Mainamati War Cemetery
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.
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]
