Families remember loved ones on Battle of Passchendaele anniversary
Monday, 11 October 2021
On the bleak day of October 12, 1917, 843 Kiwi soldiers were killed at the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium during World War I.
Also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, the death toll eventually raised to 950 from those who were wounded having not made it. Overall 1900 were injured.
Southland man John Davidson survived that day and was able to return to his home in Hokonui, but it could not be deemed as a lucky escape.
His grandson Iain Davidson said John never spoke of what he had faced after he returned, and he never joined the local RSA.
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“It was an unbridled disaster really.
“They were going against barbed wire fence that hadn't been cut, and they had no chance at all. New Zealanders just got wiped out really. It was one of the bloodiest days of [the] first world war, for New Zealand anyway.”
John returned wounded with shrapnel in his arm and leg.
“His medical files are pretty grisly … they say missing bits of muscle off his arm and had deep lacerations … and things like that.
“He came home after that … it was the end of his war,” Iain said.
Robina Wilson still feels surprised that her grandfather Frank Sinclair did not return wounded, however he was the same in keeping mum about what he had faced during the battles.
“The only odd thing we ever heard was through other people. He certainly didn’t talk about any of the battles. He just told random stories like, we know that he got a tattoo that he never liked, and we know he used to cut people’s hair on the boat on the way back, and he used to cut my dad’s hair with the same clippers.”
The only way Wilson’s family ever learned about Sinclair’s time away was through his service records, she said.
Southland Boys High School archivist Lynley Dear said from her research she found that of the millions of men killed during WWI, some of their bodies still lie in the Belgium town of Ypres.
“Beneath the farms and woods of the area … lie the unrecovered bodies of more than 40,000 soldiers, who died or drowned, wounded in the mud.
“Their bodies are still turned up by ploughs and digging machines,” she said.
From her research, Dear found it to be a common phenomenon for soldiers to stay quiet about their time away, especially in those times, because unlike present day there were no talks around mental health.
“It’s because if you think about it, they went through it, the lived through it, they were among the few to live through it and therefore to re-live it … obviously their brain just shuts down, they cannot go over it again,” Dear said.
However, the men did re-live it under circumstances not in their control, such as dreams, nightmares, hallucinations and some even developed mental disorders, she said.
“So, they weren’t ever going to be likely sit down and have a family chat about it. It was way beyond that territory.”