The 6th June 1944. D-Day. It was one of the most important and pivotal military operations of the
Second World War, as the Allies would land in Normandy and try to take a foothold in Europe.
The plan was to get off the beaches as soon as possible and to destroy
the emplacements that the Germans had, and within days the Allies
wanted to liberate many of the towns and villages around the Normandy Coast.
The different beaches had different levels of resistance, with Omaha being the deadliest.
But despite the Normandy landings being seen as a huge success and a victory which turned the
war for the Allies, there was a huge civilian cost. Men were mown down by machine gun fire
as soon as the ramps of the landing craft were dropped, and it was slaughter on a huge scale.
Thousands of men would lay their lives down, but what is not as well known is the operations
following the landings to clean up the bodies of those allied soldiers who died on the beaches.
The sea in places was turned red with the horror, but join us today as we look at what happened to
the dead bodies of d-day. To support our channel, please make sure to subscribe.
The plans for D-Day had been in place for years, and following the retreat from Dunkirk,
the Allies knew that they would need to go and try to take a foothold in Europe.
In the years inbetween, the RAF had defeated the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain,
but eventually in 1944 the decision was made for the Allies to go back to Europe to retake France.
It’s estimated that 160,000 soldiers landed on the five beaches of Omaha, Gold, Sword, Juno and Utah.
The American soldiers landed at the beaches codenamed Omaha and Utah,
and the German resistance here was rather intense and brutal. The terrain and also the weather made
things more difficult, and many soldiers had to wade through water whilst the Germans fired
their machine guns at them. But many different men would fall in the landings, and the men had
to just leave their fallen comrades behind them as they had to get off the beach as soon as possible.
Despite being incredibly organised, the Allies probably did not anticipate the resistance and
experience that the soldiers would face when they landed and it was very chaotic.
Eisenhower had been told before that he should expect the majority of the 150,000 soldiers to
die in the attempts to regain Normandy, and he was told that the paratroop landing would bring a
75% death rate. It’s not entirely known the exact number of men that died on the beaches, but most
memorials claim that there were round 4,414 allied deaths with the most deadly beach being Omaha with
2000 American soldiers dying there. On other beaches 2000 British soldiers were killed,
and 340 Canadians were also killed. The Germans lost around 4,000 to 9,000 men in the operation.
But most of these men today have been laid to rest inside the various
military cemeteries in Normandy, but this was not the case on D-Day.
As the soldiers were occupied pushing towards the ridges and the bunkers, the dying soldiers
were often left to succumb to their fate. Medics were struggling to cope with the huge number of
casualties, and the ones who survived had nothing else on their mind than to push forward and get
out of the way of heavy fire.No one expected these men to be tending to the dead in these moments,
and they certainly did not expect them to interrupt the dead in graves whilst they were
being shot at. Some soldiers who saw people dying did offer a slight bit of comfort to them if they
had shelter from the fire, but some would see a dead body and then cover their remains with a
blanket or a cloth, or anything they had and then they moved on. A number of soldiers would recount
how as they were taken onto the beach, there were the floating remains of fallen soldiers
in the water as the waves were bringing them back and then washing them back on the shore.
Some soldiers had to crawl onto of those who were floating and were lying on the beach.
There is a famous image of one leftenant kneeling next to the body of a comrade on Omaha,
and in the back there are the remains of more soldiers. But the first wave of landing soldiers
would say the remains were scattered across the sand. There were some medics and men who
were on the ships that would receive the wounded and dead soldiers who had been pulled onto the
boats. When the landing craft got back, some of the landing craft were carrying the remains
of men who had been killed by German bullets and they hadn’t even disembarked the ships.
Those who were in the next wave would see this and would be shocked, but as the Allies took
control of German positions and took control of the beaches, they were tasked with moving
further into France and pushing on. They were still not in the business of dealing with the
dead who were on the beaches, but behind them were the bodies of thousands of comrades.
