A Grave Task: The Wartime
Job Nobody Wanted
New soldiers arriving at Building 341 at Fort Warren,
Wyoming, in November 1943 were blissfully unaware of what the future held. Told
they were a “GR outfit,” they speculated on what that meant. Maybe guerilla
raiders, one suggested. They liked the sound of that. The next day, their
commanding officer, Captain Thomas A. Rowntree, snapped them to attention and
informed the men that they were now the 612th Graves Registration
Company.
“You could hear the
sucking in of breaths and the gasps of disbelief and feel a sudden numbness,”
recalled Private Thomas J. Dowling. “It was a job that had to be done in war;
it was certainly no disgrace, but it was something you always thought about
being done by someone else.”
As the shocked men
staggered back to their barracks to process the news, their disbelief turned to
outrage. “This is what I was drafted for?” one soldier griped. “I ain’t going.
I came to fight, not bury,” another vowed. “If there’s any burying to be done,”
yet another said, “let somebody else do it.” A sergeant tried to mollify them,
telling them they would be only supervising the burials, but that was no
comfort. It was a restless, sleepless night in the barracks.
The men’s
displeasure meant nothing to the army—the job was essential and someone had to
do it. Until graves registration troops were trained and sent overseas,
chaplains, medical service troops, and line soldiers performed burials. Transfer
requests went nowhere, and the company trained through the winter of 1943-44.
The 612th was not alone. In a war that engulfed the world, graves registration
units served in all campaigns and theaters, from tiny Pacific islands to the
continent of Europe. Theirs was the grimmest mission of the war: the location,
identification, and burial of American soldiers who fell in battle. But as the
appalling job got underway, the men assigned to the task learned to see it in a
new light.
The U.S. Navy and
the Marine Corps improvised their own burial procedures, but the Army—which
suffered nearly four times as many deaths as the Marines and Navy combined—took
the lead in joint operations and bore the brunt of the grim task.
The 612th was a
typical army company even if its mission was not. Its men hailed from 37
states, from big cities and small towns, and had nicknames like “Saucer Eyes,”
“Gopher,” and “Horse Thief.” They learned the ways of military life-—marching,
drilling, handling weapons, and carrying out infantry maneuvers-—and learned
the ways of their unique job.
Under the guise of
“specialized conditioning training,” the men traveled to Denver to observe an
autopsy—a jarring experience. Some of the soldiers stared at the ceiling during
the procedure; others turned green and dashed for the men’s room. One fainted,
“sliding down the door jamb like a fireman answering an alarm,” as the 612th’s
unit history recalled. In order to understand the challenges of terrain, the
men built model cemeteries, complete with 100 model graves and white wooden
crosses. Conducting burials in a combat zone was a far more difficult task, but
the graves registration bible, Field Manual 10-63, taught them to do it the
army way.
The army sent the
612th to England in early 1944—along with the also newly minted 603rd, 606th,
607th, 608th, and 3041st graves registration companies—to prepare for the
Allied invasion of France. But the 607th was bloodied five weeks before the
fight, when German patrol boats attacked an invasion rehearsal off Slapton
Sands, England. Among the 749 men killed that night were 16 graves registration
soldiers.
On D-Day, the units
went into action—and were immediately inundated. As an advance man for the
603rd, Sergeant Elbert E. Legg landed in a glider with the 82nd Airborne
Division. The 21-year-old had been instructed to select sites for body
collection stations, but high casualties among the airborne units shelved that
plan. Legg decided “the time had come for me to be, and to act like, the graves
registration representative that I was.”
He picked a site
for a cemetery at Blosville, near Sainte-Mère-Église. Lacking the necessary
equipment and supplies, he paced off the proper distance between graves and
split wooden K-ration boxes into smaller pieces for markers. When the bodies
began arriving, he helped unload them—the first time he had touched a dead
body. He fashioned shrouds out of discarded parachutes that littered the
countryside and hired French workers to dig graves, paying them with freshly
printed invasion currency. The bodies arrived faster than the men could bury them.
