18 replies to this topic

[magscotabroad]

For the first time today I stopped at the Loos Memorial, took a walk round it and took some photos for a member, and I can't remember seeing one with so many unknown graves in just one cemetery, and I was wondering do we have statistics for each cemetery, to know exactly how many graves have names on them, and how many are unidentified.
thanks for any info
mags

[spoons]

I was at Poelcappelle cemetery last week and was told that it has the highest number of unknown graves at around 84%

\Spoons

[magscotabroad]

I never thought that it could be so many, I know that there are a lot of names on the different bays when the bodies weren't recovered, but I am really surprised to see that so many recovered bodies were left unidentified

mags

[Michelle Young]

Mags
The original regsiters list how many unknowns but the new ones just say nearly X amount of casualties of which X are unknown. Sometimes they have a table with a breakdown in the regsiters. I wish the CWGC had just scanned the roiginals rather than produce those bland dummed down ones!

Michelle

[centurion]

magscotabroad, on 04 July 2012 - 07:51 PM, said:

I never thought that it could be so many, I know that there are a lot of names on the different bays when the bodies weren't recovered, but I am really surprised to see that so many recovered bodies were left unidentified

mags

Some bodies will have been buried once maybe more times before they were consolidated into the final cemetery. Original grave markers may well have been lost so that what what was once an identified body became unidentified.

[SPOF]

Mags

VC Corner Cemetery (not the Memorial behind it) at Fromelles is entirely made up of unknown soldiers. To quote the CWGC:

"V.C. Corner Cemetery was made after the Armistice. It contains the graves of 410 Australian soldiers who died in the Attack at Fromelles and whose bodies were found on the battlefield, but not a single body could be identified. It was therefore decided not to mark the individual graves, but to record on a memorial the names of all the Australian soldiers who were killed in the engagement and whose graves were not known."

Part of the reason for this is that during the search and recovery of the wounded after 19th July 1916, many identity discs were removed from the fallen as proof of his death. There were also remains from the other battles at Fromelles in cvtober 1914 and 9th May 1915.  Rather than have a cemetery full of headstones saying KUG, they laid larges crosses and some lovely rose bushes and is an extrremely powerful message about the Unknowns and Missing.

As far as I know, it is the only CWGC cemetery to consist only of unkown men.

Glen

[PJA]

Here is a breakdown of the most famous - and the biggest - of all CWGC cemeteries, Tyne Cot :

Unidentified :  3,488 (29.2%)
Partly Identified :  5,436
Memorial tablets : 101
Identified : 2,936 (24.5%)

Total :  11,961

The essential fact  is that just under one quarter of all the dead interred here are fully identified.

The Partly Identified ( 45.5%) are buried with a headstone which might indicate nationality, or regiment, or rank or perhaps even date of death.

The Memorial Tablets ( 0.85%) relate to presumed graves or memorial stones for graves which have been lost.

I got this info. from Franky Bostyn's book

Passchendaele 1917  The Story Of the Fallen And Tyne Cot Cemetery




Phil (PJA)

[chrislock]

Phil.

Franky has produced an excellent book in general however he has made a common glaring error as many visitors to CWGC cemeteries do and that is to to assume all soldiers under the base level KUG headstones are unknown British soldiers from the British empire. He reveals this statement on page 286.

I have written confirmation from the CWGC that in many cases, nothing whatsoever is known of the men buried under these stones and that includes nationality. The fact is many of these without doubt will be German and others and this will upset the figures as can be seen when mathematics and casualty lists are applied to the cemeteries.

I hope this helps.

Chris

[PJA]

That had occurred to me, Chris.

I actually thought about it when I wrote the post, and I thought to myself that there must be some Germans buried as KUG...." many" ?

Perhaps one or at most two per cent. Who knows ?

Would the number be sufficiently high to distort the arithmetic in general terms ?  I don't think so.

But your point is valid, and i take it.

Phil (PJA)

[chrislock]

Well I can only go by the evidence as supplied by the CWGC and I confirm:

Nothing whatsoever is known about many of the men who rest at peace under base line KUG headstones, even their nationalities are unknown. I am intrigued that if this is the case, how do you come up with 2% at the most?