The decision was made to temporarily interrogated the bodies in a graveyard,
as leaving them in the open was said to have been distasteful and too hard for the back up
soldiers to see. Also for sanitation and hygiene the bodies needed dealing with.
One man, Sergeant Elbert E Legg decided for one temporary gravesite, and he would use whatever
tools he could to bury the dead, often on the beaches. The graves were then marked
with wooden debris, and when they came across paratroopers who had been killed, they marked the
parachutists with their parachutes, using them as shrouds to wrap the bodies. Other soldiers would
recount that the allies following establishing a front would work quickly to bury the remains
of the fallen, as it was the start of June and the decomposition of the bodies was happening quickly.
Trailers were offloaded from landing craft to carry the dead to then take them to burial
grounds off the beach-head and nearby. Within 4 days, the Allies had established 8 military
cemeteries int he areas surrounding the beaches, and a month after D-Day it’s
believed that these cemeteries held the remains of more than 30,000 soldiers who had been killed.
The Quartermaster Graves Registration Service also emerged, and this was an attempt by the
Americans to identify the bodies of the fallen using their dog tags and they would then process
the dead and then inter them in the graves. There were many grave registration companies and groups
set up by the different armies, and they had been trained in many different practises to organising
burial grounds, to watching autopsies. But many of the men despite their hardy training had not
prepared for the actual act of dealing with the dead. Identifying the remains of those
soldiers who were killed on the D-Day beaches was varied, as it could be as easy as using the
metal dog tags around their neck, but often there were more complex identification methods used.
The standard working way to bury the bodies was to bury the remains with one dog tag, whilst sending
the other back for registration purposes. But the chaotic nature of the beaches and the horror of
the slaughter often led that bodies would be found without dog tags or these were sometimes broken.
The men who were there to recover the dead also had to often wade throughout the water and the
sea to collect the remains of those who had died. Some soldiers even had to exhume those
who had died inside of sunken craft or vehicles, and some people had to be collected by divers.
One private would note how one of his worst experiences was having to free the remains
of a fallen soldier who had become tangled in the propellers of a landing craft. But the sanitation
for those who buried the dead was not great, and the Germans would also place booby-traps on the
dead during the war, so this was another hazard they had to deal with. But captured on the D-Day
beaches were a number of German prisoners of war, and these men were then ordered to help deal with
the dead. Some captured soldiers were forced to work as grave diggers in the cemeteries,
but many did freak out as they believed that the graves they were digging were for them,
like the German practice of executing prisoners who would be forced to dig their graves first.
Local civilians also helped to bury the dead, and the French were paid to do this also.
But still today there are a number of Allied men who have not been identified. The exact number of
dead on the 6th June 1944 is unknown due to the chaos that happened. Some were killed not on the
beaches, for example in the parachute landing of D-Day, and for this it’s difficult to calculate
an exact death toll. Some soldiers went missing and no remains were found. But following the war,
there were many soldiers who remained in the military cemeteries in Europe far from their
homes. Many families did not want to exhume their beloved sons and fathers, and repatriating them
back to America and other counties was considered too difficult and costly. But some did want to
bring the dead of D-Day home, and the American government would set aside millions to repatriate.
In total over 1.5 billion dollars was spent bringing the D-Day fallen back to America, but
more than 171,000 fallen American soldiers by 1951 had been returned to their homes and families.
But the dead of D-Day to begin with were left behind by those men who’s primary objective was
to get off the beaches. The clean up operation fell to those who were in the latter stages of
the advancement and they were then tasked with burying those on the beaches who had been killed.
Still today there are men who gave their lives for the free-ing of occupied Europe who lie in
graveyards and have not been identified. There are still men who are missing, and there are still
fallen soldiers who lie on the battlefields of Europe. This is the same for the First World War,
but despite D-Day being seen as a heroic day, there was a huge cost to the lives
of the military, and we must never forget those who gave their lives to ridding Europe from evil.
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