Mainamati War Cemetery
![](/images/thumb/b/b9/CrossOfSacrificeMainamati.jpg/300px-CrossOfSacrificeMainamati.jpg)
Mainamati War Cemetery is the graveyard of those soldiers who died during the 2nd world war in Bengal front. The Cemetery is situated 1 km. down the road leading from Comilla to Sylhet and a short distance past the Cantonment Military Hospital. There is a C.W.G.C. road direction sign on a roundabout at the crossroad. Mainamati is some 7 kilometres from the centre of Comilla, which is on the railway line linking Dhaka to Chittagong.
Before the war Mainamati was a small settlement of a few dozen huts, but during the war (Second World War) a large military camp was established there. Several ordnance depots and a number of military hospitals, both British and Indian, were in the area, including Nos. 14 and 150 British General Hospitals; and the majority of the burials in Mainamati War Cemetery were from the various hospitals. Graves from isolated places in the surrounding country, and some from as far a field as Burma, were moved into the cemetery by the Army Graves Service and later on by the Commission; and it was found also necessary to transfer graves from small cemeteries at Dhaka, Faridpur, Paksay, Saidpur, Santahar and Sirajganj, where they could not be maintained.
![](/images/thumb/f/f2/MainamatiGrave.jpg/300px-MainamatiGrave.jpg)
The cemetery was started by the Army and laid out by the garrison engineer. It is dominated by a small flat-topped hill crowned. Between the entrance and this hill lie the Christian graves, and on the far side of it are the Muslim graves. On a terrace about halfway up the hill, facing the entrance, stands the Cross of Sacrifice, and on the other side a shelter looks over the Muslim graves to a tree-framed view of the countryside beyond. There are now over 737 graves in this cemetery, that include the warriors of the then Pakistan/India, Japan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, USA, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries. [Nasrin Akhter]