Dan Snow's History Hit - Searching for the Lost of World War One

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

At the end of the World War One, around one million citizens of the British Empire had been lost, and the whereabouts of about half of these was unknown. Families could be waiting weeks, months or years to hear whether their loved ones were imprisoned, wounded, missing or dead, if they heard at all. This was the task of the searchers. In the years following the war, these volunteer investigators conducted 5 million interviews, finding answers for around 400 thousand families. Robert Sackville-West is on our sibling podcast, Warfare, to bring us the stories of those looking for news of their fathers, brothers and sons, and the evolution of the search to this day. Robert’s book ‘The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War’ is out now.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody. Welcome. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. A lot of unusual pods this week. We had Scratching Fanny on the podcast yesterday.

The ghost used to appear in Cock Lane in London. Don't at me. This is the truth. It's history. I can't help it. Scratching Fanny obviously as it goes did not in fact exist but it was a hoax perpetrated on the good people of London and Britain in the 18th century. You can hear more about that and lots of other hoaxes on yesterday's podcast. And then of course we had the wonderful Margaret Mackenzie, the lady who sadly has just passed away, who died shortly after recording the podcast talking about the First World War camps on Salisbury Plain and a lifetime of research into them. It's been quite the week on the History Hit podcast, the world's best history podcast. Today we're going to be hearing from one of our other sibling podcasts. It's the warfare podcast this time for military historians and it talks about, appropriately in this time of remembrance,

it talks about the end of the First World War. Around a million citizens of the British Empire had been lost and of those, about half lay in unknown graves. Families waited for weeks, months, for years. They hoped against hope that they might have been imprisoned, a case of mistaken identity perhaps, that they would be released from enemy prisoner of war camps, or they waited to hear whether their body would be found and they would have a place to go and mourn the loss of a loved one. As you're going to hear in this podcast, an extraordinary effort was undertaken to try and make sense of what had occurred. Huge armies of volunteer investigators conducted five million interviews, hopefully trying to find

answers for around half a million families robert sackville west appears on the warfare podcast talking to james and brings us these stories of people looking for brothers sons husbands friends and how in some ways the search continues right to this day robert's brilliant book the searchers the quest for the loss of the first world war is out now and here he is on the pod just after you listen to it don't forget to go and subscribe to History Hit TV Christmas is approaching folks if you want to give a gift that does

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folks which we will be announcing quite soon. So make sure you go historyhit.tv. Get yourself or give the gift of history this Christmas. Don't miss out. Historyhit.tv. But in the meantime everyone here is the harrowing story of The Searchers. Enjoy. Hi, Robert. Welcome to the History Hit Warfare podcast. How are you doing today? Very well, thank you. It's great to be talking to you. It's great to be talking to you as well. Where are you talking to us from in the world? From Sevenoaks in Kent. talking to us from in the world? From Sevenoaks in Kent. Sevenoaks in Kent. Now I know Sevenoaks.

I used to date a girl in Sevenoaks. It's a beautiful town, a beautiful place and I think we may have even walked around the grounds of your home. Well I live in a house called Knoll which has a massive park, a thousand acre park which is open open, you know, 24-7 to everybody. And I hope that you did have romantic strolls there. It's open to everybody, including me, which is very good. Absolutely. Now, congratulations on your new book, The Searchers, The Quest for the Lost of the First World War. And, well, who are the searchers? There are several different types of searcher. In the most general terms, the thing about the First World War was that there were probably around a million British Empire war dead. About half of those, half a million people have no known grave. And as a result of that, their relatives were in this sort of limbo of not knowing for weeks, months, in some cases years, and many of them were desperately

searching for something. Now it may be to hear that their missing husband, for example, was a prisoner of war or he'd ended up in a hospital, wounded in a hospital somewhere, that he was still alive. When the fact of his death was established, they might then search the graveyards, the cemeteries of France and Flanders, to try and find and visit his grave. A whole generation, therefore, of bereaved relatives, and it's thought that around three million British people lost a close relative, and by that I mean a father, a brother, a son, or a husband. Three million people lost a close relative, and they, in their different ways, are the primary searchers in this book. Although there were other searchers, professional searchers, who were engaged to search, as it were, on their behalf.