When graves
registration troops reached Normandy on the afternoon of June 6, hundreds of
bodies littered the beaches; high tide washed corpses ashore, and low tide
revealed men trapped under wrecked vessels and beach obstacles. Graves
registration men had to go underwater to cut corpses entangled in landing craft
propellers, something Private John D. Little of the 607th called “the worst
experience I would ever encounter.” Time was of the essence; the sight of
bodies would be damaging to the morale of the thousands of fresh troops coming
ashore. “They’ll see enough as they move forward. God help them,” a lieutenant
told the 612th.
Prompt burial was
necessary not just for morale; it was crucial for reasons of sanitation,
especially in warm weather. The odor of decomposition was almost unbearable.
“We stuffed our noses with cotton and wore cloth across our faces,” Private
Dowling said. No matter how often they washed out the one-ton trailers used to
transport bodies, the odor lingered. “It was strange to travel through a
village, only to have the other troops hold their noses and beckon us fast
passage,” said Captain Joseph J. Shomon, commander of the 611th. “We always had
the right-of-way.”
A day’s work also
left the men covered in blood. Showers and laundry facilities were in short
supply, so infections and blood poisoning became occupational hazards. They had
to be careful, too, because the Germans sometimes booby-trapped bodies.
Many graves
registration soldiers functioned as “robots doing a job,” Dowling said. The
faces of the dead haunted them: “Some stared wide-eyed; others had died in the
middle of a scream, and their mouths hung open. Others had no face at all,” he
recalled. The companies worked day and night, clearing the beaches in four
days.
By June 10 the
graves registration companies had built eight cemeteries near the invasion
beaches; by August 8 the cemeteries contained more than 30,000 dead. Digging
graves was a back-breaking effort—work that often fell to service troops,
usually African American. The army also used local civilians or German
prisoners; the latter became dedicated workers once they realized the graves
were not for them.
The work took a
psychological toll on the men. “Not many of us were killed, but we died in
different ways,” Dowling said. “The work was nightmarish, and it ate at our
hearts…cracked some of us, darkened the spirits of others, and numbed the
rest.”
Some used jokes to
cope, including the men of the 612th, who sarcastically thanked the army for
their “magnificent salaries, prolonged European tour, liberal education, and
other favors too numerous to mention.” Army cartoonist Sergeant Bill Mauldin
recalled a graves registration trailer christened “The Green Turd” and noted
how “touches of humor, such as the name of their vehicle, were ways of staying
sane on the job.” Mauldin, whose cartoons also helped sustain GIs’ morale,
never included bodies in his drawings, believing readers “would be able to
deduce that there were bodies just offstage.”
For frontline
soldiers, bodies were a common sight. In areas of active combat, troops would
bury their fallen comrades where they fell, often in a shallow grave marked
only with a large rock, a stick, or a rifle with its bayonet thrust into the
ground. In a pinch, a shallow trench or shell crater would do; these bodies
would be exhumed later and reburied. Graves registration recovery parties had
to comb battlefields after the fighting; a soldier’s first rule of survival is
to use cover, and bodies were often in well-concealed spots.
Graves registration
men often bore the brunt of combat troops’ fear and anguish. As the 607th’s
Private Little drove a trailer full of bodies to a cemetery one day, he picked
up a hitchhiking soldier. When the soldier realized what Little’s trailer carried,
he hopped out and walked the rest of the way. Little also remembered a GI who
had just lost a buddy approach a graves registration soldier with gritted
teeth, a menacing look, rifle at the ready, and an order: “You take care of
him!”
Respect for the
dead was a given, said Major Merwin J. DeKorp of the 46th Graves Registration
Company, because he and his men felt a solemn duty to give the fallen “the most
dignified burial that circumstances allowed.” Identifying the dead was critical
as well. Families back home wanted to know for sure the fate of their loved one
and took solace in knowing that he had been identified. “No task was too
difficult or too gruesome when the identity of a soldier was at stake,” Captain
Shomon said. But the destructiveness of modern weapons often made
identification time-consuming and difficult—especially in the case of remains
inside crashed planes or burned-out tanks, where sometimes all that could be
found were melted rings, teeth, and dog tags.
Dog tags, a pair of
government-issued identification disks, were the primary means of identification.
