WWII Archaeology

The battle for Peleliu in what is now the Republic of Palau, Micronesia, took place in late 1944 and was one of the most bitter island conflicts of the Pacific War. The 11,000-strong Japanese garrison died almost to a man, along with thousands of forced labourers from Korea and elsewhere; the invading Americans took some of their highest proportional casualties of the entire war. The indigenous cultural, and sacred, landscape of the island was obliterated, with far-reaching social and psychological consequences for the native Palauans. Building on extensive archaeological surveys of the battlefield, this paper explores the different ways in which the former combatants, the indigenous population, bystanders and external stakeholders have chosen to remember the fighting through their relationship with its material remains. In particular, we focus on the memorial process that actually began during the battle itself, in the form of proactive souvenir hunting. Often commencing literally seconds after enemy soldiers died, and conducted to the point of self-endangerment during ongoing combat, this phenomenon was widespread in the Pacific campaigns (and elsewhere) and is underrepresented in the literature of war. As heirlooms in veteran families, the resulting material culture is now itself part of Peleliu's documented archaeological heritage. The collection of battlefield debris continues today, at a critical intersection with the appropriate and respectful recovery of human remains. Against a contemporary backdrop of geopolitical concerns that still resonate from the war, conflicting memories of the battle for Peleliu are reified as both the sacred and the profane.

Témoin de l’effort de guerre des Forces armées canadiennes lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la batterie côtière de Fort Péninsule représente l’un des ouvrages de génie militaire les plus distinctifs encore en place et visitables au Québec. À l’été de 2016, Parcs Canada a orchestré un projet de réfection de la batterie pour pallier les problèmes structuraux causés par les intempéries et le passage du temps dans le but de rendre le site sécuritaire et de nouveau accessible aux visiteurs. Cette contribution dresse le bilan d’une intervention archéologique menée en amont des travaux et dont l’issue a permis de recueillir des informations inédites en lien avec l’environnement et l’architecture de la batterie et avec quatre grandes phases d’aménagement se rapportant à sa construction, son occupation et son abandon par l’armée, puis à sa mise en valeur par Parcs Canada.

The Fort Peninsula Coast al Battery represents one of the most significant engineering works witnessing the Canadian war effort during the Second World War still standing and accessible to tourists in Quebec. In the summer of 2016, Parks Canada orchestrated the recapitalization of the main bunker to address structural problems caused by weather and the passage of time, and to provide secure visitor access. This article focuses on an archeological investigation carried out before the commencement of the recapitalization work which enabled the gathering of valuable information on the topography and the architecture of the battery as well as four major phases related to its construction, occupation and abandonment by the Canadian Army and its rehabilitation by Parks Canada.

SUMMARY: Coquetdale Community Archaeology investigated the First World War practice trench network on Blaeberry Hill near Rothbury, Northumberland, in February and June 2008. Preliminary survey identified two areas for excavation: Area 1, the intersection of a dugout and communications trench, and Area 2, a reserve trench. This paper summarises and builds on the results of the excavation report. The aims of the project were to investigate the extent, nature and development of military training in Coquetdale, to identify the nature and survival of WW1 remains, and to identify the impact of the military on Upper Coquetdale. This paper finds that the trenches were probably constructed and re-used in trench construction training for the Tynedale 1st Pioneers Battalion in 1915, and are comparable in their layout depth and design features to both War Office specifications and Western Front trenches. While the presence of the Pioneers in Rothbury was a significant social event, these trenches and the training that occurred there did not significantly increase recruitment in the later years of the War.

Shared here with permission of AA Editor.

Three Dutch naval ships, HNLMS De Ruyter, HNLMS Java and HNLMS Kortenaer went down in the Battle of the Java Sea on 27 February 1942, claiming the lives of 915 sailors. In November 2016 an international diving team from the Karel Doorman Foundation discovered that the warships had disappeared.

