Memorials to the Missing

  

Verdun Douaumont Ossuary

The historians who advised the producers of the classic BBC/PBS series The Great War (1996) estimated that the total number of personnel reported “Missing” by all combatant forces in WWI was about 7.75 million, or about 35 percent of total casualties. In after-action reports the casualties were usually estimated, and as the war progressed, these estimates became less accurate. In fact, the only two combatant forces that kept consistently good records at all were the British Empire and the Americans. 

The majority of the missing are from the Eastern Front, where (1) there were huge numbers of POWs taken on both sides, many of whom were never accounted for; (2) there were large numbers of desertions, also on both sides; and (3) almost all casualties were buried in unmarked, often mass, graves.  

British Empire missing in WWI were officially tallied as 191,652 or 21 percent, of total killed or died. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists on its 127 memorials around the world the names of 397,431 personnel who have no known grave. Thus, somewhere around 205,779 were tallied as dead but their remains are unidentified, lost, or buried at sea. The official total of the fallen was 908,371. 

 A British scholar has this rule of thumb: about half of the British dead lie in known burial places (not necessarily individual graves), about a quarter are buried in sites but not identified, and the  remains of the rest have not been found. In all the CWGC cemeteries there are about 587,000  known burials and 559,000 unknown burials; these numbers include burials from other conflicts. 

Today the CWGC maintains burial sites in 1,992 locations on the Western Front alone. During the war there were many thousands of temporary cemeteries and individual burial sites, and the  consolidation process was inexact. On visiting CWGC cemeteries, one is struck by the large  number of individual graves that bear no names. Some are even merely tagged “A Soldier of the  Great War”, so some of these remains are certainly French or German. 

 

 The Menin Gate Memorial, Ieper, Belgium, newly restored by the CWGC

Every year additional remains are found, usually as a result of construction, archeological work, or metal detecting. Attempts are made to identify these through artifactual research, war diary entries, and even DNA, if possible.   

In the case of the Americans, the math is much simpler. In 1926 it was determined that there were 4,452 Americans missing (or 3.8 percent of total U.S. losses), and all are commemorated by name on memorial walls at American Battle Monuments Commission cemetery chapels, of which there are just 13. Today the actual number of missing is smaller, as the remains of some Americans have subsequently been found. ABMC cemeteries have 30,921 burials, of which 1,674 (5.4 percent) are marked “Unknown.” At the time of the construction of the permanent cemeteries, American families were given the choice of leaving the remains in the theater or returning them to the U.S., and by over 2 to 1 they chose to bring them home at government expense. 

Comparing the British Empire to the U.S., why are the American ratios of the missing to total casualties and unknown to known burials so much smaller? The answer is simple: American soldiers’ remains didn’t have as much time to get lost. The duration of the combat was much shorter, mostly a little over four months, and the U.S. forces were moving ever forward; the ground wasn’t changing hands and being relentlessly shelled by both sides. 

 

Montfaucon American Monument, unveiled in 1937

  Jim Patton