Pozières Memorial

Pozières Memorial
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
View looking east across the cemetery, with colonnades of memorial panels in the background
For forces of the United Kingdom and South Africa
Unveiled	4 August 1930
Location	50°02′03″N 02°42′55″E / 50.03417°N 2.71528°E / 50.03417; 2.71528Coordinates: 50°02′03″N 02°42′55″E / 50.03417°N 2.71528°E / 50.03417; 2.71528
Designed by	William Harrison Cowlishaw Laurence A. Turner (sculptor)
In memory of the officers and men of the Fifth and Fourth Armies who fought on the Somme battlefields 21 March – 7 August 1918 and to those of their dead who have no known grave
Statistics source: Cemetery details. Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

The Pozières Memorial is a World War I memorial, located near the commune of Pozières, in the Somme department of France, and unveiled in August 1930. It lists the names of 14,657 British and South African soldiers of the Fifth and Fourth Armies with no known grave who were killed between 21 March 1918 and 7 August 1918, during the German advance known as the Spring Offensive (21 March–18 July), and the period of Allied consolidation and recovery that followed. The final date is determined by the start of the period known as the Advance to Victory on 8 August.

The memorial forms the perimeter walls of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, which principally contains the bodies of men killed during the Battle of Pozières and the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

The memorial commemorates the missing of the British Fifth Army, and to a lesser extent of the Fourth Army (re-formed to turn the tide of battle following the virtual disintegration of the Fifth Army). The original intention was that the memorial at Pozières should commemorate the missing of the Third Army, while those of the Fifth Army would be commemorated at Saint-Quentin, at the heart of the Army's sector in March 1918. However, the French authorities objected to the amount of land being taken for British memorials, and so the names of the Third Army missing were added to the Arras Memorial, while the Fifth Army memorial was situated here, despite the fact that Pozières lay on the wrong side of the River Somme from the area in which those named had died.