CWGC adds nearly 10,000 Punjabi soldiers to war dead records

Nearly 10,000 Punjabi soldiers are being added to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s official database of war dead, a correction that restores names long missing from the record of the First World War.

The commission’s database already records the details of 1.7 million Commonwealth men and women who died in the two world wars, and its archive holds more than 60,000 items charting the organisation’s own history.

The commission records show undivided India supplied 1.5 million men to the First World War effort, with Punjab the largest source of recruits. About 300,000 Punjabi men served across East Africa, Egypt, France, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine and Salonika. Nearly 13,000 Punjabi men died, yet many were omitted from the records that were meant to preserve their names.

The commission now commemorates by name about 74,000 officers and enlisted men of the Indian Army who died in the war. Roughly 8,000 are buried in CWGC cemeteries, while about 65,000 are named on memorials. In Mesopotamia, the Basra Memorial in Iraq commemorates more than 40,600 Commonwealth dead whose graves are unknown, and more than 33,000 Indian Army soldiers had been missing from its panels for over a century because only British personnel and Indian officers were originally inscribed.

The gaps trace to a 1918 decision by the Indian General Staff, poor grave marking and incomplete cremation records. The digital name panels now bring those 33,000 Indian soldiers together on the memorial for the first time.