It's incredible, isn't it, Robert? When we look to warfare today, and as our listeners know all too well for me going on and on and on about it, I research a lot into the history of robotic weapons in war, automated weapons, the emergence of drone warfare. We look at how warfare is conducted today, and it is conducted, we could say, at arm's length, more or less, in most cases, by remote control, by these uncrewed aerial systems that deploy force thousands and thousands of kilometres away, in many ways without our democracies, our citizens knowing too much about it. And that's because, I guess, because we don't, after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

we don't sacrifice our best, our brightest, our youngest, our mothers, our daughters, our sons in those conflicts anymore. And that's very much a political decision that has been made. So it's hard for us, I think, to identify with a public 100 years ago who are sitting in the turmoil, the pain and the suffering of trying to find out what happened to their closest loved ones, to search for the missing. Can you tell us in some ways some of these remarkable lengths to which people went to, to give meaning to their loss, to have some sort of closure? My book is full of stories about the different ways in which people tried to achieve this. I'll take one example, possibly a well-known example, but a very, very poignant one,

was Britain's first Nobel Prize winner for literature, Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son. His son John was killed in 1915, and for four years Rudyard Kipling and his wife Carrie would not accept the fact that he was probably dead. And they kept interviewing his former comrades. They kept writing to the ambassadors of neutral countries just for any information that might enable them to continue to believe that there was a glimmer of hope. And it was only four years after John's death in 1919 that they accepted the actual finality of his death. And they then spent the next decade searching for his grave, which they never found. And every year the Kiplings would go off to France in a series of Rolls Royces that Kipling owned, each of which was called the Duchess. And they drove around France in the Duchess, visiting cemeteries, looking and hoping

that they would find where John was buried. They never discovered his grave, although they were present and did attend the ceremony in 1930 when at Luz, which is very close to the battle site where he was killed, a memorial wall of the 20,000 soldiers lost at Luce was unveiled and John's name was among the 20,000 soldiers. It was a terrible irony actually because in 1992, almost 60 years after Kipling's death, as a result of fairly detailed research by people at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, a grave that had previously been attributed to an unknown lieutenant of the Irish Guards, the attribution of that grave was changed to be named after John Kipling because it was decided that unknown soldier was in fact John Kipling. But Kipling himself, Roger Kipling, never got to know this.

So that's one example of a terrible and decades-long search. And whereas Kipling's looked in the battlefields of France for graves, as thousands of other families did too on pilgrimages to the battlefields of France. There's another family, the Lodges, who turned to the spirit world and they searched for their son, who they accepted was dead, but they searched for contact and communication with their son in the spirit world through mediums. And was that to search in the spirit world, Robert, to get clues from their son about where his body might be? They knew that Raymond, their son, was dead. They accepted that fact. They knew where he was buried. They were notified of his grave number, plot, everything.

What they wanted to do was simply to establish, because they believed in an afterlife, they wanted to establish that John was thriving in that afterlife and that he was happy. And a lot of people turned to spiritualism simply to be convinced that even if their son or their father was dead, that they were happy in their afterlife, to which they had sort of seamlessly transitioned. And did they find out if he was happy? Well, usually they did establish that they were happy. There was another celebrated spiritualist of the time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He lost his son Kingsley in 1918. And in 1919, he and his wife attended a seance session in Portsmouth and made contact for the first time with Kingsley. And the question that Conan Doyle asked Kingsley, his son, was, you know, how are things? And Kingsley replied, I am so happy. And this is what the parents wanted to know, if they believed in spiritualism,

that their children were happy. And so was there a rise in spiritualism after the First World War? Is this a boom for those who work as mediums. Yeah, absolutely. And there were probably quite a lot of charlatans out there, whatever you think about this world. But there were others who genuinely believed that they were fulfilling some important psychological and social purpose for society in providing some sort of consolation, some sort of reassurance.

And to be fair, they probably were. But I've got, I suppose, a more artistic literary question here. Was there, to any extent, which the death of Kipling's son or the death of Conan Doyle's son fed into their work and had an impact on their writings? Certainly, Kipling was a broken man after he learnt of the death of his son in 1915. He was full of energy for certain projects, but there was none of the enthusiasm that had inspired him before.

And he wrote very little creative fiction after the First World War. after the First World War. And I think most of Conan Doyle's works, his literary career was principally before the First World War. And there's another searcher, if we're talking literary things, and this is a professional searcher, the novelist E.M. Forster, who had written by the age of 30. He was 30 in 1910. He'd written his four, well, four of his five biggest novels.

