An Otago soldier killed in action just weeks before the end of World War 1 has finally been laid to rest in France.<\/p>\n
The partial remains of Lance Corporal Patrick Duffy were lost for more than 100 years after being taken far from the French battlefield where he was fatally wounded.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They were discovered when the M\u00fctter Museum and Historical Medical Library\u00a0in Philadelphia disclosed last year it had partial WW1 human remains in its collection.<\/p>\n
The 113 sets of remains had been collected from a military hospital in Le Tr\u00e9port, France, and were transferred to the US for medical study in 1919, an accepted practice at the time.<\/p>\n
Many belonged to casualties who were already buried in Mont Huon Military Cemetery in France.<\/p>\n
Lance Corporal Duffy, who grew up in Tapanui as one of 10 children of\u00a0Michael and Lily Duffy, was one of those casualties.<\/p>\n
He left Otago and embarked for Europe in November 1915 with the\u00a0New Zealand Expeditionary Force.<\/p>\n
During three years of war he was wounded and fell ill several times.<\/p>\n
Then in October 1918, while serving in France, he sustained gunshot wounds to his head and left hand,<\/p>\n
He died from his wounds on October 24 – less than three weeks before the end of the war.<\/p>\n
His remains were reburied this month by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission alongside those of another New Zealand soldier\u00a0Rifleman George James Tombs, the New Zealand Defence Force said.<\/p>\n
Rifleman Tombs, who was born in England,\u00a0 suffered a gunshot wound and severe fracture to his left arm at the Battle of Passchendaele on October 12, 1917, less than six months after embarking for the Western Front.<\/p>\n
Within a few hours, 843 New Zealanders were killed on the day, with the assault ultimately claiming the lives of more than 950 New Zealanders, including Rifleman Tombs.<\/p>\n
He later became seriously ill as a result of his wounds, and almost two months after he was injured he died on December 6, 1917.<\/p>\n
The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) said in a statement it had contacted\u00a0the families of these two soldiers.<\/p>\n
Their partial remains were buried in their existing graves earlier this month by the CWGC team in France, in a private interment, attended by New Zealand\u2019s Defence Attach\u00e9 based in Belgium.<\/p>\n
The NZDF would work with the families to determine whether a public ceremony will be held to further commemorate these men.<\/p>\n
– Allied Media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Otago soldier killed in action just weeks before the end of World War 1 has finally been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-393747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}