One of my fetishes, when I travel, is to visit Tombs of the Unknown Soldier. So far I’ve seen those of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Belgium, and Australia. Later this year I will be adding New Zealand.
When visiting the Australian TUS, I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t created until 1993. In reading about New Zealand, I see that it didn’t create a TUS until 2004. Likewise with Canada–no TUS until 2000. All three tombs, I should emphasize, harbor only a World War I soldier–the practice of harboring one soldier from every war is unique to the United States (at least among those I’ve visited).
So this is a two-part question:
Why didn’t any of the three then-Dominions create a TUS in the immediate aftermath of World War I?
Given that they didn’t, and lived without a TUS for 75 years, why did all three countries change their mind within a decade and create one between 1993 and 2004?
I understand that the Dominions didn’t conduct an independent foreign policy before World War I, and went to war as part of the British Empire. But I also understand that they developed national consciousness during the war, and conducted their own foreign policy afterward. I would have thought creating a TUS would have been a symbolic part of that self-assertion, but it didn’t happen until 75 years after the fact.
“The RSA unsuccessfully called for a New Zealand Tomb of the Unknown Warrior during the 1940s and 1950s in conjunction with its campaign for the completion of the National War Memorial. The call was renewed during the 1990s as a result of Australia establishing their Tomb on Armistice Day 1993 and given impetus when Canada followed with its Tomb on 28 May 2000.”
Ie had been asked for for decades, but that got it finally going.
I’d say this is the initial answer. This section of the website of the Australian War Memorial notes that the first unknown soldier entombed in Westminster Abbey in 1922:
Presumably Australia, New Zealand and Canada were satisfied that the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey adequately represented their own war dead.
WWI was certainly a major factor in the creation of a national consciousness on Australia’s part. As for the long delay in creating our own TUS? Just inertia, I expect. “Too expensive…too much trouble”. I’m sure people suggested it, but there were probably always more pressing items on the agenda. I’m not sure what occurred in the run up to 1993 that galvanised official opinion. The 75th anniversary of Gallipoli in 1990 perhaps?
The constitutional and national development of older Commonwealth dominions was an evolution, not a revolution. It wasn’t like we came out of WWI determined to have all the trappings of independent nations, split from Britain. Even though Canadian sense of nationalism shot up after the war, the transition to full formal independence took another 60 years, with the enactment of the Canada Act 1982. Having an unknown soldier was one of many possible developments along the way.
When the remains were repatriated, the tombstone also came along, and it’s in Memorial Hall, which is designed to have the sun shine squarely on the tombstone through a skylight at 11 am on November 11.
I will do that! I last visited Ottawa in 1986, before the tomb obviously, and I’d like to go again, but given the reality of limited vacation time I may not make it again until I retire. Hopefully that will not be too many years distant!
Why is the OP asking this? Do you know who they are? 'Cause if you know who they are and aren’t telling, that’s illegal. And I think you can put in the tower of London and the Queen’s pleasure.