biographies recently and have noticed that there are some examples of theft from the dead on the battlefield, British as well as German.  I don't think it was very common, but it did happen.  Relatives also frequently complained that certain valuable effects, eg, rings, were missing.  I realise that many relatives had no conception of the chaos of the battlefield and that when clearing battlefields some weeks or months after an attack, the most that would be recovered would be the identity disc.  However, there are clear cases that were more than "souveniring".  I was wondering if anyone has examples of battlefield theft?  Also, does anyone know if pilferers were ever tried for this offence and, if so, at what level?  Were these crimes dealt with by company commanders, or were offenders sent higher up the legal chain?  I am focusing on personal possessions rather than army materials.  Both Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves were victims of theft (not on the battlefield, of course).  I make a distinction between scrounging, souveniring and stealing and am interested in British units, not Dominion units.


Thanks


Mike

[auchonvillerssomme]

Probably far more common than you think
This is part of a question raised in Parliament. HC Deb 31 December 1916
Major C. HUNTER
Not only did I receive hundreds of letters from people all over the country, but I received letters from general officers on the subject. Naturally those letters are private and confidential, and I will only read one extract from one of the letters, which I shall be willing to show to any hon. Member who desires to see it. It is from a general officer in Gallipoli. Referring to my question, he said: ‘I should say that in 75 per cent. of cases the bodies of dead officers were completely rifled of everything of value.’ He went on to say: ‘My blood boils still when I think of my dead officers in Gallipoli, everything taken off their bodies—glasses, wrist watches, money, trinkets, etc. Their bodies were never for one moment in the hands of the Turks.’

[chrislock]

[quote name='auchonvillerssomme' timestamp='1336303659' post='1748455']
Probably far more common than you think
This is part of a question raised in Parliament. HC Deb 31 December 1916
Major C. HUNTER
Not only did I receive hundreds of letters from people all over the country, but I received letters from general officers on the subject. Naturally those letters are private and confidential, and I will only read one extract from one of the letters, which I shall be willing to show to any hon. Member who desires to see it. It is from a general officer in Gallipoli. Referring to my question, he said: ‘I should say that in 75 per cent. of cases the bodies of dead officers were completely rifled of everything of value.’ He went on to say: ‘My blood boils still when I think of my dead officers in Gallipoli, everything taken off their bodies—glasses, wrist watches, money, trinkets, etc. Their bodies were never for one moment in the hands of the Turks.’
[/quote

Read and be amazed by this soldiers story....

http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/fiftyaustralians/24.asp

[Perth Digger]

Thanks for that AVS, I'll follow up that in Hansard.  
Thanks, too, Chris.  I've seen that photo before.  One wonders what size his knapsack was!

Mike

[edwin astill]

Taking things from dead Germans was pretty much accepted.  My grandfather told me that the etiquette was to leave the pockets sleeves inside out so that the next chap could see that the body had been searched, and spare him the bother of a needless (and probably unpleasant )search.

As far as British taking things from British, I would not be surprised if people were less scrupulous when coming across the body of a man from another regiment.   If you have spent several years surrounded by death you may have a different set of values from those you started with.

Edwin

[Moonraker]

Impossible to say, I know, but I wonder how much thieving was done by "comrades", how much by burial parties and how much in casualty clearing stations and hospitals? Did not some soldiers say that RAMC stood for "Rob All My Comrades"?

Moonraker

[nthornton19179]

Van Emden's 'The quick and the dead' describes in detail this very subject (giving various accounts)



I'd reccomend the book btw


Neil

[Perth Digger]

Edwin: there's confirmation of pockets being turned inside out in an obscure book, Combed Out, by F. A. Voigt, published in 1920 (and now reprinted).  Voigt was in a labour company and very anti-war.  I'm not sure, but I think his first name was Fritz.

