A new project is being launched to honour hundreds of “forgotten” soldiers from both world wars who are not currently commemorated.
The National Army Museum, in west London, has established a dedicated unit to investigate cases where the deaths of soldiers, sailors and airmen from the conflicts were inadvertently overlooked by the authorities.
Once each case has been verified, the name of the fallen serviceman will be passed on to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in order to ensure it is added to a memorial.
The project starts this month and is to run for two years. There is already a backlog of 360 names, submitted by relatives and amateur historians, and the museum believes that this year’s centenary of the outbreak of the First World War will lead to a far greater number of names being put forward, as people research their family history and make discoveries.
Every British or Commonwealth soldier killed in either war should be commemorated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. However, bureaucratic lapses mean that many were accidentally omitted from the records.
Some experts have suggested there could be as many as 10,000 names mistakenly left off the records, which could now be added.
Among them was Lance Corporal Peter Pollock, 21, killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The omission was detected by amateur historians and his name has been added to the Thiepval Memorial, in France, to those killed in the battle for whom there is no known grave.
The task of investigating such claims was previously performed by the Ministry of Defence, but it will now be taken on by the dedicated, two man team at the museum, in Chelsea, as part of its plans to mark the centenary.
David Bownes, assistant director of the National Army Museum, said: “Restoring honour to the casualties of the World Wars is a deserving enterprise and one that the National Army Museum’s experts are well-equipped to investigate and substantiate.”
The majority of the missing names discovered so far by researchers are from the First World War.
The CWGC was not founded until three years into the conflict, in 1917 – initially as the Imperial War Graves Commission – and did not start its work in earnest until after the war ended. Its role was to ensure that every war dead had an official headstone or, if they had no known grave, were commemorated on an official memorial.
It drew up lists of the dead and set about trying to locate those already buried, but in an era before computers, many of the dead appear to have fallen from the records or otherwise been lost in the fog of war.
Many of those omitted were those, like Pollock, the son of a Presbyterian minister, serving in the Royal Irish Rifles, whose bodies were never found.
John Bull, from Stockport, was also killed on the first day of the Somme – July 1 1916 – and like Pollock his body was never recovered.
Bull had enlisted in the second Pals battalions of the Manchester Regiment in September 1914, alongside three brothers, Ernest, William and Abraham.
Due to an error, his death was not properly recorded – although that of his brother Ernest, fatally wounded on the same day, was – and his name was not passed on to the Commission, until it was found to be missing by researchers. His name has now joined Pollock’s on the Thiepval memorial.
Many of those overlooked died of wounds or illness, away from the front line, among them Reginald Buckman, 25, a footman from Ardingly, Sussex who was serving as a Bombardier in the Royal Field Artillery. He died of his injuries in hospital in London in October 1916, a month after being shot on the Western Front. He now has an official headstone on his grave in Highbrook, West Sussex.
Wednesday 08 January 2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/10557073/Project-to-honour-unrecorded-WW1-dead.html
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