If nothing whatsoever is known in many of the cases, how do you apply correct and valid arithmatic?

Chris

[PJA]

Guesswork, supposition ; I must admit, Chris, that I cannot substantiate my suggestion about the one or two per cent.

It's what I think, but not what I know.

I notice in some CWGC cemeteries that there are little plots containing German dead, identified as such.

I'm thinking on my feet as I write this, so if I seem to be confused and contradictory in my statements, then please indulge me...

Tyne Cot contains a much lower than average number of identified dead. But fewer than thirty per cent of them are "absolutely" unidentified.  For two per cent of the cemetery's total dead to be German would require that they account for nearly seven per cent of all those marked KUG. Possible, of course : but plausible ?  I wonder.

You pose a convincing challenge to the statements made by Martin Middlebrook, who predicates his tabulations of British dead in the Somme battlefields on the assumption that the KUGs in the cemeteries are all from the British Empire.

This is beginning to bother me.

I'll keep thinking and try and bolster up my suggestions.

Phil (PJA)

[steve morse]

spoons, on 04 July 2012 - 07:49 PM, said:

I was at Poelcappelle cemetery last week and was told that it has the highest number of unknown graves at around 84%

\Spoons

Poelcappelle is also a cemetery from after the war. Men from 1915 can be found there and as far away as Hooge.
7478 graves of which 6231 are unknown, so 84% is close.

Poelcappelle taken by 9th Bn Sherwood Foresters on 4 October 1917, the day Fred Greaves won his VC
Steve M

[Peter Woodger]

Chris
I know that this is an old bone of contention but let me argue against you.
When CWGC staff are dealing with records they are dealing with British Nationals, Australian Nationals, Canadian Nationals, New Zealand Nationals, South African Nationals and Indian Nationals.To them the British are British but the others are not, they are a different Nationality. It is true that many bodies wearing Kharki could not be identified by Nation with this definition of Nation
For Nation to mean French or German then there would have to be no scrap of uniform left on the body of either blue or field gray. The majority of clearance was done by Labour Companies in 1919/1920 and they were paid an extra fee per day for the job of handling decomposing bodies. It is inconcievable to imagine flesh still there but the uniform gone.
I know that you believe you interpretation but I for one do not.
Peter

[chrislock]

Well put Phil and at first I had my reservations but the forum has today raised such vast interest in the cemeteries and burials by asking itself who is actually buried within the CWGC cemeteries under base line KUG headstones it just got to me: just as yourself we are now collectively asking very deep questions.

The fact is, cemeteries are filled with "A soldier of the Great War" "A British/Australian/Canadian/New Zealand Soldier" etc etc etc and so my wife posed a letter to the CWGC HQ asking who is actually resting at peace under base line KUG burials.
It took a while for the response to appear but when it did arrive we were amazed! The response states that nothing whatsoever is known of the men who rest in peace below base line KUG headstones. I always assumed that were unknown British but no longer.

The evidence supplied via this incredible forum has changed my entire perception of who rests at peace within the cemeteries today however, it does not bother me too much as whoever is buried wherever, they are all commemorated somewhere and as long as the CWGC gardeners do as they do then I am mostly happy with that.

Martin Middlebrook may well believe that all KUG burials are British and who am I to challenge that but the CWGC response in my wife's care does not agree with that statement.

Chris

[chrislock]

Again well put Peter and thank God we all have our own reasoning. It makes healthy and acurate debate but I can only go on sourced evidence and to not believe or ignore the information being released by the organisation who is responsible for the dead, in my head that doesnt fit.

Milena is currently touring the Russian WW2 battlefields and returns on Sunday. I will secure and post her CWGC response on her return and if memory serves me correctly, it also may state that not not only is nothing known on the identity of the men, but their nationality is not known likewise!! Nowhere does the letter state that base line KUG are unknown British empire burials but I guess you are right in one way, we all believe what we wish to believe and if I fall into the catagory also then so be it. Where do we go from here then?