Moonraker: Yes, there are certainly cases of survivors in hospitals losing their valuables.  I think the best chance a dead man had, in periods of intense fighting, of getting his valuables returned to his family was if his effects ended up with the battalion quartermaster, whose job it was to record them and ensure they were parcelled up.  

Neil: Thanks, I've read Van Emden, who has a passage about money being taken from the body of a corporal in the company.  So it could occur very close to home, as it were.

Thanks to all.

Mike

[Perth Digger]

Edwin: there's confirmation of pockets being turned inside out in an obscure book, Combed Out, by Frederick Augustus Voigt, published in 1920 (and now reprinted and available on-line).  Voigt was in a labour company and very anti-war and, in my view, pro-German.  He was later a journalist with the Guardian.

Moonraker: Yes, there are certainly cases of survivors in hospitals losing their valuables.  I think the best chance a dead man had, in periods of intense fighting, of getting his valuables returned to his family was if his effects ended up with the battalion quartermaster, whose job it was to record them and ensure they were parcelled up.  

Neil: Thanks, I've read Van Emden, who has a passage about money being taken from the body of a corporal in the company.  So it could occur very close to home, as it were.

Thanks to all.

Mike

[auchonvillerssomme]

I have been trying to find the reference to a RAMC Corporal who after the war opened a pharmacy, locally questions were asked about how a man could go to war as a pharmacy assistant and return with enough money to open a shop.

[Lancashire Fusilier]

1917 photograph caption reads :-

" British prisoners of war search the bodies of dead soldiers for valuables while a German guard makes an inventory. "

Attached Files

•  checking bodies.jpg   57.58K   6 downloads

[Moonraker]

Did the British Army (or any other) have regulations about this sort of thing? Mike in the first post says "I make a distinction between scrounging, souveniring and stealing", though no doubt some of us will interpret these definitions in different ways. Personal documents such as letters and diaries (banned, I think, but...) might have provided useful intelligence. Taking money would appear to be stealing. And what happened to the inventorised valuables in the photo above?  Were these returned to the next-of-kin - I vaguely recall this happening with British families, but usually in the context of the contents of an officer's kitbag left behind in his quarters. And what about the tradition of auctioning off a dead man's belongings, with the proceeds being sent to the family? I suspect that when there were thousands of casualties after a day's fighting not much was done at all except to get the bodies buried.


Moonraker

[hazel clark]

Will Bird, in his book "Ghosts Have Warm Hands", makes mention of stretcher bearers taking 500 francs from  a dead Canadian officer.
H.C.

Moonraker, on 06 May 2012 - 04:04 PM, said:

Impossible to say, I know, but I wonder how much thieving was done by "comrades", how much by burial parties and how much in casualty clearing stations and hospitals? Did not some soldiers say that RAMC stood for "Rob All My Comrades"?

Moonraker

[geraint]

A soldier pillaging a dead comrade always had the excuse that he was retrieving personal effects to hand in to the company orderly.

[Perth Digger]

Belated thanks for all the comments.

[Alun Thomas]

Serjeant P/349 H . A. Collison DCM, Military Police Staff Corps (G.H.Q. Detective Staff), who died on 04/07/1918, was murdered  by 2nd Lieutenant John Paterson (3rd Bn attached 1st Bn Essex Regiment) during an attempt to arrest the latter for desertion the previous day. He is buried at grave IV.C.13 at Les Baraques Military Cemetery, Sangatte. He  was awarded his DCM for investigating the theft of property from the dead in the front line while under fire. There is more given under a thread on the Forum entitled 'Henry Collison or Collinson'.

[Crunchy]

From a family point of view my Great Uncle (avatar) was killed at Anzac and very few of his possessions were returned to Australia. In a remarkable turn of fate, in the early 1930's an english woman visited his brother's (my Grandfather) homestead in Western Australia and stayed for a few weeks. She had with her a kangaroos skin rug which had been given to her by an english officer who had been at Gallipoli. My grandfather mentioned that his brother had one that looked exactly the same which he had taken away to the war but was never returned. When they examined the rug they found the initials ODHH in the corner; my Great Uncle's initials. It was the same rug. My mother was there at the time.

