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Post subject: Austrian soldiers frozen in time - 3 men died in 1918 battle
 Posted: Aug 25, 2004 - 12:36 PM
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Joined: Mar 13, 2004
Posts: 209
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ROME?An amateur Italian historian has found the preserved bodies of three Austro-Hungarian soldiers in an Alpine glacier, 86 years after they were killed in World War I.
Maurizio Vicenzi, president of a local war museum, said yesterday the three were likely killed in a battle to retake the peak of San Matteo on Sept. 3, 1918, when Austro-Hungarian troops were repelled by Italian fire as they left their mountaintop trenches.
Vicenzi, a mountain rescue worker, discovered the mummified bodies on Friday. They were encased upside down in ice at 3,640 metres altitude near the Swiss and Austrian borders.
"Using binoculars, I saw what looked like a stain on the Forni glacier and went to look," Vicenzi, 46, from the northern Italian town of Peio said yesterday.
"When I got close, I discovered they were the bodies of soldiers frozen in the glacier. Nothing like this has ever happened in my lifetime. Bodies haven't been found in the ice around here for decades," he said.
Vicenzi's fellow rescue workers helped him remove the bodies on Sunday. They were transferred to the Peio morgue by helicopter.
The soldiers' uniforms were mostly intact including leather belts, a gas mask and a cap with a star on it.
Historians are already studying Vicenzi's find and believe the men were probably killed by a grenade, according to the BBC.
"The great battle" was fought along a 50-kilometre front of glaciers in what is thought to be the highest altitude battle in history.
The Austrians won but 11 soldiers were killed.
The body of one of the soldiers will be handed over to an Italian archaeological museum for research, authorities said yesterday.
The museum at Bolzano in northern Italy will be allowed to preserve and study the remains, while the other two are scheduled to be buried this week at an Italian military cemetery at Peio, the news agency AFP reported.
Similar thawing in the Similaun glacier, in the same region where Friday's discovery was made, led to the discovery in 1991 of Otzi, a hunter who had lived about 5,300 years ago.
Reuters
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