World War - The Great War Tour - The Missing

Good morning, we are continuing with the Great War Tour with Norm Christie Series.  I am still unsure how I feel like this is an appropriate series to share even though it is part of World War I history.  I am watching this series for you teachers, so you do not have to when it comes to planning what documentaries to show during normal class time or when there is a substitute teacher in the room.  I press on.   This episode has a run time of 48:55 and is called the Missing.

Of the 60,000 Canadian soldiers, 20,000 of those soldiers were declared missing during the Great War.  12,000 names are engraved by a memorial at Vimy Ridge.  Each name tells a different story.  One soldier was Frank McGee and he scored fourteen goals during the Stanley Cup.  These are men that simply vanished for their families back home.  Norm Christie hopes to fill in the blanks of these vanished lives.  Christie continues driving through the countryside on his war tour.  The beautiful countryside is a stark contrast to what the countryside looked like during the Great War.

His first stop in this episode is the Cabaret Rouge Cemetery, a place with 7,500 hundred burials.  60% of these burials are unknown.  These headstones are marked “Unknown but unto God.”  There were so many men killed that nobody recorded the dead.  The living focused on survival.  The living mattered, the dead did not. After the battle, a burial team would go out and pull off the tags.  Once this tag was pulled from a later team the soldier would become an unknown soldier.  Additionally, men could be blown to pieces from a shell.

In the early years of the war, there was no official team to go out to record and bury the soldiers under their names.  In the heat of battle, the dead were thrown into holes and were marked.  Sometimes later battles would destroy these temporary graves.

After the war ended, exhumation teams would go into the battlefields and recover the bodies.  These bodies were going to be put into official cemeteries.  Then the bodies would be committed to the cemeteries.  The work was both gruesome and dangerous.  The men who did this work had to be careful when they dug.  One crew was killed instantly when it hit a bomb.  Over 125,000 bodies were discovered and these bodies were interned in these cemeteries.  Is there any way these stories can be completed and the men identified?  The information in this section was pretty overwhelming.

Christie tours another cemetery and highlights what he did to identify who was buried in a grave in a cemetery.  He looked at the records and by process of elimination discovered that there was only one man missing from this company.  The headstone was able to get changed to have the soldier’s name.  The soldier was Fred Lockhart and he was only eighteen years old.  Christie points to other examples in the cemetery where unknown soldiers went to known soldiers.  He talks about identifying soldiers by process of elimination to help identify the dead.

Christie then makes his way to Pheasant Woods Cemetery.  This was the site of an Australian defeat.  The remains of Australian soldiers were discovered.  Pheasant Woods is unique because it was a cemetery established in 2009 for World War I dead.  Over 400 men were unaccounted for and historians carefully examined photographs and records to determine where these men were buried.  Aerial photographs at the time of the Great War show an area of six shallow graves: these were the remains of the Australian dead.  If you want to learn more about the story of this cemetery you should watch the rest of this episode.

The section on the burials was pretty interesting.  Christie provided some details as to what the exhumation squads did to help identify and bury the dead.  For some reason, I thought there was a somber tone to this episode in comparison to the first episode I shared.  Maybe it was the tone of the music, I do not know.  This would be a good episode to show to demonstrate research methods.  Overall, this was a stronger episode in comparison to the first one I reviewed.