Amazing that it turned up.

Regards
Chris

[roel22]

The caption in post #11 could also have read: 'British POW's search the bodies of dead soldiers, looking for ID".
Many families of the British/Australian dead buried after Fromelles were notified their loved ones had been buried by the Germans.

Roel

[themonsstar]

The two pictures are from the lists which was sent back to the Germans,by the Red Cross of deceased German servicemen found by British invasion, I'm sure the Germans will have been doing the same.

pic number two

Attached Files

•  Dead German Soldiers No 1.JPG   42.04K   5 downloads
•  Dead German Soldiers No 2.JPG   48.48K   3 downloads

[themonsstar]

This is part of what Edwin said post 5, " If you have spent several years surrounded by death you may have a different set of values from those you started with."

I would so try this for a couple of days or a couple of months on or around a battlefield, you would then understand how low human nature would get,when it comes to dealing with dead bodies of the enemies or your own side, sticking cigarettes in the mouths of dead enemy soldiers is quite tame to what really goes on the battlefield, I suspect my grandfathers generation would be no different.

Skipping and a couple of generations and going back to that period,some of the soldiers came from areas of mass poverty, they had never even seen some of the equipment, jewellery, watches & money.  

What use is that to a dead man on a battlefield, when your whole life is contained in what you can carry in your pack on your back.

[PJA]

That horrible pun on the initials of the Royal Army Medical Corps speaks volumes :

RAMC = Rob All My Comrades

Not nice, not fair, but suggests how things were perceived.

Phil (PJA)

[Ianander]

Hi Mike
             In the war Diary for the Highland Battalion ( 2nd Black Watch & 1st Seaforth Highlanders ) there is looting after a battle in Iraq in 1916
here is the extract

     At about 11-20am  the Turks showed a Crescent Hospital flag in their from line and without further ado advance from their position in their third trench.
    In front many stretchers were carried and although all were armed their intentions were most pacific and entirely concentrated on looting rifles and clothing excepting their Doctors, a few in number, who attended the wounded and some unwounded from between their 2nd and 3rd lines were seen being removed. After reference we sent out a red cross flag and by 2pm recovered at least 150 wounded who would have perished had lay lain out all day in the sun. We also got back 10 unwounded men who in small parties were pinned to the ground in the vicinity of the enemy’s front line.

Regards
Ian

[PJA]

This very week, almost as if on cue to mark the 197th anniversary of the Batlte of Waterloo, the nearly complete skeleton of a soldier has been unearthed during the construction of a new car park near the Lion Mound.  There is a musket ball still embedded between his ribs, and the location of the body near a British hospital suggests that he was almost certainly one of Wellington's men. More pertinently to the theme of this thread, there are several coins buried with him. Looting of the dead - and the wounded and dying - was commonplace in that era ; the callousness of everyday life was intensified on the battlefield.  The local peasantry were said to have murdered the wounded as they plundered the field. The discovery of these coins is all the more remarkable.  Why, I wonder, weren't they taken by the people who buried him ?

Apparently,  they sometimes refrained one hundred years before the Great War.....


Phil (PJA)

[Huw Davies]

The dead of Waterloo even had their teeth looted. Comparativley young men, and very little sugar was to be had, so the teeth were healthy and in great demand for dentures. For years afterwards people with dentures were said to have a "Waterloo smile". Some years later the burial pits of Waterloo were dug up, the bones pulverised, bagged and exported back to the UK for use as agricultural fertilizer.

[PJA]

Huw Davies, on 19 June 2012 - 05:54 AM, said:

Some years later the burial pits of Waterloo were dug up, the bones pulverised, bagged and exported back to the UK for use as agricultural fertilizer.

Now that's taking theft from the bodies a bit too far !  Actually taking the bodies themselves !

I wonder if the story's true.

Phil (PJA)