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

[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 two tags, one to be removed from the body after death, and one to stay with it. They were color coded green and red.
https://www.westernfrontassociation.com/world-war-i-articles/identifying-the-dead-a-short-study-of-the-identification-tags-of-1914-1918/

Primary source!! AO 267, September 1916 shows how the green and red tags were to be worn together, with the round red No. 2 disc attached to the lower part of the octagonal green No. 1 disc. https://www.flickr.com/photos/westernfrontassociation/4103848556/

Info on ID discs from the Imperial War Museums. This page says that the owner's religion would be indicated on the tag (for burial rite purposes): https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/first-world-war-identity-tags

Some wiki history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_tag#World_War_I

Photo ID doesn't seem to have been a thing in this era. Edited bc I wrote 2016 instead of 1916 in one place.

[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...