Which unit(s) were responsible to remove dead from Normandy beachheads?

Lots of coverage of the survivors of D-Day, and those who paid the ultimate price. Of survivors who still can't forget seeing their friends and comrades slaughtered in front of them.

But imagine what it was like to have to pick up the broken bodies day in day out after every battle. Bury the dead in makeshift graves only to dig them up again to bury them in official military cemeteries. Try to forget every shattered lifeless face and body for the rest of your life.

We haven't heard about any of these veterans who have every reason to be far more traumatized than even those who participated in the battles.

But WHO were those guys? Where are they now? We should remember them.

-snip-

Graves registration companies, Quartermaster Corps.

Cheers and all,

Good question. My instinct tells me that they were probably black engineers, but it's nothing more than that.

Every company, when I was in the army, had a graves registration officer. Usually he was the 'Ensign Pulver' type, and was also the morale officer etc. But I doubt that any officer, however green, would have been spared for the task that day.

Of course the first contact with the dead would be the medics, determining whether or not they were actually dead or about to become so. From the photographs I have seen, policing up the bodies was not a high priority on D-Day.

all the best

In the British Army, the job of recovering bodies from the battlefield usually fell to the Battalion Chaplain and his team or the friends of the fallen. Those that died at dressing stations and hospitals were handled by Brigade and Divisional medical companies. Divisional pioneer companies dug the initial field graves and often moved the corpses. Preparing such graves was a standard part of preparing for a battle.

The exhumation of corpses from field graves into cemeteries was in two stages. Corp and Army workers, often civilian, moved and sorted out bodies from scattered field graves and organised them into temporary battalion cemeteries. Later, often long after the war, civilian contractors for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission set up the neat war graves cemeteries we see today.

On the Commonwealth Normandy beaches, I believe the advanced divisional medical teams established on the beaches at the end of D-Day recovered the bodies over the next few days with help from the Royal Navy and pioneer companies. They were buried in field graves near the beaches.