After WWI it was found that 32 villages and later 53 parishes lost no servicemen in WWI and, of those, 13 lost no servicemen in WWII making the villages Thankful and Doubly Thankful respectively.
Does the concept of Thankful and Doubly Thankful exist outside of the UK? I imagine that, with its late entry to both wars and large number of cities, the US would have many but what about France, Germany, Russia, Italy, ect. Were the number of deaths for France and Germany so high that Thankful cities are not likely?
Does this concept exist outside of the United Kingdom, and if it does not is there a particular reason?
I’ve never heard of this rather moving practice in the US, and I think that might be due to cultural differences. The US has no civil registration of people’s residences, and the Depression years saw a lot of migration. Americans have generally tended to be more mobile than Britons, and also to have less sense of “belonging” to a particular village or town; in any case the villages have no listing of who is a resident. Boys who joined the military from widely scattered farms and ranches wouldn’t necessarily have thought of themselves as being “from” the county seat, or the town where they shopped or were schooled. Especially during the Second World War, their family members might have moved for employment opportunities, and when the war was over, the service member might have chosen to stay in a distant city rather than return to rural poverty.
Many, if not most, counties in the US did erect memorials (usually on the courthouse lawn) afterward to the service members they lost in the wars. These have been added to and supplemented to mark subsequent wars.
A few villages (communes, which are in turn very often equivalent to historical parishes) in France did not suffer any death on the battlefield during the 20th century (though the most crucial war, so to speak, to earn this title certainly was WW1; the number of men drafted and the mortality endured in subsequent conflict were less drastic). This article of a regional newspaper mentions seven villages, all of them very small. There is, however, no label for them, though they do have the particularity of lacking the otherwise ubiquitous war memorial.