[KS] War cemeteries in North Korea
Jim Hoare
jim at jhoare10.fsnet.co.uk
Tue Jul 4 16:13:58 EDT 2006
Oh dear. Clearly nobody read - or perhaps understood what I wrote!
A couple of points. It is not because Waterloo was a long time ago that we
do not take note of its dead. As I said, until late in the nineteenth
century - I suggested the American Civil War marks a turning point - there
seems to have been no practise of honouring the war dead as has been the
custom since World War I in Europe. You will come across individual and
sometimes regimental monuments in churches for wars such as the Crimean War,
the Austro-Prussian War etc- mainly but not exclusively for officers but
nothing anywhere like the graveyards of Belgium and northern France. The
North Koreans too have war memorials but they are not in graveyards.
I also pointed out that ordinary graves have not all disappeared in North
Korea - I have photos to prove it. And even in China, they are coming back.
Look out of the train windows between Shenyang and Beijing and you will see
them now where you did not see them twenty years ago, and the trend is even
more common in south China.
I would still maintain that part of the problem in North Korea is that there
was so much devastation that even where burial places were established, they
were often destroyed. Also, the dead were buried where they fell and there
was probably little attempt to map such places. In other words, while there
may well be other factors at work, there are also real practical reasons why
wartime graves have not, or only rarely, survived.
Jim Hoare
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