I beg to differ.
Many WW1 burials are turning up in France where infrastructure projects are disturbing the earth. Soldiers whose whereabouts have not been known are, in all cases being given a decent burial with a headstone, and in many cases, finally named.
My Uncle was killed in action on the Somme. I’d love for a Guillemont by-pass to turn up his remains whilst I am still alive.
Moggy
The western front of WWI cut across hundreds of miles of Europe with the opportunity for lost men to be found at any point; this wind farm project is in one relatively small area where the crash site is known of. These two definitions are not the same.
Given that two of the crew are still ‘missing’ and that they could well have attempted to parachute out of the bomber as it fell out-of-control your ‘war grave’ could cover quite a large and indeterminate area…
…how exactly do you intend to define where anybody is allowed to construct anything?
Had they parachuted then surely they would have been discovered before now? Bodies don’t tend to lay around on the surface undiscovered for long, generally. But since the Lanc crashed, without the two missing crew being found, it might be reasonable to assume that their bodies were consumed in the destruction beyond the ability available at the time to recover them; surely this makes it a grave site? The site is known, is not all that big (relatively), and there is a good chance that the undiscovered crew are lying there, in spirit if nothing else; surely that makes it a grave site?
The term ‘war grave’ is absolutely government-speak for we cannot afford to recover (and ‘we’ means the taxpayer here), or try to recover, every missing serviceman from every war that Britain has ever been involved with.
Try HMS Royal Oak, HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Repulse, etc. Their sites are known, it would have been difficult or impossible to try and recover bodies at the time and the chances are that there is little or nothing to recover now – so should we declare that these sites are no longer war graves and officially allow divers to pick through the wreckage and take away souvenirs, rather than sneak it as they (apparently) do now?
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