Casualties of War

[Michael B]

My intention of the thread is to show signatures of those KIA or MIA and declared deceased. Listing names is easy I can come up with about 150 Olympians that were killed from WWI through the Iraq War. The wow factor for me is going through an autograph album to decipher the signatures and discovering that they died during a war. I find that fascinating. The signatures of Polish Olympians I showed were all on the same page of an autograph album. They were collected by a New Zealand boxer who competed in 1932. He had this album with 6x8 pages and his name embossed in gold on the front. He had theme pages - Argentine Boxing Team, 18 of the 19 members of the team from India, Italian Boxing team, half of the Greek team, Italian fencing team and all of the male members of the Polish team segregated by sport - fencing, athletics and rowing. There were also about 8 pages of Japanese athletes in all sports. The boxer who obtained these signatures was Harold Thomas. He fought one match in the Olympics and lost which ended his Olympic career. Eight months later, on March 29, 1933, he committed suicide by jumping from a train in Wellington, New Zealand just a few hours after hearing his fiance had died. He was 24 years, two months old. I cut the signed pages from the album but could not destroy the album. I was able to return it, along with photocopies of the removed pages, to the president of the New Zealand Olympic Committee when he was in Washington, D.C. for the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) convention in October, 2015. I felt like I was getting it back home.