If they were missing, graves registration men would take prints of all 10
fingers and prepare a dental chart. If the body was in bad shape, they would
inject fluid into the fingers to allow for usable prints or, in extreme cases,
remove skin from the fingertips to get prints. Personal effects, such as
documents in a wallet, often proved identity, as did statements by soldiers who
had known the deceased. Laundry marks on clothing, which contained the first
letter of a soldier’s surname and the last four digits of his service number,
were valuable clues.
Graves registration
troops inventoried personal effects—including rings, wallets, watches, and
photos—and shipped them to the Quartermaster Depot in Kansas City, Missouri, to
be cleaned and sent to the next of kin. In the field, soldiers destroyed
bloodstained items and things that could embarrass the family; they distributed
to other troops perishable items like cigarettes, chewing gum, and rations.
They also gathered government-issued items like weapons and ammunition for any
soldier who needed them.
As Allied forces
advanced toward Germany, the graves registration troops went forward, too. The
coming of winter presented new obstacles: picks and shovels bounced off frozen
dirt, hampering both burials and the recovery of bodies from temporary graves. “The
corpses were frozen stiff and it was extremely hard to get into the pockets to
remove all personal effects,” Captain Shomon of the 611th said. They thawed the
bodies in morgue tents to “work on them and loosen all joints for their
subsequent burial,” he said. To accommodate the casualties, graves registration
men built large new cemeteries, such as the Henri-Chapelle cemetery in Belgium
and the Margraten cemetery in the Netherlands.
The December 1944
German breakthrough in the Ardennes brought more work and new horrors. From
December 17, 1944, to January 16, 1945, a single unit buried 3,159 American
dead. The frontlines were fluid, and the lightly armed graves registration
troops faced the prospect of fighting as infantry—a thought they did not relish
because they carried only small arms and “high velocity shovels”—but that never
occurred.
In January 1945
graves registration soldiers processed the bodies of 84 American prisoners who
had been massacred near Malmedy, Belgium, on December 17, 1944. It was an important
job, and their observations would be used as evidence in the subsequent war
crimes trials of those responsible. What the men saw of those bodies, which had
frozen in place, reached a new level of the macabre. The corpses “froze so fast
when they were slaughtered that when the bodies started thawing, they bled like
they had just been shot. Water slowly dripped from their eyes and it looked
like they were crying,” Private Little of the 607th recalled. “Some of the
boys’ muscles would contract or release and they would move their arms or
legs.” One corpse even sat upright, he said.
After Allied troops
crossed the Rhine, graves registration units like the 607th and 611th avoided
burying American dead in German soil whenever possible. “We felt that the people
back home would not want their sons buried in Germany,” Captain Shomon said.
Instead, they shuttled the dead several hundred miles back to Belgium or the
Netherlands for burial in Allied soil.
When the war ended,
graves registration soldiers still had work to do—scouring battlefields for
hastily buried bodies that had been overlooked. In the European Theater, the
bodies were scattered over 1.5 million square miles of territory; in the
Pacific, they were scattered across numerous islands and in dense jungles.
In 1946 Congress
authorized the return of bodies, at government expense, for burial
in the United States at an eventual cost of nearly $191 million. The families
of 170,752 fallen servicemen chose this option, and graves registration units
oversaw the return of these bodies. The families of the remaining 109,866
decided to leave their loved ones overseas. The 172-acre Normandy American
Cemetery and Memorial overlooking Omaha Beach accommodated nearly 10,000 of the
latter. Remaining in limbo were over 70,000 fallen servicemen whose bodies were
not recovered, as well as the 10,356 remains that were unidentified.
Although graves
registration troops performed an emotionally draining, disturbing, and
thankless task during the war, many of them came to realize the importance of
their work—and its legacy. “When we looked at the lines of markers in one
cemetery after another,” Private Dowling wrote, “we knew that if we were not
doing this job we would be letting down every soul back home.” It was a point of
pride, the men felt—“the last great service a combat unit could perform for its
fallen comrades.” They had given it their best. “We did not have to like it,
but it had to be done,” Dowling said, “so we made up our minds to do it right.
And we did.”
