When discussing the aftermath of battles, we always hear about the tactical outcomes. If we hear about casualties, it’s usually little more than a number in a box.
Some battles had hundreds of thousands of deaths. All of those corpses had to end up somewhere but what actually happened to them once the fighting ceased?
I know Americans had the Graves Registration services and Germany had protocols for burials, but I can only find handbook-like level of detail. How closely did soldiers actually follow these rules? How quickly did the process take? Did most countries bring the bodies home or did they use on-site mass graves? The nitty-gritty of what happened doesn’t seems to have many primary accounts, especially in the Pacific Theater.
My grandfather was a WWII veteran and he never liked to talk about these types of experiences but I feel like this is an important part of what actually happened in the War.
The best resource for understanding how the U.S. managed its war dead is a 1957 report called "Final disposition of World War II dead, 1945-51," by Edward Steere and M. Boardman. It has all kinds of details for both the Pacific and European theaters, as well as other locations around the world.
A brief summary: Those Americans killed in combat or who died overseas were buried ASAP in temporary cemeteries created nearby by graves registration troops. No bodies came home during the war, as ordered by the War Department. After the war, bodies were exhumed from the temporary cemeteries, and recovered from remote locations, and consolidated in central locations on Allied soil in Europe and the Pacific. Families were then given the choice of whether to have loved ones returned to the U.S. and permanently buried overseas in U.S. military cemeteries. About 60 percent chose to have loved ones returned home - about 171,000 bodies. The first war dead arrived in the U.S. in the fall of 1947.
Steere also wrote an earlier book, The Graves Registration Service in World War II.
Lastly, one more resource, from the VA's National Cemetery Administration.