…Meet WW1's Chinese Labour Corps.
"By late 1916, the Allied armies on the Western Front were being bled white.
The British had lost more than 600,000 men at the Somme in four months alone, while France had sacrificed a half-million soldiers holding off a 300-day German onslaught at Verdun. With the dead piling up and recruitment targets falling short, commanders needed every able body they could muster to man the front lines. Yet by the war's third year, there were simply not enough hands available for trench digging duties, road maintenance, or even just filling sandbags. The war effort needed labourers and it needed them fast. Desperate, Allied commanders eventually did what plantation owners in the Caribbean and railway barons in North America had been doing for decades. They hired Chinese labourers to do the dirty work — more than 140,000 of them.
Although the men of this Chinese Labour Corps, or CLC as it was known, were armed only with picks and shovels rather than rifles and grenades, their contribution to the Allied victory was considerable. Yet their efforts have been all but forgotten amid the wider narrative of the First World War. Hired for as little as one pound and paid a few pennies a day, the men of the CLC hauled supplies, constructed fortifications, maintained fighting vehicles and repaired roads and bridges – often under horrendous living conditions and frequently while under enemy fire. What's more, it wasn't until the last decade that their efforts and sacrifices were even mentioned in remembrance services…"
Full article here.
link
Wonder to know if someone of them managed to settle in France or England.
Amicalement
Armand
goes to sea with the Terrain Mat.
