east_kent_winter_ 2012.pdf - The Western Front Association

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After the event at Chatham, Henk van der Linden visited the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and presented a copy of his book to Commander Jason Phillips, OBE RN, the Commander BRNC. The book is now held in the College Library. Henk has started a group for those interested in the story, and for the relatives of the casualties. He is aiming to produce a quarterly email bulletin to keep everyone up to date with developments and also plans for the centenary commemorations in 2014. His email address is H.van.der.linden@tip.nl for anyone keen to join the group or to contact him. HB WWI remains found in an Italian glacier - 200 pieces of ammunition from WWI frozen in time for nearly a century were discovered this summer after a glacier melted in the mountains of northern Italy. The bodies of two WWI soldiers believed to have been members of an artillery unit in the Austro-Hungarian army were also found at an altitude of 9,850 feet on the Presena glacier, in the Trentino-Alto Adige region. Their remains were flown by helicopter to a hospital in Vicenza, where they will undergo laboratory analysis for identification. They will then be buried in a war cemetery. Experts said that with glaciers melting as a result of climate change, more WWI relics and remains will emerge, testimony to a campaign which cost the lives of a million men, and which Ernest Hemingway called “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery” of the war. Campaign to save WWI training trenches in Scotland A campaign to save trenches at Dreghorn Woods in Colinton is being led by historian Lynne Gladstone Millar, whose father William Ewart Gladstone Millar, was trained there before he was sent to the Somme. Colinton is a suburb about 6km south of Edinburgh. Between 1909 and 1915, the War Office constructed Redford Barracks to the east of the village. The men of the 16th Battalion The Royal Scots would have trained here and dug these trenches in 1915-16 before going to France. Many lost their lives at the Battle of the Somme. As part of the UK government's defence spending review, UK Defence Secretary Liam Fox announced in July 2011, that Redford and Dreghorn Barracks will become surplus to requirements and are earmarked for disposal. Just up the road is Craiglockhart, site of the military hospital where the WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon and others recovered from shell shock and battle fatigue. Representatives from Historic Scotland, the Ministry of Defence and the city council met in September to discuss how the trenches could be preserved. Local historians called for the trenches to be viewed in the same way as sites of significance in other countries and feel it is important to preserve anything that is connected to WW1 at a time when we are trying to get more youngsters interested in the First World War. Clearing the trenches of scrubland would cost around £10,000. Sad footnote : Member John Henderson kindly gave me a book of WWI newspapers at the October meeting, I looked at marriages listed in The Times in early August 1914. Captain Hugh Ince Webb Bowen who was married on 2 nd August came from Haverfordwest and served in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He died on 23 rd May 1915 aged 37 and is buried in the Lancashire Landing Cemetery in Turkey.
Thankful villages: The places where everyone came back from the war The mass slaughter of 1914-18 robbed the UK of a million lives, leaving no part of the country untouched but there were somwe villages where all those who served returned home. Unlike the overwhelming majority of British settlements, Upper Slaughter in the Cotswolds has no war memorial. Instead in the village hall are two wooden plaques which celebrate the men, and one woman, from the village who served in both world wars who all returned home. It is that rarest of British locations, a "thankful village" - the term coined in the 1930s by the writer Arthur Mee to describe the communities which suffered no military fatalities in WWI. No Scottish community appears to have been left unscathed, and no thankful villages have been identified in Ireland, all of which was still part of the UK during WWI. For every village like Upper Slaughter, or Knowlton in Kent, there was another like Wadhurst in East Sussex, with a population of just over 3,500 people, which lost 149 men in WWI. Indeed, according to the WWI historian Dan Snow, it was often small communities in which the psychological burden of the carnage was most painfully felt. Largely to blame for this, WWI historian Dan Snow believes, was the system of Pals Battalions made up of friends, work colleagues and relatives who had been promised they could fight alongside each other when they enlisted. These battalions were a useful recruiting tool for War Secretary Lord Kitchener, who believed that mobilising large numbers of enthusiastic recruits quickly was the best method of winning the war. The reality of trench warfare, however, meant that small communities could face disproportionate levels of bloodshed within a matter of hours. The "pals" system was phased out in 1917, but not before it left an indelible mark on the British consciousness. Even those in the thankful villages did not escape the hardships and disruption imposed by total war. By 1918, rationing was in force and everywhere on the home front would take many years to recover. Many of the fortunate veterans who made it home were permanently damaged by their experiences, whether physically or mentally. Just 14 villages were lucky enough to escape losses in WWII as well as WWI. IWM going digital BBC Studios and Post Production’s Digital Media Services team has been chosen to digitise and future-proof a substantial proportion of IWM’s (Imperial War Museums’) collection of over 250 hours of WWI film footage. The project will be completed by the end of 2013. The age of the films and their historic prominence mean the black and white 35mm reels have to be handled with extreme care. BBC Studios and Post Production’s Digital Media Services team are cleaning and preparing the film before scanning it to DPX files. By digitising its content, IWM will make its collection available worldwide via its Collections Search facility and provide the highest quality digital copies. Information Request John Stone from Whitstable recently visited Thiepval Visitor's Centre and noticed that they are currently showing a short film entitled 'Aftermath and Memory' which covers the reconstruction programme on the Somme and the architects involved in the design of memorials, both in France and the UK. He was interested to note that the Whitstable civic memorial was included and wondered whether WFA had any input on this film Can anyone help Battle Story: Loos 1915 by Peter Doyle Hardback, The History Press, 2012 The Battle of Loos saw a change in Allied strategy which until then had been a series of small-scale assaults that achieved little or no ground gained. At Loos Kitchener's Army was deployed in strength for the first time and aimed to take ground over a 20-mile front. As the fog of war descended the first day's gains were lost and in the end the 'Big Push' saw little achieved with Allied losses of about 50,000 men. The text explores the unfolding action of the battle and puts the reader on the frontline.
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