Identity theft during WWI

[rei17]

Okay, so this is highly specific and I'm having a hard time googling it (seriously, somebody up there is going to think I'm planning identity theft by now, for how often I googled "false identity during wwi", "soldiers swapping identity", "mistaken identity" "passport during WWI" and so on). My question is: How hard or easy would it have been for

Comments

[nagi_schwarz]

I don’t know what specific ID a soldier had back then. A lot of whether the swap would be successful would depend on what other ID the soldier had beyond the military. If the military had few picture IDs then (or just a passport for travel and the resemblance was close enough) a simple dog tag swap might be enough. (Easier on lower ranked soldiers just because there were more of them and they were more anonymous but officers were fewer in number and more likely to have people who knew them personally.)

I think soldiers might have needed passports for overseas travel. Also their military records (like medical records) would have had a photo included.

Did people need driver’s licenses back then? If so, that might include a photo.

If your character was in higher education, like at university, there might be a photo of him at an annual dinner or something at his college.

[reynardo]

Drivers' licences didn't have photos until a long time afterwards. Even in Australia in the 1980s, my licence was a piece of paper.

In fact, the only identification pictures I can think of for the very early 1900s is mugshots.

However, many officers or their families had portrait photographs taken of them in their uniforms at commission. although for a field commission, less likely.

[nagi_schwarz]

I wondered. I know in some places drivers’ licenses weren’t even required at all for a long time, so I figured that might not be a thing.

[beesandbrews]

This was a fairly common trope in fiction. Agatha Christie did a Poirot story about it. (Whose name escapes me but it was one of the Christmas stories).

It cropped up in British television mysteries in the 90s and early 2000s. Pie in the Sky did an episode like that using a variation on your theme.

Given the battlefield chaos, and general lack of record keeping, it wouldn't have been that difficult, as long as the person whose identity being claimed didn't have a close social circle.

(Although I just finished a book last week where the victim did, but they failed to notice anyway because the police officer was a ringer for the victim. (Tanya French The Likeness).

[beesandbrews]

It was Hercule Poirot's Christmas that had the identity switch of the granddaughter and her traveling companion.

[rei17]

Ooooh I've actually read that one, but it's been years ago. Maybe I should check it out again to get some inspiration.

[orange_fell]

I don't have a precise answer to your question yet, but here's a resource that could be very useful in case your plot needs to include some little details of the characters' military uniforms, such as their buttons, cuffs, medals, or insignia. http://www.photodetective.co.uk/WW1-Index.html

More:
http://www.photodetective.co.uk/Army-1914.html

http://www.photodetective.co.uk/Tie-pin.html

[rei17]

Always helpful, thank you so much! =)

[orange_fell]

A very well-researched article on the history of soldiers' ID tags, with photos. Near the middle is a long description of WWI British tags. It seems your soldiers, if they enlisted after 1914, would most likely have had an official disc (tag) made of red asbestos stamped with some information, worn on a cord around the neck, under the clothing. At first, each soldier was only issued ONE, which means that if it was removed after the wearer's death (which it often was, since this was apparently required for administrative purposes), now you have an anonymous body. So, "[t]he majority of soldiers acquired “private purchase” discs (usually in the form of a bracelet) and others obtained a second issue disc (on rare occasions, a blank disc can be encountered that, due to the unavailability of stamp sets, the details have been written in ink - a problem that was so widespread during the first quarter of 1915 that an Army Order was issued - AO 206 of 20th May 1915 - that expressly forbade this practice . . ." So in 1916 they started issuing

[rei17]

Thank you so much! =)
I did find out about the tags they used to identify soldiers and I honestly wondered if it could be THAT easy - just switch out your tags with the ones of a dead guy and that's it?
But it seems as if it could've been that easy...

[tabaqui]

An *officer* would be pretty well known - there was a much larger percentage of officers from the peerage/nobility or with military connections at the beginning of the war, with middle-class service men only starting to be promoted toward the end of the war. Either way, an officer would have had to meet various other officers, inspect troops, and etc., so he would be more known to men of his rank and above, and to his immediate troops than a random private or corporal

[rei17]

Thanks for the long answer and the links! That's very helpful.

The personal stuff is not the problem. :)
He impersonates a close friend who died in the war, so he knows a lot about him and his family and he knows that his parents died and that the friend had been estranged from the rest of the family for a long time.
So that's not a problem, because most relatives who remember him have seen him a long time ago when he was a kid. Also there is a passing resemblance (height, hair and eye color are fairly similar, etc.), certainly enough to fool people who haven't seen you in twenty years.

[tabaqui]

You're welcome!
Sounds good.