CWGC NEWSLETTERS

[DuncaninFrance]

The CWGC are now producing a monthly newsletter which should contain some interesting information.
The first one - May 2009 - has just been published and contains a link to some interesting photographs. http://www.cwgc.org/admin/files/Histori ... graphs.pdf
You can subscribe free at http://www.cwgc.org/content.asp?menuid= ... &menu=main

[Niner]

That is fasinating study in the results of war and the price paid by the UK in what had been young lives.

Saw the tail end of a show on public tv the other night. Walter Cronkite had a show about the second world war and its cost in American blood. He was at a monument with the names of thousands of Americans who died as a result of the war and were buried at this particular place in France. He had been a reporter during the war long before he went on to be the first big name US TV news broadcaster. This was a recent production and he is really showing his age now....but he couldn't help the tears as he read some of the names engraved on the wall. They didn't have anything like a full life and he did.

American soldiers who died in WWII or WWI are , for the most part, still buried in the land where they died. Later wars bring all the bodies that can be found home. Men that died in my war in Vietnam are mostly buried in their own home towns. No large fields of crosses. I don't know if that is good or bad.

[DuncaninFrance]

No large fields of crosses. I don't know if that is good or bad.

Um, a good point. I really can't answer that one Robert but the sheer size of the task in repatriating the dead after 1918 & 1945 was impossible. My personal view is that they should rest where they were buried, perhaps with comrades in arms, and in doing so I do believe that it makes remembrance all the more solid as the years go by. Individual memorials are part of that act but when you stand in Tyne Cot or under the Menin Gate with it's 54,876 names of the missing or in the Douaumont Ossuary at Verdun where the bones of 130,000 soldiers lie then the rows of graves and the masses of names instil a pride and a sorrow in me and a gratitude that I feel I owe to each one of them. That is my own personal feeling and one which I hop[e others feel when the visit these sites.

[Woftam]

Individual memorials I think have a very important place. It is very evocative and sometimes heart rendering to come across the memorials erected by family and friends to those who never returned tucked away in a quiet field or by the side of a small country road.
I don't know about Tyne Cot or the Douaumont Ossuary at Verdun Duncan but I have stood under the Menin Gate and listened to the Last Post. I don't think there was a dry eye in the crowd, myself included, by the time it finished.
For me though Villiers-Bretonneux (the memorial in my tag line) brings the pride and gratitude of which you speak Duncan. Second to it would be the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It is sad to see the Roll ablaze with red poppies but sadder that not every name has a poppie next to it.