And at the beginning of the war, he was creatively blocked. In his private life, he was sort of stifled. So, you know, he sort of flitted between his mother's suburban home in Weybridge and Cambridge, where he was a fellow. There's a closeted world of Cambridge. And in 1915, he volunteers to go to Alexandria, Egypt, as a professional Red Cross searcher. And his job there for three years, he thought he'd stay three months, but he stayed three years, was to interview soldiers who'd been wounded at Gallipoli and transported out of Gallipoli to hospitals in Alexandria and Cairo which were the sort of hospital bases for that particular front and his job was to interview these wounded soldiers about information they could provide

on their missing comrades to try to establish whether their missing comrades were dead or whether there was a chance that they were still alive. And so Forster spends his whole war doing this. And he, equally, as a result of a completely different set of experiences and a different take, as it were, on the search, he writes very little creatively after the war. Passage to India is, in in fact published in 1924, but he'd written most of that before the war. So I don't know whether there is a sort of connection between the war and the experience of bereavement and death with the impact on the creative life of these writers or not. It's definitely something to look into, isn't it?

I mean, the extent to which it just creates a mental block. It's so fascinating that Forster went out to Cairo and to Alexandria. Do we know who was funding the searches at this point? And also, how long were British soldiers in the hospitals in those areas? Were they there long after the war as well? Did these interviewers, these searchers keep going out to these parts of the world to continue documenting and trying to find the graves and what happened for people? By the end of the war, most people in hospital were in the process of being repatriated to

hospitals in Britain. But also at the end of the war, a whole load in sort of late 1918, early 1919, tens of thousands of British prisoners of war who'd been in prisons in Germany, for example, were repatriated and came back to Britain. And at the reception centres around the country where they were received, checked medically, demobilised, they would be interviewed also by these professional searchers. I say professional, they were volunteer searchers. They were sort of professionally trained, but they were on the whole unpaid. But still, it cost money, this operation, going back to your first question.

unpaid. But still, it cost money, this operation, going back to your first question. And it was run by the British Red Cross. And there was this department called the Wounded and Missing Inquiry Department, which employed or engaged 1,200 searchers in the UK and several hundred more in places like Boulogne or Alexandria to do this job. So it was funded by, as the British Red Cross was, by some government funding at the time, but a lot of voluntary contributions from the general public. They must have been inundated. It sounds like a lot of people to start with,

but when you think about the sheer amount of people they're searching for, it was almost an insurmountable, impossible task. How long did that department go on for? How long was the search going on for? Oh, the department was closed down in 1919. I'll come back to whether the search continued or not. But the scale of the job that they undertook, this department, they conducted the 1,200 plus searchers over the course of the war, five million interviews with soldiers about their missing comrades, and as a result of this, wrote 400,000 letters to families who had inquired about the whereabouts. And the extraordinary thing about these letters is that they provided personal detail, really, on the last moments of the dead soldier, because on the whole, missing meant dead. So most of their

conclusions of their inquiries was, yes, we can confirm, to the best of our knowledge, so-and-so is dead. But they did provide personal information, and that was of great comfort to the family, because that was the first time that individual family members felt that anyone was listening to them. The War Office would just send a letter or a telegram saying, missing, dead, and that was it. But actually, these 400,000 letters provided just a little bit more information. And even if the news was bad, the families believed that at least somebody cared. So yet again, it was providing a massive sort of psychological service to the country.

If you listen to Dan Snow's History, we're hearing from our Warfare podcast all about the search for the missing of the First World War. More coming up. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Were they accurate, these letters? Because I remember looking into Vera Brittain and her brother and her partner were both killed. And we actually had an episode on Vera Brittain with Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. And she was saying that they were both reportedly killed by sniper fire, which is, you know, when we look at a just war, the laws of war, in proportionate and discriminant deployment of force, war, the laws of war, in proportionate and discriminant deployment of force. The idea of being shot by a sniper through the head is kind of almost seen as, if there is such a thing,

a more merciful, clean, immediate way to die. When in reality, we know that, of course, that is most often not the case. Were these letters based on fact most of the time, or were these letters based upon a fiction to just try and make the family have that closure? That's a very good question, because there was a lot of debate at the time about how euphemistic or not these letters should be. You know, should they say shot in the genitals, for example, or shot down below? There are a lot of different ways of describing these terribly gruesome deaths. And the directive from the department was generally that you should encourage, obviously,

