When war is fought in a region and the death toll hits 5 digits or more, what are the contemporary on-the-ground logistics for dealing with that many bodies in a war-torn region? Do warring factions prioritize removing their dead? What are the strategies for limiting disease and vermin?
In: 5
In low-intensity conditions, the army deals with bodies individually, bagging them and putting them in coffins and shipping them home to their families, perhaps embalmed on the way to prevent rotting. In high-intensity conditions, this becomes too much trouble to deal with and they resort to burying soldiers on the spot in graveyards they hastily dig. In *very* high-intensity conditions, they won’t be digging individual marked graves in a graveyard, they’ll just be digging a giant mass grave.
>Do warring factions prioritize removing their dead?
Yes. Historically it’s crucial for morale that armies not leave their dead laying out in the air to rot. They try to carry back their dead when they can, and sometimes temporary local truces are agreed between the two enemy sides to allow each side to return to a battlefield to collect their dead. If no truce is declared, the enemy who occupies the territory has a legal responsibility to bury the dead in as organized and dignified a fashion possible. In the Geneva Convention it is considered a war crime to disrespect or dismember enemy corpses (meaning like hanging the bodies from trees or putting their heads on pikes), as well as to leave the bodies out to rot. You’re supposed to put at least some effort into documenting and burying the bodies. In general though, if your body gets left behind on the battlefield, you’ll probably be recorded as “Missing in Action”. The enemy rarely puts in the effort to like write down where individual bodies were buried and send their dog tags home at the end of the war.
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