Royal Fusilier P.O.Ws March 1918

[andrew pugh]

Good Evening All.

Could anyone tell me how many or if there is any way of finding out how many 17th Battalion Royal Fusiliers( City of London Reg)were taken prisoner by the Germans from the 23rd of March 1918, until the end of the same month?

Best Regards Andy.

[Doug Johnson]

Andy,

I doubt there is any easy way. If there is specific information then it will probably have been put together post war for historic reasons. Finding the names of those who were missing on that day may be difficult but to then identify all those who were alive and taken prisoner would need some research even at the time. The problem is that the many of those taken prisoner were not reported as such perhaps for many months afterwards, depending on whether they were kept working behind the lines or not. Confirmation of them as prisoners of war could have been done piecemeal so there would not be a single report with all of them on. If this was the Queens RWS then their PoW records have survived and that would have been a good starting point. Others records may also have survived but if they have have they have yet to be widely known. There is a further difficulty in that many prisoners died in German hands as a direct result of them being kept "illegally" behind the lines (died of starvation, accident and "enemy" action ie killed by their own side. Others who were nominally PoWs did not survive their wounds. Many of those that died were not reported as PoWs before they died and the only way of identifying them as being PoWs may be by comparing the date of death to the date they went missing.

Doug