Posted on 07/24/2007 5:32:08 PM PDT by indcons
They made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, hurling themselves from the trenches before vanishing in a hail of German bullets so thick that it was described by one witness as a "crisscrossed lattice of death".
Now, more than 90 years after hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers died and disappeared in the First World War killing fields of northern France, historians believe they have found several mass graves containing the remains of the "lost army".
The find is the biggest of its kind since the end of the Great War and may lead to the discovery of 399 soldiers who were killed but whose bodies were never found and the building of the first new British war cemetery since the Sixties.
Of the dead, 239 are thought to be from the British 61st Division and 160 from the Australian 5th Division.
The soldiers perished in an Allied attack at Fromelles, 10 miles from Lille, which was fought 91 years ago last week. The battle, in which Adolf Hitler, then a 27-year-old corporal in the Bavarian reserve infantry, is believed to have fought, was intended to divert German attention and troops away from the Battle of the Somme, the main offensive which was raging 50 miles to the south.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Military history ping
PING!
What a mindless loss.
Why? Thats where they died and where they were buried. Exhume them, identify them then give them their proper heros burials then declare the site a national monument...........
The Gardener. Rudyard Kipling's memorial to the British war dead and their families. His only son was killed at Loos.
A war that should have been avoided. There was no reason we should have fought in WWI. Germany would have won and no Nazi Germany, hundreds of thousands would have been saved a needless death, not to mention the millions in WW2.
A good book on WWI is “Illusions of Victory”.
There was a special program on the Military or History channel that also concluded that.
Not all mass graves are the result of torture and firing squads, especially during war.
yitbos
“Germany would have won”. A highly questionable assertion!
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