Finding the Fallen

Beneath the farmland of Northern Belgium lie graveyards, the final resting place of the fallen of the First World War. At Ypres, our team excavate the past, a shovelful at a time, to preserve the memories of the shattered lives that ended here. They discover evidence of the first trenches of The Great War—mere scrapes of earth that would evolve into complex lines of trenches that if placed in a single line would encircle the Earth. In the process they unearth the partial remains of three German soldiers from the 213 Reserve Regiment, who fought and died here. Retracing on foot and by train the very steps these soldiers took in the Autumn of 1914, members of the team uncover a massacre of civilians in a small Belgian town.

Serre in Northern France was an infamous German stronghold in the Great War. Thousands died here, many of them buried where they fell. Three soldiers are discovered. One is British but a lack of material evidence prevents identification. The other two are German, discovered with tantalizing clues as to their identity. One soldier took into battle a touching souvenir of home, a pictorial shoe polish lid. He also broke a cardinal rule of war by scratching his name on his i.d. tag. The partial name and the keepsake allow a positive identification. The other was found with a matted lump of paper. Using real world “CSI” techniques, a lost document is restored and gives up a name and a place. In the end, enlisted man and officer- brothers only in death—are reburied together in a military cemetery, sharing a single stone.

Tunnels and craters in the heart of a French coalfield hide horrors from the First World War. More than 50,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded here in a hellish battle that moved underground. Our team of archaeologists, historians, and forensic experts is here to excavate the lip of a gigantic crater that was created by a massive underground explosion. They discover a mass grave and, within the burial site, clues to one of the fallen soldiers, a German from Bavaria. A simple uniform button, a regiment number on an epaulette, and a postcard inside a music book, lead to the identity of this soldier: a gifted violinist named Leopold Rotharmel turned warrior in the German unit that would later be called the Storm Troopers.

Our team of archaeologists, forensic experts and historians travel to the front lines of the Battle of the Somme, a sector known as Beaumont Hamel, looking for the truth of what happened that day. They uncover medical supplies lead to the location of what may have been a front line medical post - a hub of chaos on that fateful day. And it is here that the team makes a stunning discovery: it’s only a single button. But it’s a button that could only been worn by one soldier on the morning that marked the commencement of the Battle of the Somme: the Regimental Medical Officer. This find sets the team off on a journey to uncover the life of one Dr. William Bunting Wamsley, a Methodist doctor from Northern England who also spent time working in China at Methodist missions.

In Northern Belgium lies the site of the infamous battle of Passchendaele, fought in 1917, a place where man and beast drowned in a churning sea of mud. As the team unearth the remains of a complex trench system, they discover one of the first modern wristwatches– a technological innovation that was born of war. Forensic investigation reveals letters are etched onto its strap - a discovery that launches a journey to identify its owner, a soldier, one of the Fallen. The search leads to John Humphrey England, a Second Lieutenant under the Welsh regiment, who died in the mud of Passchendaele July 31 1917. But this quest has a twist in the tail.