When the smoke cleared and the fighting was over, World War I was the deadliest war in
human history, with a staggering ten million military personnel and seven million civilians
dead.
Two decades later, World War II would top this figure, with between seventy and eighty
five million people killed.
World War II alone would kill off three percent of the world's population.
But with some of the largest and bloodiest battles in history, you might wonder what
happened after the battle to all those dead soldiers and civilians?
Disposing of the dead is a vital military task for many reasons.
Chief amongst them though is hygienic and morale concerns.
Dead bodies littering a battlefield will very quickly lead to outbreaks of disease and illness,
and a high enough concentration of dead bodies can even poison local water supplies if a
battle took place in the wrong area.
With disease being as big a killer in most wars as enemy action, the world very quickly
learned that there needed to be an efficient and quick way to dispose of bodies after combat,
or risk the health of the survivors and local communities.
Another major concern though is the effect that casualties have on overall morale, after
all nobody wants to move through a battlefield to get to the new front lines and be greeted
by the grisly remains of hundreds or even thousands of soldiers who came before you
and died.
During the allied invasion of Normandy in World War II, the removal of battlefield casualties
from the landing beaches became a matter of paramount importance.
Men were dispatched to clean up the beaches of both allied and German corpses, sometimes
even having to dive under the water to cut bodies free from overturned landing craft.
It was a grisly business, but one that was vitally necessary in order to protect the
morale of troops landing in subsequent waves.
In the past the removal of battlefield casualties was largely left up to local villagers and,
if there was time and resources, perhaps some military units.
In World War I individual units were largely responsible for seeing to their own dead,
and fellow soldiers would search the battlefield for corpses and deliver them for burial in
mass graves.
Often military units would enlist the aid of local villagers to help sort the battlefield
for casualties, and the dead of both sides were buried with their comrades, albeit in
different mass graves for the two opposing armies.
Usually after a large battle a local ceasefire would be negotiated, allowing both sides to
send men out to recover their dead.
When the situation allowed, the men would be buried in individual graves, but typically
mass graves were the simplest and therefore preferred option.
The location of the graves would be recorded and later when time allowed, or perhaps after
the war, bodies would be exhumed and then given proper burials.
Things improved during World War II somewhat, and more emphasis was placed on proper burials
when possible for both enemy and friendly dead.
The responsibility still lay with individual units, but both sides had military graves
officers whose specific job was burying the dead.
The Germans dictated that mass graves were the preferred option for burial, and that
these graves should be located near railway lines if possible.
The burial site should also include pathways so that after the war it could be turned into
a proper military cemetery.
However as the war raged on the practice became unfeasible and mass graves were dug where
they could be conveniently located.
Local ceasefires were still common place after major battles so that both sides could recover
their dead.
The allies also left the responsibility of burying their dead largely in the hands of
the individual units, who would comb a battlefield after the fight and gather corpses for burial.
The Americans though had a unit known as the Quartermaster Graves Registration Service,
or GRS, who was tasked with the proper burial of American dead, and the incredible lengths
to which these men went to ensure the recovery and burial of their dead was nothing short
of heroic.
A much greater emphasis was placed on proper burial rites for individuals based on their
religion, and as often as possible the dead were buried in individual and proper graves,
instead of mass graves.
The GRS units would not just bury American casualties, but any allied casualty they came
across, even axis soldiers and civilians killed in the crossfire.
They would often hire local villagers to help with the task, and even used POWs to help
dig graves- who were often terrified believing that they were digging their own graves.
The GRS units were well known to go to extraordinary lengths not only to recover bodies, but to
identify them and give them proper burials according to the fallen's religious affiliation.
The graves would be well marked and the location passed along to relevant authorities, with
many of the graves exhumed after the war and the bodies moved to proper military cemeteries
across Europe.
Identifying the dead could be grisly business, specially given the efficacy of modern weapons.
Often inside a burned-out tank all that could be discovered was molten rings and other jewelry
and teeth.
If the GRS men were lucky, they may find a dog tag intact.
Crawling into crashed airplanes though could lead to the discovery of many dead, most of
them dismembered and almost impossible to identify.
Still, the GRS soldiers diligently worked to pry loose human remains and have them identified
any way possible.
Dog tags were the primary way of identifying a soldier, but if those were missing then
the men would take prints of all ten fingers and prepare a dental chart for identification.
If the body was in really bad shape though a special fluid could be injected into the
fingers to allow them to get usable prints, and in severe cases the men would cut the
skin off the tips of the fingers directly.
Each soldier's uniform also bore laundry marks which bore the first letter of the last name
and the last four digits of their service number.
Where once looting of personal effects prevailed, the men of the GRS went to great lengths to
protect the personal effects of the dead.
Things such as wallets, rings, watches and photos were all shipped to the Quartermaster
Depot in Kansas City, Missouri, and there they would be cleaned and sent to the next
of kin.
Bloodstained items and things that could be embarrassing to the family were destroyed
on the battlefield, while perishable items such as rations, chewing gum, and cigarettes
were distributed amongst the troops.
Weapons and ammunition were also gathered up and given to soldiers in need.
The GRS men may not have been proper infantry, but that doesn't mean that they operated safely
behind friendly lines.
In fact, GRS soldiers were amongst the first to land in France during the D-Day invasion,
with some of them aboard the gliders that delivered airborne infantry troops behind
enemy lines.
Their task was grim, but necessary, as they were to see to the burial of expected losses
amongst the first allied forces to land in Europe.
On the beaches of Normandy, GRS men cut casualties out of landing craft, and retrieved their
soggy and bloated bodies from the surf.
As the war moved east, GRS soldiers followed the front lines, and when winter arrived their
job became that much harder.
The snow and ice froze corpses in place, and the men brought bodies into heated morgue
tents in order to defrost the bodies up enough to allow for the recovery of personal effects,
and to prepare for proper burials.
When the offensive crossed into Germany, the allied casualties were shipped hundreds of
miles back to be buried in France, the Netherlands, or Belgium, with the GRS men believing that
no family back home would want their dead son to be buried in Germany.
At the end of World War II when everybody else got to go home, the GRS soldiers stayed
behind, going back over the battlefields of Europe looking for hastily dug graves that
had been overlooked.
In just the European theater alone, bodies were scattered over 1.5 million miles of territory,
and in the Pacific the bodies of dead American soldiers were spread out across innumerable
jungle islands.
The GRS men nonetheless diligently scoured both theaters of war for the dead, and in
1946 the government authorized the return of bodies at government expense for proper
burial at home.
The program would eventually cost $191 million dollars but would allow the families of 170,000
fallen soldiers to bury their loved ones in home burial plots inside the US.
The recovery of the dead after a major battle is a gruesome, yet necessary affair.
The existence of units like the Graves Registration Service, and the incredible lengths they went
to in order to ensure the recovery and proper burial of so many dead soldiers however speaks
to a strange dichotomy of human nature.
On one hand, we invest millions of dollars into weapons that allow us to take life with
greater and greater efficacy, and on the other we also spend millions on the recovery of
the dead in order to honor the life they once had.
If aliens ever arrived on earth they’d probably think we were crazy, and we’d be hard pressed
to dispute it.
If you had to serve in one of the world wars, would you rather have been an infantry soldier
or a graves registration service soldier?
Think you would've had the stomach to handle thousands of dead bodies?
Let us know in the comments!
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