For this episode viewer discretion is advised.
Death during the Great War came in many forms;
exploding into a bloody mist while your battlecruiser was destroyed at the Battle of Jutland,
suffocating or being burned alive by flamethrowers in the Trentino,
being eaten by wolves in the Carpathian mountains, artillery barrages, machine gun barrages,
drowning in mud, poison gas; men died by the hundreds of thousands,
but what happened to the bodies, the remains? That's what I'm going to look at today.
*The Great War theme plays*
I'm Indy Neidell, welcome to a Great War special episode about death and the First World War.
Many of the practices of dealing with the dead during this war were first used
toward the end of the American Civil War.
The enormity of the casualties then created something of a revolution in how a government
treated fallen troops. Traditionally soldiers killed in combat were buried in communal graves that
were not marked as military burial sites, and the locations were often lost to time.
Only famous heroes or leaders got the honour of having a specifically marked grave.
Military burial sites had sprung up in Europe from the mid-19th century, but the soldiers
were not separated into individual graves.
During the American Civil War U.S. Congress set up a program of national cemeteries like Arlington and Gettysburg.
Several hundred thousand men were buried in small cemeteries scattered around the States,
but, after the war, military authorities made a big effort to collect the remains
and rebury them in the national cemeteries.
Fast-forward to the early weeks of this war and the warring nations had no official registers
to report the names and locations of battlefield burials.
You were fortunate if you died in a hospital behind the lines since then you could be buried in
a local cemetery and registered for possible future retrieval.
The families of the dead expected a record of the grave for pilgrimage visits or repatriation,
so comprehensive official war graves registration was soon established, but the Great War
offered serious challenges that were often beyond the means of the limited burial registration available.
The mechanised nature of mass killing meant that many of the dead were lost by battlefield conditions.
Artillery churned the soil and scattered remnants, you could be killed in no-mans land and remain there
for ages, or you could sink and drown in the mud never to be found, and
modern weaponry caused such bodily damage that it wasn't possible to identify, or even find
a complete body for burial. With the limited resources available burial grounds were near battlefields
and were often destroyed or lost.
That's why there are so many missing casualties in so many unknown graves.
Over time specific military units were given the task of grave registration and burial details,
moving away from the tradition of soldiers who had just fought a battle burying their comrades,
which had a terrible effect on morale, or burying the enemy of whom they had no records anyhow.
Burial service was never, as you may imagine, an easy task.
Bodies could lie around for weeks and be a true horror.
One British soldier recounted:...
...
When the Americans arrived with their experience from their civil war, things became somewhat more
professional, and the graves registration services were established.
These consolidated and preserved mortuary records and maintained cemeteries at the rear of the battlefield.
These companies actively supported the front line troops with dedicated units whose primary mission
was the recovery and registration of the newly-dead.
These men took pretty serious risks to identify the fallen, working under shell fire or gas attacks,
they also introduced the idea of getting relatives of fallen soldiers to leave the remains in the country
where they died.
Former president Theodore Roosevelt encouraged this by having his youngest son, Quentin,
buried near where he fell in 1918;...
...he said.
There were also big logistical issues.
Burial services needed accommodation and supplies, and weather could halt them entirely
as happened in the winter of 1918.
A typical burial team was five or six men to exhume the body, transport it to a cemetery, and rebury it.
Burial companies were often squads of thirty-two men.
They carried rubber gloves, shovels, stakes for marking locations, canvas and rope to tie-up remians,
stretchers, disinfectant, and wire cutters.
It was noted that...
When searching for bodies there were indications like rifles or stakes sticking out of the ground bearing helmets
or equipment, partial remains protruding from the ground, rat holes, small bones and things would be
brought to the surface by rats, or discoloration of grass, dirt or water by the bodies beneath.
All of these, and more, could indicate where a body lay buried.
For identification purposes the body was, of course, searched for tags or ID of some sort, but though
identity discs were introduced and gradually popularised, post battle identification
was still difficult.
In April, 1920, British burial services estimated that of those mostly whole bodies found with their effects,
a quarter of them were still unidentifiable, and of the six hundred bodies a week being recoved at the time,
only twenty percent of them were identified.
The post-war burial services ran far from smoothly, with discipline issues, financial problems,
lack of supplies, and lack of staffing because of the huge number of bodies to be recovered.
The nature of the job itself was a big issue as well, depression was marked and common,
as were behavioural problems; drinking, insubordination and so forth, just like those men who saw active combat.
Counting the dead from this war is not an exact science, the German war graves agency estimates
there are eighty-thousand German soldiers in Flanders alone that are unaccounted for,
and barely half of the Western Front dead had been buried in military cemeteries by the end of the war.
Many records from Germany and Russia were destroyed in World War Two.
As for total estimates unaccounted for,...
...
Italy and Russia, and some other nations, don't even have real estimates.
Bodies are still being discovered to this day when roads or houses are built, or found by chance on all the many
battlefields of the war.
From the Alps to the Arabian desert, from the Ukrainian plains to the wrecked ships at the bottom of the seas,
you're looking at well over one million soldiers' bodies unaccounted for.
Over one million. That means that somewhere out there are a million soldiers with no name and no burial,
most never to be found.
One true legacy of the Great War.
Big thanks to Will E. Lutz for the research for this episode.
If you'd like to see a special episode we did about a village that was wiped off the face of the earth
during the war, you can click right here for our special about Fleury.
Please do not forget to subscribe and I will see you next time.