"The Forgotten Trench Diggers of the Western Front" Topic

Meet WW1's Chinese Labour Corps.

"The Men of the Chinese Labour Corps — they carried no rifles, but they still helped the Allies win the First Word War. More than 140,000 Chinese workers, along with thens of thousands of migrants from Egypt, India and elsewhere dug trenches, built roads and hauled supplies all along the Western Front. Only recently, have their sacrifices come to light. This image is from a vintage post card recovered by World War One historian Paul Reed and appears on his site GreatWarPhotos.com.
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 other tasks: trench digging duties, road maintenance, or even just filling sandbags. While fresh fighting men were hard to come by, the war effort also 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 hands to do the dirty work — more than 140,000 of them.

Although the men of the 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 no less 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. [1] 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

Amicalement
Armand

And American blacks did similar work.

From a New York Public Library exhibit link

The war most directly impacted those African Americans called to fight and labor in the military overseas. Over 200,000 crossed the Atlantic and served in France. The majority worked in service units, broadly characterized as the Service of Supply (SOS). They dug ditches, cleaned latrines, transported supplies, cleared debris, and buried rotting corpses. The largest number of African-American SOS troops served as stevedores, working on the docks of Brest, St. Nazaire, Bordeaux, and other French port cities to load and unload crucial supplies.

Jim