IDENTIFYING WAR GRAVES.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 June 1922, Page 3

IDENTIFYING WAR GRAVES.

. A TASK OF. DIFFICULTY. GALLIPOLI AND MESOPOTAMIA. MANY UNKNOWN SOLDIERS. .. The Minister of Defence has received a communication from, the Imperial War Graves Commission on the subject of unknown graves. The message gives further evidence of the difficulties experienced by search parties in locating graves, and in identifying bodies exhumed from isolated graves on the battlefields of France and Belgium. All the areas in which fighting took place have been searched and researched; in some instances as many as six times, but owing to most of the ground having been under constant heavy shellfire, the whole surface has been completely altered so that landmarks and grave registration marks have been obliterated. In the majority of cases where bodies have been located, the absence of identification discs has made identification impossible unless some trinket or other imperishable article carried by a soldier was found to bear his name. Taking two cemeteries only, one in each country, the position is: Guards’ Cemetery (Belgium), 2192 unknown burials and 1156 known; New Irish Farm Cemetery (France), 2550 unknown burials, and 1193 unknown. The New Irish Farm Cemetery is 14 I miles from Ypres, and the Guards’ Ceme- ' tery is 12 mile from Combles; and as the New Zealand Division was in 'opera- i tion against the enpmy in the neighborhood of these burial-grounds—in the Bat- ; tie of Passchendaele in the case of the ; former and in the first Battle of the • Somme in the case of the latter—there is every possibility that the bodies of many of our fallen for whom no burial reports have been received have been reinterred ' in these cemeteries as “unknown.” There are many cemeteries containing a very large proportion of unknown graves, and the commission has decided that every such grave shall have its individual head- I stone. Where it has been possible to I identify a body as that of a deceased member of the N.Z.E.F., the inscription on the headstone will be: “In Memory of a New Zealand Soldier Known unto God.” The death casulaties notified to the Im- ! perial War Graves Commission total approximately 1,000,000, divided as follow: British Forces 684,000 Dominion and Colonial Forces .. 140*000 Indian and Native African Troops (including Indian followers) 64,000 Royal Navy 35>000 1 Royal Air Force 5 600 Mercantile Marine (approx.) 15*000 Native African followers 50,000 Of this number more than 19,000 graves ' had been located and registered at March 31, 1921; the number in France and Belgium to that date was 503,025, in Egypt and Palestine 35,862,. in Macedonia 11,283. The percentage of unidentified graves is largest in the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia. Out of about 31,000 death casualties reported by the forces in the Dardanelles, only 7313 graves have been identified in Gallipoli, in addition to 2557 in the different islands of the Aegean. In Mesopotamia, out of nearly 40,000 death casualties, only 7169 graves have been identified.