The bodies of dozens of British soldiers killed during the Korean war will never be recovered, the Government has admitted.
T he bodies of dozens of British soldiers killed during the Korean war will never be recovered, the Government has admitted.
The first official count of Britain’s missing war dead from the war has established the remains of 255 UK servicemen and women are lying in North Korea – roughly a quarter of the 1,129 Britons who died in the war.
Ministers are now appealing to relatives of British troops who lost their lives in the war to provide DNA samples so they can be identified.
However, the remains of a further 46 servicemen and women are classified as “with no known grave” and so either “lost at sea or buried at sea” with little chance of being recovered.
The Korean War is sometimes been called a ‘forgotten war’ despite up to three million people losing their lives, including thousands of US and British servicemen and women.
Hopes were raised this year that the bodies of the British war dead can be repatriated after a summit between US president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un .
That triggered the return of around 55 caskets of remains – some of whom may be British – in late July that have been found in the North since the end of the four-year Korean War in 1954.
I n a letter to Lord Alton of Liverpool, the campaigning Liberal Democrat peer, Earl Howe, a Ministry of Defence minister, said officials had “recently concluded an exercise to cross-reference records in the UK and the British embassy in Seoul of those personnel with no known grave, to confirm the number of personnel whose remains might possibly in North Korea.
“From a total of 301 UK service personnel with no known grave, I can now confirm the remains of 255 UK service personnel are believed to be in North Korea.