[Peter Woodger]

Another point to consider is the figures used by Hurst in his 1929 book The Silent Cities. He was encouraged to write the book by IWGC who gave him the figures to use. In describing Serre Road 1 he says that there are 2106 Uk, 149 Australian, 123 Canadian, 27 New Zealand, 6 South African and 1 Newfoundland. Note no Unknowns at all. These could well be the figures used by IWGC to aportion costs between the Nations but none are attributed to the French or Germans.

Did you ever ask CWGC if their answer accepted that there were a large proportion of French and German burials amongst the "Soldiers of the Great War"?

A most intriging sublect

Peter

[PJA]

What took me back when I consulted Franky Bostyn's tabulation was the very large number of " Partially Identified".  I should have been aware of this : heck, I've visited Tyne Cot a few times.  Strange how you can see things, but fail to register them properly. I had just made a sweeping assumption that they were either Known or Unknown, and failed to appreciate how many of them were identified to a degree....nearly half of them in the case of Tyne Cot.

Is it possible, Chris, that the CWGC reply to Milena'a question was rather ingenuous ?  Many big institutions - even the CWGC  - employ their share of " spotty kids" who might be out of their depth when dealing with some of the questions.

Everything about the work of the Commission suggests to me that, from the outset, phenomenal efforts were made to provide every casualty with either proper identified burial, or, failing that, a decent commemoration by name.  Where there was doubt, it was openly countenanced and admitted : hence the Special Memorials with their " believed to be" inscriptions, and the " Duhallow Block" practice that Seige Gunner told us about in another thread,

If the number of German dead buried as KUGs was significant, wouldn't the Commission have made something of this ?

The notion of large numbers of Germans - and here I'm talking about many thousands - lying in CWGC cemeteries as KUGs just doesn't " feel right".

And yet, Chris, I have to admit that perhaps - for me - it's a case of the " wish being father to the thought."  I place great reliance on the data from CWGC registers as a means of assessing the scale of British casualties in certain battles, and the prospect of my calculations being thrown out of kilter by the presence of significant numbers of Germans being included as KUGs is disconcerting.

There is, however, an unequivocal comment made by Franky Bostyn on page 286 of his book :

The un-identified from the UK have graves with the words " A Soldier of the Great War - Known unto God." This indicates that at the time of burial it could only be confirmed that this was a soldier from the British Empire.

Could it be that Franky was just unable - or unwilling - to deal with this vexatious question of unidentified Germans lying amidst a British Empire war cemetery ?  Is he mistaken ?  Or is he making that statement from sure knowledge ?

The great consolation, from an idealistic point of view, is the notion that if Germans are buried as KUGs, then all dead soldiers, from both sides, are given due honour.

Phil (PJA)

[roel22]

Peter Woodger, on 05 July 2012 - 04:00 PM, said:

For Nation to mean French or German then there would have to be no scrap of uniform left on the body of either blue or field gray. The majority of clearance was done by Labour Companies in 1919/1920 and they were paid an extra fee per day for the job of handling decomposing bodies. It is inconcievable to imagine flesh still there but the uniform gone.

From Peter E. Hodgkinson, author of Clearing The Dead:
By 14 March 1919 there had been only 1,750 exhumations (...) Nine men were needed per exhumation per day (...).

At the 37th meeting of the IWGC on 18 October 1921, after the labour companies had returned home, it was recorded:
"Sir Robert Hudson said that if it was known to the public that bodies were being found at the rate of 200 a week at the time the search parties were disbanded, the public would want an explanation."

In the summer of 1922 James Ghillies, Minister of Lesmahagon, whose son was missing at Serre, wrote: "I visited the Somme district in November last. The ground for the most part lay as at the Armistice - & thousands of unknown British soldiers are being brought up as the work of restoration proceeds."
So after 1921 the work of the labour companies was far from over.

Roel

[Peter Woodger]

Roel
Yes I should have been more pedantic and said from mid 1919 since the work of the Labour companies did not get going until then.
In their annual report of 1927 the IWGC said that 20,00 bodies had been found since the IWGC took over from the Army. Looking at this figure in relation to the total number I still say that the majority were cleared by the Labour companies from mid 1919 to 1920.
As for Sir Robert, his figure would mean 10,000 per year and this figure is not supported by IWGC reports.
Peter