Facebook attempt to remember Allied soldiers killed in Belgium

A drive is underway here in Belgium to attempt to create Facebook pages for each of the 27,594 Allied soldiers who were killed in Belgium during WWII and are buried in Belgian cemeteries, men from countries including the U.S., Britain, France and Australia.

High school students are each being asked to research the lives and battles of a chosen soldier and with the help of archives kept by the Institute for Veterans, produce a Facebook page for each one with photos, audio and video. It is hoped relatives of the dead soldiers will submit whatever documents and other evidence they have.

The first Facebook page created as part of that project honors Lance Cpl. Thomas Leslie Cartwright of High Wycombe, England. Cartwright was killed in fighting in 1944and is buried in the Kasterlee War Cemetery in northern Belgium along with 99 comrades of the British Army's Royal Scots.

The plan is to have each soldier documented on Facebook by 2014, when the country will mark the 70th anniversary of Belgium's liberation.

"You are only dead if no one talks about you anymore," said Pol Van Den Driessche, a Belgian senator who launched the project, known as "Live and Remember."

What is Belgium actually for?

It is of no strategic value to anyone, and should no longer be sustained artificially
To paraphrase Rene Magritte, one of the few unquestionably famous Belgians, 'Ceci n'est pas une nation'. As the slow dissolution of their state continues, even Francophone Belgians, hitherto champions of the status quo, are casting around for alternatives. A poll in Le Soir suggests that 49 per cent of Walloons favour incorporation into France, up from 22 per cent at the end of last year.
The Flemish, for their part, tend to see Belgium as a mechanism for taking their taxes and subsidising the Walloons. (They are wrong: it is a mechanism for taking their taxes and subsidising the most bloated public sector in Europe. Ordinary Walloons do just as badly out of the racket as they do.)

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Modern Development Threatens Historic WWI Site in Belgium

The fields around the battlefield of Ypres, the site of four years of bloodshed during World War I, are littered with hidden trenches, bunkers and dugouts that are being excavated by archaeologists. But the expansion of an industrial park, combined with the city of Ypres' rapid expansion, threatens to destroy kilometers of hidden history. STORY

With the 100-year anniversary approaching in 2014, interest in World War I continues to grow, and the economic benefit brought by 330,000 visitors to Ypres last year has given the modern defenders of these battlefields added ammunition.

Harry Lamin Blogging from World War One!

This has turned into a giant internet hit.
In the past year, the writings of Private Harry Lamin from the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment have come to compete with the diaries of call girls, policemen and politicos. The travails of this soldier, set down on the front line in France and Italy in letters to his family, are being posted online 90 years to the day after they were written.
In letters to his older brother Jack, a clergyman in Leeds, he writes of being “buried and knocked about” on Messines Ridge and of “rough, rough times” on the front line.

His fate has been kept a secret by Bill Lamin, his 59-year-old grandson, who runs the blog and adds photographs and maps he has found while researching the path that his grandfather took through the war. The idea for the blog came to Private Lamin’s grandson, a maths and IT teacher, in 2006.
This guy should take credit for inventing blogs before Al Gore finds out. Keep up on the adventures of Harry here

Remembering the Forgotten in Flanders Fields

Passchendaele: the Flemish village that gave its name to one of war's worst horrors

Ninety years have passed since soldiers fought in the mud of Flanders. But for the people who live in this region, the gardeners who tend the graves, and the people who lead guided tours, the past is still far from forgotten.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission, an international organisation set up after World War One to look after the graves of soldiers buried in battlefields scattered across much of Europe. In 1923, the organisation was shipping more than 4,000 headstones a week to meet demand. By 1927, it had created more than 500 cemeteries, 400,000 headstones and 1,000 memorial crosses.

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An Account of the Battle with picture gallery: Fighting in Flanders Fields

Anniversary of the Dinant Massacre

On this day in history, In one of the worst atrocities of the First World War, German troops executed over 700 people in the Belgium town of Dinant, then sacked and burnt the town.

Nearly 700 Belgians, of whom 73 were women and 39 children, had been killed; and some 600 others who had been made prisoners had been sent to Germany, where they would be taught to live. Of the 1,400 houses which Dinant contained 1,200 were destroyed, burned from top to bottom, having first been pillaged; and the factories which had afforded a livelihood for several hundreds of hands, were now but heaps of ashes.

MORE WORLD WAR ONE BELGIAN HISTORY