The management and protection of shipwrecks from the Second World War is very complicated, because of the different values that different stakeholders attach to it. These WWII shipwrecks are often war graves, important to relatives as lieux de mémoire. The shipwrecks thus have an emotional, commemoration value, but they also have a historical, archaeological and intrinsic value. If WWII shipwrecks are investigated using archaeological methods, they can provide new information on the WWII period, but it can also change certain details. To the salvors the shipwrecks have an economic value, but they actually have several economic values as they also bring in diving tourists, and they are fishing spots for the local fishermen. These different values played a major role during the joint Dutch-Indonesian investigation that followed after the notification that the three Dutch warships had disappeared from the bottom of the Java Sea.

Only with proper understanding and consideration of the different values or significances the WWII shipwrecks hold to different stakeholders, new ways of managing these complex sites may be developed that will be effective in the long run. Countries and different stakeholder groups must work together on this.

WA Coastal & Marine was commissioned by Historic Scotland to provide high-resolution multibeam bathymetry data targeted on a number of wreck sites in Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

Scapa Flow is a large natural harbour in the southern part of the Orkney Islands in the North of Scotland, which served as Britain’s main naval base during WWI and WWII. Its waters hold Scotland’s highest concentrations of shipwrecks. WA Coastal & Marine manganed the acquisition of multibeam data over the wrecks by MMT Netsurvey and subsequently conducted an archaeological assessment of this multibeam data.

In addition to this WA Coastal & Marine conducted and a Desk-Based Assessment (DBA) of the wreck sites covered by the multibeam data in order to enhance the historic environment record with respect to these sites and to support Historic Scotland’s work on the Scottish Marine Protected Areas Project.

Il 25 ottobre 1941 il piroscafo Monrosa partì dal Pireo diretto a Creta con truppe, quadrupedi e materiali della Divisione Siena, destinati a rafforzare la guarnigione dell’isola conquistata pochi mesi prima dai paracadutisti tedeschi con l’Operazione Merkur. Alle 13,18 veniva attaccato dal sommergibile inglese HMS Triumph e colpito da almeno due siluri affondò rapidamente a causa dello scoppio delle caldaie. La IANTD, con il patrocinio del prestigioso Explorer Club, ha organizzato e condotto dal 10 al 20 giugno una spedizione sull’importante relitto con fini archeologici e scientifici, in particolare mirata alla conferma dell’identificazione del relitto effettivamente con quello del Monrosa. Il relitto è stato identificato come quello del piroscafo Monrosa  e l temine della spedizione è stata depositata una corona in onore dei caduti.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YoM68TjPHo

Watom Island, in the East New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea, was occupied by Japanese forces during the Second World War; twenty-one Allied Prisoners of War (of whom eighteen survived) were held there from 1944 to 1945. Numerous tunnels and defensive emplacements were dug on the island, and many remain open today. During an archaeological research pro- gramme at Rakival Village into the prehistoric occupation of Watom, some of these wartime sites were also recorded, and this paper describes a variety of different site types. These include numerous underground tunnel com- plexes, beach defences, and a 150 mm howitzer that is still in position at the top of the island. It is argued that Watom was more than just an occupied island, and was, in effect, a fort that defended the rear approaches to Rabaul.

The relation between the archaology of the three Scandinavian countries with German archaeology during the 1930'es and WWII is briefly reviewed and the case of the Danish researcher Gudmund Hatt who after the war was found guilty of illegal cooperation with the occupation powers and dismissed from his job in dishonour is discussed in more detail. The paper finally discusses the relation between archaeology and politics and state that archaeology has a responsibility to confront the national chauvinistic groups of any time with the fact that no culture anywhere developed without foreign influence.

