The Unknown British Warrior

[allenlondon]

I’d always thought it was an unknown warrior - could have been German, British, or any of the poor *** sacrificed on the fields of the First War.

But it isn’t. It’s a British soldier.

And to an extent, that lessens the impact to me, I’d always thought of the ceremony as anti-war. Not so.

[ummmm]

What about the survivors. Those men who watched their comrades and friends blown to bits?

The amount of men who suffered for the rest of their lives with flashbacks. Their families and their children watching them suffer.

What about them?

[Peter Pedant]

// Will there be a remembrance day for the tens of thousands who died because of the ineptitude, blunders, etc. during the pandemic, //

no they will be forgotten just as we forgot the spanish flu epidemic

and for scale - peanuts - we have just got up to no of deaths 50 000 that occurred on the first day of the Somme

and even that is dwarfed by the no of deaths 100 000 in Tokyo Mar 1945. Twenty sq mi ) (twenty city of Londons). conventional bombing killed far more than the atomic bombs.

so yes we should remember the dead ....

[retrocop]

Andres

//Soldiers have worn some kind of identification since early times. In ww1 /ww2 if I'm not mistaken they wore two . One was taken from dead colleagues back to the base and the other left on the dead soldier . Only conclusion can be that they all three had been reduced to a pile of bones but what happened to the tags .//

As a matter of interest in the last W.W. soldiers were issued with three dogtags. The discs were made of fibre in round discs the size of a 2p. Two were attached by string around the neck and for some reason the third was tied to the soldiers respirator bag.There is a special directive in Kings Regulations as how to tie the butcher's knot on the string so the writing could be read on both discs.Soldiers later used leather bootlaces because the string broke so quickly. Some soldiers placed one of their two on their boot laces.
In the first and 2nd W.W. both discs were made of fibre which quite easily could disintegrate in a serious explosive blast. Dog tags are now made of metal plate and have rubber surrounds called 'keepers' to stop them rattling when skirmishing or on a recce. In the modern army dog tags are only worn on active service. It was believed that one fibre disc was fireproof and the other was rotproof so you would be recognised when 'carboneezay' in your Sopwith Camel and eventually surfaced ten years after your sub had been sunk.Both myths not true. They burn and rot.
Not a lot of people know that useless trivia. :-)

[andres]

retro-^^^- that's not useless it is very informative and interesting.