the interviewees to tell the truth, but also that you should relay those truths because the families could tell when they were being fobbed off with a sort of something that was rather cosmetic in some way or other so I think in general those replies that had the ring of truth were thought to provide something closer to what the families really needed, because there was a lot of not-truth-telling during the course of the First World War. To say the least, right, Robert, I mean, it was almost a patronising paternalistic way in which the public were treated, in many cases, by the government. And so it is interesting to hear that by the end of the war, people are being treated like adults, as they should be, much like they were treated far more during the Second World War, in terms of public information

and information sharing. You know, when it came down to finding out what was going on, it was as much information and as truthful and as honest as possible, not a veneer of victory by Christmas, let's say. I mean, this is a feature, I think, of commemoration and identification and informing people about death in the First World War. It was an absolutely extraordinary time. Before the First World War, the British Army consisted of 300,000 or so regular soldiers. Over the course of four years of the First World War, something like five million British service personnel were deployed on the Western Front. And those both volunteer and conscripted soldiers were citizen soldiers. So there is suddenly a move from a professional army to a

citizen army that is fighting because it believes that it's fighting in a patriotic cause. And because it is a citizen army and doesn't have the traditions and expectations of a professional army where it was almost an occupational hazard, an unmarked grave in a foreign country. That's what might have been expected 100 years before, after the Battle of Waterloo, because these soldiers and their families had volunteered in a common cause. The notion for the first time rose, I think, that the state had a duty to these soldiers to identify, bury and commemorate them in a way that they had not done, the state had not done before. So to that extent, there was a sort of democratisation of death, which was brand new. That's one of the achievements, I think, of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It's almost an incomprehensible task that was at hand to them because what was it

that happened when they then found the place where a soldier had been buried in an ad hoc grave? Surely it was this point then that they had to exhume the body, rebury, move over, well, hundreds of miles? Were many brought home or were they just left in purpose-built war graves? The British government took a decision quite early on that there would be no repatriation of bodies. And they took that maybe on cost grounds or they may have taken it because they believed that if they allowed some bodies to be brought back home, the richer bodies would be brought back home, whereas there was a notion that officers and men should be buried beside the comrades with whom they'd fought. So there was no repatriation. A decision was therefore taken that they would be buried in these cemeteries,

A decision was therefore taken that they would be buried in these cemeteries. And a lot of thought did go into the design and construction of these sort of hauntingly beautiful cemeteries that you see today. But what you see today was not how they looked in 1918 or just after the war. Because in 1918, the battlefields of the Western Front were a complete chaos. It was just terrible. There were rickety crosses marking graves. There were places where bodies were still actually left out to rot. It was like Armageddon. Between 1919 and 1921, there was a massive task of clearing up, basically, the battlefields of the Western Front for two reasons, partly because the farmers wanted to get back on that land, but also because the government believed that if the families visited those sites, they would be so appalled by the lack of care that was given to these people.

So a massive program of clearing up the battlefields began, which involved exhuming hundreds of thousands of bodies. of bodies. Now, some of these bodies may have been lying beneath a temporary wooden cross, but others would just be buried in the mud. And attempts were made, as these bodies were exhumed, and we, as I say, hundreds of thousands, attempts were made to identify these bodies, not always successfully by any means, and then they would be moved to a new purpose-built cemetery as nearby as possible, where those that had been identified would be buried with their name on the headstone, and those bodies that were unidentified, would be buried as, for example, unknown British soldier known unto God. Wow. And who was given the responsibility of going across these battlefields? I can imagine, surely, a perilous task today.

It's an eternal harvest when you have farmers in Belgium and France endlessly digging up mustard gas canisters and everything else that comes up. I mean, who was put in the situation where they had to dig up these hundreds of thousands of bodies and move them to these cemeteries? The job fell to the army initially and then to the Labour Corps within the army. and then to the Labour Corps within the army. Now, a lot of those soldiers had been demobilised, but had volunteered to return to do this horrific task. Some because they actually believed that they were doing the right thing by their comrades, and some because this was some form of employment.

