Recovering Gallipoli’s Missing Soldiers

Recovering Gallipoli’s Missing Soldiers

In November 1918, Lieutenant Cyril Hughes and his graves registration section landed on Gallipoli on a bleak day that winter storms punished the rugged terrain.

Hughes was confronted with a landscape of broken trenches, and rusted barbed wire. He could see the bones of hastily buried soldiers from a mile away as broad white streaks down the ravines.

Hughes’ section joined the British Graves Registration Unit, which would find, identify, record, and temporarily protect every British and dominion grave, and bury any unburied dead.

Hughes had a strong connection to Gallipoli, landing there in May 1915. He was twice wounded before being evacuated. Hughes regretted abandoning his comrades’ graves: ‘In 1915 we did not quite finish our job,’ he explained, ‘but, by Heaven, we would see it out this time.’

An immense task confronted Hughes’ section. Of 12,000 Allied soldiers who had died in the Anzac sector, nearly 6,000 were unburied, their remains scattered about the ridges. 

Hughes’ task of tracing and interring the unburied proved challenging. Winter rains had washed away burial sites, with remains swept down crevices; dense scrub and wild flowers obscured skeletons; and wild dogs had preyed upon bodies and scattered their bones.

This picture illustrates the section’s work, with remains of Anzac soldiers killed at Chunuk Bair having been collected and prepared for burial. Very few could be identified. 

Hughes established his headquarters at Kilia Liman, where he displayed a Union Jack and two Australian flags. As a reminder of home, he planted gums trees, nursing them through the extreme seasons. 

Hughes recorded a lone Australian father arriving at his camp to search for his missing son. He spent a few days ‘looking for his son’s grave’. Realising that his search was hopeless, he ‘pushed off to Italy’.

In September 1919, Hughes was appointed Inspector of Works, and assumed responsibility for executing the Imperial War Graves Commission’s charter across all of Gallipoli.

By 1925, Hughes’s party had practically finished the reburials, and all its cemetery construction work on Gallipoli.

Photograph credit: Imperial War Museum