The underwater archaeology of ancient battles and warships is not a new study but one that spans back to the beginning of the watery discipline; however, the underwater archaeology of modern military or conflict sites such as Second World War (WWII) battlefields is more recent. Because of its nascent status, many of the ethical and professional decisions about how we approach such sites, how we interpret the sites, and how we protect the sites remain to be considered. Conflict
archaeology on land has been actively addressing these professional and ethical issues for a few decades and as Schofield ( 2009 :27) points out, “there is a duty on those charged with presenting recent military sites to balance numerous responsibilities: to remember the fallen; to avoid trivialising contributions to the war effort; but also (I would argue) to ensure some emotional engagement with the subject.”

An interim report:
The links between archaeology and politics, and archaeology and war, have received a lot of attention recently –not only in Germany, but also worldwide, including in workshops, at congresses and in anthologies, with particular emphasis on the wars of the first half of the Twentieth century. As part of the «Cluster 5» network, the German Archaeological Institute has also been examining its own past. The main focus is on the actions and responsibilities of its leading staff during the National Socialist era. In July 2016, the DAI Athens launched the project «Reappraising the History of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens during the National Socialist Era». The aim is to conduct a detailed and critical study that will eventually form a monograph. In this text, our contribution and some initial results are presented.

Dieser Artikel informiert über den Stand des Projekts "Aufarbeitung der Geschichte des DAI Athen während der NS-Zeit“ im Jahr 2018. Es soll ein Eindruck von den Schwierigkeiten, den Fortschritten und den ersten Ergebnissen vermittelt werden. Auch gewinnen die Leserinnen und Leser Einblick in den Umfang und die Komplexität der verwendeten Originalquellen aus deutschen und griechischen Archiven.

These are the additional pages that were not included in the booklet but which have been requested by people who wish to walk the site.
The walk is approximately two miles long, beginning at Hall Road Coastguard Station and car park, Crosby. The entrances to the Fort lie one mile from the train station at Hall Road and Hightown respectively. There are some benches along the coastal part of the walk should you need to rest and enjoy the view.

En 2016, une opération d'archéologie préventive à été menée aux abords de la caserne Chanzy de Stenay (Meuse), préalablement aux travaux d'aménagment d'une Zone d'activité commerciale. La fouille a révélé une forte occupation militaire du site lors des XIXe et XXe siècles, caractérisée par les passages successifs de plusieurs nations belligérantes (française, allemande et américaine). L'intérêt essentiel de cette fouille a été de redécouvrir et d'exhumer les très nombreux vestiges d'un camp de transit pour prisonniers allemands, mis en place dès le 6 octobre 1944 par les autorités américaines sur le sol lorrain.

This paper summarizes a project that involved a community consensus-building and preservation effort focused on the protection of WWII-related caves on private property in Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). The project was designed to assess local interest in protecting sites on private property, increase awareness and advocacy for their protection, and create a preservation plan for protection of these sites by both the community and regulatory agencies. As such, it took a community archaeology approach to working with descendant communities on conflict heritage sites.

This Second World War air-raid shelter was found at Lanes End, near the village of St Leonards, south Buckinghamshire, UK. Oddly enough, it was discovered quite by chance in 2015 whilst on a visit to a proposed development site to discuss a mitigation plan for a prehistoric earthwork.  Returning to the site in January 2016 I used the demolition machine to flip over the shelter’s lid so I could record the structure’s interior before it was removed.
What came next was even more unexpected. Whilst sitting on the upturned roof making notes, I happened to notice very faint newsprint in the concrete. The underside of the roof bore the impressions of wooden shuttering and sheets of newspaper had evidently been used to line the wood before the concrete pour. Remarkably, the ink from at least four newspapers was fragmentarily preserved in the concrete, providing a terminus post quem for the construction of the air-raid shelter - the 21st of June 1940!

The report provides a descriptive and illustrative account of observations, including photographs and scale elevations and plans.