But it was a hideous task. form of employment but it was a hideous task and the task took its toll psychologically on a lot of the exhumers who were doing this task for up to two years from 1919 to 1921 by which time the bodies had been moved or most of the bodies had been moved to these new cemeteries but as you say the search goes on it was dangerous at the time because sometimes unexploded ordnance exploded. They said there were accidents, but it does carry on to this day. And even now, every year, around 50 sets of human remains are turned up in the fields of France and Flanders. 50 sets of human remains from the First World War. And attempts are still made to retrieve, name, bury and honour those bodies. And of course today this is through DNA profiling and other scientific advancements

that means that these people can be identified and matched with their descendants, I guess. Yes, I mean, the biggest project of that nature started in 2009. And it was the excavation of some mass graves from the Battle of Fromelles, which was a battle in 1916, when 2000 British and Australian soldiers, principally Australian soldiers, were mown down in 24 hours. It was the worst 24 hours in Australia's military history. And the bodies after the battle were tossed into mass graves by the Germans as they cleared up. And then, after a lot of research,

it was decided to attempt to open these graves. And inside these graves, there were 250 bodies. And amazingly, 166 of those bodies, they've all been buried, but 166 of them have not only been buried, but buried in named graves. They have been identified using some of these techniques that you mentioned, not least DNA sampling. The miracle of modern science. And is that because there are these vast databases of

people applying for their family history on things like ancestry? That has enabled it. What happens is that it's a combination of old school detective work in that, first of all, there may be some signs about the bodies, like they may have some identifying features. cigarette case on them or whatever, but also military historians will be able to work out which units were operating in that particular area on that day and therefore draw up a provisional list of potential names. And once you've got that list, then genealogists work forwards and back to try and establish who the living descendants of that list of names might be. And once they have got the list as well of living descendants, they then invite those living descendants to provide a DNA sample, which may or may not then match with DNA from the bodies that had been unearthed. And it is a very, very time consuming process. But I think it's a really worthwhile one. I agree. And it's amazing to hear that these efforts continue, that the searchers

are still around today, that that is still a job and that military history plays an important role in that final search i've got a final question for you robert because there's one i think way of remembering of having some sort of closure for families that we haven't spoken about and this is the establishment of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. When did this idea come about? Because, of course, there was one soldier that was brought back from the battlefields, and it is this unknown warrior. Who thought of this idea? Well, there was an army chaplain called David Railton, who in 1916 was billeted near Aumontier in France.

And at the bottom of the garden where he was billeted near Aumontier in France. And at the bottom of the garden where he was billeted, he noticed a typical plain wooden cross bearing the words, unknown soldier of the Black Watch. And he started to ask himself, you know, who was this soldier? Who was this soldier's folks? And at the same time, he was receiving a lot of

letters as a chaplain from relatives asking him for information on missing and dead soldiers and asking him where they might be buried and so on and so forth. So these two strains of thought encouraged him to come up with the idea of why not have an unknown soldier who represented all of these unknown soldiers. And he championed this idea and managed to get it through, you know, the hierarchy of Westminster Abbey and the king had to give his approval hierarchy of Westminster Abbey, and the king had to give his approval, and Haig as well. And so the unknown soldier was anonymously exhumed in 1920. In fact, four soldiers were dug up to encourage this sense of anonymity from each of the four French battlefields, Ypres, the Aisne, Somme, and so on. And then, finally, at dead of night, Brigadier Wyatt chose one of these four,

and there was no way of identifying anything about them, or even which of the four spheres of activity they'd come from, and it was chosen and transported back to England and buried in Westminster Abbey with all the sort of pomp and ceremony that would normally attend the funeral of a sort of very senior army officer. So it was an example of how extraordinary that by 1920 you were burying a common soldier with all the pomp that would normally be accorded only to a field marshal. pomp that would normally be accorded only to a field marshal and the effect this had on all the people who attended or watched the procession and who then for days and weeks afterwards left wreaths and so on on the tomb of the unknown warrior was extraordinary they actually believed that this as it were surrogate body was in fact their loved one. People in the crowd would be saying, it's him, my boy's returned home.

And somehow or other, this one body managed to provide on that day, again, some of the consolation for all those people who had had no body to mourn, no grave at which to grieve. Thank you so much, Robert. As we mark Armistice Day on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, you've given us some context of the importance of this search after the First World War and, of course, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, which we will all see on our television sets around the world. Tell us, where can we buy the book? Well, I think you can buy it at, say, all good bookshops. And it is called The Searchers, The Quest for the Lost of the First World War by Robert Sackville-West. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Robert. And, I mean, David Dimblebiss said that it is fascinating,

carefully researched and beautifully written. And so if you've got reviews like that, then it's definitely well worth the read. Robert, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners,

depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.