I was just reading about the Battle of Stalingrad, which got me wondering-- how do you bury the dead from a battle that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people? Where do the manpower and the resources come from?
My son and I took a trip with his Boy Scout troop to Gettysburg Battlefield earlier in the summer, and this topic was discussed for this battle.
At the time of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the town of Gettysburg had a population of about 2,400 residents. Over the course of the three-day battle, there were nearly 50,000 casualties, including approximately 8,000 soldiers killed in action. The local residents worked day and night burying soldiers where they fell, due to the hot July sun. Soldiers were buried in fields, gardens, and farmhouse yards. The carcasses of thousands of horses were burned.
Local residents then spent months disinterring bodies and either reburying them in the newly dedicated National cemetery at which President Lincoln gave the famous Gettysburg Address in November 1863 (in the case of Union soldiers), or shipping the bodies south to southern cemeteries in the case of Confederate soldiers. Some bodies were shipped directly to family members if the families were willing to pay the freight to the local coroner. For an additional fee, the coroner would also embalm the body for the trip.
Mass burials in pits is a traditional method. They recently found one dug as Napoleon retreated from Russia.
I’ve read that some of the support troops (drivers, mechanics etc.) are expected to help with body collections. Especially after a major battle.
At Stalingrad, most of the dead were simply buried in the rubble; apparently, the place stank for months.
It can also depend on who wins. Even in small battles, the loser usually gets their bodies pushed into a mass grave with a bulldozer while the winner takes as much care of their dead as they have time and resources for, which means the winners may get the same treatment if that’s all they can do.
Dan Carlin did an epic series for his Hardcore History podcast on the Russian Front of WW2 not too long ago. As I recall, he cited a recent account from someone who’d visited the site of one of the major Russian battlefields in the first episode. They said that the ground was quite… crunchy, from the bones of the dead that are there to this day.
I stopped giving the Food Service airmen crap after I found out that they are the ones responsible for collecting, sorting, and preserving the dead after battles for the Air Force. Turns out, they don’t have a direct combat role, they aren’t preparing food when fighting is going on, and they are the only guys on the base who can be expected to have refrigerators large enough for storing bodies.:eek:
OK, 8000 soldiers died. Up to 2400 residents could have potentially died. WHo were the other ~40000 who died?
:eek: I hope they wash their hands before they go make dinner. :o
ETA: jackdavinci: Casualty doesn’t necessarily mean dead, just injured.
I just hope they don’t put the dead guys in the same fridge as the leftovers! :eek:
“Casualties” are not deaths. Non fatal wounded are counted as casualties. There were approximately 8000 deaths at Gettysburg.
For a long time, I also thought casualties=deaths. Of course, civil war era medicine being what it was, many of those casualties may have ended as deaths days or weeks later but aren’t counted among deaths of the 3 days of actual battle.
Wow! Never too old to learn something new I hope Strunk and White will propose “X # dead and Y # injured” as the new standard…
ETA: While I admit, I had the false notion that ‘casualty’ = ‘dead’, the context of the specific post in question doesn’t help. This is a thread about burying dead bodies - why was it prudent to highlight the number of injured people?
[quote=“jackdavinci, post:12, topic:552659”]
Because when you start an engenament with ~90, 000 men, and you end with 30, 000 men who need medical care and are unable to feed or move themselves, another 10, 000 men who need to be guarded, 10, 000 dead horses and a retreating army that needs to be pursued, you really don’t have many resources to spare for burying the 10,000 dead.
The old axiom is that every wounded man needs 5 men to support him and every prisoner needs 2, so the number of non-fatal casualties is very important in detemrining resources.
Only one of the local civilians was killed, a 20-year old woman hit by a stray bullet as she was baking in her kitchen.
What everyone else said. Casualties include dead, wounded, and captured.
The point about the number of residents and the number of casualties is how overwhelmed the local populace was after the battle. While the two armies took some of their wounded with them (if they were not too injured to travel), and buried many of the dead in shallow graves where they fell, there were still many bodies to deal with, along with thousands of dead horses.
Soldiers too wounded to be moved were left to be cared for by the local populace, and all of the dead who were buried in shallow graves in fields, gardens, and farmyards had to be disinterred and reburied so that the local farmers could use their fields again. This was a huge undertaking, and took months. The number of dead was several times larger than the total local population.
Army chow is people ! 
In WWII, the Graves Registration Service would come by and collect on of the soldier’s two dog tags, and put the other in his mouth. Then the feet would be crossed at the ankles to show he’d been counted.
Bodies would be buried wrapped in their half pup-tents temporarily so they wouldn’t be eaten by dogs and birds, later exhumed and transported to military cemeteries. Most of the dirty work was done by POW’s whenever possible.
As far as the bad old days were concerned, the locals were obliged to dig pits and bury all the dead, since it was in their main interest. They’d make the best of it, robbing the dead of everything, including teeth for dentures. After the Battle of Plevna between the the Russians and the Turks, the bones were shipped to England as fertilizer.
One bit of ignorance I’d long held was that the location the Battle of Kosovo between the Turks and Serbians was called “Field of Blackbirds” due to the aftermath, but I later learned that it was called that before the battle. Where I am, in Georgia USA, we have very few crows: most scavenging is done by buzzards. It must have been pretty grim during the Civil War.
Interestingly enough I just watched a documentary last night on Netflix called Aftermath: The Remnants of War. They specially covered the area around Stalingrad for the part on dealing with so many bodies.
The simple answer is that the bodies were buried where they were with little to no documentation. Sometimes they weren’t even buried at all.
~Bengt Thordeman; Armour From The Battle Of Wisby
I read somewhere that when Kaiser Wilhelm went to view the archeological dig, the stench from the corpses was palpable.
After watching the HBO miniseries “The Pacific” earlier this summer, I got motivated to read Bob Leckie’s “Helmet for my Pillow” and E.B. Sledge’s “With the Old Breed.” I recommend both books highly.
One thing that both authors try to capture-- especially Sledge-- is that death on the battlefield is omnipresent, and enduring. Sledge’s experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa are a case in point: dead soldiers, especially the Japanese but sometimes also American dead, were left out in the open where they were killed. They’d bloat, outgas, rot all in the heat and rain. If the front lines moved, eventually patrols would be formed to gather and bury corpses-- methodically for the American dead, mass graves for the Japanese dead.
One thing that stood out for me is Sledge’s description of the smell of the battlefield, Peleliu in particular. Since it was all volcanic rock, there was no place to bury the dead. There was also no place to dig latrines, either. A planned 4-day battle turned into two months of rotting corpses and puddles of feces. The smell was impossible to escape, it was impossible to ignore, it just hung in their noses for weeks on end (and for days after they left).
War movies have gotten more realistic in recent decades, but none have ever been able to convey that smell.
I think the military channel might lose a lot of viewers if smell-o-vision or scratch-and-sniff could be as easily replicated as 3D.