As the WWI was approaching its last months, the move of 12 nurses to Basra on 8 January 1918, after some six months in Salonika, must have come as a considerable relief as long as Basra was a flourishing strong base of the British army and many hundreds of miles away from the battle front up the Tigris. However, Basra proved to be far from a pleasant place. The young girls were attached to Number 3 British General Hospital established in the big Ashar’s palace of Sheikh Khazaal, Emir of the Arab Emirate of Arabis-tan (now Khuzestan, Iran.) A deadly tragedy was waiting the young girls. The article describes that tragedy.

By September 1944, the Allies had pushed Axis forces northward to the Gothic defensive line in the Apennine Mountains near Florence. The American 10th Mountain Division-recruited for experience in high, steep, cold landscapes and well-trained in conducting mountain warfare-was successful in breaking this line's center despite little combat experience. I suggest the Division's experience and training in the high remote landscape of the Colorado mountains forged a mindset that created an elite combat unit able to analyze, understand, and shape the meaning and the materiality of the contested landscape of the Gothic Line and facilitated its destruction.

Agreements have been made between the Netherlands and Indonesian government to investigate what may have happened to the sites of the three Dutch Navy ships Hr.Ms. De Ruyter, Hr.Ms. Java and Hr.Ms. Kortenaer. This was done in a three-step research.

This is the report of the Joint Verification Mission Java Sea, 6 to 9th of February 2017, Jakarta, Indonesia titled: Joint Verification of the location and condition of Hr.Ms. De Ruyter, Java and Kortenaer

This article discusses the archaeological research of World War II explosive ordnance in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.  Article appears in "Archaeology" magazine Volume 68 number 2-March/April 2015. Digital version available at archaeology.org

http://www.archaeology.org/issues/171-1503/letter-from/2965-letter-from-the-marshall-islands-defuzing-the-past

Archaeological and archival data from a World War II internment camp where a predominantly Japanese American population was incarcerated offers a glimpse into the United States government’s compliance with the Geneva Prisoners of War Convention of 1929. The Geneva Convention outlines the basic necessities afforded to prisoners of war and non-citizens, such as access to leisure activities; alcohol; dental and ophthalmological care; and medical facilities. The study of vision and eye-related artefacts, such as safety goggles and eye medicine, provides an opportunity to examine how prisoners’ health was managed by the United States government during World War II.

An autograph book of a Polish forced
labourer in WWII Lapland
”Lapland: bare rock, mosquitoes, mud, tundra and hunger”
In August 2017 I travelled
from Glasgow, Scotland (UK)
to Rovaniemi to visit the collec-
tions of the Regional Museum
of Lapland and discuss with the
curators any material or archi-
ves relating to the German pre-
sence in Lapland during WWII.
My visit to the museum, made
possible through a grant gene-
rously awarded by the Society
of Antiquaries of Scotland’s
‘Gunning Jubilee Gift’, begins
an initial phase of research
focusing on the experiences of,
Franciszek Wardzynski, a Polish
citizen transported from War-
saw to Rovaniemi as a forced
labourer in the German auxilia-
ry unit Organisation Todt (OT).

Para Franz Novak -funcionario de la Gestapo que participó en deportación masiva en trenes- dicho nombre “no era más que una estación ferroviaria”. Casi de igual manera se pronuncia el médico Myklós Nyiszli -el asistente (malgré lui) del Dr. Mengele- quien desde Cracovia llegó al Lager en calidad de prisionero, enviado cual mercancía: “El letrero anuncia el nombre de la localidad ‘Auschwitz’. No nos dice nada. Nunca hemos escuchado hablar de este sitio”. Hoy representa un todo...

