96% of Americans killed in action were recovered, compared to 78% for both World War II and Korea. By the end of the war, only 28 bodies remained unidentified. All but one of them were identified by 1984, when the last one was interred in the Tomb of the Unknowns.
Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency works to recover the remains of missing soldiers. The agency has accounted for 1,474 missing WWII soldiers since beginning its work in 1973. Government figures show that more than 72,000 WWII soldiers are still missing.
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.
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.
Civilian deaths totaled 50–55 million. Military deaths from all causes totaled 21–25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war. More than half of the total number of casualties are accounted for by the dead of the Republic of China and of the Soviet Union.
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 Soviet Union suffered the highest number of fatalities of any single nation, with estimates mostly falling between 22 and 27 million deaths. China then suffered the second greatest, at around 20 million, although these figures are less certain and often overlap with the Chinese Civil War.
Richard Arvin Overton (May 11, 1906 – December 27, 2018) was an American supercentenarian who at the age of 112 years, 230 days was the oldest verified surviving U.S. World War II veteran and oldest man in the United States. He served in the United States Army.
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.
While the war was underway, the U.S. military banned the return of any overseas war dead. Money was to go toward fighting rather than shipping bodies back home. Instead, soldiers buried their comrades in temporary military cemeteries throughout the European and Pacific theaters.
At first, the meals were stews, and more varieties were added as the war went on, including meat and spaghetti in tomato sauce, chopped ham, eggs and potatoes, meat and noodles, pork and beans; ham and lima beans, and chicken and vegetables.
During World War II, some members of the United States military mutilated dead Japanese service personnel in the Pacific theater. The mutilation of Japanese service personnel included the taking of body parts as "war souvenirs" and "war trophies".
During WWII, morbidity from such diseases as tuberculosis (anti-tuberculosis agents did not begin to appear until 1949), rheumatic fever, hepatitis and tropical diseases was high and the prime reason for residual disability and time lost from duty.
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 German Army was comprehensively defeated in Normandy, its losses compounded by Hitler's refusal to allow his generals to conduct an orderly withdrawal. Allied delay in closing the Falaise-Argentan pocket allowed many German troops to escape, but around 400,000 were killed, wounded or captured during the campaign.
During World War II and Vietnam, a telegram was the sole means of family notification. Only on rare occasions, for example when a family lost multiple members, were chaplains and military officers sent to the home of the family.
Key early parts of the invasion did not go to plan.
But almost nothing went exactly as planned on June 6, 1944. In the end, partly due to poor weather and visibility, bombers failed to take out key artillery, particularly at Omaha Beach.
Simo Häyhä (Finnish: [ˈsimo ˈhæy̯hæ] ( listen); 17 December 1905 – 1 April 2002), often referred to by his nickname, The White Death (Finnish: Valkoinen kuolema; Russian: Белая смерть, romanized: Belaya smert'), was a Finnish military sniper in World War II during the 1939–1940 Winter War against the Soviet Union.
Private First Class Charles Havlat (November 4, 1910 – May 7, 1945) is recognized as being the last United States Army soldier to be killed in combat in the European Theater of Operations during World War II.
He joined the Army at age 15 and fought in the Battle of the Bulge at age 16. But he wasn't the youngest to serve. That honor belongs to Calvin Graham, who joined at age 12.
The Soviet Union is estimated to have suffered the highest number of WWII casualties.
World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China.
Britain and France lost most of their empires due to World War II. Germany, Italy, and Japan were conquered and occupied. The Soviet Union lost its most productive citizens—more than twenty million died in the war.