The Army's Installation Restoration Program (IRP) and the Military Munitions Response Program (MMRP) are the two active-installation cleanup programs funded under DERP.
The survivors. That can either be an occupying force or those of the losing side of the war. After WWII, German citizens cleaned up the debris, bodies, and destroyed buildings. The Allied military tended to remove military equipment, either to be thoroughly destroyed or, when deemed necessary, taken away for study.
After 1918 the immense task of “clearing up” was carried out by the military and the civilians who were returning to their shattered communities. The landscape in the fighting lines had been smashed to pieces. Roads, woods, farms and villages were often no longer recognisable.
When the return program ended in 1951, more than 171,000 bodies — 60 percent of America's World War II fallen — were reunited with waiting families. The remaining overseas dead were reinterred in new, permanent cemeteries, including Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery. The repatriation plan cost $163 million.
The process of clearing the land continues up to this day, and at a rate of around 400 tons of shells cleared every year the Démineurs estimate that WWI ordnance will take another two to seven centuries to clear completely.
No man's land is waste or unowned land or an uninhabited or desolate area that may be under dispute between parties who leave it unoccupied out of fear or uncertainty. The term was originally used to define a contested territory or a dumping ground for refuse between fiefdoms.
It remains as uninhabited 'common' ground to this day. Echoing its use in medieval England, 'No Man's Land' was adopted to describe frontier territories not yet fully under US government control. This continued well into the 1930s. No Man's Land, Illinois, 20km north of Chicago, became especially notorious.
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.
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.
Our research and operational missions involve coordination with hundreds of countries and municipalities worldwide. As of the latest update on May 22, 2023, more than 81,000 Americans remain missing from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Gulf Wars/other conflicts.
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.
Use the latrines
Toilets – known as latrines – were positioned as far away as possible from fighting and living spaces. The best latrines came in the form of buckets which were emptied and disinfected regularly by designated orderlies.
If walking through original trenches is what you really want to do, you can't miss Verdun. The region is peaceful now, but it is almost like nothing has changed here. There is so much to see! Trenches, bunkers, tunnels and large fortifications are all still here to be explored.
The IRP, established in 1975, identifies, investigates and cleans up contamination posing environmental and health and safety risks at or migrating from active Army installations.
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.
Alvin H. Perry's assignment was a cleanup mission in the aftermath of Operation Overlord's invasion of the Normandy beaches by allied forces.
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 Soviet Union is estimated to have suffered the highest number of WWII casualties.
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.
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, fewer than 389,000 of the 16 million Americans who fought during World War II remain.
The “No Man's Land”, between South Australia's western border at the 132 meridian and the Western Australian border at the 129 meridian, remained part of New South Wales until 1861. South Australia sought for many years to have this area of about 80,000 square miles annexed to its colony.
The island was used by the United States Navy as a practice bombing range from 1943 to 1996. In 1998, the Navy transferred the island to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service for use as an unstaffed wildlife refuge, which now forms Nomans Land Island National Wildlife Refuge.
Overview. No Man's Land is a term still used today to colloquially indicate 'anywhere from derelict inner-city areas to spaces between borders, and even tax havens'. In essence, it is 'a place where there has been an intentional withdrawal of state power and sovereignty'.