iC-ACCESS evaluates the role that material culture plays in enhancing, limiting or suppressing knowledge concerning former Nazi and Soviet campscapes. We adopt a broad definition of material evidence: objects (e.g. personal belongings, weapons, tools, domestic items, clothing), structural remnants (e.g. buildings, barracks, fences and guard towers, extermination infrastructures), human remains and forensic trace evidence (e.g. DNA of victims in mass graves) to understand their role in the development of camp memorials and heritage sites. We are equally concerned with material remains in archives and memorial museums, as with findings of previous archaeological investigation, but we also examine the ways in which material traces and forensic evidence have been used by revisionist groups, educators, the media and the public (in particular online) to engineer alternative interpretations of Nazi and Soviet atrocities. Working closely with the associated partners and other stakeholders, activities include site visits focused on critically evaluating the presence/absence of material culture within key sites, observational experiments of visitor interactions and " public archaeology " activities. As such, iC-ACCESS demonstrates the role that materiality (which often resides unnoticed in archives or in the landscape) can play in the perception of sites. iC-ACCESS assesses the dynamics of competing postwar memories of Nazi, Communist and fascist terror at work in the European space and aims to offer tools which can potentially offer a coherent way of their storytelling that integrates different histories and divergent memories. 'Heritage as narrative' is articulated through national experiences and tropes of resistance, collaboration, occupation, and victimhood and perpetration and we consider how these affect and undermine the manner in which heritage is perceived and used in former conflict areas. We do so through transnational analyses of existing narratives relating to campscapes (represented in testimonies, literature, public media, museums, memorials and education), the processes of signi-fication and appropriation and mainstream historical discourses and how they might overshadow complementary, or conflicted perspectives. iC-ACCESS explores novel ways in which new technologies and methods can help identify, and provide access to buried physical traces and forensic evidence of and within campscapes. The methodology will draw upon state-of-the-art techniques derived from archaeology, forensic investigation , geography and digital humanities in order to locate, record and digitally preserve landscapes of mass violence. Recent advances in non-and minimally invasive archaeological methods, when coupled with surveying technologies from other disciplines, offer the potential to account for sensitivities surrounding conflict sites; they also facilitate a much more detailed analysis of both the areas within the boundaries of camps and surrounding landscape. We use novel applications of satellite remote sensing, airborne and terrestrial laser scanning (LiDAR), drones (UAVs), terrestrial topographic and geophysical survey, and micro-and macro-methods of archaeological excavation. iC-ACCESS provides highly detailed, three dimensional landscape models that also incorporate aerial imagery, photographs and maps, as state-of-the-art educational tools. The project considers testimonies as integral of visitor experiences and a selfstanding research material on campscapes in the digital era. It thus aims to collect, analyse and rethink interview collections so that they open up paradigmatic presentations of histories or supplement sparse contextual information relating to these sites. We study the (past, present and future) role of audio and video testimonies in safeguarding, understanding and valorising campscapes. Whether these individual stories can account for a previously uncharted micro-histories or become an additional source regarding representations of victimhood, of agency or responsibility, they provide a new reason for reflection and experimentation. These types of sources often support a differentiated understanding of painful memories of conflicts of the 20th century and are presumably more flexible in conveying the mutually shared effects of these pasts. By counterposing archival collections of personal testimonies to historical simplifications of conflicted pasts, iC-ACCESS aims to convey the multiple perspectives on individual experiences circumscribed to campscapes. ASSOCIATED PARTNERS PROJECT FINANCED BY TESTIMONIES: CAMPSCAPES AS MEMORY MATERIALITY: CAMPSCAPES AS TRACES iC-ACCESS uses and examines the potential of digital tools to offer new possibilities to connect local, national and global audiences to access conflicted heritage, without factual, time or location constraints. Virtual and augmented reality can be particularly useful at sites where no/few visible remains survive above the ground, as it can substitute traditional visitor experiences and provide an understanding of the campscape as " place ". The project team will create a digital network of 4D reconstructed sites through the assimilation of the 3D visualisations and the subsequent layering of documentary evidence (e.g. material traces, oral testimonies, photographs, media, narratives and memories) connected to landscapes, monuments, memorials and museums. Through Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (VAMR) and other forms of digital media we provide interactive, spatial tools that can be used online, within museums , campscapes and in classrooms. The potential of digital tools in the re-visualisation of conflict has arguably not yet been fully realised and we aim to provide new ways of representing and raising awareness.