Among those recovered was Medal of Honor recipient Alexander Bonnyman. As of May 24, 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, there were still 72,222 U.S. servicemen and civilians still unaccounted for from World War II.
The Department of Defense revived previous efforts to recover the remains of missing American soldiers during the 1970s. Since then, the remains of almost 1,000 Americans killed during World War II have been identified and returned to their families with military honors, according to the POW/MIA agency.
At the end of the war, there were approximately 79,000 Americans unaccounted for. This number included those buried with honor as unknowns, officially buried at sea, lost at sea, and missing in action. Today, more than 73,000 of those lost Americans remain totally unaccounted for from WWII.
Like World War I, families of those killed abroad could choose burial in an overseas military cemetery or choose to repatriate the remains of a loved one to U.S. soil. More than 60 percent of WWII families chose to have the remains returned to the United States for interment.
There are 1,582 Americans still unaccounted for, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Veterans, surviving family members and others dispute that number, however.
Of the 22,376 Australian prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, some 8,031 died while in captivity. After the end of the war, War Crimes Trials were held to investigate reports of atrocities, massacres and other causes of death.
Members of RAAF aircrews, who had bailed out during operations over Germany, occupied Europe or North Africa, also became POWs. Of the 8,000 Australians taken prisoner by the Germans and Italians, 265 died during their captivity.
The job fell to the American Graves Registration Service, the Transportation Corps, and thousands of civilian employees. Moving from country to country, they located graves, disinterred and formally identified remains, prepared bodies for permanent burials, and sent them home by ships and trains.
The Americans forced nearby German townspeople to witness the atrocity site, disinter the bodies, place them in coffins, parade these bodies through the town and lay them to rest in town cemeteries.
As there were no federal provisions for burying the dead, responsibility for clearing a battlefield of dead bodies fell to individual units, volunteer organizations, and even civilians.
Today the Normandy American Cemetery, sited on a bluff high above the coast, is one of the world's best-known military memorials. These hallowed grounds preserve the remains of nearly 9,400 Americans who died during the Allied liberation of France.
In World War II alone, government records show that 183,000 children lost their fathers during their service overseas. Many young children had no recollection of their fathers and thus depended on family stories, mementos, pictures, and letters to provide a link that memory could not.
Of WWII's warring powers only the Soviet Union suffered mass starvation, but as this column, part of a Vox debate on the economics of WWII, describes, it is a measure of the war's global reach that 20 to 25 million civilians died of hunger or hunger-related diseases outside Europe.
Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi was discovered on Guam on 24 January 1972, almost 28 years after the Allies had regained control of the island in 1944.
Today, 160 sets of recovered remains lie behind the closed mortuary doors at the CWGC Experience centre at Beaurains, near Arras, where the public can see the work of the stonemasons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and gardeners who for 100 year have maintained the immaculate Commonwealth cemeteries of the western front and ...
The soldiers were found in neat rows of wooden coffins lined with zinc with their heads pointing north in an indication that the site was an “advance cemetery” rather than a “retreat cemetery”, the commission, or Volksbund, said.
Historians estimate that at least 2 million German women were raped at the end of World War II. That figure is based on German hospital and abortion clinic records. Many women, like Schumacher, were raped multiple times.
Exactly 81 years after the start of World War II, around 1.3 million Germans are still missing and their fates may never be cleared up.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, as head of the American occupation of Germany in 1945, deliberately starved to death German prisoners of war in staggering numbers. Mr. Bacque charges that "the victims undoubtedly number over 800,000, almost certainly over 900,000 and quite likely over a million.
About once every week to ten days, Soldiers would go to the rear for their shower. Upon entering the shower area they turned in their dirty clothing. After showering they received new cloths. They had their choice for size: small, medium, or large.
Buried, Rotting, or Burnt
Many corpses left on the battlefield would, of course, be buried. Christopher Daniell's book Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066-1550 indicates that in the Middle Ages, people preferred to bury bodies in consecrated ground.
Cat holes
Well, the military adapted that idea when it comes to human waste disposal and created what are known, aptly, as "cat holes." According to field manuals, proper cat holes are 12-inches long, 12-inches wide, and 12-inches deep.
The Japanese used many types of physical punishment. Some prisoners were made to hold a heavy stone above their heads for many hours. Others might be forced into small cells with little food or water. Tom Uren described how a young Aboriginal soldier was made to kneel on a piece of bamboo for a number of days.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
Total battle casualties were 72,814. Over 31,000 Australian became prisoners-of-war. Of these more than 22,000 were captured by the Japanese; by August 1945 over one third of them had died in the appalling conditions of the prisoner-of-war camps.