In olden times, practices were rough in disposing of a slain foe’s body. From classical antiquity, Homer reported the victorious Achilles dragging the body of the vanquished Hector behind his chariot in front of the gates of Troy, then heaping on indignities until, after 12 days, even the gods were tired of it and ordered the body returned for decent burial.
The commander of a Royal Navy raiding party in 1718 made sure that there would be no decent burial for the pirate Edward Teach after the tars took out the notorious Blackbeard. The commander had Teach’s body decapitated, tossed the headless corpse into the water, and fastened the head to his ship’s bowsprit for the return voyage. Such practices seem motivated not merely by a desire to terrorize the deceased’s followers and emulators, as well as sometimes a desire for revenge, but also by a psychological need to show how tough the victor is.
Less macabre practices prevailed in more recent times. As the Second World War ended the body of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler was buried in an unmarked and still unlocated grave after he committed suicide following capture. What happened to the bodies of the Nazi leaders following the Nuremberg trial is murky, but the accepted version is that they were cremated and the ashes secretly dumped into a river. Even murkier is what happened to the body of Adolf Hitler, and those of others in his immediate entourage. The accepted version is that the Soviet secret service kept the remains in a secret burial site for a quarter century, then cremated them and dumped the ashes into a river. It is said that parts of Hitler’s jaw and skull remain in Moscow. If so, this runs counter to the proclaimed motive behind obliteration without identifiable remains — the fear of shrines to the departed developing amongst hard core adherents.
Preventing a shrine developing was cited for the recent American removal of Osama Bin Laden’s body and its hasty burial at sea. The impact a person had in life continues after death. No amount of dishonouring the body or making it vanish makes much difference. Such attempts probably stand more as testimony to the victor’s fear of the person’s influence.
Following the restoration of the monarchy in Britain, the body of former Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was exhumed from an honoured burial site and exhibited as a common criminal after undergoing mock execution. Cromwell’s trophies in life included the head of King Charles I. Despite the post mortem despoliation, the force of his personality lived on. His skull, severed from the corpse, was eventually buried on the grounds of his old college, but at a still unmarked location — from fear not of a shrine but of desecration by ardent latter day royalists or distorted attention seekers.
One of the first ships commissioned in the Continental Navy of the American Revolutionaries in 1776 was the Oliver Cromwell. Around time of the First World War, King George V declined a similar name for a battleship in Britain’s Royal Navy. At the start of the Second World War Cromwell’s blistering words to the Long Parliament were quoted to stinging effect in the parliamentary debate that brought down the ineffectual Prime Minister Chamberlain. By the end of the conflict the British army had a Cromwell tank — Oliver had been a superlative cavalry leader.
St. Albert resident David Haas has extensive regular and reserve force peacetime military service.
