eli5, what happens to the dead bodies in a battlefield

Question

Humans war against each other all the time, and throughout history hundreds of millions of people have died on the battlefield.

This begs the question, what happens to the bodies?

Like on the beaches of Normandy, thousands of people died. But the beaches, to my knowledge, aren’t filled with dead bones and stuff.

So where did they go? Is there a secret service that collects bodies?

In: 14

Answer 1

What happens to dead bodies after battle depends a lot on the era it happend, and the situation when the soldier died.

In world war 2, whenever possible, bodies were cleaned up after battle. Often first buried next to roads or local graveyards and later on dug up and reburied in those large rememberence graveyards all over Europe. Similair things happend in world war 1, but as many soldiers died in bomb craters, collapesed trenches or other pits on the battlefield and were quickly covered in dirt many more soldiers are still discovered from the great war.

In the past, bodies were sometimes treated with less respect. After Waterloo, many sets of dentures were made from the teeth of all those dead soldiers. Soldiers are often young man, with their teeth still in good condition so made for the ideal “donors”. Later on, most were apparently buried but later on many more were exhumed. This was because the sugar industry needed burned “animal” bones to filter sugarbeet sap. [https://www.thebulletin.be/soldiers-bones-used-make-sugar-after-battle-waterloo-reveal-researchers](https://www.thebulletin.be/soldiers-bones-used-make-sugar-after-battle-waterloo-reveal-researchers)

Mass graves were a more common way to deal with bodies throughout history as digging neat plots is a lot of work, but generally any society burns, buries or at least dumps the bodies of the fallen somewhere of a cliff or in a river. Dead people stink, look scary and spread diseases and attrack predators. Just leaving them was almost never a proper course of action if you live nearby and have the means to clean it up. Looting the dead happend more though in the past.