Question about Western Europe battlefields.

Pardon my lack of specific knowledge here but I have been curious about something.

What happened to the WWI battlefields in France and Belgium during the WWII years. Were there any WWII battles on or near WWI sites? How did the Germans treat these places? Are there WWI areas of battle that did not survive WWII?

hris Friedrich < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it > wrote in article <68du8i$ This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it >... Canada's Vimy memorial (France) was completed about 1937 as a very tall structure on the crest of a hill. It was not destroyed by the german army when they took the country so that should say something. Graveyards are at battlefields, there are always two or more sides involved, with friend and foe near each other. 70% of WW1 casualties were unidentified, often in bits and pieces. Anything generally I've read about ww1 monuments indicates they are intact today. To me that says the whermach were professional and respected these sites. Why not?

The monument to the 2nd Australian Divsion on Mont St Quentin was destroyed by the Germans (perhaps because it portrayed a Digger stabbing a German with a bayonet!) and was replaced after WWII. The monument to the Zebrugge Raid was also destroyed by the Germans, as was a monument at Steenstraat commemorating the first use of poison gas in 1915 (a German office took exception to the wording, refusing to accept that the Germans had been first to use this weapon).

Generally, deliberate destruction of defacing of monuments was rare, and cemetaries in the main were respected. I read somewhere, for instance, that the local representatives of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who tended the cemetaries were allowed to continue their work throughout the war (even though some of them were retired British soldiers).

This may have been the case in Western Europe but in Eastern Europe they were not so 'proferssional and respected' in respect of war memorials. The War Memorial to World War I in Warsaw was almost completely destroyed by the Germans. The destruction of the memorial was undertaken as a conscious decision to show the Poles that the Germans were the conquerors and just enough of the original memorial was left to remind the Poles of might of the 'German whermach' and their ability to determine 'life or death' in

The only one that comes to mind is Arras.